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

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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. 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.’ 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. 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:

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. 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. 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: I do not believe that heterosexuality is a sexual practice or a sexual identity but, like Monique Wittig, a political regime that reduces the sum total of the living human body and its psychic energy to its reproductive potential, a position of discursive and institutional power. Epistemologically and politically, the psychoanalyst is a binary heterosexual body... until proven otherwise. The author questions the concepts of identifying as male and female, and the hostile response the psychoanalyst community has for so long taken against trans people. Still it is seen as a condition, gender dysphoria, something to be solved by a transition of the subject to another constructed gender.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.’

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.’ 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.’ I still think it’s worth a read because it’s so short and because it does have an interesting context & framing device. 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. 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’.

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. 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 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.

A New Paradigm

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 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?” I may be more integrationist than Preciado, myself a clinician and at times experimenting with my capability to use “the language of the norm.” That said, for me, his confrontational tone fell somewhat flat. Trans and queer issues are centered at the most prestigious psychoanalytic institutes in New York City, where I live, and while not free of ignorance or fetishizing/careerist fascination, the leaders in these places generally seem committed to engaging with the brutal history of their own discipline. The Abigail Shriers of the therapy world notwithstanding, there are many well-meaning if slightly clumsy champions of queer liberation in the coastal U.S. psychoanalytic establishment. 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:

The regime of difference

As a psychologist in training, trans woman, and social justice educator, I sometimes speak to groups of cis mental health practitioners in academic settings about competency providing mental healthcare for trans people. I do this work relying less on tools I learned through studying and debating theory, and more by drawing on what I try to do as an organizer. Instead of attempting to appear impressive or clever, I aim to connect emotionally, with the goal of fomenting meaningful individual and cultural change. This is an interesting book which I think has a little trouble finding a place in the world of queer theory. It’s simply too broad to appeal to people who are already familiar with queer theory, yet it’s not actually calibrated to appeal to those who aren’t already at least sympathetic to queer theory. 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.’ MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.