5

The Perverse Society

The victory over Nazism was made possible thanks to an alliance of Communists and Democrats who all supported the ideal of freedom, progress and emancipation that they had inherited from the Enlightenment. The victors did not, however, share the same conception of man and human aspirations. In those societies where the Communist model had triumphed, it was obvious from the 1930s onwards that the great socialist utopia had degenerated into a regime that constantly encouraged crime, a delight in evil and the loss of all freedoms. Believers in progress therefore had to ask themselves if it was possible to perpetuate the spirit of the Revolution, despite its vicissitudes, by supporting struggles against the subjugation of women, the colonized and ethic minorities. The question was all the more important in that the democratic system, which was based upon individualism, freedom of competition and mercantilism, was, despite its obvious superiority, by no means immune to inversions of the Law that frequently resulted in aberrations that went against its own principles: witch hunts, imperial conquests, absurd pretensions to normalize human behaviours, the degradation of culture, repression in the name of an ideal of good, Puritanism, pornography, and so on.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conflict between these two conceptions of man ended, as we know, with the victory of a liberal democratic model based upon a disenchanted world view, an insane belief that the end of history was at hand, and the conviction that society could be rationalized by the application of calculations, and therefore evaluation, to all human activities. A new biopower would, it was believed, abolish not only nation-states, which would give way to multitudes (Milner 2005),¹ but also the boundary between humans and animals and, within the human world, all conflict, all aspirations to rebellion, all desire for self-annihilation, and therefore all the excesses that revealed the presence of our dark side. There would be no more perversion and no more sublimation.²

Doing away with perversion: such is the new utopia of today's democratic, globalized and supposedly post-modern societies. They wish to eradicate evil, conflict, destiny and excess, and to promote the ideal of the tranquil management of organic life. But is there not a danger that this project will result in the appearance of new forms of perversion and new perverse discourses within society? Is there not a danger that society itself will be transformed into a perverse society?

After Auschwitz, all the words that supposedly defined the defining characteristics of humanity came under serious challenge. Given that men had, thanks to scientific and technological progress, succeeded in inventing a way of exterminating men that was without precedent in human history, the issue of man's place within the natural world acquired a new urgency.

As ethology developed into a comparative study of human and animal behaviour that contradicted the old Cartesian theory of the duality of mind and body, the question of the origins of evil was raised once more, just as it had been raised after the Darwinian revolution.

If the most despicable of men who tortures other men can be described as ‘bestial’ or ‘inhuman’ because he displays, in his relations with his fellow men,³ a cruelty that appears to be an expression of his profound animality, what are we to make of the way human beings treated animals? As Catherine Clément notes (2006: 111):

In Western societies we have yet to reach the heights of the life that human and non-humans share in native societies. In our societies, we are still capable of abandoning pets that have become a nuisance, of dressing them up in coats and making them wear hats or sunglasses […] In our societies, we put animals that are close to death to sleep on the pretext of preventing them from feeling any pain; we are not even capable of helping them to die with dignity; we treat them like beasts.

Do we have the right to torture animals⁴ or, more simply, to fetishize them in the same way that we fetishize people? Do we have the right to make them suffer the horrors of industrial slaughter houses that do not spare them the pain of dying? Do we have the right to shut them up in laboratories and to carry out what are often perfectly useless experiments on them without concerning ourselves about their sufferings? Do we have the right to train them to teach them to satisfy human sexual perversions? Is it not unworthy of a civilized humanity to use them to kill or torture human beings? What is the difference between humans and animals? What do apes and human beings have in common? Which is crueler and more murderous: the animal or the man? Are animals perverse? We are descended from apes; are we destined to revert to being apes, now that the behavioural and cognitive sciences have established a continuity between human and non-human primates? Are we to assume that non-human primates not only experience mental states, feeling and emotions but may also have a symbolic organization and a language?⁵

One last question also needs to be asked: given that the great apes were brought to Europe at the time when the rights of man were being promulgated, is it now – one hundred and fifty years after the Darwinian revolution and sixty years after the mass murders of the twentieth century – legitimate to extend those same rights to non-human primates that are facing extinction as a result of human madness? In a celebrated text, Lévi-Strauss (1962: 41) argues that

We started by cutting man off from nature and establishing him in an absolute reign. We believed ourselves to have thus erased his most unassailable characteristic: that he is first a living being. Remaining blind to this common property, we gave free reign to all excesses. Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim – to the profit of ever smaller minorities – the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion.

While relations between humans and animals are central to the founding mythologies that lie at the origins of human societies, it is not irrelevant to note that the word ‘bestiality’ was for centuries used to refer not just to human ferocity – being an animal – but to the consummation of a sexual act between a human and an animal. In this context, it should be noted that crossing the sexual species barrier – or ‘carnal habitation’– is not to be confused with the great mythical tales of the Minotaur, the Great God Pan, Zeus and Leda, of how the Egyptians copulated with crocodiles to increase their virility or with the totems of primitive people.

Despite all the fantasies bestiality may inspire, it is humans and not animals who indulge in the practice, as they alone have the privilege of choosing the objects to which they are attracted. No matter whether it takes a festive, murderous or ritualized form, the act of bestiality is inevitably, to different degrees, the result of training, or in other words of the perverse use of the body of the animal. It is in fact a way of enjoying the pain inflicted on the animal by inflicting it, through the animal, on oneself or other people. In that sense, training, which is in fact an ambiguous term, is not the same as ‘teaching’ – which may, for example, tame an animal or domesticate it so that it can live among human beings and, if need be, help them.⁶

Male animals that are specially trained, by means of conditioning with food or scents, to have sexual relations with humans are therefore called androzoons. Pornographic and scientific literature abounds in terrifying tales depicting every possible form of sexual intercourse between human beings and animals. Just as the gladiators were forced to play a part in their own extermination and just as Christians were fed to starving lions simply to satisfy the perversity of the mob, animals trained to copulate with humans were once featured prominently in the games staged in the circus. In the sixth century, the Empress Theodora, the daughter of a bear leader, the debauched and violent protectress of prostitutes and a follower of the Monophysite doctrine, would expose herself to the howling mob in the arenas of Constantinople. As she lay on her back with her legs raised, carefully trained geese pecked grains of corn from her open vagina.

While animals, like slaves and gladiators, were used to satisfy the sexual appetites of kings and emperors, they were also used in torture. Bears, goats, dogs, bulls and zebra were trained to rape and murder prisoners or those who had been sentenced to death.⁷ In other periods, they were used in the privacy of brothels or private salons to provoke certain kinds of orgasm, as in the ancient practice of ‘avidosodomy’ or having sex with a bird: ‘As the man is about to orgasm he breaks the neck of the bird causing the bird's cloaca sphincter to constrict and spasm, thus creating pleasurable sensations for the man’ (Love 1999: 300).

Smaller animals such as rats, insects and small snakes have always, without knowing it, inflicted terrible torments on human beings, but it was human beings who invented them, and they sometimes brought about their own deaths as a result. Everyone is familiar with the notorious practice of inserting a rodent into the body, as described by Freud in the case history of the ‘rat man’ (Ernst Lanzer). When he was off during manoeuvres in 1907, he heard Captain Memeczej, a man who was ‘obviously fond of cruelty’ describing a specially horrible punishment used in the East: the criminal was stripped naked and tied up, ‘a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks … some rats were put into it … and they … bored their way … into his anus. After half an hour, both the rats and the victim were dead’ (Freud 1909: 166).⁸

Because it was likened to a transgression of the procreative order, and therefore considered to be an unnatural vice, bestiality was seen by the monotheistic religions, and especially by Jews and Christians, as a crime and a heresy, just like sodomy and onanism. While the old practices of exhibiting and training animals to torture prisoners or for perverse festivities had been abolished, wretched peasants who were simply found guilty of ‘carnal habitation’ with their favourite animals were burned at the stake for centuries.

Convinced that anyone who had sexual relations with the Devil would give birth to monsters, magistrates sentenced the animals to death on the grounds that they were as perverse as their partners. In 1601, for instance, Claudine de Culam, a servant at the priory of Reverecourt and the daughter of a peasant family from Rozay-en-Brie, was sentenced to be burned at the stake at the age of sixteen because she had been caught in a state of carnal habitations with a white dog with red spots. ‘I found Claudine sprawled on her bed of rest’, explained the prior, ‘with the dog between her thighs and having carnal knowledge of her. As soon as she saw me, she pulled down her skirts and chased the dog away, but as it began to thrust its muzzle up her skirts, I kicked it and it went off, whimpering and limping.’ The girl spoke up in her dog's defence, but it was beaten.

At the request of her mother, who believed her to be innocent, she was examined, in the presence of the animal, by a panel of experts in a room adjoining the court of appeal. The experts later concluded that the dog had jumped on Claudine ‘to take her doggy style’. The guilty pair – one is tempted to call them lovers – suffered the same fate, and were strangled before being burned. Their ashes were then scattered to ensure that no trace of their coitus remained (Lever 1985: 94–6). Would anyone who reads this tragic story dare to say that the case of poor Claudine, who was in love with the dog, was identical to that of the terrible Theodora? They certainly both indulged in carnal habitation, but only Theodora dreamed up a training system that made animals the instrument of the human exercise de jouissance and domination. In one case, sovereign power was exercised over animals; in the other, both victim and animal were handed over to the law of their executioners.

Unlike the homosexual, the masturbating child and the hysterical woman, who, as we have seen, were for the sexologists of the nineteenth century the three major figures of human perversion, the zoophile – who was subject to no penal sanctions once the crime of bestiality and sodomy had been removed from the statute book⁹ – was no longer seen as a real pervert in the sense that he posed a threat to society. The zoophile was simply a sick person, afflicted by a sort of social and mental debility.

Krafft-Ebing (1924) identifies three types of zoophilia: bestiality (violation of animals), zooerasty (which results from impotence for the normal act) and erotic zoophilia. He takes absolutely no interest in the mute suffering of the animal, and nor does he take animal sexuality into account. He thus differentiated himself from the judges of the ecclesiastical courts in the same way that modern ethologists differentiate themselves from him.

