When the mid-nineteenth-century sexologists whose discourses Foucault loved to evoke began to use the term “perversion” to describe deviant sexual behaviors, it was clear that their classificatory systems articu- lated moral judgments in spite of the intentions of the most enlightened to adopt a disinterested, scientific tone. These judgments, in other words, are simply embedded in the history of the term. This contention would suggest that the expansion of perversion’s semantic field onto the late- modern terrain of sexuality discourse did in fact fill a disciplinary func- tion. From this point of view Foucault’s hypothesis on sexuality would seem to be correct: Just as perversion from the fourteenth century on- ward served to legislate moral correctness through the concept of sin and the institution of the confession, perversion in its sexual usage functioned to enforce the normality of particular sexual behaviors through the discur- sive constructions of nineteenth-century sexology and psychiatry.
When these claims are subjected to closer scrutiny, however, one discovers that they are not entirely correct. For if perversion’s modern usage is fundamentally linked to a notion of a Good from whose course we have deviated, a particular lineage of this usage describes this devia- tion as constitutive, as the condition of possibility of (moral) conscious- ness as such. From this second perspective, the normative Good appears not as an imposition of power which constrains the subject from outside, but rather as an internal, properly structural agency of accountability
situated at the level of the subject’s self-relation. As I indicated at the outset, this is the tradition which I argue informs the Freudian dis- course on perversion, and it will be the task of the next four chapters to link up, through the study of concrete cultural cases, the presexological and prepsychoanalytic moral and ethical etymology with the con- ceptualization of perversion in Freudian psychoanalysis. As we will see, for a number of modern thinkers belonging to this latter tradition, each indebted to particular Judeo-Christian formulations of original sin and radical evil, the normative ambitions of constructs of moral goodness necessarily fail. In consequence, such constructs cannot unambiguously indicate the proper course for ethical action. As the following chapters will repeatedly show, this is so because moral goodness simply exceeds the capacities of thought: What we ought to do remains, like desire itself, both indeterminate and undeterminable.
And if, unheeding of the historicists’ prohibitions, one advances through the centuries from the metaphysical explorations of morality in early modernity into the late modern era of sexuality, one notes that Freud makes an analogous gesture in his landmark interrogation of perversion. The theory of sexuality cannot finally define sexual normal- ity because sexuality, in its essence, is perverse. Just as we continually fail to incarnate the absolute disinterest the moral law commands, so are we inherently incapable of keeping the libido on the course of the proper genital object. Perversion, in both its moral and sexual usages, here demarcates the dehiscence between the subject’s multiple conditions— historical, cultural, political, in sum discursive—and its ineradicable sense that these conditions fail to incarnate an elusive, absolute Good. The main task ahead of us will therefore be to describe the structure of this failure, highlighting the properly psychical level on which it operates, and to identify the tradition to which this structure belongs as tragic, dialectical and, ultimately, psychoanalytic.
In contrast to the late Foucauldian position, which links the sexual usage of perversion to a normative deployment of discourse, psycho- analysis—and the intellectual traditions from which it inherits—instead describes the moral and sexual spheres as constitutively split between an inherent human perversity and an insidious categorical absolute which calls the subject to moral perfection and immunity to desire. Where Foucault links that which hinders the accrual of sexual intensities to the normative force of power, psychoanalysis posits, in contrast, an internal, properly psychical limit tied to the elements of mental representation which produces a necessary illusion—a fantasy—of its beyond. From this latter perspective Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis begins to appear as a futile—and politically disastrous—effort to suture
this structural gap which prevents us from realizing in our everyday practice the principles which guide our actions, and from acquiring that elusive normative self-intimacy which would finally disclose in full the frustratingly impenetrable enigma of desire.
“Perversion,” writes Serge André, “is much more than a clinical entity: it’s a way of thinking.”26 This proposition is correct provided one
understands the last phrase along the lines of the term “discourse,” but crucially in Lacan’s—not Foucault’s—sense. For Lacan did not believe that discourse is a positive and determinate system of subject-produc- tion which brings to fruition the intentions of abstract power. Discourse for Lacan is rather a form of the social relation—a way of organizing a collective subjective function around a traumatic void of nonknowledge— and perversion can be understood as a particular form of this social relation, one which offers a specific way of coping with power’s dehis- cence from knowledge by means of the disavowal of this dehiscence. Indeed, the psychoanalytic tradition contributes most valuably to the theory of perversion when it renounces the sexological attempt to clas- sify sexual behaviors in favor of the description of the clinical and politi- cal implications of a particular libidinal economy which rests, ultimately, on a particular self-instrumentalizing relation to the sociosymbolic Other and its inherent void. The psychoanalytic concept of the perverse struc- ture serves to elucidate our tendency to refuse to tarry with the enigma of desire by arriving at an overhasty conclusion as to what the Other wants of us, and consequently to fashion ourselves—our speech, our actions—as its object of satisfaction.
