Can the [ ] Speak?: The Ineffective Speech Act and the Absentee Audience
May 22, 2025
This essay by Summer Mohrmann is published on the occasion of “A Report to an Academy”: Student Responses to Kafka as part of the Kafka in New York symposium held on December 5, 2024. Graduate students from the CUNY Graduate Center and SUNY-New Paltz were invited to respond to the themes and materials in the Morgan Library & Museum’s Kafka in New York exhibition in new and subversive ways.
“I am the monster who speaks to you. I am the monster you have created with your discourse”
Paul Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?
As Roman Jakobson posits in “Linguistics and Poetics,” the meaning of a sign is dependent on the semiotic code it finds itself situated within that both addresser and addressee must agree upon (66). Prior to any concerns for slipping, flickering, or chains of signification, the speech act requires first and foremost a common epistemic ground, an agreed upon paradigm and approach to reality, that acts as the unspoken stage upon which the message is sent and decoded. Revisiting the question of “can the subaltern speak,” Gayatri Spivak likewise notes that “All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception” (A Critique 309). For the subaltern to speak, then, “speaking and hearing” are both necessary to “complete the speech act” (The Spivak Reader302). What is perhaps misleading about Spivak’s original question is the implication—that she herself refutes—that the subaltern is not already speaking, has not already spoken.
In 2019, Paul Preciado was invited “to give a speech to 3,500 psychoanalysts who had gathered […] on the theme of ‘Women in psychoanalysis’” (11). Preciado, recording this in later publications as a “speech given by a transman / by a non-binary body,” tells of his institutional, academic, political, and psychological experiences as a trans man (10). His audience—composed of doctors, students, leaders in their fields, and supposed healers—heckled him ceaselessly, shouted for him to leave the stage, laughed at his comprehensive, well researched, persuasive speech, and made a mockery of his personal, embodied experience. Many amongst them simply got up and left, refusing to even listen: “I tried to speed up, skipped several paragraphs, I managed to read only a quarter of my prepared speech,” Preciado recounts later (11).
His speech, Can the Monster Speak, adopts not only an undeniably Spivakian title, but is modeled upon Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” the story of an ape who calls himself Red Peter, is shot twice during a hunting expedition along the Gold Coast, and, finally, transported to Europe where he is trained to perform in music halls. While under the tutelage of humans, Red Peter learns to master both the physical and spoken languages of his captors—first training himself to take swigs of liquor to the delight of his jailor and endure the bitter liquid, before ultimately teaching himself to speak.
Yet, as Réda Bensmai’a notes in a reflection on Benjamin’s refusal to reduce Kafka’s works to archetypal mythologies or didactics, “no matter how we approach it—and this is Benjamin’s ‘lesson’— Kafka’s work does not lend itself to domestication” (xi). Her forward to Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, continues, noting that Kafka’s literature
resists on all levels, and it demands at every obstacle and disruption that one simultaneously invents and experiences in its unfolding-not merely a new rhetoric or a new mode of reading but a genuine “traversal of its writing” from which one does not emerge unscathed. It goes without saying that such a change of perspective—not satisfied with reading, one experiences, travels, concretely transforms oneself—cannot be conceived without a radical change in the very nature of the order of signs that is at work in the text” (xii).
Preciado, too, is interested in the “radical change in the very nature of the order of signs” at work both in both Kafka’s “Report,” and his own troubled and troubling report to a similarly “civilized” academy. In both instances, the monster, the ape—the Other—locate and assume their expected role in the social contract, but where Red Peter is met with applause—both his rhetorical and physical entrances into the domestic world deemed acceptable—Preciado’s much less fictitious address is met with outrage, and outright refusal. Like Spivak’s case study on Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, who leaves a detailed suicide note and waits for menstruation before taking her life so as to ensure her reasons are not skewed or overwritten (they are), the subalterns speak. Speaking is not and never has been the issue. The problem we have—the problem we are complicit in creating—is a refusal to listen.
Address fails when it asks to be taken seriously in epistemological frameworks and paradigms wherein the ruling class and hegemonically normative have agreed upon certain codes determining that subaltern voice is only welcome as spectacle or entertainment, and automatically understood as performativity rather than genuine and earnest attempts at rhetorical intervention. Preciado’s original audience for Can the Monster Speak is responsible for his silencing. And, while superficially it seems Red Peter’s address is successfully received, Kafka’s poetics are too complicated to accept or assert such a two-dimensional didacticism: “Freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out;” Red Peter tells his audience– tells us, “right or left or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way prove to be an illusion; […] To get out somewhere, to get out!” (Kafka 254). Red Peter understands and acknowledges that there is no freedom to be had in the violent, colonial world of the human, but that, in order to find a way out of his cage, he must learn these spoken, behaved, and performed languages.
