CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK (PB)

In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado spoke at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts – for whom he is a ‘mentally ill person’ suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’ – Preciado drew on 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. Inevitably, fragments of the lecture ended up online, translated with no regard to context. This publication is the definitive transcript.