Be that as it may, the positivist medicine that lay at the heart of scientific knowledge no longer saw any need to include animals in its great catalogue of deviant pathologies. Animals were not regarded as ill and were not forced to undergo treatment when they were found guilty of carnal habitation with a human being. The nosological world of the perversions, as defined by sexology, was a purely human realm. Over the next one hundred years, an impressive number of sophisticated terms were coined to describe every possible transgression of the species barrier in order to conceal the horror they inspired by a scientific facade: avisodomy (birds), cynophilia (dogs), necrobestiality (dead animals), ophidiophilia (reptiles), simiophilia (monkeys), animal voyeurism, pseudo-zoophilia (sex games in which one partner behaves like an animal), bestial sadism and so on.

In an astonishing text, Henri F. Ellenberger (1964) compares the various ways in which animals have been kept in captivity. He identifies three: the paradeisos of the ancient Persians, in which the animals were at liberty, the zoological gardens of the Aztecs, in which the animals were methodically classified and lived alongside dwarfs, hunchbacks, the physically abnormal and albinos, and the menageries of the Western world, where animals, like fools, were kept for the entertainment of kings. He then notes that the Revolution put an end to the sovereign's dominance over animals.¹⁰

According to Ellenberger, the Revolution gave birth to both the asylum and the modern zoological garden. He immediately adds that as the more the mad were concealed from the gaze of the crowds who wanted to humiliate them, thanks to the virtues of confinement, the more animals were exhibited.¹¹ In conclusion, Ellenberger speculates as to the therapeutic effect visiting zoos might have had on the mad. He insists that the insane recover a certain dignity by coming into contact with the gaze of animals. Unlike both the fundamentalists of animal liberation,¹² whom he criticizes for their anthropomorphic vision of animals, and those who destroy nature and the animal kingdom, he speaks in utopian terms of a possible return to the paradeisos of old.

Rather than exploring the various facets of the interwoven history of the mad, animals and the abnormal, or describing the various ways human being treat animality, as Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth de Fontenay have done, the ethnologists, cognitivists and behaviourists concentrated not just on classifying species and animals' ways of life, but also on their sexuality. The main goal of those who specialized in the study of the great apes was to discover all possible similarities between human and non-human primates. From this post-Darwinian perspective, the point is not to show that men are descended from monkeys, but to elevate monkeys to the status of men.

It was initially argued that the absence of any form of face-to-face copulation in mammals was an indication that their sexuality was organized around bestiality, violence, aggression, dominance – and, why not, enjoyment [jouissance] of the other. Face-to-face copulation was therefore seen as specifically human or as the sign of the normality of a human sexuality based upon a necessary recognition of the primacy of the difference between the sexes. It was then deduced that there was no such thing as a female orgasm in the animal kingdom.

Primatologists and specialists on mammals therefore baptized face-to-face copulation as the ‘missionary position’ so as to certify that it was bound up with civilization – or rather with the civilizing mission of the Christian West: ‘The frontal copulatory position was elevated to a cultural innovation of great significance, one that fundamentally altered the relationship between men and women. It was felt that pre-literate people would greatly benefit from education about this mode of intercourse, hence the term missionary position’ (Waal 1998: 101).

While the fact that this position is unknown in the animal kingdom could be seen as one of the major signs that allow us to differentiate between human and animals, the fact that human beings practice coitus a tergo had to be interpreted as a survival of animal behaviour. For the moralists, it will be recalled, this style of copulation was an expression of an instinct that was bestial, and therefore demonic or perverse, as the Devil has always been represented as a lecherous beast. For similar reasons, the female orgasm was, from this perspective, described as the expression of a perverse animality.

Darwinian naturalists and evolutionists subsequently argued that the human practice of coitus a tergo merely proved that there was a real and absolute continuity between the two species. From that perspective, animals may have some awareness of good and evil: some animals are perverse, and others are not, or are perverse to a greater or lesser degree. The purpose of this hypothesis was to demonstrate that perversion was a natural phenomenon. If male apes copulated with each other, they were inverts. So why could cows not be inverts? The fact that they could suck their own teats meant that there was no reason why they should not be likened to fetishists or masturbators.

For their part, psychoanalysts tended to see face-to-face copulation, which is exclusively human, as a sort of proof of the existence of a pre-Oedipal complex: every man was a son who wanted to fuse with his mother, and every woman was a mother who transformed the man who inseminated her into part of her own body. When men and women copulate in this way, they said in substance, the man is in the position of an infant in its mother's arms, while the woman is a substitute-infant for the man.

The observation of bonobos shattered all these hypotheses. These exceptional apes, which are cousins to the chimpanzees, form a strange society in which both males and females appear to be more drawn to the pleasures of sex and food than conquest and domination. They copulate face-to-face, practice fellatio and masturbation and, more significant still, their sexuality is not directly related to reproduction. Males sometimes have relations with other males, and females with other females. Orgasm, which is experienced by both sexes, gives rise to manifestations of intense pleasure.

The primatologists insist, in a word, that all bonobo activities resemble human activities, or at least appear to do so. Young apes can, for example, look like sulky children and express disappointment if they are deprived of food. When they are having sex, females may cry out in pleasure and they sometimes join in the games of the males, tickling their stomachs or armpits. Of all the apes, it is, in short, the bonobos that most closely resemble human beings in terms of their behaviour.

And yet, be that as it may, it has to be said that, whatever primatologists may claim, no animal sexuality will ever resemble human sexuality for the simple reason that it is devoid of any complex symbolic language, and therefore of any form of self-consciousness.

That is why all observation of animal sexuality simply confirms the researchers' anthropomorphic assumptions or, worse still, leads to a perverse, and completely un-Darwinian, attempt to turn human beings into apes, and apes into human beings. Unless it is perverse, no science will ever prove that there is such a thing as perversion in the animal kingdom. Animals know nothing of the Law or of the transgression of the Law. They are not fetishists, paedophiles, coprophiles, necrophiliacs, criminals, masochists, voyeurs or exhibitions, and they are unable to sublimate. And the fact that some male primates will not copulate with their mothers,¹³ or seem to prefer another male to a female, does not provide grounds for arguing that the great apes are familiar with either the prohibition of incest or the joys of sodomy.

Similarly, the fact that animals, even when tamed, can be dangerous, aggressive, murderous and cruel does not allow us to deduce that they kill human beings or other animals simply for the pleasure of exterminating them. The cruelty of animals is not related to human cruelty because it is instinctive and can never be likened to some delight in cruelty. As Georges Bataille rightly points out, there is no crime and no eroticism in the animal kingdom: ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death’ (Bataille 2006b: 13) … ‘Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man … Human choice is … different from that of animals. It appeals to the infinitely complex inner mobility which belongs to man alone. The animal does have a subjective life but this life seems to be conferred upon it like an inert object, once and for all. Human eroticism differs from animal sexuality precisely in this, that it calls inner life into play’ (2006b: 29).

There is, then, no eroticism in the animal world: no bodily eroticism, no emotional eroticism, and no sacred eroticism.

Being part of the living world, animals do, on the other hand, inhabit an imaginary world that allows them to express their pain, just as we do. This means that human beings, who are the sole masters of the Law, must include animals in the sphere of law: ‘No animal is capable of inflicting what men inflict on other men, and that is why describing a crime as bestial is a disastrous nonsense. It is highly likely that animals, or at least the animals we are acquainted with, know nothing of the excesses that lead to the extremes of good and evil … No animal subjectivity can recognize the other as a subjectivity that is identical to its own or have any notion of what is meant by the law, which means animal can ever enter into a contract with us’ (Fontenay 2004).

Try as we may to train animals to make them behave like human beings and experiment on them to test the effects of certain hormones, electrical current or surgical interventions, we simply have to accept that only humans can be perverse.¹⁴

It is, in other words, as a great a mistake to deny that humans are part of the animal kingdom, as do creationists and believers in intelligent design, as it is to attempt to abolish all differences between human being and animals, like the utilitarians of deep ecology or the cognitive behaviourists, who argue that there is an absolute continuity between the animal model and the human model. The former turn man into a divine creature and run the risk that, one day, man will see himself as a god and exterminate all those beings (so-called ‘inferior’ men and animals) who are deemed to be divine enough to go on living, while the latter condemn human beings to a sordid determinism that denies them any awareness of their fate, any free will and any ability to tell the difference between good and evil.

It is therefore not surprising that the creationists are so critical of the great figure of Darwin, who demonstrated that men are descended from the apes, or that the behaviourists’ bête noire should be Freud. Freud is Darwin's heir and describes man as a subject who is decentred but aware of the humiliation that forces him to share his fate with the animals. They are his brothers, but they belong to a different species and he has always both loved and tortured them. Eventually, we will have to accept that there are similarities between the two species and resist all the temptations of an ill-conceived ethology: ‘Man … alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being … The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (Darwin 2004: 135, 151).

While animals are not perverse, some of the theories human beings have dreamed up to explain animality certainly are. We owe the invention of a strange theory of animality that enjoys exceptional popularity all over the world to Peter Singer (1976), an Australian utilitarian philosopher born just after the Second World War, and the founder of the great animal liberation movement. In a book published in 1976 and subsequently translated into many languages, he describes the terrible tortures that Western society, which has been perverted by a scientistic ideal, inflicts upon animals. Monkeys are gassed, irradiated or poisoned simply for the pleasure of giving them ‘stimulation’ and are used as guinea pigs in place of human beings. Mice are murdered in laboratories for the sole purpose of testing poisons. Living chickens are hung up by their feet on hooks as they are carried into industrial slaughter houses. Calves are forced to live in cramped boxes to make them anaemic and better to eat. Pregnant sows are kept in stalls where they are tightly tethered by their necks. All these descriptions and images are sickening.¹⁵

But, far from simply calling for a legitimate campaign to improve conditions for animals, Singer assimilates them to human beings. And he therefore concludes that the treatment human beings reserve for animals by eating them, and not just torturing them, is the same as the treatment of dominant groups throughout the history of humanity when behaving as racists, colonialists, the organizers of genocides, torturers, fascists, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, and so on.

