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. 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: 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’. 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 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.Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. A heartfelt text, to trigger debate and foster understanding while also expressing righteous anger. 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:

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

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. 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. 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.’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. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.