Red Peter understands the codes; to locate a way out of his cage, “[his] ape nature fled out of [him],” he recalls, “head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it” (Kafka 258). He does not outright challenge the discourse worlds that brand him capital ‘O’ Other. As Deleuze and Guattari write of Red Peter’s education, “the imitation is only superficial, since it no longer concerns the reproduction of figures but the production of a continuum of intensities in a nonparallel and asymmetrical evolution where the man no less becomes an ape than the ape becomes a man. The act of becoming is a capturing, a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or an imitation” (13). The subaltern—the monster, the ape—speaks, and what’s more they speak in the language of their oppressor, but they do not imitate or reproduce the epistemic frameworks from which their audience observes, and therein lies their crime: as Deleuze and Guattari famously detail, “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16).
In his speech, Preciado explains that “Paradigms are ‘discourse worlds’ in which a certain coherence, a certain semio-technical peace, a certain agreement reign. But they are not worlds of immutable meaning” and when too many questions arise, these paradigms become “refractory, harmful, even deleterious until [they are] replaced by a new epistemology, a new mechanism capable of dealing with new questions” (Preciado 58). How many must go unheard before we decide we need to invent a new paradigm, a new code, with which we can decipher these forms of minor literature, these modes of subaltern address?
At a recent conference on comparative literary studies, tables were marred by missing participants, coordinators, and attendees due to racist, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic policies denying visas and entry. Spivak, our keynote, addressed a crowd dappled with keffiyehs, and said not a word about the Palestinians. When asked what we can do to think comparatively, she answered “learn languages.” Red Peter, too, learned both spoken and performed languages in pursuit of his way out: “So I learned things, gentleman.” he tells his crowd, “Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition” (258 Kafka). In November 2023, after Yoav Gallant justified collective punishment in Gaza by reducing the Palestinians to “human animals”(Fabian; “Israeli Defence Minister”), a video circulated online wherein a group of children addressed an Anglophonic audience in passionate yet broken– learned– English: “We came to Al-Shifa to seek shelter from the bombing, but we suddenly faced death again when they targeted the hospital,” a young boy stutteringly reads against the background noise of drones and crowds, “The occupation is starving us. We don’t find water, food, and we drink from the unusable water. […] We come now to shout and invite you to protect us” (Al Jazeera English). Many such rhetorical interventions and pleas have been made in the last year and change, yet, even now, they go unanswered.
For subalterns– monsters, apes, “human animals”– speech is not the issue—has never been the issue. The problem is one of paradigmatic codes and epistemologies wherein the subaltern is always just an Occidental shadow. When the simple fact of someone’s existence raises too many questions for one ideological perspective to accommodate, what happens when they decide to speak? “It is not a mere tautology to say that the colonial or postcolonial subaltern is defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture, even from other groupings among the colonized. What is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?”, Spivak asks (309 A Critique). I ask, what is at stake when we insist that the audience listens?
In a late-stage capitalist culture founded on imperialism, colonialism, and sustained via necropolitical and Manichaean policies, the speaking subaltern is, sure, a danger, but the listening audience could become a cultural juggernaut. For, it is not the subaltern that who remains quiet—they speak, they speak in your, our, tongue!– it is the interceptor whose semiotic groundwork prescribes limits to the assignation of the title “human” that refuses even to sit through, say, Preciado’s speech, or a clip of starving kids standing outside a bombed hospital. In short, we must consider the issue not as a failure of language, but a failure of interception and, more importantly, a failure of empathy that bears, at the very least, acknowledgment if not immediate action.
“In any case,” as Red Peter concludes, “I am not appealing to any man’s verdict, I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report” (Kafka 259). I, too, myself a “human animal,” am only making a report.
People
Works Cited
Al Jazeera English. “Palestinian children plead for protection in Gaza press conference | Al Jazeera Newsfeed. ”YouTube. youtube.com/watch?v=zLxHBRPLzow.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan and foreword by Réda Bensmai’a. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Fabian, Emanuel. “Defense minister announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food or fuel.” The Times of Israel, 9 Oct. 2023, timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel.
“Israeli Defence Minister Orders ‘Complete Siege’ on Gaza.” Al Jazeera, aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza.
Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Language in Literature, edited by Krystina Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 62-94.
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken Books, 1971.
Preciado, Paul B. Can the Monster Speak: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, translated by Frank Wynne, Semiotext(e), 2020.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999.
—. The Spivak Reader Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, Taylor and Francis, 2013.
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