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

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Paul Preciado’s controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 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 terms of ‘ways out’, Preciado’s conceit of the ‘cage’ is interesting. He draws parallels between himself and the ape Red Peter from Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’. Red Peter is a ‘civilised’ ape who, having learned human language, appears before an academy of scientists to explain what human evolution has meant to him. It has, in short, meant that he has had to forget his life as an ape , living within the constraints of putatively emancipated colonial European humanism. Preciado notes:

Preciado was invited to give a lecture in front of l'École de la Cause Freudienne on their "women in psychoanalysis" day and decided to take the several hundred strong audience of psychoanalysts to task for their arrogance and pathologization of women, trans people, survivors of sexual violence, et al. His argument is summarzied above — that psychoanalysis needs to get its head out of the 19th Century and wake up to the world we currently live in, particularly regarding trans and intersex people. As so often with Preciado, he presents a bunch of ideas which are already old hat among trans people and queers as though they are earth-shattering revelations. Though, judging by my favourite part of this book — the footnotes where Preciado places the audience booing at him! — perhaps for some stodgy straight Parisian psychoanalysts, they truly are ground-breaking and a bit threatening. 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. 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. An erudite essay on the right to be oneself, free from normative psychoanalysis. The author makes a wider point on the in his view colonial and patriarchal basis of the dichotomy between masculinity and feminity

Preciado elegantly summarizes the admittedly brutal history of psychoanalysis and gender. Much of what he documents I first encountered in a paper by Patricia Gherovici, “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change,” which traces the medical and psychiatric development of the idea of transsexuality in Western Europe and the United States. Yet Gherovici’s account differs from Preciado’s. As an analyst and an American Lacanian, Gherovici wants to advance the discipline and expresses sympathy toward its leading figures and their historically limited views. Preciado, meanwhile, wants to shred the discipline, to blow it apart. He writes: 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. Let’s say I had no other route, always assuming that it was not a case of choosing freedom but of creating it.

In Can the Monster Speak?, he compares himself to a number of figures, starting with Red Peter, an ape kidnapped from Africa who learns how to speak and gives a lecture to a hall of scientists in a story by Kafka. Preciado, from what he calls over and over again the “cage” of his trans body, also compares himself to Galileo, Freud, Frankenstein’s monster, a migrant, a child, a cow, and the professor in Money Heist. He seems to feel disempowered by his audience and at the same time to wish to elevate himself above them and speak downward. At times this grandiose voice is seductive and the images are elegant. It can also feel a bit clueless.I still think it’s worth a read because it’s so short and because it does have an interesting context & framing device. 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.’ 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.