“Can the Monster Speak? A report to an academy of psychoanalysts” by Paul B. Preciado is the full text of a speech that was only able to be partially held at the 49th Study Day of the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris in the November of 2019 (Preciado 2021). It’s title is a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1998) and it is held by a subaltern body: the trans body, the non-binary body of Paul B. Preciado. The speech was unable to be held fully due to a lack of time and interruptions from the audience of psychoanalysts. It’s a powerful and radical critique of psychoanalytical theories, traditions and institutions and their roles in supporting and being parts of colonial patriarchy, and in doing so is also an immediately (and intensely) intersectional text. Although Preciado - speaking in front of a congress of psychoanalysts as a trans man - focuses on psychoanalysis and its role in the colonial co-creation of binary gender and the pathologization of trans bodies for obvious reasons, he doesn’t limit his radical critique and deconstruction to the concept of gender. He consistently speaks of the colonial patriarchy, highlighting the intersections between coloniality, racism and gender, he speaks out against the historical and present centering of “white heterosexual middle-class men in psychoanalysis” (Preciado 2021: 19). Most importantly for this essay, he illuminates intersections and connections between animality and speciesism, and his experiences with transphobia and colonial heteronormativity. How he does this will be the content of the main body of this essay, but first I want to introduce a concept I will be working with in the following text and which I think to be very fruitful for any intersectional analysis and practice: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the line of flight (ligne de fuite) (Deleuze and Guattari 1991).
First introduced in “Rhizome”, the first chapter of their 1980 book “A Thousand Plateaus”, a line of flight is an aspect of an assemblage (e.g. a book, a conversation, an idea, a power structure etc.) that - if taken - causes the assemblage to change and adapt to those changes by pulling it into new directions. Lines of flight are present in every assemblage, they are what leads to deterritorializations of stratified systems of thought and action (Deleuze and Guattari 1991). For example, a classic or neoliberal economics textbook about the English, Belgian or German economy can include a reference to the automobile industry, which presents a line of flight leading towards the history of the colonial economy of rubber extraction and slavery in those countries’ former African colonies. Leading to a shift in focus from classical or neoliberal economics to coloniality and critical political economics. The reference’s function as a line of flight does not need to be intended or even thought about by the authors to be effective. That is because lines of flight always come from and lead towards the external, showing that no change or movement (and further no existence) is possible without relationships and connections to the ‘outside’ or an/many ‘other/s’. A line of flight never comes alone, it is a multiplicity. It is always already 1 + n lines of flight and those lines of flight do not lead to only one place; they are multiplicities leading to other multiplicities. In the context of intersectionality, lines of flight are everywhere. Intersectionality itself can be seen as a line of flight away from single axis frameworks of oppression and resistance. Similarly, a key aspect of intersectional thought and practice, Matsuda’s method of “asking the other question” (Matsuda 1991: 1189), always constitutes and creates multiple lines of flight away from isolated and atomized conceptions of subordination towards new awarenesses of the interconnections between different relationships of domination and resistance. The drawing, making aware of and then taking of a line of flight is a political intervention against a stratified structure made so by uneven power relations. It is with this perspective that I want to apply the concept of lines of flight to Preciado’s “Can the Monster Speak?”. Not to critique the text itself, but to expand on its radical interventions, to take some of the lines of flight it presents but isn’t able to take fully due to its unavoidable limitations as a speech with a time limit. I will be focusing on two parts of the speech and using them as lines of flight towards intersectional discussions on speciesism and colonial patriarchy.
The first line of flight I want to focus on is Preciado’s use and comparison of himself to the ape “Red Peter” from Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (Preciado 2021). At the beginning of the speech, Preciado introduces himself and his position by drawing an analogy between himself and Red Peter, who in Kafka’s text is an ape who was captured on a hunting expedition of the firm Hagenbeck in the Gold Coast in the early 20th century. Red Peter, who is speaking in front of an academy of scientists, reports of how he was captured, transported to Europe in a cage on a steamship and was trained to perform in music halls before later joining human society after learning to drink alcohol and speak (Kafka 2001). He does not present this process as one of evolution or emancipation from his ape-nature though, but simply as something he had to do if he didn’t want to die in the cage, literal and figurative, that he had been put in solely by being an ape in human society. To survive, to find “a way out”, he reports of how he had to accept the ‘cage’ of human subjectivity. The text is a critique of colonial European humanism and its rigid taxonomies of human-animal, normal-abnormal. Preciado goes on to say: “Just as Red Peter addressed himself to the scientists, so today I address myself to you, the academicians of psychoanalysis, from my ‘cage’ as a trans man.” (Preciado 2021: 18), connecting his situation with that of the ape that learned to speak. This comparison, which is further explored in the speech, presents an intense line of flight towards the intersections of speciesism, colonial heteronormativity and transphobia. By comparing himself to Red Peter (thereby claiming to be closer to him than to the human psychoanalysts present), Preciado crosses one of the fundamental borders of the ‘human’: the border between ‘human’ and ‘animal’, between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ (Dell'Aversano 2019). He thereby not only transgresses and critiques the gender binary, but also the nature-culture binary/divide (which I have discussed as an intensely anti-intersectional concept in a previous text (see Enby 2024)).
