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PRINT Luke Warde Alice Wickenden “A trans person
is not imitating anything, just as a crocodile is not imitating a floating tree trunk, or a chameleon the colours of the world.” - Paul B. Preciado This is Your Mind on Plants Michael Pollan [Allen Lane ] Can The Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts Paul B. Preciado [Fitzcarraldo] Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants is essentially a sequel to How To Change Your Mind, his acclaimed 2018 book. Whereas in the latter he guided readers through the renaissance of ‘psychedelic science’, This is Your Mind on Plants offers a more personal and, in many ways, bolder trip. The book’s tripartite structure is itself a provocation; Pollan sandwiches his reflections on what might seem the relative innocuity of caffeine between meditations on the more rarefied – and illicit – worlds of Papaver somniferum, the poppy from which opium is derived, and mescaline, the active psychotropic in the peyote cactus. This helps subtly convey This is Your Mind on Plants’ broader point: that how we taxonomize what goes under the laughably imprecise rubric of ‘drugs’ – proscribing some; encouraging the consumption of others – is in large measure arbitrary. As Pollan documents, this has – and continues to have – disastrous consequences for society at large. Yet, it’s perhaps a testament to the drug war’s waning zeal that Pollan could emerge as an important voice of reason on this topic in the first place. And none of this is to say he’s unaware of the pernicious effects these substances can have. Yet, as he points out, following legion others, ‘drugs’ are hardly unique in this regard. As with many things that can serve uses both salutary and malign, “it’s up to us to devise a healthy relationship with them.” LW The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin verb monere, to warn. From this arose monstrum, meaning a portent, a prodigy, a monstrous creature, and monstrare, to show or point out. (A related word is demonstrate, which only has a demon lurking within it accidentally.) A monster is something that warns us. Something that has come to show us something. A monster reveals our sins. Most importantly, a monster is only a monster in relation to us, which is why Paul B. Preciado takes it as the defining vehicle for gender in this book, the translation of a speech written for (and never quite delivered at) the 49th Study Day of the École de la Cause Freudienne, whose theme was ‘Women in psychoanalysis’. As Preciado explains, “The speech triggered an earthquake”; in the end, only a quarter of it was read. “It is from the position assigned to me by you as a mentally ill person that I address you,” Preciado begins, confronting psychoanalysis with “the monster you have created with your discourse and your clinical practices.” It’s compelling rhetoric; I fail to see how anyone could come away from this book without a deep respect for Preciado’s grasp of language, at the very least. He insists on revealing the sham of gender, on the way that we (all of us, and psychoanalysts in particular) cannot escape the ‘cage’ of thinking: “A trans person is not imitating anything, just as a crocodile is not imitating a floating tree trunk, or a chameleon the colours of the world. To be trans is to cease to be a crocodile and connect with one’s vegetal future, to understand that the rainbow can become a skin.” In a world of crocodiles, to cease to be a crocodile is to become a monster. “I am not at all what you imagine,” Preciado declares, which is sort of his point: transness challenges the way we think, the binary logic of the heteronormative imagination. I agree with this, just as I agree with Preciado’s anger. “Why is it, my beloved binary friends, that you are convinced that only subalterns possess an identity?” he asks. Why must we be defined by our relation to anyone else, to the story we are given and choose not to follow? I would be amiss, however, to ignore that other metaphors here sit less comfortably. When Preciado – a trans man, yes, but a white one – declares that, “The trans body is a colony. Every day, on some street in Tijuana or Los Angeles, Saint Petersburg or Goa, Athens or Seville, a trans body is killed with the same impunity that a new occupied settlement is built on one bank or the other of the River Jordan,” I felt particularly uneasy. There are trans people in Palestine whose existence isn’t a metaphor. But, ultimately, this is a speech which yearns for transformation, which finishes with a rousing cry that “life is mutation and multiplicity”; tension and unease are part of that process. AW 46