Can the Monster Speak? - Paul B. Preciado - annotation
Annotations
Dedication
2026-04-09 11:46 | Page No.: 8
When I asked whether there was a psychoanalyst in the auditorium who was queer, trans or non-binary, there was silence, broken only by giggles. When I asked that psychoanalytic institutions face up to their responsibilities in response to contemporary discursive changes in the epistemology of sexual and gender identity, half the audience laughed and the other half shouted or demanded that I leave the premises.
Epigraph
2026-04-09 11:47 | Page No.: 10
‘What am I doing here? I have come to terrorize you! I am a monster, you say? No! I am the people! I am an exception? No! I am the rule; you are the exception! You are the chimera; I am the reality!’
—Victor Hugo, The Man who Laughs (1869), quoted by artist Lorenza Böttner in her thesis ‘Handicapped?’ (1982)
Can the Monster Speak?
2026-04-09 11:48 | Page No.: 13
In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote ‘Ein Bericht für eine Akademie’ – ‘A Report to an Academy’. The narrator of the text is an ape who, having learned human language, is appearing before an academy of the greatest scientific authorities to report to them on what human evolution has meant to him.
2026-04-09 11:49 | Page No.: 14
Once captured, the ape says he had no choice: if he did not wish to die locked up in a cage, he had to accept the ‘cage’ of human subjectivity.
2026-04-09 11:49 | Page No.: 15
I am the monster who speaks to you. The monster you have created with your discourse and your clinical practices. I am the monster who gets up from the analyst’s couch and dares to speak, not as a patient, but as a citizen, as your monstrous equal.
2026-04-09 11:50 | Page No.: 15
As a trans body, as a non-binary body, whose right to speak as an expert about my condition, or to produce a discourse or any form of knowledge about myself is not recognized by the medicinal profession, the law, psychoanalysis or psychiatry, I have done as Red Peter did, I have learned the language of Freud and Lacan, the language of the colonial patriarchy, your language, and I am here to address you.
2026-04-09 11:51 | Page No.: 16
A necropolitical1 animal that you have a tendency to confuse with ‘universal human’ and which remains, at least until the present, the subject of the central statement in the discourses of the psychoanalytical institutions of colonial modernism.
2026-04-09 11:51 | Page No.: 17
whatever the case, this cage is better than that of ‘men and women’ in that it acknowledges its status as a cage.
2026-04-09 11:52 | Page No.: 17
In the life of a trans adult, consequently, six years take on the same importance they have for a newborn in the first months of life, as colours appear before their eyes, as forms take on mass, as hands grip for the first time, as the throat, until now capable only of guttural cries, and the lips, until now used only to suckle, articulate their first word.
2026-04-09 11:52 | Page No.: 17
I bring up the pleasure of childhood learning because a similar pleasure exists in the appropriation of a new voice and a new name, in the exploration of the world beyond the cage of masculinity and femininity that is part of the process of transitioning.
2026-04-09 11:54 | Page No.: 19
I was trapped. Had I been nailed to the floor, it would not have reduced my scope for action. Why were things as they were? What was it in my child’s body that predetermined my whole life? You could scratch yourself until you bled and not find an answer. You could split your head open on the steel bars of gender and not discover the reason.
2026-04-09 11:54 | Page No.: 20
But I resisted domestication, I survived the systematic process intended to extinguish my life force, which governed my childhood and adolescence.
2026-04-09 11:56 | Page No.: 21
In order to discover the other books that would lead me to where I am today, I had to travel, I had to learn other languages: this was how I discovered Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sappho and Socrates, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen [To See a Woman], the ‘Rapport contre la normalité’ [‘Report against Normality’] published by the Front d’Action Révolutionnaire Gay, Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy, Guillaume Dustan’s In My Room, the diaries of Lou Sullivan, the novels of Kathy Acker, the feminist rereading of the history of science by Londa Schiebinger, Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling, the theoretical texts of Gayle Rubin, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve K. Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Susan Striker, Sandy Stone and Karen Barad.
2026-04-09 11:57 | Page No.: 22
So, since in the heteropatriarchal binary circus women are offered the role of belle or victim, and since I was not and did not feel myself capable of being one or the other, I decided to stop being a woman. Why couldn’t abandoning femininity not become a fundamental tactic of feminism? This amazing association of ideas, lucid and magnificent, must have hatched somewhere in my womb, since women’s creativity is said to reside solely in the uterus. And so it must have been in my rebellious, non-reproductive uterus that all the other strategies were conceived: the rage that made me mistrust the norm, the taste for insubordination… Just as children endlessly repeat gestures that give them pleasure and allow them to learn, so I repeated gestures that violated the norm so I could find a way out.