He then invents the so-called concept of ‘speciesism’ to describe the specific form of discrimination that supposedly characterizes the essential relationship between animals and humans, and compares it to racism. ‘Anti-speciesism’ is, in his view, therefore equivalent to a liberation movement akin to anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, feminism or anti-racism.

The thesis seems generous, and has seduced many defenders of the animal cause who are exasperated with the inertia of those who control the market for food, experimental science, and expeditions to capture animals of all kinds. If, however, we look at it more closely, we find that it is based upon an inversion of the laws of nature that transforms man, not into a being who is identical to an animal, but into the representative of a species that is inferior, or even sub-animal. And in order to regenerate the human condition, which has been bastardized by its carnivorous instincts, Singer calls for the creation of a new man. ‘Vegetarian man’¹⁶ alone can free other men – the filth who eat ham sandwiches¹⁷ – from their status as murderers. Singer also believes that eating animals is in itself a criminal act that is as abject as torturing them for pleasure. He thus makes every human carnivore an accomplice to a collective murder that can be likened to a sort of genocide.

The thesis defended by the anti-speciesists is based not only on a kind of hatred of humanity and valorization of a new ‘non-meatist’ human species, but also on a perverse attempt to abolish the species barrier.¹⁸ Witness, if need be, the way they ‘revise’ the definition of humanity. They are not interested in protecting animals from violence and establishing new animal rights, but in granting ‘the non-human great apes’ human rights.

This argument is based upon the conviction, which is shared by Singer and his followers, that the great apes, just like humans, have cognitive models that give them access to language and, above all, that they are ‘more human’ than humans afflicted with madness, senility or neurological diseases. By tracing a new frontier between the human and the non-human – a frontier that transgresses the classic organization of relations between nature and culture¹⁹ – animal liberationists in fact expel a whole race of ‘abnormals’ who are judged to be inferior or incapable of reason from the human realm: the handicapped, the mad, people with Down's syndrome, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and so on. And in doing so, they privilege the animality of the great apes – which is deemed to be superior to the humanity of abnormal humans – to the detriment of the animal kingdom's other species: mammals, birds and reptiles.²⁰

It comes as no surprise to find that the inventor of such a perverse system has become an apologist for zoophilia (Singer 2001). He bases his arguments on the thesis of the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers, who has written a book on bestiality (2000) advancing the aberrational idea that animals are sexually attracted to human beings. Likening the power of scents to actual desire, he calls for the removal of the taboo that supposedly surrounds zoophilia and claims that sexual relations between animals and humans should be regarded as just as normal as relations between humans, on the grounds that animals can be consenting partners. According to this argument, zoophiles should be treated in the same way that homosexuals are now treated. They should be free to live with their favourite companions, and even free to marry them.

Singer's support for such theories brought him under attack from his own side when animal rights groups accused him of barbarism. Using perverse theories to deny that human beings are by their very nature carnivores is, after all, no way to improve the fate of animals or to get out of the vicious circle that Lévi-Strauss describes so well. And besides, if we adopt Singer's egalitarian stance, how can we prevent humans from eating animals without at the same time preventing animals from eating their fellow animals? Do we have to turn all carnivores into herbivores?

We know that, as a result of the development of mass society and industrial slaughter houses, human beings now eat more meat than their ancestors, who lived in a rural world in which only the nobility enjoyed the right to hunt. But that does not necessarily mean that they should be prevented from eating meat. In democratic societies, the decision to give up eating meat must be a matter of individual choice, and not the result of the sectarian indoctrination that promotes yet another ‘new man’ ideology. If we act on the basis of that principle, we will one day have to ban any way of exterminating certain animal species that damage crops or pose a threat to human life.

While the question of animal protection has become an essential feature of contemporary debates about ecology, the question of zoophilia is an important influence on changing views of animality.

It would of course be a mistake to try to reintroduce the crime of bestiality, which was removed from the statute book over two hundred years ago, into contemporary law. But the fact that we no longer persecute those unfortunates who indulge in private in carnal habitation with their favourite animals, does not mean that we do not have to rethink the contemporary problematic of zoophilia.

Pornographic photographs are posted on the internet. Animals trained for sexual purposes can be bought by mail order. Dogs, cats, birds and snakes are trained to perform ritual acts of fellatio or anal penetration, and are killed and tortured. Domestic pets are mutilated in various ways.²¹ Such is the face of contemporary zoophilia.²² The cruelty is legal but, like pointless laboratory experiments, it can be described as a form of slavery.

We have to conclude that the worldwide distribution of pornographic images of sex between human zoophiles and trained animals is the modern expression of a perverse system that is both collective and anonymous, and that it is much more perverse than the actual sexual relations that peasants had with their animals, or that city dwellers had with their pets. In the one case, practising or potential zoophiles are encouraged to indulge in a cruel addiction that leads them to treat animals as commodities; in the other, they act instinctively, but without any mediation from an institutionalized third party.

In more general terms, we can say that today's mercantile civilization is becoming a perverse society because it identifies with an ideal that fetishizes the bodies and genitals of both human and non-humans on a globalized scale, and because there is a widespread tendency to erase all boundaries between the human and the non-human, between the body and the psyche, between nature and culture, and between norms and the transgression of norms. Such fetishism is encouraged both by the distribution of images and by the development of a virtual pornography that is refined, clean and hygienic, and that appears to do no harm. In a sense, this society is even more perverse than the perverts it can no longer define. It exploits the will to jouissance so as to repress it all the more. As for the anti-speciesist theories on animal liberation that, like to many other theories of this kind, parody the ideal of progress and enlightenment, they are no more than the puritanical face of this domesticated pornography.

The example of these representations of zoophilia and their various narrative supports once more demonstrated that, as in the nineteenth century, the discourse of psychiatry is providing contemporary society with the morality it is looking for.

The goal of the old sexology was to classify various types of perversion, to give names to the infinite variations on what was judged to be an abnormal sexology, and to stigmatize the dangerousness of the masturbating child, the hysterical woman and the male homosexual. We are now seeing a reversal of that perspective. Just as anti-speciesists and fanatical behaviourists want to liken men to apes and deny the existence of any species barrier, psychiatry claims to be abolishing the very idea that perversion might exist by refusing to pronounce its name.

In 1974, and under pressure from gay and lesbian liberation movements, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) resolved, on the basis of a referendum, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The decision caused a scandal. It in fact indicated that, being unable to define the nature of homosexuality in human terms, the American psychiatric community had given in, in demagogic fashion, to the pressure of public opinion by asking its members to vote on a problem that had nothing to do with any electoral decision. Thirteen years later, in 1987, the term ‘perversion’ – like ‘hysteria’ – vanished from the international vocabulary of psychiatry without any theoretical debate, and was replaced by ‘paraphilia’.²³ Homosexuality is not included in that category.

One can, of course, take the view that this event, which took place in two stages – the declassification of homosexuality and then the removal of perversion from the list – marked a decisive victory for movements for the emancipation of minorities. After having suffered so much persecution, homosexuals, who had the support of most of the ‘people of the perverse’, had finally depsychiatrized their sexuality and convinced the legislators and representatives of medical science that same-sex love could easily have the same status as love for the opposite sex without plunging society into chaos. The legal decriminalization of homosexuality in the West – which had gradually been going on since 1975 – quite logically went hand-in-hand with its depsychiatrization because the psychiatric discourse that coined the term ‘homosexuality’ had never, from the late nineteenth century onwards, been able to do anything more than turn inverts into mental patients.

If, however, we look more closely, we find that this victory was also the symptom of a disaster for medical science and its approach to the psyche. The disaster in fact occurred when the promoters of the famous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) finally abandoned the psychoanalytic, psychodynamic or phenomenological terminology – which had humanized psychiatry over a period of sixty years by supplying it with a philosophy of the subject – and replaced it with behavioural criteria that made no reference to subjectivity (see Kirk and Kutchins 1992). The goal was to demonstrate that disorders of the soul were purely psychopharmalogical or surgical problems, and that they could be reduced to disorders or dissociations, or in other words motor breakdowns.

According to what is now a globalized approach – one which is accepted everywhere on the planet – the word ‘paraphilia’ refers not only to what were once described as perverse sexual practices – exhibitionism, fetishism, frottage, paedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, voyeurism, transvestism – but also to perverse fantasies, which cannot be linked to perverse practices. Then there is the category of so-called ‘non-specific paraphilias’, which includes phone sex, necrophilia, partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia, coprophilia, cliterophilia and urophilia.

As we can see, the term ‘paraphilia’ does not cover acts that are legally defined as crimes, such as rape, sexual murder, delinquency, living on immoral earnings or terrorism (paedophilia and exhibitionism are the exceptions to the rule). And nor, finally, does it cover the addictions and exacerbated forms of narcissism that many clinicians see as forms of self-destruction: drug addiction, bulimia, anorexia and so on (cf. Racamier 1970; Sirotta 2003).

The disappearance of the word ‘perversion’ from psychiatry's lexicon allows modern medical science to describe anyone as a ‘paraphile’. Both subjects who repeatedly have perverse fantasies (or in other words most of the world's inhabitants) and those who actually indulge in perverse sexual practices (legal or otherwise) can be so defined. While no one is a pervert because the word has disappeared, everyone is a potential pervert if they can be suspected of having been completely obsessed, on more than one occasion, with sado-masochistic, fetishistic, or criminal fantasies.

This recourse to a terminology that makes no mention of its dark side means that perversion no longer has any substance. The subject of medical science's new discourse is not influenced by the violence of his or her passions, but by a conditioning that is unrelated to language. There is also a danger that the subject will become the object of a permanent suspicion because his fantasies are seen as perverse acts, which have been rebaptized as ‘paraphiliac’. One day, there will no doubt be a call for fantasies to be systematically screened, evaluated, reified and included in the files in accordance with the most extreme logic of the domestication of the imaginary.

