Perversion and the Social Relation: sic IV - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822330857 ISBN 13: 9780822330851

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The masochist, the voyeur, the sadist, the sodomite, the fetishist, the pedophile, and the necrophiliac all expose hidden but essential elements of the social relation. Arguing that the concept of perversion, usually stigmatized, ought rather to be understood as a necessary stage in the development of all non-psychotic subjects, the essays in Perversion and the Social Relation consider the usefulness of the category of the perverse for exploring how social relations are formed, maintained, and transformed.

By focusing on perversion as a psychic structure rather than as aberrant behavior, the contributors provide an alternative to models of social interpretation based on classical Oedipal models of maturation and desire. At the same time, they critique claims that the perverse is necessarily subversive or liberating. In their lucid introduction, the editors explain that while fixation at the stage of the perverse can result in considerable suffering for the individual and others, perversion motivates social relations by providing pleasure and fulfilling the psychological need to put something in the place of the Father. The contributors draw on a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives--Freudian and Lacanian--as well as anthropology, history, literature, and film. From Slavoj Zizek's meditation on "the politics of masochism" in David Fincher's movie Fight Club through readings of works including William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Don DeLillo's White Noise, and William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, the essays collected here illuminate perversion's necessary role in social relations.

Contributors. Michael P. Bibler, Dennis A. Foster, Bruce Fink, Octave Mannoni, E. L. McCallum, James Penney, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Nina Schwartz, Slavoj Zizek

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Molly Anne Rothenberg is Associate of English and Co-Director of the Literature Program at Tulane University. She is a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of Re-Thinking Blake's Textuality.

Dennis A. Foster is Frensley Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is author of Confession and Complicity in Narrative and Sublime Enjoyment.

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of many books, and editor of Cogito and the Unconscious, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (coedited), and Tarrying with the Negative, all published by Duke University Press.

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"The only true awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene, excessive pleasure (surplus enjoyment) we get from it. This is why the first gesture of liberation is not to get rid of this excessive pleasure, but to assume it actively."--Slavoj Zizek, from his chapter, "The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link"

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Perversion and the Social Relation

By Dennis A. Foster

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Dennis A. Foster
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822330851

Chapter One

Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis Foster

Introduction. Beneath the Skin: Perversion and Social Analysis

We conceived of this volume as a way of asking some fundamental questions from a psychoanalytic perspective about how the social relation functions, how it is that we can live together. Admittedly, we don't always live together well. In fact, considering the many ways we humans have found to despise each other and to act on that feeling, it is surprising that we find any pleasure or comfort at all in the company of others, particularly of strangers. It seems likely that if Freud were writing his analyses of group psychology today, he would find more reason than ever to imagine we had grown out of a primal horde, seeing how ready we are to return to some similar social organization, closed within an ethnic identity, ruled by tyrants. His story of a primal father whose terrible governance was replaced by a gentler, if more pervasive, law has functioned with great persistence to explain our ability to repress our more destructive impulses and to sublimate them into socially productive activities. However, such a model is inadequate to describe varieties of social relations in post-Freudian communities, perhaps as neurosis has ceased to explain the ills or health of our contemporaries. That is, the Oedipal subordination of instinct to law may not be the only way of managing instinctual impulses in socially productive ways, and the resistance to law might not be the only way of going wrong.

In 1980, Hans Loewald wrote a striking essay entitled "The Waning of the Oedipus Complex" in which he attempted to preserve traditional Freudian interpretations even as he lamented their failures to address the passions of his era. Discussing what he seemed to imagine were simpler times, he argued that the Oedipus complex was resolved when one came to terms with patricide, the killing of the father in order to take up one's own desires in the world. But the evident tone of nostalgia in the essay reveals less that each of us must get over the guilt we experience for betraying the father than that there is no father left worth killing. The Oedipus complex wanes because it no longer functions when the law has faded. In this essay's echo of The Waning of the Middle Ages, we hear Johan Huizinga's longing for a time he imagines before the Enlightenment, before the Renaissance, just before, when feelings were more immediate and people, ruled by men of violence, lived with a passionate intensity. In both writers, the wish for a father's law reveals its absence as well as the emergence of an analysis based on something before the law. Many have called such a wish the perverse.

