(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 a Danish translation and republished by the publishing house Aleatorik in Copenhagen. It bears the title Can the monster talk? A Report to a Psychoanalytic Academy. The book was published directly in French in 2020 with a tribute to Preciado's partner and workmate for many years, Virginie Despentes, one of the most significant fiction writers in France today.
Preciado connoisseurs will again be able to enjoy the author's decisive 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 homosexual relationships. In addition, the request, 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 lecture triggered an earthquake. When I asked the audience if there was a gay, transgender or nonbinary psychoanalyst present, I was met with a resounding silence.» But immediately afterwards there are interruptions with shouts from the hall, and soon Preciado is taken away from the floor by the meeting leader after only delivering 25% of the lecture. That lecture was then published as a book by the important Parisian publisher Grasset, which i.a. has published essays by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Serres. Preciado's book came from the printing house on June 1, 2020 (so half a year after the post among the assembled psychoanalysts). As early as June 11, the daily could Le Monde bring an insinuatingly negative review of the absolutely 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 adaptation story to an academy of homo sapiens. Preciado then does the opposite, as his text must explain 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 critique of the demand for identity. So the two-track, binary gender division is presented as a form of colonization of the bodies, which allows for more clarifications about dependence, exploitation and reproductive demands, i.e. general bonds. Preciado points out that his text does not advocate some 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 thus not a matter of personal freedom that is at stake in the book, and not at all a demand for "sexual freedom". Preciaodo writes, on the contrary: "The genitals do not exist, there are only colonial power pianos". So 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. Cf. for example, Friedrich Engels' confrontation with "the family, private property and the state" or the founding of Max Weber's sociology, the prerequisite of which was precisely the removal of 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 theory of cognition.
Preciado points out «that major changes have already caused the epistemology of the gender difference to falter, that it is mutating and within the next ten or twenty years will probably give way to a new epistemology. The 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, addressing his audience: «In light of the epistemological transformation that is already underway, you, ladies and gentlemen, French psychoanalysts, must decide what you want to do, where you want to place yourself, in which 'cage ' You will be locked up 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. Several of Butler's books are available in Danish, e.g. the very current one 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 move down into the materiality of dissolution in order to hit the 'microphysics' of power, as it was called by Michel 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
It is therefore, and now I return to Roudinesco's insinuations, to accuse Preciado of writing from a sense of self-pity, as Roudinesco does in his review, quite misleading. That there is no self-pity at Preciado, I was also aware of in the previous Preciado review here in the newspaper (from spring 2023). Why then 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 the pity for subjects and the persecuted, fascism produces 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 bisexual person can also weaken the foundation of psychoanalytic science, namely that the psyche is rounded by its formation between father, mother and Oedipus. So it is dangerous for both the treatment and the 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.»
