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. 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. 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.

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. 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.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." 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. 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: 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.’ 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.

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. Book Genre: Essays, Feminism, Gender, Gender Studies, LGBT, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Queer, Theory, Writing Like Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto , Preciado creates a posthuman figure to escape the confines of white European colonial hegemony. However, Preciado moves from the image of the monstrous, civilised ape to becoming the monster himself, by means of testosterone injections. This idea of moving beyond the human is one Deleuze and Guattari are very interested in; particularly in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The segmented life of the human needs to go schizo if it is to cross boundaries and escape the capitalist-realist machine of manufactured desire. 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.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.

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.” 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.’ Let’s say I had no other route, always assuming that it was not a case of choosing freedom but of creating it. 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: 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.

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: 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.