Both Preciado and Red Peter had to learn the language of their oppressors, the language of the colonial capitalist patriarchy to be able to survive and speak out. Preciado had to learn how to speak (close to) ‘correctly’ and ‘objectively’ about gender and sexuality, i. e. like evidently white heterosexual middle-class men like Freud and Lacan, to not be labelled irrevocably mentally ill and refused any right to be taken seriously by his audience or to speak in front of them in the first place. Red Peter had to learn to speak in a human language at all in order to not be dismissed as ‘simply’ an animal, incapable of (human) ‘reason’ and therefore unable to report of his experiences to an academy of scientists. Both of their bodies, non-human and non-binary/trans* are not given the right to create a discourse and knowledge about themselves if they do not conform to the rules of normative human society, science and medicine. Here, an important difference in how trans* human animals and non-human animals are characterized as incapable of ‘reason’ arises. The exclusion of trans* human animals from the construct of ‘reason’ is justified by claiming them to be various levels and kinds of mentally ill based on an inability (or more aptly from a trans* perspective, an unwillingness) to perform heteronormative and gender binary conceptions of human existence. But the labels of ‘mental illness’, ‘gender identity disorder’, ‘gender dysphoria’ etc. still imply a capacity for ‘reason’ that is missing in a particular trans* body. In seeming contrast, non-human animals are not labelled as ‘mentally ill’, instead in most cases it is simply (and falsely) asserted that non-human animals have no capacities for ‘reason’ at all and can therefore not be ‘mentally ill’ either. This assertion holds up as little as the assertion of trans* people being ‘mentally ill’. Both reveal deep-seeded speciesism and transphobia, where the human (ostensibly cis, and preferably heteronormatively so) is the sole entity with access to the highest level of existence: ‘reason’. That all of this is only possible with extremely narrow and exclusionary definitions of concepts such as ‘reason’ and ‘intelligence’ is made evident in the case of non-human animals by Dell’Aversano when she states: “Everything that we can do and animals cannot is considered evidence of complex cognition; everything animals can do that we cannot is considered an “instinct”, having nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence, even though it should be clear even to a human […] that surviving in an environment as complex and as challenging as that in which most animals thrive in the wild, with no police to scare off potential murders and no supermarkets to shop for food, requires considerably more intelligence than is needed to vegetate in front of a TV set.” (Dell'Aversano 2019: 29). In addition, this difference is not ontological, as it is presented in speciesist discourse. It is not one of kind, but of scale. This is made more evident by the fact that the effects of this difference manifest themselves as intensities of oppression and erasure, and not as oppression and non-oppression. Trans* people are permitted/forced onto a narrow path towards ‘reason’ and ‘health’, the one prescribed by normative medicine, and those who refuse “were [and to extents still are] persecuted by the police and the judicial system as potentially criminal, and […] they were [and to extents still are] pathologized by the psychiatric and psychoanalytical framework, locked in psychiatric prisons, raped in order to prove their true ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’, subjected to lobotomies, hormone therapy, electro-convulsive therapy or the so-called ‘analytical cure’” (Preciado 2021: 59). What is missing from this list (which does not mean it doesn’t happen, only that it is somewhat less common), is murder. Which non-human animals, especially those who are not within the narrow paths of ‘conservation’, ‘nature reservations’ and ‘national parks’ prescribed by human governments, are subjected to continuously on a massive global scale for the sake of human consumption of their flesh and other bodily products. Again, the differences are in the realms of scale, not of kind. The bodies of non-human animals, from ‘livestock’ to speaking apes called Red Peter, are colonies. Just like Preciado describes the trans body in relation to heteronormativity: “The trans body is a colony. […] The trans body is […] a place of mining and extermination of life. […] Our organs are the oil that the normative sexual machine requires in order to function. Everywhere, the trans body is hated, and, at the same time, fantasized, desired, consumed.” (Preciado 2021: 37).
