Praise of Perversion

[Christophe]

This is a rather slippery topic, so I'll put it into a dark corner of the O'Kenny's Pub. To reach this dark back room, you gotta pass through small rusty doors surround by litter, and duck into long narrow corridors with hidden branch-offs and trapdoors.

 

Et voilà! We're inmidst of a scenario as described by Marquis de Sade in his numerous literary works, the most popular being Justine or the 120 days of Sodom.

 

As part of my ITP Gold Star Shadow Module, I recently decided to study the meaning and non-meaning of Perversion in order to cleanse myself from any such dirty phantasmas, desires, dreams or anything else that has anything to do with this sick bastard crap shit called perversion.

 

So I read a book, and watched a movie about said content to develop an opinion about it. The book being Janine Chasseguet-Smirguel's "Anatomy of human perversion" which gives a psychoanalytic account of the matter at hand.

 

It was suprisingly boring to read this book. Only the original passages by "pervert"  artists (de Sade, Wilde, Carroll) provoked some bodily response in me (sic).

 

In short, Miss Chasseguet-Smirguel traces the origin of perversion back to the subject's infancy. Basically the pervert subject doesn't acknowledge the authority of the father, instead remains in narcissistic union with the mother who ensures his superiority by giving the child every love and pleasure she can manage to give.

This constellation results in an avoidance of the Oedipal Conflict. The loss of self-worth and the baisse of narcissistic feed charge that comes with the disenchantment of the omnipotence of the partial body drives through the Incest Taboo (The NO of the Father) is not happening with the pervert individual.

Instead, the pervert phantasizes his own genital tool as being superior to the real genital Phallus of the Father. He must constantly convince himself and his surroundings that his feeling of superiority is for real; the result is a certain pressure and defense mechanism against the truth, all the while the pervert has a weak intuition that his position is an incorrect one. But the pain and indeed torture that would come with the realization of the truth (which matches the original avoidance) is usually too much to bear and the pervert reality must go on, stabilized with fetish, wild unleashed sexuality, polyamory orgies, always with a focus on the pre-genital body drives (oral, anal).

Chasseguet-Smirguel shows with detailed analysis of De Sade and Oscar Wilde, that the aim of the pervert is the negation of all hierarchies and differences. Everything must be reduced to mush, dirt, shit, primordial ooze. It's all the same, it's all equal, pain and pleasure, life and death, good and evil. No hierarchies means nothing is better than anything else. All this is based on the original denial and repression of the Law of the Father.

Lacan, as usual, gives a slightly different interpretation. He (with Freud) describes the coming together of male and female, the presexual courtship, as drilling tunnels from two different directions: the males following the penetrating sexual drive, the female following the relational, narrational clearance. With Lacan, these two tunnels never meet in the middle: there's always a remainder. The only way to make the Loving Couple meet, is to bend the Law of the Father to create the short-circuit necessary for actualizing the sexual intercourse. This bending of the Law necessarily implies some form of perversion or another.

Suffice it to say that for Lacan the normal healthy human being does not exist. We can only choose between more or less pathological coping strategies concerning the Real; all friction, no perfection.

 

yuk yuk

[Mary W.]

Joel's problem though was that he was a goody two-shoes. Catholic girls only put out easily for the bad boys like the Fonz because it was sooo forbidden, sooo naughty, sooo exciting and oh so perverse.

 

Perhaps so -- at least before the Fonz jumped the shark. Which we knew was too good to be true...

OTOH, sometimes the girls want to be with the girls.

You all keep inspiring my inner polymorphous DJ.  :)