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. 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.’

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.

Can the Monster Speak?

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.’ 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." PDF / EPUB File Name: Can_the_Monster_Speak_A_Report_to_an_Academy_of_Psychoanalysts_-_Paul_B_Preciado.pdf, Can_the_Monster_Speak_A_Report_to_an_Academy_of_Psychoanalysts_-_Paul_B_Preciado.epub

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 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 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: 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.To introduce myself, since you are a group of 3,500 psychoanalysts and I feel a little alone on this side of the stage, to take a running jump and hoist myself onto the shoulders of the master of metamorphosis, the greatest analyst of the excesses that hide behind the façade of scientific reason and of the madness commonly referred to as mental health: Franz Kafka.

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. Ultimately, Preciado turns to paradigms, quoting Latour: paradigms ‘allow new facts to emerge.’ They, like the ‘runway of an airport’, make it possible for certain facts to land’. They are ‘discourse worlds’, not ‘worlds of immutable meaning’. The paradigm must shift, and it must start with psychoanalysis. I’ll leave Preciado to have the final words here: 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 We urgently need clinical practice to transition. This cannot happen without a revolutionary mutation in psychoanalysis, and a critical challenge of its patriarchal-colonial presuppositions. A transition in clinical practice would entail a shift in position: the object of study becomes the subject, while the person who, until now, has been the subject agrees to submit to a process of study, questioning and experimentation. The former subject agrees to change. The subject/object duality (both clinically and epistemologically) disappears and is replaced by a new relationship, one that conjointly leads to mutation and to becoming other. It will be about strength and mutation rather than power and knowledge. It will entail learning together, and healing our wounds, abandoning the techniques of violence and devising a new approach to the reproduction of life on a planetary scale.” 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.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. 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?” 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.’ 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: 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: