To all I will love,

Please allow me to take the liberty of writing to you, although you do not know me. I do so moved by a force that surpasses good manners and social conventions.

Before fear, shame, or decorum prevent me, I am writing to tell you that I love you. Perhaps you have been loved before. Or perhaps you consider that no one has ever loved you. If I speak for myself, I would say that filial love is full of pitfalls, romantic love is always finite and couple love reveals itself sooner or later as its opposite. Perhaps this year, like me, you have feared that you will die without knowing if you have been really loved or if you yourself have really loved anyone in your life. That is why I have decided not to be afraid of the ridicule that the open expression of love for the other unleashes in society, and to communicate that enthusiasm to you with this letter. I want you to be sure of one thing:

I have loved you. I don’t know if you can feel it. In this instant, I love you, while you decode with your eyes the traces that, moving my fingers, I have carved on a digital screen for you, the same traces that now cross your optic nerve and reach your brain, becoming images or sounds. I am writing to you just so you know. For you to experience it. Let, if you wish, the sensation of being loved invade you. If this proximity or this experience intimidates or displeases you, you can interrupt the reading of this letter at any time. This message is an affective-conceptual operation that only becomes a reality when it is activated through your conscious reading.

And since you are moving forward, I say to you: I love you with a radically political love. I assume all that you are, all your history. I seek neither to summarize it nor to deny it. Someone could accuse me of pretending to love a history that I do not know. But does each of us know our own history? The history of each one of us does not fit in a conscious memory. And yet it exists, it is there, in front of me, with its opaque presence, to be loved.

I address myself to your physical being that survives the violence of the norm, to your androgynous existence, to your non-binary reality, to your body before the normalization operated by capitalism reduced it to an instrument of industrial production. I do not love you because you are male or female, or because you are not. I do not love you because of the color of your skin. I do not love you because of the shape of your body or your ability to walk on two legs. I do not love you because you are healthy, or because you are a promoter of wealth. I do not love you even for your ideas. I address you as a living, mutant, irreducible entity. This is how I desire you: in mutation.

To be able to love you in this way I must get rid of the hatred of everything that does not correspond to the social or economic norm that has been instilled in me since my childhood. I love you with my physical being that has survived the norm, with my androgynous existence, with my non-binary reality. I try to unfold when I propel love towards you the memory of my body that resists being reduced to an instrument of capitalism. I love you with my existence before the sexual division of labor determined my sex, or my gender, before my skin was codified by the logics of the history of colonization, of racism, of industrial society. I love you before and after colonial capitalism. I love you in the midst of the radiation still emanating from Fukushima and Chernobyl. I love you with my cells and yours recombined with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I love you before and after the existence of electricity and the Internet, before and after animal evolution and the sixth extinction.

Perhaps you have experienced animal love, plant love, mineral love, star love. Perhaps you have felt how animals, plants, rocks, stars have loved you with a vital and diffuse, contaminating passion. Perhaps you have loved a city and felt loved by it. Perhaps you have fallen in love with a piece of music, a book, a work of art and felt loved by it. It is this form of love that I am talking about. All religions and governmental technologies have tried to appropriate this love; to tame it, to control it, to fragment it. Because its force is revolutionary. Now you know: I love you as the animal you are, with your vegetable, mineral, and stellar memory. I love the irreducible multiplicity that dwells in you, your brain as a millenary city. I love you as the work of art that you are. Of that love, you will never be deprived. That seems to me the only way out.

It would be great to receive a letter from you and even better to see you. To feel reciprocated. Walking along the hills that border the Mur river, and letting my gaze rest on the paths that lead to the park, I imagined you there, walking. Then, arriving at the hotel, I had the impression that I could see you, in that same room, on that same bed, sleeping, your dreams spreading like a mist into which I could enter. It would be great if we could cross paths on the double-spiral staircase of the Burg or if the Kuntshaus were for both of us a sort of common prosthetic organ.

I would like to have tea with you some day in the century, if my frail health allows me, and to know your definition of beauty. But it is even more beautiful to feel that, right now, in this instant, through a strange telepathy, my feelings and yours (whatever they are) meet and mingle.

Always yours,
Paul B. Preciado


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