Somato-militancy: A New Vision for Psychoanalysis in the Work of Paul B. Preciado

Abstract

Looking at Paul B. Preciado’s relationship to psychoanalysis across texts, but especially the recent book Can the Monster Speak?: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, I seek to disentangle a possible vision for a new psychoanalysis from Preciado’s concerns, ambivalence and disgust with the professional field. I call this a somato-militant psychoanalysis that leans on Freud’s notion of conversion as the creation of a parasitic traumatic kernel that insists on the side of the body and shows a potential for mutuation, transference, amplified potentia gaudendi, surgical intervention and a radical exteriorization of the subject through access to desire. This somatic archival work runs against an idea of psychoanalysis as merely a privatization and interiorization of the subject, a site for upholding the colonial-patriarchal regime of gender norms and an attempt at therapeutic re-territorialization. In the end, the meeting between Preciado and psychoanalysis is given a name: terminal, meaning both at the very limit, the end point, and incurable.