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Book cover of Can the Monster Speak?

Can the Monster Speak?

A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts

Paul Preciado

13
Coup de coeur
Coup de coeur (LGBTQ+), by Lily
This book is an essential read for anyone interested in psychoanalysis and how the field has (re)produced categories of gender. Specifically, Preciado highlights the ways in which psychoanalysis has (re)enforced the gender binary, harmful ideas of gender essentialism and mental illness pertaining to gender dysphoria. The author asks psychoanalysts to consider their positionality, urging them to see the potential transformative power of their field to reflect the world we live in more accurately.

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.

Translated by Frank Wynne
Publisher: FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 02 Jun 2021
Dimensions: 128 x 196 x 12 mm
ISBN: 9781913097585