The clamorous post-Foucauldian call enjoining us to engage in a thoroughgoing depathologization of the discourse of perversion finally offers an elitist and subjectivist project which paradoxically depoliticizes sexuality through its very hyperpoliticization. This tendency advances as an ideal for praxis a relentless and surely doomed pursuit of ever more intense forms of erotic or corporeal pseudotransgression. As Juliet Flower MacCannell has cannily observed, the blasé reception in main- stream popular culture of the new consumerist culture of perversion demonstrates an alarming degree of complicity with respect to the ethic of overproduction and obsessional hyperactivity increasingly command- ing labor relations and conditions in the new high-tech economy. That the new tourist-friendly fetish clubs and the so-called Multimedia Gulch of software firms inhabit the same South-of-Market San Francisco neigh- borhood, she bravely suggests, is no mere coincidence.27 But
MacCannell’s prescient contention additionally features in my view a more general corollary: One should not fail to note the suggestiveness of the historical coincidence of, on the one hand, the Foucauldian cri-
tique of sexuality and subjectivity and, on the other, the unprecedented liberation of the forces of market capitalism—in other words the here- tofore unforeseen colonization by capital of even the most traditional, remote, “backward” life-forms.
Capitalism has never been particularly homophobic; homosexuality as such has never functioned as an obstacle to the commodification of everyday life and the subsuming of social relations under the drive for profit. The radical post-Oedipal deterritorialization of sexuality—the growing obsolescence of the nuclear family in the advanced economies, the decline of paternal authority, the synergistic collusion of the sex trade and the new media, for example—has exposed marginal sexual cultures to the full effects of market capitalism on the level of its current unforeseen expansion. Or perhaps Deleuze and Guattari were right when they framed the issue the opposite way: The liberation of global capital has caused the symptoms of today’s sexual deterritorialization, and these symptoms—the recently fashionable proliferation of pseudosubversive forms of gender performativity, the paradoxical coincidence of sexual hypervisibility and erotic entropy, the nostalgic or even reactionary truth of numerous officially anarchorevolutionar y forms of resistance to ultraliberal economic globalization—are part and parcel of the logic of late capitalism. On the level of the mainstreaming of homosexual cul- tures and their integration within the structures of the global market, phenomena such as the gay glossy fashion magazine, the gay holiday cruise, and the gay network sitcom, not to mention the endless multipli- cation of internet pornography pages and paid dating services, tren- chantly call into question the capacity of minority sexual cultures to resist the increasingly unlimited expansion of capital. Indeed, it is highly probable that this expansion has itself produced the very notion of the minority sexual culture as lifestyle option, as a featured entrée on the menu of available modes of conspicuous consumption.
Meanwhile, on the level of the institution of theory, Foucault’s im- pact on sexuality studies has strongly discouraged the analysis of nonheterosexual social formations in their relation to the larger political and economic totalities. Indeed, Foucault’s influence has led many of the discipline’s most influential figures not only to adopt an unambiguously hostile posture with respect to all concepts of the state, but also to recommend that all cultural initiatives on behalf on nonheterosexual sub- jects forego the liberal rhetoric or rights and liberties in favor of the con- struction of autonomous minority sexual communities entirely severed from (what is left of) the general public sphere. At the present moment it is extremely difficult, for example, to address within the confines of hege- monic queer theory the radical failure of Western homosexual cultures to
call into question the market logic which appears so utterly to have taken them over. Virtually all valences of queer theory, from those which espouse the politics of identity to those which call for its radical deconstruction, implicitly presuppose as their political goal a form of recognition or integration within the current regime of power. This is indeed the vexatious terrain to which I return in detail in the book’s concluding postscript, which functions as the other politico-theoretical bookend for the concrete studies falling between. Indeed, those readers most interested in contemporary queer theory may wish to consult it at the present chapter’s imminent conclusion.
