Paul B. Preciado

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. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado called for a radical transformation of psychoanalytic discourse and practices, denouncing its complicity with the ideology of sexual difference.

A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts

Can the Monster Speak?

Stephanie 

Psychoanalysis is not a critique of this epistemology [of sexual difference and binary gender], but the therapy needed for the patriarchal-colonial subject to continue to function despite the extraordinary psychic cost and the inexpressible violence of this regime.

All the things that are terrible and terrifying about transsexuality and gender transitioning are not found in the process of transition itself, but in the way in which the boundaries between the sexes punish and threaten to kill anyone who dares cross them  it is not gender transitioning that is horrifying and dangerous, but the regime of sexual difference.

rowanna 

eris

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 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. Speaking from his own "mutant" cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era--an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

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

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