Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy by Roberto Esposito, tr. Timothy Campbell (2008)
Roberto Esposito studies what he calls the discourse on immunity finding it at work from ancient Rome to Nazism and contemporary society. His genealogical study was crucial for me to understand not only how Covid-19 was politically managed but also how some of the political measures (the strengthen of frontiers, the digitalisation of social bonds, the extension of surveillance techniques) will become part of the authoritarian turn of contemporary capitalism.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014)
Or any other book by Claudia Rankine, for her way of creating a language where poetry meets critical race theory. Like in the tradition of James Baldwin and June Jordan, activism seems to be possible only through the task of destroying and re-inventing language that poetry can perform.
Hiroshima est partout by Günther Anders (2008)
This book is the journal of Günther Anders when he visited Hiroshima in 1958. It was the main inspiration for Dysphoria Mundi, apart from queer and trans authors. An urgent book to read in moment of global war and an author to rediscover in English, since much of his work is still un-translated. Anders’s intuition is that Hiroshima is not just a site of horror and destruction, but that the atomic bomb installed a new share time and condition we still live in.
The Nova Trilogy by William S. Burroughs (1961-67)
William S. Burroughs is for me one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. While writing Dysphoria Mundi, I follow the cut-up trilogy and some of its intuitions about the human body as a soft machine, about communication as contagion or power as addiction as critical paths to understand the transformation of contemporary cyber-biotech societies.
Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich (2016)
Almost for the same reasons that Günther Anders, but even closer to the skin, since Svetlana Alexievich enters into the intimacy of horror and brings every voice back to us.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan ed. Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (2019)
Lou Sullivan was the first trans author and activist to come out at the same time as gay and HIV positive. I read his diaries while writing the book. He was able to envision like almost nobody before the need to establish new forms of transversal alliances beyond fixed normative identities, not just for fighting repression or control systems, but also for inventing freedom and producing radical pleasure.
The Woman in the Portrait: Collected Short Stories by Juliet Jacques (2024)
The shorts stories in this book kept me company not while I was working on the writing of the book, but rather when I was translating it. I can see myself in each of her sometimes fiction sometimes real characters. It is difficult to be so funny and political at the same time.
