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

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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.’ Paul Preciado’s controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.

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.

Who gets to be human?

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. The part of me that is a writer feels some embarrassment, stemming from my own shame around the ways I may appear grandiose or self-congratulatory in my writing. I don’t like or feel proud of the part of me that wants a lot of attention and validation for saying my ideas in public, and I sometimes feel averse toward other people who I sense share this tendency. This part of me wants to dunk on Preciado for being arrogant; if I can distance myself from him, maybe I can redeem myself from my own shame, eliminate the stink of my own bloviating white-trans-cultural-privilege-falsely-aligned-with-the-marginalized persona. I feel in my discomfort the ways I am turned off by how Preciado speaks at times, and also the ways I feel drawn toward him. I have also experienced transphobia in psychodynamic establishment spaces, and there’s something powerful about seeing someone claim that experience. 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. 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

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.’Preciado urges psychoanalysts to evolve, to incorporate variety. What becomes evident, is that our belief systems steeped in binary notions of this or that, stop us from seeing the full spectrum of human experience. If we have a predetermined regime of knowledge and power, then we will always measure everything against it, missing out on what is actually there. In the end, the main question is: “What if genital difference or gender expression were not the criteria for the acceptance of a human body in a social and political collective?” MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 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.’

Preciado ... is a skilled rhetorician and distinctly anti-histrionic in his presentation of the facts of his experience....The book, which could easily have lapsed into a study of an object, becomes the document in which the object argues to be recognised: that the trans-individual be considered valid as a person, not an illness.’ 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: 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 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.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. 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. 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.