2026-04-09 11:58 | Page No.: 23
I simply wanted a way out: I didn’t care what it was. So I could move forward, so I could escape this mockery of sexual difference, so I would not be arrested, hands in the air, and forced back to the boundaries of this taxonomy. This is how I came to start injecting myself with testosterone, surrounded by a group of friends who were also seeking an exit. This is how this thing that you call ‘the female condition’ burst out from me at breakneck speed, tumbling head over heels, taking me further than I could ever have imagined. Let me repeat myself: I was looking for a door, an exit, a way out.
2026-04-09 11:58 | Page No.: 23
I carefully avoid using the word freedom, I prefer to speak about finding a way out of the regime of sexual difference, which does not mean instantly becoming free.
2026-04-09 12:00 | Page No.: 25
Liberation, whether gender or sexual, cannot under any circumstances be a more equitable redistribution of violence, nor a more pop acceptance of oppression. Liberty is a tunnel that must be dug by hand. Freedom is a way out. Liberty – like the new name by which you now call me, or the vaguely hirsute face you see before you – is something that is carefully fabricated and exercised.
2026-04-09 12:00 | Page No.: 25
And my way out, among other things, was testosterone. In this process, the hormone is not an end in itself: it is an ally in the task of inventing an elsewhere.
2026-04-09 12:01 | Page No.: 26
Let me tell you, however, that in this apparent state of constraint I managed to fabricate greater freedom than I had had as a supposedly free woman in the technopatriarchal society of the early twenty-first century, if by freedom we mean the ability to go out, to perceive a horizon, to build a project, to experience if only for a fleeting instant the radical community of all life, all energy, all matter beyond the taxonomic hierarchies invented by human history.
2026-04-09 12:02 | Page No.: 28
When I was awarded my doctorate at Princeton University and I saw a new group of instructors applaud me, I realized that I had to be circumspect. Here it is again, the cage: gilded this time, but just as solid as those I had known before. My predecessor, Red Peter, claimed that he ‘beat his way through the bushes’, and that is precisely what I did, I beat my way through the bushes of academia…
2026-04-09 12:04 | Page No.: 30
Then I went out into the street and started talking with this voice that was at once mine and someone else’s. My first words propelled me into the community of those who think of themselves as men, who welcomed me as never before: ‘Listen to him talk, he’s a man!’ To me these words felt like a branding iron, taken from the flames, marking me out as a man, finally accepting me into the masculine community.
2026-04-09 12:04 | Page No.: 30
Little by little, this alien voice became a part of me. It is with this voice, fabricated yet organic, staged yet entirely my own, that I address you today, esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the Academy.
2026-04-09 12:06 | Page No.: 32
Why is it, my beloved binary friends, that you are convinced that only subalterns possess an identity? Why are you convinced that only Muslims, Jews, queers, lesbians, trans folk, people who live in the banlieues, migrants and Blacks have an identity?
2026-04-09 12:07 | Page No.: 33
To be branded with an identity means simply that one does not have the power to designate one’s identity as universal.
2026-04-09 12:06 | Page No.: 33
There is no universality in the psychoanalytic tales you recount. The mytho-psychological tales picked up by Freud and raised to the rank of science by Lacan are simply local stories, tales of the patriarchal-colonial European mind, tales used to legitimize the sovereign power of the white father over all other bodies.
2026-04-09 12:07 | Page No.: 34
Some among you will say that in becoming ‘trans’ I have renounced my true female nature. Others will say that there was within me a pre-existing masculine nature (whether defined in terms of genetics, endocrinology or psychology) that sought to express itself. Still others will say that it was the secret desires of my parents (invariably imaged as a binary heterosexual, preferably white couple) that surfaced in me and made me what I am today. Bullshit. These are no more than grotesque simplifications. I am not at all what you imagine. It is no easier to know who an individual is than to determine the precise location of an electron in a particle accelerator.
2026-04-09 12:08 | Page No.: 35
The first law, which I considered self-evident during the whole process of my transition, was to do away with the fear of being abnormal that had been planted in my heart as a child. It is this fear that needs to be identified, quarantined and eliminated from memory.