In a sense, DSM – a perverse classification of perversion, the perverse and sexual perversions – realizes Sade's great social utopia, but it does so in a deadly way: differences are abolished, subjects are reduced to being objects that are under surveillance, a disciplinary ideology triumphs over the ethics of freedom, the feeling of guilt is dissolved, and the order of desire is suppressed.²⁴

But the comparison goes no further. As we know, Sade's utopia could have been dreamed up only by a libertine who never had any intention of realizing it in the real world. Sade was a tragic author who led the life of a pariah and spent most of it locked up with criminals and the insane. His narratives urge us to turn the revolutionary act into a deflagration. In his destructive fantasy, he imagines that this will hasten the transition between the old and the new. Today's behavioural psychiatrists, in contrast, are the puritanical agents of an anonymous biocracy.

The triumph of this new psychiatry of screening, evaluation and behaviour has brought about a shift from a system of knowledge to one of truth. Dispossessed of their authority for the benefit of a perverse system that makes them its servants, psychiatrists are faced with a situation that forces them to watch the therapeutic alliance without being actors in it. And as we can see from the petitions and declarations of practitioners who are exasperated by this development within their discipline – or even its disappearance – that never stop complaining about this.

As a result of this change, patients are now expected to describe their symptoms in public and to become experts on their own pathologies and pain. They therefore make their own diagnoses, which are no more than an expression of a vast tyrannical cult of confession.

At the same time, the audiovisual media have, as we know and with the consent of every protagonist in the great post-modern display of exhibitionism, become the major instruments of an ideology that is as pornographic as it is puritanical. All over the world, reality television, in which everyone is forced to put their private life on show, functions as the new asylum of modern times, and it is not unrelated to the spirit that inspired DSM's classifications. It is a vast zoological garden that is organized like a realm of never-ending surveillance in which time has been suspended.

A society that worships this kind of transparency and surveillance and that seeks to abolish its dark side, is a perverse society. But, and this is the paradox, this transparency, which the audiovisual media have turned into a categorical imperative, means that democratic states can scarcely go on concealing their barbaric, shameful and perverse practices. Witness, if need be, the history of torture. When, with the tacit approval of the French Army's highest authorities, torture was used in Algeria, it took years for eye-witnesses, victims and historians to prove what had happened. As we recently saw from the war in Iraq, the torturers are now the first to publicize their actions: they pose for photographs of themselves in action. The photographs are then distributed all over the world (cf. Douin 1998). It can never be stated too often that there are many facets to the perversion that both encourages civilization's advances and at the same parodies them or even destroys them.

While today's industrial and technological society has its perverse tendencies because of its pornographic fetishization of bodies, the puritanical medical discourse that abolishes the notion of perversion and the elaboration of insane theses about relations between humans and animals, the perverse have yet to be identified. Where does perversion begin, and what are the main components of perverse discourse today?

Excluded from the procreative order and stigmatized as the accursed share of human societies, the homosexuals of the past – Wilde, Proust and the characters in their novels – were recognizable, identifiable, branded and stigmatized. As we have said, they made up the famous people of the perverse: they were an ‘accursed race’ that could, as Proust remarked, be compared with women or the Jews. They were an elite race that was capable of sublimation. Many European states that observe the rule of Law now acknowledge their desire to start families. And they are becoming even more of a threat to their enemies because they are less visible. As a result, it is no longer the exclusion of homosexuals from the family order that upsets reactionaries of all stripes; on the contrary, it is their desire to become part of it.

This clearly demonstrates that, in order to be integrated into the procreative order, homosexuals have had, in a sense, to abandon the place they were assigned for centuries. One therefore has the impression that it is not rebels from an accursed race who defy the law who speak a perverse discourse, but those who want to prevent the inverts of old from acquiring a new legal status. It is in the name of the sanctification of sexual difference and the notion of object-choice that the supporters of this discourse, who are hostile to the new norms, oppose all legal reforms designed to turn marriage into a secular union between two individuals, irrespective of their sex.

As a result of this inversion of perspective, they now sing the praises of the shadowy race they once persecuted, and are now trying at all cost to keep it in its place for fear that the normative order will collapse, even though it is now no more than a shadow of what it once was. This pathetic and quasi-fetishistic revaluation of the accursed figure of the invert has nothing at all to do with any Proustian literature. Basically, it is nothing more than an archaic version of the scientific discourse that claims to be able to do away with inversion by doing away with the word that once named it.

It is not enough to describe such discourses as perverse. We have yet to understand which great figures have now replaced the infernal trio of the masturbating child, the male homosexual and the hysterical women in this new climate of Puritanism and pornography.

The more psychiatric discourse replaces the word ‘perversion’ with ‘paraphilia’ in the belief that it can do away with the implicit reference to God, good, evil, the Law and transgression of the Law, or even to jouissance and desire, the more it becomes synonymous with ‘perversity’ in civil society. The syntagm ‘perverse effect’ has never been more widely used than it is today to indicate that programmes that were originally based on just causes end up producing the opposite results to what everyone thought or imagined they would produce.

Christophe Dejours uses the expression in an interview (2007) about ‘new social illnesses’ and denounces post-industrial capitalism as a ‘perverse system’. This almost immaterial capitalism is centred on the quest for profit and improved quality control, and it has had unintended consequences. Rather than improving productivity and efficiency, it damages the social fabric and causes its subjects to self-destruct. Hence the rise in the number of suicides and economic failures: ‘Performance is defined in terms of profit, and not in terms of improving the quality of the work. Take the tropism of “total quality”, which is now everywhere. This is a fearsome and perverse system because there is no such thing as total quality. The claim that there is such a thing encourages people to cheat and be dishonest.’

For the same reasons, there is more and more talk of the ‘perverse effects’ of progressive laws that were meant to encourage the emancipation of minorities²⁵ or to improve conditions in our prisons. Although it is no longer used by science, the word is so popular with public opinion that even experts now use it, sometimes in incoherent ways.

A committee on ethics, for instance, bans therapeutic cloning for fear that it might have the ‘perverse effect’ of encouraging disguised forms of reproductive cloning. We are suspicious of all scientific innovations because we are terrified by the idea that they will have the ‘perverse’ effect of reviving old ideas about the obscene eugenics of the filthy beasts of Auschwitz.

In our individualist and disenchanted society, it is not unusual for a politician to be described as ‘perverse’ in a bid to stigmatize the deceptive nature of his or her promises and to suggest that they are calculated, a dirty trick, or a ploy. In that respect, all the great contemporary mythologies that talk of plots, conspiracies or organized imposture no doubt represent an updating of the notion of perversion, which has been reworked in terms of the old dualities of good and evil, and the divine and the Satanic.

The writers and journalists who are so keen on revealing their turpitudes have never been so fascinated by torturers. For similar reasons, the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century, which once sang the praises of heroic epics, began to look into the fate of victims and then became interested in the fate of the authors of genocides.

It is, in a word, because psychology, ethology or psychiatry could neither theorize perversion as a structure nor say who the perverse were in any coherent fashion that the word has, in current usage, regained the terrifying meaning it lost when mental medicine dropped it. It is as though scientistic discourse had lost not only its scientificity but also its ethics when it tried to take the place of God and refused to grant the psyche and subjective consciousness any status because it rejected both psychoanalysis and philosophy.

This positivist science is, despite all the in-depth research that has been done in this area, all the more incapable of theorizing the status of perversion in that it has been unable to establish any serious correlation between perversion and genetic or biological anomalies. One day, we will have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that, while it is specific to human beings, delight in evil does have a subjective and psychic history. And as Freud argued, access to civilization, the Law or progress is the only thing that allows us to control that part of ourselves that can never be tamed.

As a result, and in the absence of any pertinent contribution from medicine, ethology or biology, it is legal discourse that gives perversions, if not perversion, their new institutional face. When it comes to sexuality, juridical discourse in fact makes a distinction between so-called legal practices and those that incur legal sanctions. And given that the state no longer interferes in the private life of its citizens – which represents, of course, a major step in the right direction – all perverse sexual practices are now permissible between consenting adults.²⁶ Any subject is now free to be a swinger, an inveterate masturbator or a sado-masochist. Any subject can commit incest, and to be a coprophile, a coprophague, a fetishist, a prostitute, a transvestite, a necrophile or a religious fanatic. Any subject is free to frequent tattoo parlours and backrooms, have piercings, practise fist fucking, enjoy flagellation or join satanic cults, provided that he does not make a public exhibition of himself, does not violate graves or conceal corpses, does not sell his body or organs to profit-making associations, does not practice cannibalism and does not mistreat his instinctual object (in cases involving sexual relations with animals).

In this context, the perverse are no longer seen as perverse because the law takes the view that they do not pose any threat to society, and because their perversions remain a private matter. And perverts who have been normalized, authorized, decriminalized and de-psychiatrized have now taken up the long story of pleasures, passions, transgressions and vices that writers and specialists in the history of psychopathology have been writing ever since Sade in their learned, erotic, pornographic, psychoanalytic and sexological books.

Sex, in all its various forms, has never before inspired so many books. Never before has it been so fascinating. Never before has it been studied, theorized, examined, probed, exhibited and interpreted as much as in our society, which thought that, by freeing sex from censorship and all the constraints of the moral order, it would find the answer to the enigma of desire and its fits and starts in the jouissance of the body.

As a result, the law has taken the place of psychiatry, and it is the law that makes a distinction between permissible ‘paraphiles’ and social ‘paraphiles’ whose acts make them liable to criminal proceedings, namely rapists, paedophiles, mad killers, sex criminals, exhibitionists, grave robbers and stalkers. The category of ‘deviant’ or ‘delinquent’ has now been extended to include all those – abusers, the victims of other and of self-harm – who disturb public order with their nihilistic and devastating behaviour and frustrate biopower's ideal. It includes promiscuous HIV-positive homosexuals who are guilty of spreading the virus because they refuse to use protection, delinquent adolescents who reoffend, so-called hyperactive, aggressive and violent children who are beyond the control of their parents or teachers, obese adults, depressives, narcissists and suicidal subjects who deliberately refuse treatment.

