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

[Christophe]

The film I was talking about was Bob Guccione's "Caligula" (1979) with actors Malcom McDowell as Caligula, Teresa Ann Savoy as Drusilla and Peter O'Toole as Tiberius.

 

The story takes place in pagan degenerate Rome. Emperor Tiberius is murdered and his nephew Gaius Augustus, calles Caligula, becomes the new Caesar. The young orphan boy very quickly gets corrupted by the power of his office. He has an incestual relationship with his sister, marries a priestess, has a three-some marriage night, and in general commits crimes and perversions too numerous to name them all. He kills his senators by will, appoints his favorite horse instead. In the furious finale, he proclaims himself a god, destroys the old temples and statues and replaces them by gold and platinum statues of his own. Eventually he is killed by a conspiracy of the angry senators (whose wives Caligula had forced to work for free in the town's brothels).

 

The Biography of a Pervert, in beautiful pictures. I recommend the uncensored version without fig leaves for full pleasure.

 

As a YouTube comment sais: "Caligula is the best acted porno you'll ever see"

 

Enjoy:

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Loved Caligula. After seeing it with my date we immediately fucked and sucked in several perverse ways in her van right in the parking lot, making loud animal sounds to the chagin and delight of passersby. I have never outgrown polymorphous perversity. To the contrary, it has evolved in me. Like Trix it's not just for kids.

[Edward theurj Berge]

The thread reminds me of the “black swan” and “horror and spirituality” threads, in that the experience of “liberation” often comes in sundry forms outside the conventional norm. It seems almost necessary in fact to push the limits of our comfort zones to elicit such experience, unusual sex and drug abuse being the typical countercultural short-circuits. This post in particular seems to resonate here, with the ultimate perversion, suicide, being the most liberating of all.

[kelamuni]

Interesting.

This line: "Instead, the pervert phantasizes his own genital tool as being superior to the real genital Phallus of th Father. He must constantly convince himself and his surroundings that his feeling of superioriety is for real; the result is a certain pressure and defense mechanism against the truth... " This is what Korn's  A.D.I.D.A.S is about, as revealed in the verses (lyrics 0:10 to 0:25 and 0:35- 0:50). Luv this tune.

Here's another pertinent tune.

[kelamuni]

e, you were expecting...kenny g? :-)

[Edward theurj Berge]

Here are some snippets of de Sade's wikipedia entry. Sexual liberation goes hand in glove (yes, metaphor) with political liberation.*

Sade was in complete opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his "complete and continual denial of the right to property"...[and] his advocacy of a utopian socialist society.

Simone de Beauvoir... and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years.

One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behavior of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment. Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1966 essay "Kant avec Sade" that de Sade's ethics was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.

*

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one your love honey
Love the one you're with

 

[xibalba]

ìt looks like the size has still its importance in the collective unconscious of the males.

hahhahahhah

kelamuni said:

Interesting.

This line: "Instead, the pervert phantasizes his own genital tool as being superior to the real genital Phallus of th Father. He must constantly convince himself and his surroundings that his feeling of superioriety is for real; the result is a certain pressure and defense mechanism against the truth... " This is what Korn's  A.D.I.D.A.S is about, as revealed in the verses (lyrics 0:10 to 0:25 and 0:35- 0:50). Luv this tune.

[Balder]

Has anyone seen the Sex and Zen movies (the latest in 3-D!)?  They play creatively and humorously with this fascination with size, among other things....

xibalba said:

ìt looks like the size has still its importance in the collective unconscious of the males.

hahhahahhah

kelamuni said:

Interesting.

This line: "Instead, the pervert phantasizes his own genital tool as being superior to the real genital Phallus of th Father. He must constantly convince himself and his surroundings that his feeling of superioriety is for real; the result is a certain pressure and defense mechanism against the truth... " This is what Korn's  A.D.I.D.A.S is about, as revealed in the verses (lyrics 0:10 to 0:25 and 0:35- 0:50). Luv this tune.

[Christophe]

Did I get your attention, IPS fellows? :-D

 

As usual it's a fine line to draw between Ethics and the Satisfaction of Lust, the Good & Full Life and addictions or cravings that keep us down and out.

 

As Catherine Millet famously put it: "Somtimes Sex will make you grow, othertimes it won't."

 

See also this thread for the spiritual implications of S/M and the superior female ablity to endure incredible amounts of pain.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I'm reminded of an Indian sweat lodge wherein I endured such extreme pain that I "transcended" into a blissful state. But without the extreme pain pushing past my tolerance I doubt I would have had that experience. Well, at least not without 1000 micrograms of LSD. Or perhaps a highly skilled blow job while pulling hard on her hair as she exclaims between gags: "Fuck my face and choke me!"

[kelamuni]

hahaha.

theurj said:

I'm reminded of an Indian sweat lodge wherein I endured such extreme pain that I "transcended" into a blissful state. But without the extreme pain pushing past my tolerance I doubt I would have had that experience. Well, at least not without 1000 micrograms of LSD. Or perhaps a highly skilled blow job while pulling hard on her hair as she exclaims between gags: "Fuck my face and choke me!"

[kelamuni]

You've really come out of your shell since I first met you, theurg.