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

Product Information

For someone who repeatedly positions himself as alienated from his audience, suggesting that they can’t or won’t fully witness him, this is a rather sanguine conclusion. Notably, Preciado doesn’t use this moment to recognize or lift up the voices of contemporary analysts who are actually doing the critical work he is calling for. I still think it’s worth a read because it’s so short and because it does have an interesting context & framing device. A heartfelt text, to trigger debate and foster understanding while also expressing righteous anger.

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. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.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.’ 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. Finally I wouldn’t say that it’s on the vanguard of queer theory as it has a pretty unsubtle approach to identity—there are people saying much more interesting things—Preciado pretty much just recapitulates Butler on gender construction.

That said, there is a somewhat dodgy section in which Preciado compares the trans body (including, one presumes, the white trans body) to Africa, saying it has been similarly colonised (Direct quotes: ' The trans body is Africa; its organs, though living, speak in languages unknown to the coloniser [...]', as well as: ' The migrant has lost the nation state. The refugee has lost their house. The trans person loses their body.') The part of me that is a compassionate therapist wants to understand Preciado’s braggadocio as self-protective, a narcissistic defense, puffing one’s chest up to a room of people who may find you to be some combination of ridiculous and appalling. A stranger on the internet recently wrote to me about working to overcome “transpessimism,” a position she characterized by “a constant defensiveness that is so utterly draining.” I see this defensiveness in Preciado’s stance, a righteous anger born out of real grievance, overflowing. 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.Very clever and articulate. It's hard to argue with a lot of what he says, primarily because a lot of it is already decently established. Preciado's hypothesis or manifesto here is that psychoanalysis is ultimately doomed to fail, being structured so solidly around rigid boundaries of male/female and normal/abnormal (e.g. the Oedipus and Electra complexes) unless it can change with the times and recognise a new paradigm of gender and sexuality which allows for infinite multiplicity. I found his argument mostly compelling and clearly articulated. I found it hard, when quoting Preciado, to quote succinctly. He writes long winding paragraphs that curlicue around his main idea. He himself alludes to his long-windedness in the opening of Can the Monster Speak?. He notes that “the organizers reminded me that my allocated time had run out, I tried to speed up, skipped several paragraphs, I managed to read only a quarter of my prepared speech.” The first time I read this, I took it to mean that he had been slighted by the organizers of the event. Upon rereading, it occurred to me that perhaps he had attempted to deliver a talk that took four times as long to share as the time he had been allotted. It’s not totally clear. It’s not the only part of the text where, especially upon rereading, I wondered how exactly to interpret his position of grievance. 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.’ 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. Psychoanalytic concepts of the libido, of active-passive roles, penis envy, castration anxiety, the phallic woman, genital love, hysteria, masochism, bisexuality, androgyny, the phallic phase, the Oedipus complex, the oedipal position, the pre-genital and genital stages, perversion, coitus, the preliminary pleasure principle, the primal scene, homosexuality, heterosexuality - the list is almost endless - are meaningless outside the epistemology of sex, gender and sexual difference."

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.In 2017, one of the more challenging and self-hating periods of my life in terms of my own transition and mental health, I asked my psychodynamic psychotherapist, who was also trans, if he thought I was suffering from narcissism. I had been having conversations at the time with a friend about one of their family members who monologued about himself constantly, and I was feeling like I had become similarly narcissistic in my depression, anxiety, and dysphoria, a long-talking self-absorbed parody of a wounded adult person. My therapist replied generously that he thought I was not suffering from pathological narcissism, but that I did have narcissistic defenses, ways of intensely focusing on myself when I was in pain that could be healing in some ways and create problems in others. I channel this side of myself, the side that wants to talk and talk, into my writing, which is also personal, creative. I attempt to channel other parts of myself when I am practicing therapy or teaching. The joy of reading Preciado, whether or not one has the theoretical tools to support or refute him, is the single and singular life that pulses in every word, and speaks to the individual within each of us and not – as all too often – to our persona.’ 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.