The way things are going, we will be able to expand the list to include subjects who are found guilty of triggering their own organic illnesses because of their frenetic behaviour.²⁷

Public opinion tends to take a hierarchical view of human misery, and the homeless are at the top of the hierarchy. Because they are dirty, alcoholic, smelly and live with their dogs (cf. Declerck 2001), they are now seen as the biggest nuisance of all – and as the most perverse of all because they are accused of enjoying their idleness. And in an attempt to drive them out of town, modern hygiene's new Homais wants to drown out their stench by spraying them with malodorous substances. But can we use a state-approved stench to overcome a stench without perverting the Law?²⁸

How can anyone fail to see that, in these conditions and even if they are not named as such, the perverse are always the absolute other and that they are banished beyond the frontiers of the human, either to be treated – perversely – like rubbish, or in order to resist their tyranny when they really do have an evil influence on the real? Their influence is all the more disturbing in that it is feared that it might affect not only what the social body regards as its most precious genos – its children – but even its very existence as a law-governed community.

In that respect, the paedophile has now replaced the invert as the incarnation of the essence of all that is hateful about perversion because it attacks childhood and therefore the future of humanity. But all our contemporary fantasies about the possible genocide of the social body are also projected onto the terrorist, who is more perverse than anyone else. When it comes to evil, the contemporary terrorist is seen as the heir to Nazism.

Freud was the first person in the history of psychopathology to theorize the question of childhood sexuality and therefore, as I have already said, to lift the curse on masturbation. And it is because children are now recognized as being both legal subjects and sexed beings that their bodies are so sanctified. Any doctor who tried to use surgery or physical mutilations to prevent a child from touching his or her genitals would be regarded as perverse, and would be told in no uncertain terms that medication is much more effective. Adult masturbation, for its part, is no longer seen as a perverse practice, unless it is accompanied by exhibitionism or compulsive disorders that lead to the harassment of others. On the contrary.

Solitary sex has never been so highly valued, now that the cult of narcissism has become so dominant in our sexually transparent society. In Freudian terms, the ‘dangerous supplement’ was viewed as a normal stage in sexuality; it is now celebrated as the apotheosis of an emancipatory movement. All the more so in that solitary sex is the best way to avoid partners who get in the way, painful conflicts, passionate jealousy and, above all, the scourge of sexually transmitted diseases. It has therefore become a ‘sexual orientation’ in its own right and can be defended as such because it constantly brings the subject face-to-face, not only with his own finitude, but with the pleasures offered by the ‘sex shops’ industry, which now sell an infinite number of increasingly sophisticated vibrators for women and all kinds of inflatable dolls for men (cf. Laqueur 2003).

Masturbation can easily be combined with voyeurism: ‘Step into the private lives of hundred of young women’, says an e-mail sent out to thousands of web-surfers. ‘Take control of more than two hundred cameras all over the world. Toilets, showers, bedrooms, lounges, swimming pools, gynaecologists’ consulting rooms, saunas, jacuzzis, bathrooms. You can see what they are doing when they are alone without them seeing you. We are all curious and voyeuristic to some extent. And now you have the chance to watch what really goes on at your leisure, and without any fear of being seen.’

The fact remains that this magnificent programme, which may well satisfy our post-modern individualism, is nothing more than a desperate manifestation of a perverse attempt to get beyond auto-eroticism. The most flamboyant descriptions of the furies of ‘whacking off’ are brought to us by Philip Roth (2005: 18–19), who is the great contemporary painter of the torments of desire:

Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled kleenex and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually in dread that my loathsomeness would be discovered by someone stealing upon me just as I was in the frenzy of dropping my load … ‘Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you've got’ begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in the basement, to drive wild with my vaselined upright. ‘Come, Big Boy, come’, screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.

Contrary to what one might think, paedophilia has always been seen as a transgressive with perverse overtones,²⁹ even when marriages between adolescents, or even between young girls and old men, were arranged by their families. As we know, the Marquis de Sade recommends it in his books, even though he never indulged it in real life.

Krafft-Ebing calls it ‘paedophilia erotica’ and compares it with fetishism because, in such acts, the body of the child is nothing more than an object of jouissance. He regards abusers as being ‘tainted by heredity’ or as ‘degenerates’, whatever the nature of their penchant (love or hatred of children). But he rightly restricts the term to sexual relations between an adult and a pre-pubertal child, to ensure that the paedophile is not confused with the pederast on the one hand, and the hebephile on the other. The former term relates, as we have said, to the Greek tradition of homosexuality, while the latter is used to describe adults (men and women) who are specifically attracted to pubertal adolescents.

It is therefore difficult to describe a sexual relationship between, for example, an adolescent girl or boy of fourteen with a young adult (man or woman) of sixteen or eighteen as paedophile in any strict sense, even though all sexual relations with minors under fifteen are now illegal under French law.³⁰

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, or at the time when doctors were still hounding children who masturbated, that an interest began to be taken in the sexual abuse – incestuous and otherwise – of young children by adults. Such abuse had long been covered up, and it took the extension of psychoanalysis on the one hand and the observation of sexology on the other to bring it to light. At that time, children did not directly disclose their abuse when it happened but, years later, when they had become adults, they did disclose it to their therapists. While the victims – who were usually hysterical women – talked in the private consulting rooms of their soul-doctors about the pain they had suffered, their aggressors remain silent. And they admitted their perversions only when they came into contact with forensic medicine as a result of some offence against public decency. ‘Ordinary’ paedophiles who, without being child murderers or even, it would seem, violent men, interfered with their own children within the family, or with children of people they knew, and took the view that the child's body belonged to them and that the seduction was initiated by the children, who were anxious to give adults sexual pleasure.

These retrospective disclosures were so common that Freud initially thought that hysterical neuroses resulted from the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Convinced that he was right about his neurotica, he went so far as to suspect that his old father, Jacob Freud, had been a pervert who forced some of his children to fellate him. In a famous letter dated 21 September 1897, he then abandoned the so-called ‘seduction theory’ and asserted that, while actual abuse did occur, it could not be regarded as the sole cause of neurosis. He subsequently developed the notion of fantasy, and demonstrated that the famous sexual scenes that puzzled all the scientists of his day could easily have been imagined, and that psychical reality was different from material reality (Freud 1985. On the many debates that surround Freud's rejection of the seduction theory, see Roudinesco 1999).

Now that paedophiles (who have become paraphiles) are described as suffering from ‘sexual preference disorder’, it is the children themselves who have to disclose, even though retrospective evidence is still legally admissible. This is an effect of the way the status of children has been transformed. Thanks to the work of Freud and his successors, children are no longer seen as pure and innocent, but as ‘polymorphously perverse’ creatures whose sexuality must be educated without being repressed or, worse still, excited by attempts to seduce them. Their bodies are therefore all the more taboo because we are aware of the disastrous effects of childhood abuse. And their disclosures therefore tend to be taken at face value.

Our experience teaches us that while ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings …’ what they claim to be the truth has been distorted or reinterpreted. Children who have been the victims of abuse often accuse, in other words, other people around them as well as, or instead of, their abusers. They use a real traumatic lived experience to invent sexual scenes that are often fanciful,³¹ and dream up rings, plots and occult powers. And given that contemporary paedophilia is both widely publicized on pornographic sites and over-exposed in the media, it is not unusual for the fantasies to conform to virtual reality.

A child who has been abused, neglected, beaten, abandoned or seduced by an adult who is close to him always experiences ‘soul murder’. In such situations, children lose all self-respect because they believe they are guilty of the abuse that is inflicted on them, and later repeat the same acts or even torture themselves and their own children. ‘Some of the stories that patients tell about their parents and childhood could make the psychiatrist weep: my father beat us so badly he broke bones; my mother put lye in my halfwit brother's oatmeal; my mother kept the bedroom door open when she brought men home for sex; my stepfather took baths with me and taught me to suck him off, and when I told my mother she slapped me and called me a liar’ (Shengold 1990: 14).

The disclosures do not only reveal sexual abuse; as Shengold describes, they also reveal moral tortures in which hatred or indifference, silence and concealed madness are the dominant factors. Shengold (1990: 8f) describes the case of a young man from a very wealthy family who suffered from depression with suicidal tendencies. His alcoholic father had always treated him like an object but showed great affection towards his horses. As for his mother, she had never stopped humiliating him, even though she showered him with material gifts. When he told her that he had entered psychoanalysis, her birthday gift to him was a set of pistols that had belonged to her father.

We have already seen that the childhood of some truly perverse individuals was punctuated by similar atrocities. We also know that children who are victims of hatred, aggression, abuse and ‘soul murder’ in the privacy of their own homes are much more likely than others to become the choice prey of the paedophiles who seduce them with caresses and kind words in order to destroy them because of their perverse conviction that they actually want to be seduced.

While it is now accepted that the victims suffer, what is done to treat those who are now described as ‘sexual deviants’?

Specialist sex therapists in the United States and Canada have been using some very curious ways of treating their bodies and souls for twenty years now, with their consent. In clinics that have been transformed into research laboratories, they supply their patients, who enjoy being instrumentalized in this way, with an arsenal of gadgets and synthetic images designed to satisfy their every demand. In an attempt to extract the psychological truth from the very body of their patients, they encourage them to watch pornographic films to their hearts' content and hook them up to the many machines that measure the intensity of their emotions and erections: luxmeters, thermistors, transducers, standard polygraphs and cumulative integrators that measure how their pupils respond (Lotringer 2006).³² They even go so far as to hire them ‘partners’, who are given the task of correcting their cognitive failings by touching them or performing sex acts in the presence of the therapists. Sexual perverts, who are now known as deviants, are thus forced to become laboratory rats of their own free will.³³

They are invited to fantasize repeatedly about their criminal acts so that they can be conditioned to find them undesirable. They are then encouraged to re-educate themselves by having so-called normal intercourse while still under observation. If the treatment is found to have no effect, the sex doctors first recommend chemical castration (ingestion of hormones)³⁴ and then surgical castration (ablation of the testicles). There is no shortage of volunteers.

Can we claim that such practices are justifiable? Is it, for example, acceptable to accede to a transvestite's request to give him electrical shocks as he changes his clothes in order to cure him of his horror at being a transvestite? Do we have the right to give a homosexual drugs that make him vomit whenever he has an erection to make him sick of the homosexuality that makes him hate himself so much that he asks for them?