The emergence of perversion as a description of behaviors and desires, as discursive constructs, as fundamental psychic structures, and as political positions has been accompanied by an increasing valorization of the perverse for its analytic possibilities as well as for its revolutionary potential. For most earlier writers, there was little question but that the perverse belonged to a class of ills to be avoided or cured. The Kantian pervert acts, to the detriment of all, on inclination and pleasure rather than the stricter dictates of duty, soul's reason. The Freudian pervert fails to leave behind the polymorphous pleasures of infancy for the narrower utility of reproductive genital sexuality. While the normal neurotic wrestles with the inability to find true satisfactions within the boundaries of lawful encounters, the pervert remains in a world left frighteningly open by the father's failure either to close the door on early pleasures or to promise a future to compensate for the awful discoveries of childhood-of mutilation, loss, and death. And yet the resistance (or perhaps even subversion) that perversion offers to the father, to the law, seems for others to promise freedom. This ambivalence surrounding the category of the perverse suggests both the richness and dangers of using the term.

The Perverse Foundation

The story that psychoanalytic theories tell of psychic development indicates that certain capacities for social life derive ultimately from the necessary passage through a perverse stage, which installs structures and tendencies that persist in the mature psyche. From within a Freudian frame, the polymorphous character of infantile perversion suggests the openness of the child to multiple avenues of cathexis. That is, the category of the polymorphously perverse suggests that we are highly motivated to have varying forms of satisfaction and attachment to objects, including both human and nonhuman object relations. The stage during which the child has to find a way to separate himself as an independent entity from the engulfing, if secure and pleasurable, universe of the dyad sets up the basic forms of the adult's social ties, the satisfactions he will seek, the sufferings he will undergo and in turn inflict. Whether the absolute bonding between the child and mother actually occurs, or whether it is a retroactive construction by the child, or, again, whether it is fantasized by mother and child, and therefore lived as real, at the heart of perversion is the disavowal of the knowledge that separation is permanent, that mother lacks, and has always lacked, the power to make the world whole-again. Disavowing, as the pervert does, the knowledge of limitation, of castration, makes it possible to act on and enjoy the candidness of a polymorphously perverse body and mind. Normal neurotic pleasure is attenuated for good reasons, and if you can live within these limits, you are lucky. But that doesn't mean perverse pleasures are necessarily unavailable to the normal adult: as a stage of development, the pleasures of the polymorphously perverse remain embedded in the transformations we undergo to get civilized. The delight many of us feel (and the disgust and disapproval some others feel) in bodily movement, in song and rhythm, in the patterning of words, in looking, in eating, and in other activities learned prior to the Oedipal period and outside of social meaning suggests how the perverse persists in normative behavior. We might even ask if the meaningful activities of social life would be possible without their perverse foundations.

For the ordinary neurotic, jouissance must remain unconscious lest the experience recall too disruptively the lawlessness of polymorphous perversity with its suspicion that in fact there is no law. We encounter, however, a negative reflection of that jouissance in the contempt we so often hear in complaints about the disgusting pleasures of others: their horrible, smelly food; their loud and disorderly music; their irresponsible sexual extravagance; their profligate rates of reproduction. Perversity seems to saturate the social relations of others. Michel Foucault and Jonathan Dollimore argue that perversity is actually a discursive construct generated to define normative life. But the purpose of this construct may be less to implant an arbitrarily generated perversity than to provide cover for the specific pleasures that sustain and threaten the law. That is, I can continue to believe that my world is orderly and enjoy the covert pleasures of that world so long as I denounce the perversity that so obviously dominates the lives of others....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822330857
• ISBN 13: 9780822330851
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Herausgeber: Rothenberg Molly Anne, Foster Dennis A, Zizek Slavoj
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar