Few are those who willingly confess that among their shortcomings they lack a sense of humor. Likewise, I have not yet encountered the rare specimen who would admit to being a pervert. This unfortunate state of affairs is due, among other things, to the fact that perversion, even in the Lacanian era, has always remained an outsider. Perversion is not a structure of desire that evokes sympathy or kinship. Moreover, Lacan did not describe perversion with the same plethora of clinical insights that he provided for hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and phobia. He was able to extract from Freud’s cases – Dora, the Rat Man, and Little Hans – those strategies that underlie all of psychic life and that therefore no longer need to be perceived in pathological terms: it is inevitable that the human subject will “choose” a neurosis (SE 1, p. 220) enabling him or her to negotiate the thin line between the need to attain erotic gratification and the fear of losing the ability to want. Hence neurotic compromises are deeply ingrained in the fabric of daily life and are therefore no less respectable than any other creative productions. What psychoanalysis can offer, to those who seek its services, are merely alternative pathways that can potentially disrupt the deadly routine of the repetition compulsion.
Thus the clinical material provided by Freud offered Lacan the tools he needed to show how neurosis implicitly reveals that human beings are deeply invested in a research plan that places sexuality at its center. Probably because Freud himself did not provide a detailed clinical case of the mechanism of perversions but insisted on the radically perverse nature of infantile sexuality, Lacan’s legacy on the question of perversion remains ambiguous. Lacan “enjoys” praising its modus operandi as the ultimate model of ethical life, as he does in his famous essay “Kant avec Sade.”1 By the same token, he does not explicitly detach the structure of perversion either from homosexuality or from what have been commonly described as perverse practices.
In Lacan’s view, perversion is akin to desire per se. For him, as for Freud, human desire itself is perverse, insofar as it defies the laws of adaptation and survival found in the animal world. In that sense, the logic of perversion can only serve as a model of what is operative in all of us. Such a perspective, however, does not offer specific guidance on how to approach perversion clinically. Therefore I see my task as trying to extract from Lacan’s corpus a theory of perversion that can do justice to the ways he approached neurosis. By this I mean a conceptualization of perversion without the pejorative definition that continues to be ubiquitous in medical and legal treatises as well as in most psychoanalytic writings.
What is perversion, then? Perversion is a way of thinking or desiring, of attempting to stay psychically alive. Like hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and phobia, perversion has a logic that organizes the psychic position of a subject in relation to others. Unlike the neurotic, however, the pervert can access psychic gratification only by becoming the agent of the other’s fantasy (his target and/or partner), in order to expose the fundamental anxiety that such a fantasy camouflages. This no doubt explains why perverse desire produces horror, fear, and dismay in those who witness its mode of operation.
Perversion does not have the psychic tools to fabricate the Oedipal fantasy that can sustain the workings of desire. Instead, perverts excel in exposing the fantasy of the other and the various social lies that such fantasy necessarily enforces. This peculiar situation explains, on some level, why perversion has been perceived as a threat to the social bond. The mission of perverts, strangely, does not involve a wish to be happy. What they want at all costs is to discover a law, beyond the mask of the social order, that can bring solace to their torment. The drama of the pervert is that he or she succeeds where the neurotic fails: while the neurotic keeps desire alive by devising strategies to avoid its realization, the pervert succeeds in living out the desire of the neurotic at the cost of sacrificing himself or herself in the process. While perverts see more clearly than neurotics the architectonics of social life, they have less space to fool themselves, and without an other underfoot their capacity to foment dreams and expectations is seriously undermined.
I believe that Lacan’s return to Freud has allowed the structure of perversion to emerge not as a form of sexual aberration – because, as Freud has amply demonstrated, all sexuality is aberrant2 – but as a form of psychic functioning that can be traced back to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. For Lacan, therefore, perversion is not a symptomatology like voyeurism, sadism, exhibitionism, bondage, and the like, but rather a specific mode of desiring and making sense of the world.
In order to grasp the distinction Lacan makes between the logic of perversion and the logic of neurosis, it may be helpful to think about the way one’s own structure of desire has taken shape. This process may enhance one’s understanding of the proximity of perversion and neurosis as one discovers that one’s own mode of relating to the world may at times resemble what the pervert himself experiences. This exercise requires that we first turn to the main tenets of Lacanian theory.
It is well known that Lacan’s most important contribution to psychoanalysis consists in having applied the insights of Structuralism to Freud’s definition of the Oedipus complex. Yet it is impossible, in my view, to understand the dialectic at work in neurosis and perversion without describing how the Freudian psychic protagonists – id, ego, and super-ego – are rearticulated in the Lacanian model. Therefore, to make sense of Lacan’s highly counterintuitive treatment of Freud’s definition of the incest taboo, it is important to elucidate the Structuralist spin that Lacan applies to Freud’s topological model.
Let us note first that Lacan breaks down Freud’s stages of development by introducing at the outset the dimension of the Other at every crossroads of Oedipal dynamics. Like Freud, Lacan places narcissism at the heart of human sexuality. But, unlike Freud, he does not perceive narcissism as a stage that can be overcome through the introduction of the incest taboo. In a sense, the incest taboo is already present on the margins of the child’s life even before she has had a chance to experience herself as having an ego identity. Because for Lacan self-love is always mediated and reverberated by the desire of the primordial others, there is no need, in his account, to make a radical distinction between the ego as the agent of the reality principle and the ego as an object narcissistically invested by the subject. The subject’s vision of the world and of herself is necessarily mediated not only by the way the Other sees the child and the world, but also through messages and clues that the Other unwittingly transmits and that, for the child, form the landmarks of his or her reality. In that sense, Lacan introduces a primordial intersubjective dimension to Freud’s theory of the ego. For Lacan, there is no other reality for the subject than the one that jeopardizes or reinforces his or her psychic survival.
What is the ego? How do we constitute this apparatus that gives us the apparent certitude that we are who we are, and that we see what we see? Lacan traces the origin of the ego to what he calls the mirror stage. The mirror stage is a structural moment in psychic development, when the child encounters in the mother’s gaze the image that will shape his or her self-perception. The mirror stage inaugurates for the child the moment of experiencing that he or she is the object of the mother’s desire and love. One cannot recognize oneself as a desirable object unless the Other has signified that one is the apple of her eye, the exclusive object of her desire. This condition presupposes, of course, that the mother is a desiring being, in other words, that she wants something that she does not have. The experience of being the object of the Other’s desire, moreover, implies that the subject registers that she or he could also fail to be recognized as such. Yet such a recognition depends on a mother who conveys to her child the sense that her desire goes beyond the pleasure she derives from the sight of her baby. In other words, the child must “work” to capture his or her mother’s attention. Yet such a seductive strategy requires that the child has figured out to a certain extent what it is that the mother lacks. What is the nature of her desire? Where does she go to get what she wants?
As Freud noted in his last essay on femininity, the mother lacks the phallus (SE 22, p. 126), which means, according to Lacan, that she lacks that which could bring her fulfillment. Lacan reads Freud differently from other schools that continue to insist that Freud equates penis and phallus. For Lacan, the phallus represents for the child the signifier of the mother’s desire with which the child attempts to identify. The phallus is therefore not an object but a “slot” that can be filled by any sign or signifier that conveys to the girl or the boy something related to what the mother wants.
If the mother’s desire cannot situate her child as a separate being whom she can admire, love, and desire, the child will instead encounter the mother’s jouissance. Jouissance is a legal term referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing, as opposed to owning it. The jouissance of the Other, therefore, refers to the subject’s experience of being for the Other an object of enjoyment, of use or abuse, in contrast to being the object of the Other’s desire. It is only when the child comes to realize that the mother wants something the child does not have (and moreover does not understand) that the threat of her jouissance will become real and the child will be forced to change position.
It is at this juncture that the child’s status as an object of desire will be jeopardized, and the sense of unity that he derived from his mother’s gaze will give way to a fear of being devoured by the Other’s incomprehensible demand. This fundamental anguish will force the child to find some way out of the frightening situation. If he is not the exclusive object of his mother’s desire, he may risk becoming the object of the (m)Other’s jouissance. The child will be led to wonder, “What does she want from me?” “What can I do or be to satisfy her desire?” “Is there something or someone else that can answer her enigmatic demand?” In other words, the anxiety created in the child by the jouissance of the mother triggers the need to find an escape from what feels like a threat to the child’s psychic existence. The solution to this frightening riddle is precisely where Lacan situates Freud’s concept of castration, that is, the moment when the child is able to give a “translation” of the mother’s incomprehensible demand.
