Hangover Reading Club #14: A monster speaks to you - On the philosophy of Paul B. Preciado

The next edition of Trafó Gallery's Hangover Reading Club will be held from 2pm on 3 June 2023 (Satuday). The reading session, taking place in the frameworks of the event series Blue hours. Three nights on fluidity will be lead by Gideon Horváth and Kata Dóra Kiss.

The reading group will focus on Paul B. Preciado's controversial lecture entitled Can the monster speak?. In November 2019 Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. For his lecture, he drew inspiration from Kafka's Report to the Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. The transgender philosopher used a piquant tone to illustrate that for his audience of analysts he was no more than a test subject, a "mentally ill person" suffering from "gender dysphoria". Preciado wanted to draw the audience's attention to the fact that the binary thinking of human psychology in relation to the ideology of gender, sex and sexual difference dates back to the colonial era. The lecture was left unfinished as Preciado was eventually booed by his audience. Snippets of the lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. The full text, which is also the focus of our reader, was finally published a year and a half later by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

In the frameworks of this reading session, we will seek to answer why Preciado's lecture had such a disturbing impact on the analytic community; how the subversive language he used relates to the content of his speech; and how it reflects a critique of essentializing science.

Kata Dóra Kiss is a PhD candidate in Theoretical Psychoanalysis at the University of Pécs. Her main research interests are in the field of critical sciences, primarily the critique of psycho-sciences, and ecofeminist discourse.

Gideon Horváth is a visual artist who studied at the Université Paris VIII and the University of Fine Arts. His main research interests are gender and queer theories.

The reading group takes places in the frameworks Trafó Gallery's event series entitled Blue Hours. Three evenings on fluidity.

The text to be discussed at the Hangover Reading Club will be read in English, the discussion will take place in Hungarian. The text will be emailed in advance to those interested, please register for the reading group at gallery@trafo.hu.

The event is free of charge and all are welcome!
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