In more general terms, does our response to sexual perverts have to be exclusively surgical, behaviourist or drug-based, when we know that the reoffending rates for those sanctioned by the law is relatively low?³⁵ Would it not be better to resort to more classic forms of treatment that combine all possible approaches – chemical treatment, psychotherapy, monitoring, referrals to social services, imprisonment³⁶ – but not those based upon protocols inherited from predicative medicine? We are well aware that such subjects have to be treated on an individual basis, not because they are ill but because their subjectivity has been perverted.³⁷ In that respect, and as Freud emphasized, the existence of the Law, and therefore of sanctions, is much more significant than conditioning when it comes to controlling drives that are mistakenly described as ‘uncontrollable’.

Being perverse, and neither mad nor deluded, paedophiles act out their fantasies quite lucidly, once they have made sure that they are in no danger, that there are no police officers or witnesses around, and that the child will not resist. Whatever they may say, they are in control of their impulses, which is why, when they can, they indulge in sexual tourism to countries where child-slavery is organized.

The fact remains that the most dangerous sexual perverts, or those who rape or kill children on more than one occasion, always end up defying the Law and medicine. It is as though, in their madness, they enjoyed frustrating all attempts to sanction them by exacerbating society's will to punish – even by using the power of drugs for their own purposes.³⁸

No experimenter has succeeded in proving that perverse forms of treatment work. The perverse defy the Law. And when science, which has replaced the Law, encourages the use of such therapies, it simply encourages them to defy the Law even more. Stanley Kubrick skilfully dismantles this mechanism in A Clockwork Orange. When it comes to acts like these – and they are often compared with crimes against humanity – surely the Law must prevail over crime.

Such perverse forms of treatment are basically no more than a disguised reproduction of the corporal punishments of old. And they are no more effective than the bleedings and purges that Molière's doctors gave their patients in the age of pre-scientific medicine. In that respect, it is curious that the supporters of this insane behaviourism³⁹ have yet to reach the conclusion that abusers who have already been chemically or surgically castrated should have their hand and tongues amputated, should they re-offend. One day, they will.⁴⁰ In a remarkable article, Daniel Soulez-Larivière rightly points out (2007) that our fear of paedophilia is so great that we have surreptitiously reintroduced the idea of legal elimination, which disappeared when the death penalty was abolished in France and Europe: ‘The only way to prevent all re-offending is to eliminate all delinquents, just as the only way to prevent all plane crashes is to put an end to air travel.’

As might have been expected, the introduction of such forms of treatment⁴¹ has had the effect of promoting the idea that so-called deviant sexuality can be prevented, and not just treated: fantasies should be put under surveillance, and suspected paedophiles should be prevented from coming into contact with adolescents. A Californian pervert with no criminal record who wanted to enjoy the fear he could inspire recently stated in public that he was a paedophile and liked young girls, and posted some possible meeting places on his website (Hall 2007). At the request of concerned families, the local authorities forbade him to approach children and adolescents under the age of seventeen. He was then issued with a restraining order and regarded as a carrier of the plague.

Satisfied with their results, the sex doctors have now reached the conclusion that, if it is to be effective, the prevention of delinquency must involve not only potentially perverse patients, but also a population that has hitherto been spared their attentions: children under the age of three. While this proposal was greeted with a wave of protests, and even revulsion, in France,⁴² it has been implemented in Canada and Great Britain. It is designed to suggest that an effective policy on delinquency has less to do with either genetic or organic screening than with prevention in the classic sense. The outcome has been a transition from the screening of the behaviour of young children to the screening of foetuses. In May 2007, the British government launched a project designed to use all kinds of medical tests to identify, sixteen weeks after their conception, babies who would in future be ‘most at risk’ in terms of social exclusion and potential criminality: ‘The goal of the government's parenting strategy is, they say, to hand back control to parents, to improve their children's living conditions before they are even born and to prevent them from becoming delinquent’ (Manach 2007).

To make their project more credible, the health authorities claimed that their proposals were based on brain scans that supposedly indicated neurological differences between the brains of children who were loved by their parents and the brains of children who were not. The programme is in fact designed to help single mothers who are in difficulties or from underprivileged backgrounds during pregnancy. But is there any need to promote a campaign to help the destitute by invoking brain scans or neurological differences that have no particular significance? As we know, there is as yet and given the current state of science, no way of establishing the slightest correlation between delinquency or ‘sexual deviance’ and cerebral or neurological defects. Given its fantastic plasticity, it is a truism to say that the human brain is sensitive to psychological states. That does not, however, mean that we can deduce any meaning from our actions, desires, history or relationship with good and evil. From that point of view, the brain is nothing more than an organ that allows us to know we are thinking.

These barbaric forms of treatment have dispossessed the perverse of their perversions without overcoming their desire to hurt others and themselves; they have also been applied to a different category of patients, namely the obsessional neurotics DSM describes as being handicapped by serious organic disorders.⁴³ Having been subjected to pointless surgical interventions, they are now exposed, like laboratory animals, to various pointless techniques that use electrodes to stimulate them. Although they are effective against neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, such techniques do nothing for neurotics, unless, that is, they make them even worse than they were. A whole new vocabulary has been developed to go along with these dangerous, mutilating practices: anterior capsulectomy, anterior cingulotomy, sub-caudeal tracheotomy, bimedial lobotomy … (Wainrib 2006).

Since 11 September 2001, the paedophile has been joined by the terrorist as the complete embodiment of perversion. The terrorist not only succeeds in erasing frontiers between states and nations in order to become his own self-referential state,⁴⁴ but also in using the West's most sophisticated science against it. Today's terrorists, who have been trained in science at America's best universities, and who received a lot of pampering there, have proved themselves capable of perverting the knowledge they have acquired and using it to destroy the planet. They are usually from honourable families and appear to be normal and fully integrated into the societies in which they live and work – London, Berlin, New York or wherever it may be – but actually live hate-filled fantasy lives and, then one day a spectacular reversal takes place: without even having any particular enemy in mind, turn their bodies into weapons of destruction, and enjoy their own deaths even more than they enjoy those of their potential victims.

The terrorists who flew planes into the Twin Towers on 11 September had nothing in common with the kamikazes of Imperial Japan, who crashed their planes into military targets, or the bombers who were committed to the struggle to liberate their countries and who were in a sense, and whatever we may think of them, forced to use such weapons. Of course a suicide is a suicide. But, as I remarked of the Nazis who committed suicide, not all voluntary deaths have the same political or military meaning.

The hideously perverse phenomenon of Islamist terrorism is at once a product of Western reason, which has fallen victim to the distortion of its own principles, and, so far as the agents themselves are concerned, of a desire to escape the past. By destroying the signifiers of a system they hold in contempt, Osama bin Laden's followers are renouncing both the Western and the Islamic Enlightenments. They have broken the link that binds them to their own history, or in other words to the religion of the Law, as defined by the monotheisms. And it not by chance that the wan curses of these pernicious men with beards, who have chosen a brilliant technologist as their prince of darkness (and his physical beauty fades as he sinks into criminality, just like that of Dorian Gray), should be directed mainly at the famous and supposedly degenerate sexual freedom that democracy grants women.

For these Islamists, women as such, or in other words women as beings of desire, are the ultimate embodiment of perversion, even more so than homosexuals who, in their view, merely disguise their masculinity. And that is why women who, in an attempt to escape their voluntary servitude, try to free themselves from the slavery that is their destiny, must be struck, beaten, tortured, stoned and killed. Because they are the embodiment of radical impurity, women can only choose between concealing their bodies and killing their own identity.

And it is no accident that there should be a certain symmetry between the religious fundamentalism that is spreading in the United States and radical Islamism. Both invoke the principle of terror. Both want to control and dominate sexuality, and both use the discourse of science to pervert its ideals in the name of a Manichean religion based upon an axis of good and evil. Even when it is damaged by its inner demons, democracy can always be made more perfect, but this form of terrorism is pure evil. It is unable to negotiate, knows nothing of redemption, and is incapable of getting back to reason. Delight in death is all that matters to it. Which is no reason for inflicting barbaric treatment on either terrorists or paedophiles.

It has been demonstrated throughout this chapter that, while modern medical science has succeeded in relieving humanity from a lot of suffering and can treat almost all illnesses with remarkable efficacy, it has never had the same success in the psychic domain. And even though it has, thanks to pharmacology, accomplished the feat of changing the face of madness by putting an end to the horrors of the asylum and long-term confinement, it has always come up against its own limitations when it has tried to deal with perversions.

Be they the creators of civilization's greatest work of art or simply delight in destruction, and even though they have, because of the wretched lives they lead, been designated as society's accursed share, the perverse have the mental strength to resist all forms of medicalization. In a world in which God can no longer hear them, they defy science in order to make a mockery of it. And when some of them do appropriate science, they do so to develop weapons that can be used to satisfy their criminal impulses.

There is, however, one domain – the surgical and hormonal metamorphosis of the body – in which the power of the psyche has forced the discourse of science to obey its will.

Some human beings have always been so convinced that, despite their anatomy, they are members of the opposite sex that, not content with transvestism, they have tried to change their bodies. And just as the gods metamorphosed themselves into animals in order to copulate with humans in the great mythologies, men and women have, like Teiresias, always dreamt of simultaneously enjoying the sexual pleasures of erection and ejaculation, and of the female orgasm.

Be they hermaphrodites⁴⁵ or transvestites, these hybrids, who were once regarded with fascination because of their abnormality, were the object of an even greater fascination and repugnance in that their bodies seemed to bear the stigmata of a transgressive eroticism. For a long time, the law regarded transvestism as a form of ‘counterfeiting’ and it was, as we saw in the case of Joan of Arc, regarded as an immoral practice when it was not bound up with the need to conceal one's body in order to save one's own life. Men were forbidden to dress as women because doing so was an affront to their virility and because their effeminacy was akin to transvestism, while women were forbidden to dress as men because that unnatural vice allowed them to abolish the difference between the sexes (cf. Steinberg 2001).