If the mother indicates to her child that she desires something belonging to a realm situated beyond the gratification provided by the child, the child will be led to shift the nature of the query. Instead of wondering what it takes to be or not to be the phallus of the mother, the child will abandon the position of being the rival of the one who steals away the mother’s attention (the sibling, the father, the telephone) and will come to question what it is that the Other has that he himself lacks.
At this point two different orders of reality present themselves. On the one hand, there is the discovery that the child cannot be all that can satisfy the mother; on the other hand there is the fact that, precisely because she cannot be the exclusive object of the mother’s desire, she must be permanently lacking, so that her self-representation no longer matches the signifier of her mother’s desire. In other words, the child (as object) experiences the difference between what the mother wants and the role she herself can play in that desire. The signal of desire (the signifier) becomes detached from the signified (the thing that the signal points to).
On the whole, Lacan’s theory reverses our intuitive assumption about the relation between the word and the thing. The thing is not waiting for a word to represent it; rather it is the word that creates the thing. Language always precedes the world it represents. Lacan calls upon the insights of structural linguistics in order to demonstrate that the words we use have a function that transcends the need to communicate.
The term “signifier”, coined by Ferdinand de Saussure, takes on a specific valence in Lacan’s reading of Freud, because it provides us with a way of understanding how a specifically charged experience can leave behind a trace that is not directly related to the content of this experience as such. Thus, when Lacan says that the unconscious “is structured like a language” (S III, p. 167), this means that the unconscious is not the repository of the drives, or the storage room for “thing-representations” (SE 4, pp. 295–6). The unconscious does not have a fixed content. The moment the child encounters the signifier of his mother’s desire, therefore, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real break down into different qualitative categories. The child as a thing/object of jouissance (the Real), the child as a desired image (the Imaginary), and the child as failing to incarnate the signifier of the Other’s desire (the Symbolic) are no longer fused by the pleasure principle. This disarticulation causes a shift that inaugurates primary repression and the birth of the unconscious.
Lacan transforms Freud’s understanding of primary repression. What is being repressed is not the forbidden Oedipal yearning, but rather the charged signifiers that mark the psychic separation from the maternal realm. The unconscious thus evokes through a process of chain reaction the very experiences that allowed the subject to be cut off from the jouissance of the Other. The subject’s unconscious, then, is born at the moment when the jouissance of the Other becomes translated into the desire of the Other. As Lacan says, “Castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (or inverse scale) of the Law of desire” (E/S, p. 324, modified). It is here that Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration and Freud’s super-ego part company. This transformation from jouissance to desire does not involve, as it does for Freud, a paternal injunction that forces underground the incestuous or Oedipal fantasy (“You may not marry your mommy, and your mommy may not spoil you to her heart’s content”). Instead, as we shall see, castration is the operation that promotes the formation of the Oedipal fantasy.
For Lacan, therefore, the prohibition of incest, or the Name-of-the-Father, can be called a law only because the signifier detached from the child who is its signified operates as a psychic protection against the jouissance of the Other. Incest, in that sense, has a sexual connection only insofar as it refers to the “mix” between the child’s erotic drives and the mother’s enjoyment of her baby, that is, the mother’s enjoyment of her baby as thing/signified. Lacan theorizes the prohibition of incest as the child’s ability to identify with the clues, the signifiers, the signposts of the mother’s desire for something that the mother’s Other – the father, for example – seems to possess, something that can lead the child to a safer harbor provided by the desire and interests of this Other. We can see here how Lacan rejoins Freud’s Oedipal dynamics by another route: the child is not forced to leave the mother and her jouissance; rather, he or she is led towards the paternal realm thanks to the hints suggested by the mother. The signifiers of the mother’s desire save the child from her jouissance. Thus the law of the prohibition of incest is the operation through which, thanks to the desire of the mother for what lies beyond the child, the child will be propelled towards new poles of identifications in which the ego ideal will be constituted.
“Ego ideal” (SE 22, p. 65) is a termed coined by Freud to define certain parental traits that the child will appropriate to fortify his sense of identity. The process of identifying with these traits involves mimesis, but it also mobilizes the child’s energy to be and to do things that, in turn, will bring narcissistic gratification (pitching the ball like dad, wanting to be a doctor, “being a good girl” according to parental directives, etc.). In this sense the ego ideal is the recipient both of the dynamics of the mirror stage (the source of narcissism) and also of the most elusive signifiers of the desire of the parents. This is why children are not clones of their parents; parental unconscious messages intervene in shaping the ways the child will attempt to be or to have what the Other wants.