The second line of flight is a specific word: animalization, and the way in which Preciado uses it in his speech. In a later part of the speech, Preciado once again compares his and other subaltern’s situation to that of Red Peter’s, going on to compare “The practices of observation, objectification, punishment, exclusion and death put in place by psychoanalysis and psychiatry when dealing with dissidents to the regimes of sexual difference and colonial heteropatriarchy, with individuals considered as ‘homosexuals’, with men or women who have been raped or sexually abused, with sex workers, with trans people, with racialized people […]” (Preciado 2021: 58) to the practices of the circus or the zoo which Red Peter and other non-human animals were and are subjected to. He goes on to state that they (the practices applied to human subalterns) “are perhaps less spectacular than those of the circus or the zoo, but no less efficient” (Preciado 2021: 59). Importantly for my analysis, Preciado elaborates that: “I do not believe the comparison is gratuitous, not simply because we as homosexuals, transsexuals [sic], sex workers, racialized, transvestite or non-binary bodies we too have been othered and animalized (my emphasis), but because what medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis have done to sexual minorities over the course of the past two centuries is a comparable process of institutional and political extermination.” (Preciado 2021: 59). I want to focus on the use of “animalized” as a negative trait of a particular body or group of people. Preciado is not saying that animals are of lesser worth to humans and therefore to be animalized is bad, made evident by the fact he says “we too (my emphasis) have been othered and animalized” (Preciado 2021: 59), implying that animals are also othered and animalized (not only that, but their animalization is the basis for the animalization of other [human] bodies). He is pointing out the human made process of animalization as something that has been almost universally constructed and interpreted as negative and repulsive, especially when it happens/is applied to the body of a human animal. This is the line of flight I want to take. What is the basis for the process of animalization? What intersections exist between it and other forms of marginalization and oppression? Why is a critique of animalization potentially indispensable for any intersectional analysis? I won’t be able to answer all these questions in full in this essay, but I want to give initial impulses to show the relevance of this particular line of flight for a consistent and radical intersectional practice.
What is the basis for the process of animalization? A one-word answer is dehumanization. The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo identifies dehumanization as “One of the worst things that we can do to our fellow human beings, […] render them worthless by exercising the psychological process of dehumanization.” (Zimbardo 2007: 222). He goes on to state that “Dehumanization takes away the humanity of the potential victims, rendering them as animallike, or as nothing.” (Zimbardo 2007: 295). It is here that it becomes clear that animalization is the basis for dehumanization, and vice-versa. The constant and systematic cruelty towards non-human animals, which is accepted and encouraged by our intensely speciesist societies, provides a consistent normalization and practice of violence towards other beings that forms the basis for the treatment of ‘animalized’ and ‘dehumanized’ people (Dell'Aversano 2019). Zimbardo sums it up as follows: “A final point on the consequences of adopting a dehumanized conception of selected others is the unthinkable things we are willing to do to them once they are officially declared different and undesirable.” (Zimbardo 2007: 313). As valuable as these insights are, it’s at this point (as well as the previous Zimbardo quote), as Dell’Aversano (2019) points out, that Zimbardo’s speciesism becomes clear. She elaborates: “But of course the point is precisely that these things are not at all “unthinkable”, because they are routinely done to nonhuman animals, which are used as practice targets for the “dehumanization” of human victims. This key point completely escapes Zimbardo who, from his speciesist perspective, is unable to fathom the real meaning of his own evidence.” (Dell'Aversano 2019: 31). Similarly, his description of dehumanized victims being rendered as animallike, therefore as nothing completely ignores the reality that animals are as far from nothing as is nonhumanly and humanly possible. Here we see the definition and use of ‘animalization’ that I interpret from Preciado’s speech: a human-made process that has very little to do with the realities and complexities of animal existence, but all the more to do with the ability to justify heteronormative, racist, ableist, classist etc. violence on the basis of speciesism.
This last point also initially answers the last two questions: What intersections exist between animalization and other forms of marginalization and oppression? And why is a critique of animalization potentially indispensable for any intersectional analysis? Animalization as the process leading to the construction of non-human animals as inferior and unworthy of attention, consideration, empathy, rights or needs is the foundation of speciesist societies. And as we have seen, animalization’s application is not limited to non-human animals, its logics and effects intersect with all other forms of oppression such as racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, neurotypicalism, etc. One must only think of the many cases in which e.g. black and/or poor bodies have been labelled ‘dirty’ in relation to white and/or rich bodies. What other bodies have been labelled essentially ‘dirty’ in relation to the (assumed to be white and well-off among other things) human body? (see Corman 2019) What makes a critique of animalization especially relevant to intersectional practice and struggle is how salient and ubiquitous it, along with speciesism is, even in many critical discourses about other forms of oppression (Nocella and George 2019). Becoming attentive to and pointing out speciesism in our daily lives brings us many steps closer to understanding the intersections between different systems of oppression, and further how to resist their grip on our collective thinking and living.
Using Paul B. Preciado’s radical intervention into psychoanalytical discourse: “Can the Monster Speak?” as a starting assemblage to take lines of flight from, I have discussed the intersections between (mainly) cis-heteronormativity, colonial patriarchy and speciesism. I argue for lines of flight and the critique of animalization as useful and necessary concepts for effective intersectional thought and practice. I want to conclude with a final excerpt from Preciado’s speech: “To live beyond the patriarchal-colonial law, to live beyond the law of sexual [and species] difference, to live beyond sexual and gender [and species] violence is the right that every living body […] should have.” (Preciado 2021: 41).