Abstract

In his documentary Orlando, My Political Biography (2024), Paul B. Preciado invites us to reflect on the possibility of changing the names of all things, stating that, in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography (1928), four metamorphoses can be identified. Here, I am interested in the first. In Preciado’s words, “the first revolutionary metamorphosis is poetry”, which he defines as “the possibility of changing the names of all things”. Inspired by this passage, I aim to elaborate that changing the names of all things entails the possibility of abolition – not necessarily of other names, but of what underlies them; that it implies challenging that which subsists in the act of naming, that is, its normativities. To name, rename, unname, when one considers what underlies a name’s pronunciation, is to suggest that there is no such thing as a determined identity or a purified nature. Yet, habitually, in engaging in linguistic and epistemological disputes, we often reproduce the dynamics that we oppose1, as for example assimilationist postures in trans movements (Raha 2015).