This question of what the Other wants involves the child in the crucial problematics of the enigma of sexual difference, which is the cornerstone of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Here we must exercise caution, because when we say “sexual difference,” we usually mean the difference between boy and girl. What Lacan shows, however, is that, although in the social world sexual difference seems to refer to anatomical differences between male and female, this is not what is meant in psychoanalysis. While it is true that, with the help of social discourse, the ego will eventually define sexual difference as something concrete, at the level of the unconscious sexual difference is not primarily related to biological difference but to something else.
The discrepancy between what the child is (as real) and what he represents (as imaginary) or fails to represent (the signifier of the desire of the other) opens up for him or her the possibility of discovering a new order, a new realm of investigation. The psychic energy awakened in the child through the signifiers of the mother’s desire produces the enigma of sexual difference. By following the arrows of the mother’s desire toward the signs usually provided by the paternal realm (i.e. the ego ideal), the child will be able to situate herself or himself as a girl or a boy in the social world. In this way the ego ideal contains, and to a certain extent resolves, the competition dictated by the dynamics of the mirror stage. The child is now given a path that will enable him or her to set a limit to the mother’s jouissance and, by the same token, to push away the burning and unresolved question of sexual difference. To put it yet another way, the process of identification with the masculine and feminine traits of the parent, which seems to evoke qualities in tune with the desire of the mother, will provide the child with the ready-made answers that will define for her or him a place in the social fabric. Gender and its cultural expectations, obligations, and rituals are therefore one of the outcomes of Oedipal dynamics.
But this solution does not take care of business all around, because the real of sexual difference is not at all addressed by the social ideals involved in the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. In that sense, as Lacan points out, the Oedipus complex is a ploy, a welcome distraction from the plodding work of research into a mystery that continues to haunt the child. It is not because the child is now identified with traits of her parents or grandparents that she can make substantial progress in figuring out this ineffable bond between what she feels from within (autoerotic yearnings) and that part of the jouissance of the Other that cannot be entirely translated through the signifiers of the desire of the Other. The erotic gratification that the child experiences in her body, and that she links to her experience of being the object of desire of the mother, cannot be separated from the fact that she is to a certain extent at the service of her mother’s enjoyment (“Is she doing this for her benefit or for mine?”), which is an experience that is not devoid of anxiety.
In that sense, fending off the threat of the jouissance of the Other that is at work both at the level of the drives and at the level of the Other is precisely what produces the division in the subject between the unconscious and the ego. Therefore the formation of gender merely displaces the enigma of sexual difference; it does not solve it.
Thus these enigmatic signifiers of the Other’s desire, which evoke the real of sexual difference, do not vanish out of existence. Precisely because they retain something of the experience of separation from the mother’s jouissance and are charged with a feeling of exclusion from this mysterious order of reality in which the father is situated (Freud’s primal scene), they contradict the order of fixed meanings that the process of identification provides. This explains why the ego “chooses” to ignore the explosive question of the real of sexual difference. Yet behind the ego’s back, at the level of the unconscious, those very signifiers of the desire of the Other, calling up those moments of cuts from the jouissance of the other, continue to circulate. They attract into their web traces, words, smells, tastes, homophonic connections, metaphors, metonymies: anything related to similar ambiguous experiences evoking this strange mix of erotic pleasure and painful rejection.
Because these signifiers connote separation rather than fusion, our psychic economy at work at the level of consciousness – dependent on the rewards of the mirror stage, in which we were the exclusive object of the Other’s desire – will repress them and concentrate instead on constructing a narrative that wards off the enigmatic nature of sexual difference. There is a solution to the enigma of love and desire, as fairy tales amply demonstrate: “One day my prince will come.” Of course, such a narrative must to a certain extent conform to the rules set forth by the social contract. Hence for Lacan, as it is implicitly for Freud, the birth of the subject’s ego in the realm of symbols, of language, of social signification is concomitant with the birth of unconscious desire.
