(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Paul B. Preciado is no unknown writer to MODERN TIMES readers. In 2020, the newspaper brought the translations of Preciado's monthly chronicle from the daily Libération in Paris, and in MODERN TIMES from spring 2023 I had the opportunity to review the first Danish translation of one of Preciado's books under the title Political biology. That book was called Text Junkie and was first published in Spanish, Preciado's native language, before being translated into French by the author himself and published in 2008.
The book reviewed here has just been published in Danish translation and republished by the publisher at random in Copenhagen. It bears the title Can the monster talk? A Report to a Psychoanalytic AcademyThe book was published directly in French in 2020 with a thank you note to Preciado's partner and workmate of many years, Virginie. Descents, one of the most significant fiction writers in today's France.
Preciado connoisseurs will once again be able to enjoy the author's determined way of writing and thinking, which has become more precise in the concepts and in the issues that must be brought forward in order to establish a critique of the binarity in both heterosexual and homosexuals relationship. In addition, there is the address, as the subheading indicates, to a conference for psychoanalysts. The book begins thus:
«On November 17, 2019, I was invited to speak at the Palais des congrès in Paris in front of 3.500 psychoanalysts gathered in connection with School of the Freudian Cause's annual conference, which had the theme 'Women in Psychoanalysis'. The talk triggered an earthquake. When I asked the audience if there was a homosexual, transgender or nonbinary psychoanalyst present, I was met with a resounding silence.» But immediately afterwards there were interruptions with shouts from the audience, and soon Preciado was deprived of the floor by the chairman after having only delivered 25% of the lecture. That lecture was then published as a book by the important Parisian publisher Grasset, which has published essays by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Serres, among others. Preciado's book came out of the printer on June 1, 2020 (i.e. half a year after the uproar among the assembled psychoanalysts). Already on June 11, the daily was able to Le Monde bring an insinuatingly negative review of the absolute leading Lacan and Freud researcher in France, the then 76-year-old philosopher Elisabeth Roudinesco.
A doctrine of cognition
I return to Roudinesco's insinuations, but first a little about the book's structure and argumentation: The literary form of Preciado's 'monster' book is inspired by Kafka's parable from 1917 Report to an academy, in which a primate supposedly presents his history of adaptation to an academy of homo sapiens. Preciado then does the opposite, since his text is intended to account for a break with the «regime of gender difference», as it is called: that is, with the patriarchal, capitalist order. As in previous texts, the break is conceived with the help of important theoretical devices, first and foremost the critique of colonialism and the criticism of the identity requirement. So the two-track, binary gender division presented as a form of colonization of the bodies, which allows for more clarifications about dependency, exploitation and reproduction requirements, i.e. general bonds. Preciado points out that his text does not advocate any kind of liberation. It is about something other than emancipation:
"Personally, I did not feel free as a child in Franco's Spain, nor later when I lived as a lesbian in New York, nor now that I am, as they say, a trans man."
For Preciado, it is about making the "cage", as it is called, impossible, i.e. the frameworks and closures humans have provided for all social solutions so far.
It is not a matter of personal freedom that is at work in the book, and certainly not a demand for "sexual freedom". On the contrary, Preciado writes: "The genitals do not exist, there are only colonial enclaves of power". So for Preciado it is about making impossible the "cage", as it is called, i.e. the framework and enclosures that humans have given all social solutions up to now. Cf. for example Friedrich Engels's confrontation with "the family, private property and the state" or the founding of Max Weber's sociology, the premise of which was precisely to remove the "iron cage" of modern society. It is not Marxism or sociology that is at work in Preciado's research, but a special "epistemology", i.e. a epistemology.
Preciado points out, “that major changes have already caused the epistemology of gender difference to waver, that it is mutating and within the next ten or twenty years will probably give way to a new epistemology. They transfeminist, queer and anti-racist movements, as well as new approaches to kinship, love relationships and identification in terms of gender, desire, sexuality and naming are just signs of this mutation and of experiments in the collective production of a different epistemology about the living human body.» And Preciado adds to his audience: «In light of the epistemological transformation that is already underway, you, ladies and gentlemen, French psychoanalysts, must decide what you will do, where you will place yourselves, in which ‘cage’ you will be confined, and how you will play your discursive and clinical cards in such an important process as this.»
The trans person
It is worth noting that this book has been dedicated by Preciado to the philosopher Judith Butler, whose analyzes of vulnerability, exposure, lethality and grief have enabled a way of thinking that combines criticism of oppression and persecution with an investment in human potentiality collective opportunity to counter oppression and persecution. In Danish there are several of Butlers books include the very current Towards a performative assembly theory (Danish 2020, English original from 2015), which takes on a classic revolutionary question: What type of organization can handle human affairs beyond capitalism and patriarchy without immediately restoring control and alignment?
"The migrant has lost the nation-state. The refugee has lost his home. The transperson has lost his body. They all cross the border.”
In other words, both Butler and Preciado have reached beyond the idea of representation and are moving down into the materiality of dissolution to hit the 'microphysics' of power, as Michel called it. Foucault, another of Preciado's sources of inspiration. Preciado writes:
"The migrant has lost the nation-state. The refugee has lost his home. The transperson has lost his body. They all cross the border. The border constitutes them and cleaves them. Puts them down and rejects them. The trans body is to the epistemology of gender difference what the American continents were to the Spanish Empire». So something prohibitive, landscape-like (geography is a recurring theme in this book) and very extensive, where the traditional institutions – here the sexes – lose their footing. However, Preciado points out that there is nothing 'heroic' about administering testosterone, the product Preciado takes to develop male sexual characteristics, and that he can reduce the dose at any time, whereby the male sexual characteristics will be receding quite quickly.
A mutation of psychoanalysis
That is why, and now I return to Roudinesco's insinuations, it is completely misleading to accuse Preciado of writing from a feeling of self-pity, as Roudinesco does in his review. I also mentioned in the previous Preciado review here in the newspaper (from spring 2023). Why such insinuations? The answer is simple: Self-pity constitutes a fascist style, which the Swedish constitutional scholar Herbert Tingsten drew attention to 90 years ago in his book on Mussolini and fascism. In order to neutralize pity for subjects and the persecuted, fascism presents an ideology that it is the Italians, the Germans or today the Russians who are or were the persecuted. And Preciado's critical treatment of the androgynous person can also weaken the foundation of psychoanalytic science, namely that the psyche is rounded off by its emergence between father, mother and OedipusSo it is dangerous for both treatment and self-understanding within psychoanalysis.
Preciado concludes his book thus: «When I consider my development and its present result, I can neither complain nor be satisfied. There is still too much to do. I urgently appeal for a mutation of psychoanalysis, for the emergence of a mutant psychoanalysis, a psychoanalysis that corresponds to the paradigm mutation we are experiencing.»