2026-04-09 12:09 | Page No.: 35
The second law, one that was rather more difficult to observe, was to be wary of all simplification. To cease to assume, as you do, that I know what a man is, what a woman is, what a homosexual or a heterosexual is. To free my thinking from these shackles and experience, try to perceive, to feel, to name, beyond sexual difference.
2026-04-09 12:10 | Page No.: 37
I have not completely ceased to be Beatriz to become solely Paul. My living body, I will not say my unconscious or my consciousness, but my living body, which encompasses all its constant mutation and its multiple evolutions, is like a Greek city in which, at varying levels of energy, contemporary trans buildings, postmodern lesbian architecture and beautiful Art Deco houses coexist with ancient rustic buildings beneath whose foundations lie classical ruins both animal and vegetal, mineral and chemical substrates that tend to be invisible. The traces of past life left in my memory have become more and more complex and interconnected, creating a collection of living forces, such that it is impossible to say that only six years ago I was simply a woman and today I have become simply a man. I prefer my new condition as monster to that of man or woman, because his condition is like a foot stepping forward into the void, indicating the path to another world.
2026-04-09 12:11 | Page No.: 38
The monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviours cannot yet be considered true in a predetermined regime of knowledge and power.
2026-04-09 12:12 | Page No.: 39
The migrant has lost the nation state. The refugee has lost their house. The trans person loses their body. They all cross that border. The border is part of them and cuts through them. Usurps and overthrows them.
2026-04-09 12:14 | Page No.: 42
To be trans, one must accept the triumphant irruption of another future in oneself, in every cell of one’s body. To transition comes down to understanding that the cultural codes of masculinity and femininity are anecdotal compared to the infinite variety of modalities of existence.
2026-04-09 12:15 | Page No.: 42
the trans experience is a whirlwind of transformative energy that recodifies all political and cultural signifiers, preventing a clear (cardinal, to use the medical terminology) delineation between yesterday and today, between the feminine and the masculine.
2026-04-09 12:15 | Page No.: 43
I am an Orlando where writing has become chemistry.
2026-04-09 12:16 | Page No.: 43
But I would like to avoid the heroic account of my transition. There was nothing heroic in it. I am not a werewolf and I do not possess the immortality of the vampire. The only thing that was heroic was the desire to live – the force with which the desire to change manifested, and still continues to manifest itself through me.
2026-04-09 12:17 | Page No.: 45
In itself, gender transition is easier to accomplish than going to school every day at the same time throughout the long years of childhood and adolescence, easier than a faithful monogamous marriage, easier than pregnancy and childbirth, easier than starting a family, easier than finding a rewarding full-time job, easier than being happy in a consumer society, easier than growing old and being shut away in a retirement home. I would go so far as to say that, contrary to what is routinely claimed, the mutation process that accompanies gender transitioning is one of the most beautiful and joyous things that I have ever done in my life.
I.
2026-04-09 15:54 | Page No.: 54
An epistemology represents a closure of our cognitive system that not only offers answers to our questions, but determines the very questions that we can pose according to a pre-established interpretation of sensory data.
2026-04-09 16:03 | Page No.: 62
In the late nineteenth century, Freudian psychoanalysis began to function as a technology for regulating the psychic apparatus ‘enclosed’ within the patriarchal and colonial epistemology of sex, gender and sexual difference.
2026-04-09 16:06 | Page No.: 64
Psychoanalysis is not a critique of this epistemology, 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.
2026-04-09 16:06 | Page No.: 64
I speak with no animosity. I myself underwent psychoanalysis for seventeen years with various analysts, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Guattarian… Everything I express here, I do so not as an ‘outsider’, but as a body of psychoanalysis, a monster of the analyst’s couch.
2026-04-09 16:09 | Page No.: 65
In certain cases, my cure depended precisely on my ability to escape the psychoanalytic norm, as when I left in the middle of a session during which the analyst had done everything possible to rid me of what he considered ‘the multiple forms of fetishism that threatened my female sexuality’.
III.
2026-04-09 16:37 | Page No.: 92
Your political duty is to take care of children, not to legitimize the violence of the patriarchal-colonial regime. The time has come to drag the analysts’ couches into the streets and collectivize speech, politicize bodies, debinarize gender
Sources
2026-04-09 16:41 | Page No.: 96
Perhaps this process of transformation alone, terrible and devastating as it may seem to you, now deserves the name of psychoanalysis.