It is here that we see how Lacan flips around Freud’s Oedipal fantasy. At the level of the repressed, the signifiers of the desire of the Other, unfettered by the limitations of negation, gender, and death (this being Freud’s characterization of the grammar of the unconscious) will connect in order to form a more potent answer to the enigma. In that sense, the fantasy of incest is not the cause of primary repression. On the contrary, this fantasy is produced after the formation of the unconscious. The signifiers of the desire of the Other that constitute the chain reaction at work in the unconscious represent the desire of the Other for something that remains beyond reach. Ultimately it is with the help of these signifiers that the child will fabricate a fantasy that appears to resolve the enigma of sexual difference. Yet because these signifiers condense the paradoxical experience of being saved through a separation that entails a mixture of pleasure and anxiety, they retain the “knowledge” that jouissance works against psychic survival.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the subject will attempt to maintain a distance between unconscious desire and the fantasy it has created. Both at the level of the ego and at the level of the unconscious, what Freud has called the super-ego comes to the rescue, punishing any attempt to transgress the barrier of incest. We can now better understand what Freud meant by his theory of infantile sexuality, according to which the boy fears castration and the girl envies the boy’s penis.3 Such a theory is merely a fantasy produced after the fact of castration.
Such a theory/fantasy is at the heart of all neurotic constructions, from phobia to hysteria to obsessional neurosis. It is a montage based on the necessary psychic limitation of the individual, who is not equipped to accept, in the process of his or her development, that there is ultimately no answer to the riddle. The reason why human desire has been given a chance to operate is precisely because a slot must remain open in the system. Yet because the psychic economy perceives this open slot to be that which can threaten its search for satisfaction, which from the onset of life is bound up with the Other, the subject will be led to plug this lack with a fantasy that attempts to make sense of nonsense.
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality is indeed based on his patients’ reconstructions of how they explain the difference between boys and girls. Yet such a theory is not a closed system. If boys imagine that the little girl must have lost her penis along the way, they will still wonder what crime she committed to endure such a fate, and they will fear that the same punishment will be inflicted upon them. Inversely, the little girl, appalled by such injustice, will not cease trying to figure out what it takes to obtain such a precious object. Thus the enigma persists, despite the false solutions that the ego continually attempts to provide.
What Lacan offers psychoanalysis, therefore, is an understanding of how the subject has been misled into believing that the access to his fantasy is bound up with an all-powerful Other who will punish any form of transgression. This is why the subject will devise the most elaborate neurotic scenarios to lure this Other, to defend against it, or even to claim responsibility and guilt so that the fantasy can remain intact. The process of psychoanalysis consists in coming to realize that the fantasy that plugs the lack in the Other is only an artifact meant to produce a wrong answer to a question that must remain open-ended.
We are now equipped to turn to perversion. At which moment of the Oedipal dialectic does the perverse structure come about?
While the neurotic invests all his psychic energy in creating barriers to protect his Oedipal fantasy and prevent its realization, the pervert cannot discover in the desire of the other the arguments that can justify the elaboration of such a fantasy. The lack that he will undoubtedly encounter in the mother, and that will enable him to constitute himself as her phallus, cannot in turn be reliably translated into a desire directed towards the paternal pole. The child is then stopped in his tracks. While he is confronted with the enigma of sexual difference formulated in the question “What does she want?” the child remains trapped between the mother’s desire for the phallus that the child represents and her jouissance that she derives from that imaginary object. The possibility of inventing a fantasmatic solution that would bring the child over to the other side of symbolic castration is frozen, because the mother’s signifiers of desire fall short in giving the child a sense that the enigma of sexual difference can find such a fantasmatic solution.
While the future neurotic is given a chance both to acknowledge the lack in the Other and to find a strategy that can cover over that lack through a division between the gendered ego and the pursuit of an unconscious fantasy, the pervert is confronted with a different problematic. Whereas her psychic development leads her to the point where the lack in the Other forces an encounter with jouissance, both at the level of the drive and at the level of the jouissance of the Other, the signifiers – the clues that permit the translation from jouissance to desire – are not available. The safe harbor of identifications through which she could find a gendered position in society is jeopardized, because the mother’s desire is not directed toward the paternal pole and its cultural attributes. The pervert is forced to discover other alternatives to fend off the threat of the jouissance of the Other. What the pervert must deal with is the fact that the lack in the Other cannot find signifiers to symbolize its meaning, even if these symbols are purely imaginary.