The mental medicine of the nineteenth century rebaptized it as transvestism and described it as a sexual perversion when it took the form, not of a temporary disguise that is worn to a carnival or for some social purpose,⁴⁶ but a kind of ‘deviant’ practice resulting from the inversion commonly observed in male prostitutes, or a variant on fetishism. In both cases, the transvestite – and most transvestites are men – enjoys being identified with an article of clothing that conceals his real sex by exaggerating the characteristics of an artificial femininity to the point of caricature and wearing, like today's ‘drag queens’, fine lingerie, high heels, extravagant make-up, brightly coloured wigs, and so on.

While nineteenth-century doctors showed great compassion to hermaphrodites afflicted with an anomaly for which they could not be held responsible and which made them the victims of a natural fate, they also took a sympathetic interest in what they called ‘psychosexual hermaphroditism’, as distinct from transvestism. The men concerned, and most of them were men, were convinced that their souls were of the opposite sex, and were prepared to mutilate themselves in order to correct the monstrous error inflicted on them by nature.

Such subjects did not wear women's clothes in order to disguise themselves: they wanted to be women because they were convinced that they were already women. Krafft-Ebing (1969: 649–50):

I love my wife like a girlfriend or a dear sister, but I feel that she is growing stranger to me by the day … The idea of rejecting this terrible existence before I reach the point of madness no longer looks like a sin to me … And all at once, this idea flashes through my mind: ‘Your life is finished, and it was abnormal. Go to a doctor, fling yourself at his feet if need be, and beg him to use you as a voluntary experimental subject.’ And that idea reawakens the egoism of life: ‘Perhaps the doctor and the researcher can help you to find a new life. Transplantation, Steinach! He was fabulously successful at changing the sex of animals; can't the same scientific experiments be attempted with a human subject who volunteers for it, on a man who accepts all the consequences, and perhaps this is the only way of protecting him from inevitable madness and death?’ I made my peace with God in a thousand prayers and this approach by no means contradicts religious and moral feelings, whereas my life to date has been more and more frightfully immoral, with all the terrible contradictions and demands that implies.

This anonymous patient never dreamt, in the depths of his pain, that his wish would come true one day. In 1949, the psychic hermaphrodite syndrome was removed from the list of sexual perversions and redefined, first as transsexualism,⁴⁷ and then as gender dysmorphia, or in other words as a ‘sexual identity disorder’ rather than a sexual disorder. And while psychiatrists spent many years trying to understand the causality behind it, the newly defined male and female transsexuals⁴⁸ turned to surgery and endocrinology, and thus forced medicine to agree to something that had always been thought impossible: changing their anatomical sex.

For the first time in the history of psychiatry, subjects who did not have any anomalies or organic pathology but who were prepared to commit suicide if their mental sufferings were not treated in physical ways, threw down a challenge to international medical science. The choice was one between a metamorphosis that could make reparation for a natural ‘injustice’, or death and self-destruction.⁴⁹

Transsexuals have to follow a terrifying protocol. Before they win the right to hormonal-surgical reassignment, modern transsexuals must prove that they are neither perverse nor insane. For two years, they are obliged to undergo assessments, psychiatric examinations and various tests. During that period, they must demonstrate that they are capable of living as a person of the desired gender, while the medical teams arrange meetings with their families: parents, spouse and the children who will witness their father's metamorphosis into a woman, or their mother's metamorphosis into a man. After all side-effects have been ruled out, the medical team authorizes a course of anti-hormonal treatment. Men are given anti-androgenes and undergo hair-removal by electrolysis, while women are given progestative hormones. Then comes the surgical intervention: bilateral castration and the creation of a neo-vagina for men, and removal of the uterus and ovaries, followed by alloplasty, for women.⁵⁰

If we recall that the hormonal treatment is for life and that post-operative transsexuals will never experience the slightest sexual pleasure with these organs, one cannot but think that the pleasure they experience when their bodies are mutilated in this way is similar to that experienced by the great mystics who offered their tortured flesh to God (Millot 1983).

The new interest in transsexualism and, more generally, in questions of the metamorphoses of sexuality has given rise to an unprecedented explosion of theories and discourses about the differences between sex (anatomy) and gender (constructed identity). They have helped to outline a political, cultural and clinical representation of relations between men and women that is based as much upon sexual orientation as upon so-called ethnic identity: there are heterosexuals (men, women, blacks, whites, métis, Hispanics, etc.), homosexuals (gays, lesbians, blacks, whites, etc.) and transsexuals (men, women, gays, lesbians, blacks, white, métis …)

The notion of perversion therefore does not figure in this system, as it is the idealization of deviance that makes it possible to theorize not only all the old sexual ‘perversions’, but also perverse structures, as the expression of a new norm. Queer theory is probably the most radical version of this notion, not only because it seeks to deconstruct completely sexual difference, but also because it seeks to do away with the idea that perversion might be an essential part of civilization.⁵¹ This theory rejects both biological and social notions of sex, as every individual is free to adopt, at any moment, the position, clothes, behaviours, fantasies and delusions of the other sex. Hence the assertion that transgressive sexual practices such as promiscuity or pornography are no more than an equivalent to the norms laid down by so-called heterosexual society.⁵²

As we can see, the discourse of queer theory is no more than a puritanical continuation of Sade's utopia. But, whereas Sade saw murder, incest and sodomy as the foundations of an imaginary society based upon an inversion of the Law, queer theory transforms human sexuality into a domesticated erotica that makes no reference to the love of hatred. It is in a sense the intelligent and sophisticated obverse of DSM's classifications. It can therefore be argued that, despite the great sophistication of its analyses, this discourse, which converts figures of perverse sexuality into a combinatory of roles and positions is a new way of normalizing sexuality. Erasing boundaries and denying perversion its power to transgress the dispositif of human sexuality to the extent of censuring its name is tantamount to erasing all norms.

The concept of gender was developed by Robert Stoller, who pioneered the emancipation of transsexuals (Stoller 1968) and gave their pain a psychic status (without either encouraging or rejecting hormonal–surgical reassignment). He was the only one of the American post-Freudians of the fourth generation, to dare to use his clinical experience of perversion to elaborate a discourse which, while it recognizes perversion, its necessity and its metamorphoses, as a permanent feature of human societies, never reduced it to pure deviance. He is savagely critical of the psychoanalysts of his day, who were steeped in a moral orthodoxy that rendered them incapable of even thinking about the issue of perversion. And yet he has never succumbed to the illusions of those who believe that orgasm is the answer to everything. In 1975 (Stoller 1975: 210), he wrote: ‘Psychoanalysts take to discussing morals and ethics like drunkards to drink. I do not wish to serve as one more grand master of sexual behaviour, to judge if sexual freedom damages or enriches society, or to pronounce what laws should be created and how enforced to reflect our morality.’ But in 1979, he added (1979: 223):

Psychoanalysis is not in good repute these days … But what endeavour other than psychoanalysis, what treatment, what study of humans, has at its core unending curiosity and scepticism, the absolute demand that the individual find his truth – cut loose from magic, from secrets, and from the erotization of victimhood? Analysis, with astonishing speed, went from revolution to respectability, to outdated mythology. I do not think that a free society can easily bear the loss.

Stoller's words have never been more relevant. While the psychoanalytic movement has, over the last one hundred years, developed a coherent clinical approach to psychosis and has succeeded in developing new approaches to neurosis – which is now being challenged by perverse theories and practices – its almost exclusive concentration on structure in the clinical sense of the term⁵³ has led it to overlook the historical, political, cultural and anthropological question of perversion. For years, psychoanalysts therefore refused to take note of the changes that were occuring in the way that society saw the perverse, to say nothing of how those who were so designated saw themselves as they rejected the classifications of psychopathology in their struggle for emancipation.

Freud's heirs were afraid that perverse clinicians – sexual abusers, transgressive gurus or inveterate seducers⁵⁴ – would worm their way into their associations to wreak destruction. For three-quarters of a century, they misused the concepts of denial and splitting, and therefore chose the wrong target and prevented homosexuals – who were deemed to be perverse because of their homosexuality⁵⁵ – from becoming psychoanalysts. By adopting that attitude, they not only avoided the new issues that were being raised in civil society, but took the view that the perverse were not able to come to terms with their unconscious.

There are, however, as many perverts within the psychoanalytic community as there are in society in general. Very few of them sexually abuse their patients (which would mean perverting psychoanalysis),⁵⁶ and they are marginalized and, if need be, sanctioned by their peers, if not by the courts. The great clinicians of perversion, for their part, have, from Masud Khan to Stoller and François Peraldi, always formed a separate community.⁵⁷ It is as though there was always a danger that they would be accused of colluding with what fascinates them because they had signed a pact with the Devil.

And yet the psychoanalytic approach to perversions and the perverse is rapidly changing, now that homosexual analysts can assert their rights within their associations and no longer have to remain in the closet. And as Western society becomes more and more fascinated with exploring its own sexuality, perverse individuals who are not in trouble with the law⁵⁸ are turning increasingly to psychotherapy, now that the resources of sexology and pharmacology have been exhausted.

By dint of denying the existence of unconscious subjectivity, the discourse of science will perhaps one day convince us that perversion is nothing more than an illness, and that the perverse can be eliminated from the social body. That would mean, however, that the word ‘deviance’ would have to be used to describe – perversely – all the transgressive acts, good and bad, that humanity is capable of. And the belief that absolute evil can be eradicated would then mean that we would have to cease to admire most of those who have helped civilization to advance.

And assuming that these developments do occur and that we are no longer able to use the word ‘perversion’, we would still have to come to terms with its subterranean metamorphoses and our dark side.

Notes

¹ The term has taken on many meanings and is used in a general sense to define the metamorphoses of globalized capitalism and ways of fighting it.

² Bernard Stiegler (2006) refers to this characteristic feature of the new industrial society as ‘desublimation’. For his art, Jean Baudrillard (2005) speaks of the advent of the implacable banality that is bound up with Integral Reality.

³ When, in the course of the Jerusalem trial, prosecutor Gideon Hausner described Eichmann as ‘inhuman’ because he had sunk to the level of animality, he was mistaken because only human beings are capable of such crimes. Cf. Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan's documentary film Un Spécialiste (France 1999), Bertolt Brecht added the adjective ‘filthy’ to described fascism and Nazism as ‘the filthy beast’. The reference is to the two beasts in St John's Apocalypse: the martyred lamb and the diabolic dragon.

