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. 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." 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: 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 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.Speaking from his own ‘mutant’ cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline’s complicity with the ideology of sexual 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.

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: 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.

Escaping the cage

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: 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. 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.’

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. 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.’ 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. 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?”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.’ Book Genre: Essays, Feminism, Gender, Gender Studies, LGBT, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Queer, Theory, Writing 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. 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.

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 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.’ 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. 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. 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.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: 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. 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.’