That the mobilization of Foucault’s later political theory tends to premise itself on the properly cynical assumption that the modes of political representation as such are archaic—that they are no longer the principle means of power’s expression, or rather that any attempt to reclaim these modes in the name of popular sovereignty is hopelessly, indeed shamefully, naive—only bespeaks the extent to which queer theory has succumbed to the corporatist agenda. This tendency features among other presuppositions the idea that Apple’s or Microsoft’s inau- guration of domestic partnership packages indexes the progress and achievements of queer politics. Even those aspects of the gay movement which would appear to have a vested interest in the redemocratization of the state apparatus—the first-world AIDS/HIV lobby, for example, on the level of its call for increased access to immune-system-boosting drug therapies—too often sidestep the larger picture in favor of models of action premised on organization within the bounds of what is referred to as the “gay community.” Though very likely at its origins objectively progressive, gay liberation has shown itself to have come at the cost of an acceptance of the socioeconomic status quo. In the present climate of massive mainstreaming and commercialization within nonheterosexual cultures, the assumption that the axis of sexual orientation in cultural analysis carries a priori political significance is no longer sufficient. What is now required is a thoroughgoing analysis of the means by which queer politics and identities have been granted as consolation prizes for acqui- escence in the global postsocialist ersatz consensus. I should add that in my view a preoccupation with the inflammatory rhetoric of a rabidly homophobic religious Right, particularly influential in the United States, objectively functions as a distraction which can only depoliticize the agenda of an antihomophobic and explicitly socialist cultural and political project. In an effort to address precisely these failures within the discourse of sexuality theory, I have deemed it necessary to stress contra Foucault’s attack against psychoanalysis the importance of retaining, on the level of theory, two concepts of perversion which I summarily reiterate here.
The first concept advances on the level of content that desire is essen- tially perverse because desire is infinite and impossible. Desire always exceeds its object and articulates itself transcendentally—in a manner which overflows the container of its own sociohistorical conditions of possibility. The second concept avers that perversion is also a viable notion on the level of its emergence from Freudian discourse as a term descriptive of a particular psychic structure, a specific orientation of the subject with respect to the Other’s desire. I will argue in various ways through the course of the following chapters that this structure is not conducive to oppositional or progressive political praxis.
Indeed, the structure in question positions the subject as the instru- ment of the status quo’s jouissance—as the instrument, in the terms of a different vocabulary, of power. What is more, the second, politically noxious concept of perversion depends on a disavowal of the first. The subject becomes structurally perverse, in other words, when it attempts to disguise from itself the essentially perverse nature of desire, the impossibility, in other words, of sustaining a relation of adequation be- tween our demands—for recognition, satisfaction, love—and the pos- sible objects of experience in the sociosymbolic world. We become perverse in the strong structural sense when we presuppose that we may fully instrumentalize our desire with respect to a principle—of rea- son, utility, production, or pleasure. The discourse of perversion resists the difficult truth that desire rebels against all efforts to subsume it under the command of a normative Good.
I have hypothesized that the problematic of perversion on the level of its presexological history features an intimate relation to a certain idea of tragedy and to the tradition of the dialectic. One of the main presuppositions of this book is therefore that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is to be situated in the line of these traditions by virtue of its formulation of the subject of the unconscious and its qualification of perversion in its second, structural sense as a betrayal of the necessary possibility of this subject’s nonetheless unverifiable sovereignty. At its most basic level Lacan’s formula for the subject (S <> a) evokes this subject’s noncoincidence and nonsimultaneity with itself. This self- separation emerges as a result of this notion: though the subject is an effect of language, he or she does not exist in language. Lacan’s a—this “extimate,” fantasmatic object the subject must create in order to posit retroactively the cause of its desire—stands in for the absent absolute which gives substance to the lack of finitude, and hence the perversity, of desire. The paradox of a is that it is at once irreducible and impos- sible: It exists as a universal element of psychic life precisely because it does not—cannot—materially, verifiably exist.
Now though this structure of the subject condemns it to a difficult relation to the nonsubstantial or immaterial, it also guarantees that the subject will not be limited by its discursive conditions, however inti- mately one may wish to tie these conditions to the exercise of power. The subject will therefore feature a capacity to act with respect to the impossible, not in a manner which founds a new society bereft of politi- cal antagonism, but rather in a way which recognizes a certain impossi- bility within the subject itself, a certain stubborn and unchanging being which calls into question the legitimacy of all possible social formations, and which inscribes the ethical in a locus of hope in which social progress is paradoxically allied with the subject’s tendency toward self-annihilation, with its very resistance to progress conceived with respect to a greater social Good. It is therefore no coincidence that this book will culminate on the topic of (a politicized) ethics: Indeed, as Lacan said, the status of the subject is fundamentally ethical. In the context of the following chapters, the axiom advancing the ethical status of the subject suggests that we must not, like Foucault, lose sight of the impossible object rep- resented by Lacan’s a. For, when we do, we tend to function as this a ourselves and, regretfully, we foreclose on the possibility of a difficult, indeed often painful, but authentic and necessary critical engagement with the social world. The ultimate paradox of the discourse of perver- sion is perhaps that it is only by reasserting the primacy of the tragic structure of the subject—the idea that the structure of subjectivity al- ways fails to realize the promise of reconciliation with respect either to the self or its object—that we may avert the emergence of tragedy in the real: the end of politics as we (used to) know it, and the unqualified, irreversible victory of unlimited capital and its mortgaging of all human endeavor under the unforgiving logic of profit maximization and joyless utilitarian economic productivity.
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