⁴ It will be recalled that Article 3 of the Nuremberg tribunal's code states that any new therapeutic or experimental approach must first be tested on animals. Horrified by the Nazis' experiments, those who drafted it appear to have forgotten that men are capable of inflicting upon animals the tortures they inflict upon other human beings.

⁵ On the way philosophy has viewed the question of animality from Antiquity until now, see Élisabeth de Fontenay's admirable study (1998). See also Picq and Coppens (2001).

⁶ There are about thirty-five million pets in France.

⁷ Dressed in animal skins, Nero would hurl himself upon the sexual organs of prisoners who had been tied to stakes for torture, while Tiberius called the young boys he trained to suck his testicles under water ‘minnows’. Cf. Master and Lea (1963).

⁸ In the so-called ‘bath of flies’ torture, the prisoner is blindfolded or has his hands and feet tied. Parts of his body – the armpits, anus, lips, genitals and nostrils – are then daubed with honey. Swarms of flies appear and he either goes mad or dies in less than two hours. The flies can be replaced with ants or, worse still, bees.

⁹ Inflicting cruelty on the animal is now the only thing that is subject to legal sanctions. But is a man or woman who has sex with an animal being cruel to it? That question is now the subject of a wide-ranging debate.

¹⁰ It might be added that the genius of La Fontaine had already done a lot to subvert that sovereignty.

¹¹ Élisabeth de Fontenay rightly notes that there is an analogy between the way people gazed at the mad and the way they stared at animals. To make the point, she even suggests that the term ‘mad’ should be replaced by ‘animal’ in Michel Foucault's famous preface to his History of Madness (2006). On the pornographic way in which native people and the abnormal were put on show, see Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch and Deroo (2002).

¹² They were known at the time as ‘animal defenders’.

¹³ This is the result of a biological inhibition that has nothing to do with the establishment of the probation of incest in human societies. We know very well that it is because humans desire the act of incest and feel guilty – and not inhibited – when they transgress its prohibition that it had to be made taboo.

¹⁴ Cf. Stoller (1975). Even so, some psychiatrists have no qualms about describing pets, and especially dogs which are, they, claim sexually hyperactive, as perverse. They have even treated them with anti-depressants.

¹⁵ Other pointless experiments consist in provoking states of madness in mammals by making them absorb chemical substances in order to demonstrate the equivalence between animal and human models of madness.

¹⁶ Vegetarians and vegans have formed an animal rights movement (Veggie Pride) modelled on Gay Pride, and denounce their adversaries as ‘meatists’.

¹⁷ Singer is obsessed with ham sandwiches. In the preface to his book, he describes how, as he was having tea with a delightful old English lady who loved animals, he was horrified when she offered him a little sandwich as she told him how much she loved her cats and dogs. He told her in no uncertain terms that he did not love animals and had no pets, but that he was fighting to ensure that animals were treated as well as humans.

¹⁸ Let me make it quite clear that this thesis has absolutely nothing in common with Jacques Derrida's (2006) investigation into how philosophy theorizes animality by positing the principle of man's superiority over animals without establishing any basis for it. In that sense, Derrida rejects positivist science on the grounds that it claims to blur the difference between man and those animals who are most similar to humans (mammals and primates), rather than seeing the need to deconstruct the notion of human specificity.

¹⁹ As defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

²⁰ Both Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth de Fontenay have defended the animal condition in very different ways from Singer's supporters. See Paola Cavalieri (2000) and Élisabeth de Fontenay's response (2000).

²¹ Cats are declawed, birds have their wings clipped to prevent them from flying, and monkeys have their teeth pulled out. All these surgical mutilations are common. They are of course performed under anaesthetic and are therefore painless. Even so, they reveal a perverse attitude towards the bodies of animals.

²² Animals often die spontaneously as a result of anal penetration by men. Women are more likely to indulge in fellatio with animals, which can sometimes be trained to have sexual relations with humans.

²³ The term derives from the Greek (para = deviant and philia = love) and is used literally to define anyone who looks for excitation in response to sexual objects that are not part of the stimulus/response model.

²⁴ On 19 July 1993, the Pentagon published its new directive on homosexuals in the army. It stated that the army should admit homosexuals, provided that they do not describe themselves as such. This is a puritanical approach similar to the one that inspired DSM. For a very good study of this question see Judith Butler's Excitable Speech (1997).

²⁵ Positive discrimination.

²⁶ Provided, of course, that they are in full possession of all their mental faculties. There is, however, one restriction to this ‘consent’. It is, for example, argued that no one can consent to their own exploitation. This restriction applies to domestic slavery, prostitution and membership of criminal cults.

²⁷ In Great Britain, subjects with cancerous or cardio-vascular pathologies are no longer treated on the same basis as other patients if it has been definitely established that their condition results from serious addiction to alcohol, tobacco and so on.

²⁸ The mayor of the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil recently took delivery of a repellent designed for use on the homeless. See Le Monde, 26–7 August 2007.

²⁹ Most paedophiles are men. When women become paedophiles, it is usually because they are encouraged to do so by men who have made them their slaves.

³⁰ Paedophilia in the strict sense is therefore a sexual crime committed by an adult against the body of a child (and not corruption of a minor).

³¹ As in the Outreau trial of May–June 2004.

³² It should be recalled that although Hans Jurgen Eysenck, who was one of the founders of behavioural therapy, was forced to flee Nazi Germany, he was still influenced by anti-egalitarian theories, as can be seen from his Inequality of Man (1973). The French translation was prefaced by the right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist.

³³ While the defenders of the animal kingdom condemn the suffering that other researchers inflict on rats.

³⁴ The goal is to reduce the secretion of testosterone, which is the male sex hormone that acts upon sexual desire, by using drugs used to treat prostate cancer. The treatment does not reduce the paedophiles’ ‘sexual desires’ and causes pain in the joints; there is also the danger of pulmonary embolism. Other molecules are now being tested on volunteers, and are used in combination with behavioural therapies.

³⁵ Depending on the contrary concerned, it is between 9 and 13% for adults, and 2% for adolescents. I am grateful to Sylvère Lotringer for the wealth of documentation he supplied on this question.

³⁶ Provided that prison does not make things worse for the perverse, who are often raped or assaulted by other prisoners who claim to be punishing them by making them undergo what they made others undergo.

³⁷ The use of perverse forms of treatment does not reduce the re-offending rate.

³⁸ They deliberately drug the children they rape, and use stimulants to increase their libido.

³⁹ It has yet to be introduced in France.

⁴⁰ Most judges and lawyers are critical of these excessive forms of treatment because they do not work, and protest whenever the media publicize another case of recidivism. Some have gone so far as to denounce the ‘penal populism’ that manipulates the cynical exploitation of the emotions aroused by paedophile acts and point out that, in most cases, the repeat offending results from the lack of financial resources to deal with the delinquents when they are first imprisoned (cf. Cotta and Dosé 2007; Lemoine 2007).

⁴¹ They began to be used in the United States in the 1980s, as DSM's categories changed.

⁴² A petition drawn up by child psychiatrists gathered two hundred thousand signatures. See Prévention, dépistage du comportement chez l'enfant? (Conference proceedings from Pas de zéro de conduite pour les enfants de trois ans, Société française de santé publique, Collection ‘Santé et société’ 11, November 2006.

⁴³ Especially as their obsessional disorders have been renamed ‘OCD’ (obsessional compulsive disorder).

⁴⁴ These are now known as ‘rogue states’; cf. Derrida (2003).

⁴⁵ Hermaphrodite was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, and had both a penis and breasts. The term ‘hermaphroditism’ is applied to a certain type of hormonal disorder: subjects afflicted with it have a vulva and an atrophied penis instead of a clitoris.

⁴⁶ Such as getting a job.

⁴⁷ The term was coined in 1953 by the American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, who was Magnus Hirschfeld's heir.

⁴⁸ There are three times more transsexual men than there are women; there are between 1 and 25 cases of transsexualism per 100,000 inhabitants. Cf. Dictionnaire de la sexualite humaine.

⁴⁹ The first hormonal-surgical reassignment operation was performed by a Danish team in 1952 on George Jorgese, a twenty-seven year-old transsexual. Several previous attempts had been made from 1912 onwards (Castel 2003). The psychoanalytic literature on transsexualism is extensive, and psychoanalytic opinions vary. For a critical synthesis, see Nahon (2004).

⁵⁰ In France, transsexual men who want to become homosexual after their operation are not accepted for reassignment. It is likely that they will eventually be granted that right, which they already enjoy in other countries.

⁵¹ ‘Queer’ (‘strange’) was for a long time used as a pejorative term for male homosexuals. They themselves then adopted it as the most radical emblem of a movement that aspired to relativize, or even ‘denormalize’ what has been known as heterosexuality ever since the term ‘homosexuality’ was first coined.

⁵² The term ‘heterosexuality’ was coined by late nineteenth-century psychiatrists to describe a sexual orientation that was said to respect anatomical difference, as opposed to homosexuality, ‘trans-gendered’ or transsexuality.

⁵³ The psychoanalytic literature on this theme is very expansive. The standard work in French is still Aulagnier et al. (1967).

⁵⁴ I deal with this issue elsewhere (Roudinesco 2004). See also Gozlan (1992).

⁵⁵ Let me repeat that homosexuality is not in itself a perversion.

⁵⁶ Between 5 and 10% of analysts.

⁵⁷ Masud Khan (1924–89), Indian-born English psychoanalyst and author of many works of perversion (see Khan 1977). Accused of being bisexual and insane because of what was seen as his transgressive analytic practice, he was excluded from the British Psychoanalytic Society. François Peraldi (1938–93), a French psychoanalyst who practised in Canada. Openly gay and fascinated by transgressive sexualities, he was, in terms of his practice, a classical clinician. He died from AIDS. Rather like Stoller, Joyce McDougall, who is probably the best woman clinician of her generation in France, always argued that a different view should be taken of the perverse (Macdougall 1975). Cf. Rey-Flaud (2002), Bonet (2001a, 2001b, 2005).

⁵⁸ Perverse offenders can also be treated by institutional psychoanalysis in institutions, sometimes with success.