On November 17, 2019, Paul B. Preciado spoke to 3,500 psychoanalysts in Paris as part of the International Days of the School of Freudian Affairs. Addressing people whose profession has diagnosed him with mental illness, Preciado's speech draws on Franz Kafka's 'Report to the Academy.'
In this work, an ape, having learned human language, speaks to an academy of the highest scientific authorities. Far from emancipated, Kafka's talking ape explains that learning human language was merely a transition from one cage to another: from iron bars to human subjectivity. Addressing psychoanalysts, Preciado calls for the development of a 'new epistemology' capable of incorporating a radical plurality of living beings.
