Sex, Gender and Species Defectors

Franz Kafka and Paul B. Preciado

Abstract

Yo soy el monstruo que os habla (I Am the Monster Who Speaks to You) by Paul B. Preciado (2020), constitutes a “report”, as its subtitle reads: “Report for an Academy of Psychoanalysts”, on his status as a trans subject. In the emphatic and often poetic style that characterizes Preciado’s writing, his account is mirrored in Franz Kafka’s story “Report for an Academy” (1917). Far from being a simple highbrow reference, Preciado’s text echoes Kafka’s on numerous occasions, to the point that some of its arguments are not clear if they are not contrasted with the source text. Indeed, if we do not read Preciado’s text as a palimpsest in which the traces of what was written previously are preserved, perhaps we cannot easily appreciate the scope of his proposal of “disidentification” which, beyond gender, even reaches that of the human species. This article attempts a comparative reading of I Am the Monster Who Speaks to You and “Report to an Academy”, alongside James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim (2011), in order to contrast them with another form of radical disidentification, no longer of humanity, but of its opposite pole, animality, as it is conceived by Western culture.