Becoming a Human with a Dog – Paul B. Preciado

One day in November, when the sun was shining and I believed in the revolution, I made the decision to adopt a dog. The cub arrived a month later, on a dark day when, even though the paradigm shift was taking place (I’m sure), it was harder to believe in the revolution. The dog arrived at dawn, in a red sack, carried by a man with a delicate voice and cold hands. The first thing I smelled, even before I saw the puppy, was his smell: cinnamon cake. Perhaps the owners of her mother, Isabella, had baked a cake for Christmas and the sack was soaked in aroma. This is and always will be my earliest memory of him. A sugary smell emanating from a red sack. I imagine that for him too I was first of all a smell, before being a shape, a figure, a color and a voice.

Now I feel that the human-dog grafting operation is taking place in my subjective structure. Sometimes I feel it painfully, as if it were the implantation of a foreign organ in my body, as an invasion of another species into my human tissue. Resistance to political symbiosis manifests itself in the form of stress, pain in the back of the neck, inability to fix my gaze, tension in the toes and hands, a thud in the chest after a sigh. I can’t think, I can’t sleep, I can’t do anything.

I feed him, clean his excrement, kiss him, take him out, call him, throw him small ice cream cone or snowball shaped puppets that brings me back waiting for me to try to rip them from his teeth, I reward him, caress him, put his hand in his basket so that he can sleep peacefully. But the plant is not yet complete. All I feel is the fear that my individual contours are erased. The fear of not knowing how to take care of another life that is not mine. Taking care is not just “cool”. It makes you crazy. This is why the powerful avoid doing so, in order not to put their own subjectivity into play, in order not to compromise their sovereignty.

Resistance and love
My brain has turned into a jelly vibrating in my head. Sometimes the resistance to the graft of this other being into my subjective structure is so strong that, I confess, I was drawn to the open windows, the knives arranged symmetrically in the drawers, the stairwell, the buses that don’t stop at passage of pedestrians, from the bottles of sleeping pills, from the walls and their implacable hardness in front of the fragility of a skull, from the possibility of entering so deep into my brain that I forget to breathe.

I still don’t feel love for him. I tell myself he’s beautiful, with his black and white fur, but it’s an aesthetic observation. There is no love. Maybe someday, if the implant is successful, I’ll be a human with a dog. But for the moment I am a being
lonely and scared human looking after a puppy. We are not yet integrated.

I think it’s like when I connected the old printer to the new computer: the computer recognized it, called it by its name, installed the program; the printer recognized that there was a computer on the other end of the cable, emitting a small buzz and flashing a green light several times. But when I hit the print button, even though the gear moved and the computer screen announced it was printing, the pages came out blank. As if the printer refused to take orders from the new network it was connected to without warning. Electronic machines also need to give their consent. It is as if, in some sort of electro-sexual relationship, the printer were to say “I know you are my computer and yes, I want it”, and the computer were to respond “I recognize you as my printer and yes, I do”. It is happening to me right now. The dog and I have been linked to each other, we have recognized each other, but we cannot print a page together. The page of our common life is still blank.

I guess the same happens when having a baby, even if the parents don’t want to talk about it. The social pressure on reproduction is so great that nothing is more rewarded and better perceived than the arrival of a new human body in a familiar cell. Yet this relationship – marked by the vulnerability of a body devoid of political rights (infant or pet, albeit to varying degrees) in front of the adult – is potentially steeped in violence.

In my symptoms of rejection of the transplantation of another being into my subjective structure, I recognize the stories I have heard about parents and their children. At my birth, my mother went into a coma and could not take care of me for six months. It wasn’t that he refused to print pages. His operating system simply didn’t work, and he preferred to declare a general block rather than integrate another being into his subjective structure. Later we had a hard time printing pages together, and only in the last two or three years have we begun to do so.

A birth always implies an adoption. An adoption is always an implant. I’m probably repeating this story with the dog. Living this experience I discover the terror that my mother must have felt, but I also feel the strangeness that I felt when I came into the world. Birth is an exile. There is no nation, there is only pilgrimage. Why is the reality in which we were conceived so alien to us? A relationship is always the creation of a political community. The possibility of immune rejection. The risk of a border. The opportunity for a hug.
Maybe soon I’ll be a human with a dog. But for now, I’m just a scared human being. May my memory find all the traces that lead to the path of life. Let the laws of quantum physics do everything in their power for me and for him, for us. Let the current be established. May the affection soothe the wounds opened by the implant. Let our common history begin to be written. Yes, I want.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)