Can the Monster Speak?
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 ‘A 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. Demonstrating the discipline’s complicity with the ideology of sex, gender and sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, ended up published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated and published with no regard for exactitude. Eighteen months on, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.
Paul B. Preciado is the author of An Apartment on Uranus, Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics and Pornotopia, and wrote and directed the film Orlando, My Political Biography. He is the Director of the Institute for Planetary Transition at LUMA Arles, France. He was born in Spain and lives in France.