Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts

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Either everyone has an identity. Or there is no identity the author says, and the personal recollections on the process and experiences therein are sometimes harrowing. The speech itself made me think about the concepts, but I must say that even for someone with quite some interest in the topic the book is not necessarily very accessible.

There's a bit of a failing here in that the entire speech is predicated on the 'monster' (i.e. Spivak's subaltern, which Preciado here invokes and frames as those marginalised by existing rigid paradigms of gender and sexuality) being allowed to speak for themselves, but in failing to recognise the intersections of marginalisation and privilege here and therefore comparing his own white trans body to a culture that his own ancestors colonised, he falls short of his own manifesto. Paul Preciado’s controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.Let’s say I had no other route, always assuming that it was not a case of choosing freedom but of creating it. The epistemic binary regime "has been in crisis since the 1940s, not just because of the challenges posed by political movements of dissident minorities, but also because of the discovery of new data - morphological, chromosomal and biochemical - that renders sex and gender assignation at least contentious, if not impossible. In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a ‘mentally ill person’ suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. All of this creates a ‘cage’. Preciado uses the cage in the sense that he had to find a way out of the epistemology he was expected to buy into. I think this text’s most revolutionary revelation is that Preciado didn’t want to stop being a woman or start becoming a man so much as try to escape from the confines of gender altogether. He talks of an acute desire to find a ‘way out’. Another way the text might have been more interesting is for the author to have gone more deeply into their own experiences of psychoanalysis, but these are just glossed over.

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the École de la Cause Freudienne, and I do not know whether it is worth also extending a greeting to all those who are neither ladies nor gentlemen, because I doubt that there is anyone among you who has publicly and legally repudiated sexual difference and been accepted as a fully fledged psychoanalyst, having successfully completed the process you refer to as ‘The Pass’, which permits you to practise as an analyst. In this, I am referring to a trans or non-binary psychoanalyst who is accepted by you as an expert. If such a person exists, allow me here and now tooffer this dear mutant my warmest greetings. Speaking from his own ‘mutant’ cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline’s complicity with the ideology of sexual difference Written in a mutant language that owes much to Kafka, the master of metamorphoses, this radical text is a welcome insurrection against the psychoanalyst’s couch.’ Drawing on decades of radical trans theory, Preciado presents not just a searing critique of the psychoanalytic establishment, but also a bold challenge to it. Calling for a paradigm shift that will have an impact way beyond its intended field, Can the Monster Speak? demands its audience to think politically, granting new power to previously marginalized voices.

The Freud Problem

Like Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto , Preciado creates a posthuman figure to escape the confines of white European colonial hegemony. However, Preciado moves from the image of the monstrous, civilised ape to becoming the monster himself, by means of testosterone injections. This idea of moving beyond the human is one Deleuze and Guattari are very interested in; particularly in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The segmented life of the human needs to go schizo if it is to cross boundaries and escape the capitalist-realist machine of manufactured desire. Can The Monster Speak? is a ... beautifully-worded short read, challenging both those who are dismissive of trans rights and those who can’t see beyond the binary options in transitioning from one gender role into the other, and presenting instead a radical future that encompasses the diversity of human beings.’ Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a “mentally ill person” suffering from “gender dysphoria,” Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.

Analogously, Preciado calls his state of being a trans man a ‘cage’, too. Because of this, he is framed by European colonial hegemony as a monster in much the same terms as Red Peter. Book Genre: Essays, Feminism, Gender, Gender Studies, LGBT, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Queer, Theory, Writing Preciado, in laying bare the historically constructed epistemological cage of binary gender initially codified by Freud and reified by Lacan and generations of students, gives an archaeology of knowledge that is deft enough to position him as his own cohort’s answer to Foucault. Like Foucault, Preciado employs the historical to show how critical theory can in turn dissect, explode, and become the political.’

Can the Monster Speak?

Near the end of the book (ostensibly never spoken aloud during his engagement, due to the aforementioned booing off the stage), Preciado moves toward a statement of purpose: The part of me that is a teacher or activist, admittedly one with a psychodynamic lens, feels that Can the Monster Speak? plays out the tropes of oppositionality between marginalized queer people and the psychoanalytic establishment without taking on more deeply the issue of what transformation could look like. Preciado seems to dare his audience to take him seriously as the first step toward changing their perspective, to see him as an expert. I wonder what it would look like if he had more deeply elaborated on his invitation to his audience to enter into a “new relationship” (which he invokes only in his closing) between the psychoanalytic establishment and queer people.