The mother’s lack, in other words, is real. It truly stands for a force that destabilizes the already fragile anchoring point of her subjectivity. And so the pervert does not have a choice: he must disavow the mother’s castration. But let us be clear. The pervert knows very well that there is a discrepancy between the phallus and himself, though he does not have the wherewithal to symbolize the discrepancy. Yet it is through the unveiling of this discrepancy that the question of the real of sexual difference is opened up. Perverts, however, do not have at their disposal the hints that will allow them to “accept” that symbolic castration is the condition for exploring the meanderings of the desire of the Other. They have no choice other than to devote their psychic energy either to making sure that the mother remains phallic, with the child identified as her object of desire, or to figuring out a solution to the “real” lack in the mother. In this process, of course, their yearning to make sense of the erotic enjoyment that surges from their drives forces them to bear the disastrous realization that the mother’s “real” concerns them to the extent that they may or may not be the object of her desire.
Thus perverts’ desire does not have the opportunity to be organized around finding a fantasmatic solution to the real of sexual difference. The classical scenario of Oedipal dynamics, with its share of lies, make-believe, and sexual theories, is not accessible to them. This is why they will search desperately to access the symbolic castration that could bring solace to their misery. Their only recourse will be to defy whatever law presents itself to them, transgressing this law in the hope of finally discovering an order of reality stronger and more stable than the lies and deceptions that organized the psychic reality of their childhood. Perverts will therefore need to enact a scenario that will enable them to expose such deceptions, in order to impose a law thanks to which the Other can remain all-powerful. However, because this law cannot be dictated by the signifiers of the desire of the Other, perverts are forced to create a law of their own making, a law that appears to them to represent an order superior to the one accepted by the common run of mortals.
Yet in order to maintain the illusion that such a law exists, perverts are not afraid to offer themselves up to the Other’s jouissance. In other words, they choose to expose the very place where the neurotic struggles with accepting the loss that symbolic castration entails. The pervert feeds on the anxiety of the neurotic in order to derive libidinal gratification.
One of my very first patients, whose perverse structure became readily apparent in the treatment, soon became suspicious of my status as an analyst. I was at the time trying to find my bearings as a research candidate in an American psychoanalytic institute, while simultaneously thinking of getting extra training from a Lacanian school. I had of course no idea of the signals that I was sending off, clearly a mixture of anxiety, arrogance, and hesitation, unaware as I was then that such a shift of theoretical allegiance was affecting the way I was listening to her. Shortly after I started seeing this patient, she sent me a letter describing in detail a murder she was planning to commit that same day. She completed the blow by recommending that I seek supervision for her case. I was trapped and terrified: which law should I submit to, the police, the psychoanalytic institute, or the law of my desire? What was my responsibility in this acting out? Clearly my patient’s unconscious intent was to challenge my legitimacy as an analyst, and she had succeeded by exposing in me the place where I had refused to surrender to the law of castration.
Thus perverts strive to get to the point where the enigma can be formulated, yet they do not have the clues, the signifiers, with which to produce a theory/fantasy that could make sense of it. They are therefore forced to repeat over and over again a scenario that protects them against the terror of the jouissance of the other that is equated with the “real” reality of the mother’s lack. Yet they experience this lack not as being related to the desire of the Other (e.g. desire for the father), but as a degraded state that must be refused at all costs by maintaining the conditions through which the Other remains phallic. For the pervert, the lack in the Other is experienced as something so disgusting that it cannot even begin to be formulated through language. In other words, this lack can under no circumstances be compared to the symbolic open slot that can be unveiled at the end of analysis, once the Oedipal fantasy has been reduced to some obsolete traces of childhood experiences. The lack is literally related to the impossibility of giving to feminine desire a status other than a phallic one.
Because of these psychic hurdles, the problems posed for the pervert in the formation of identity are not the same as those faced by the neurotic. Indeed, this identity is not organized by the principle according to which the neurotic is divided between the delusions of gender formations and the unconscious pursuit of the real of sexual difference. Despite appearances, the pervert’s gender is not so stable and so defended as that of the neurotic; she or he is not so invested in defending a place as a girl or a boy in the social fabric. In this case, gender is a conscious construction or montage that is not directly meant to obliterate the slippery enigma of sexual difference. Such an enigma is not a question for the pervert. What preoccupies the pervert is the need to satisfy the erotic drive and at the same time to find a strategy that can obliterate the “real” lack in the Other.
We can easily find around us examples of what constitutes the perverse logic in cultural productions. The icon of the drag queen shows how gender is a social object that can be constructed or deconstructed at will. In the academic world, queer theory borrows from the logic of perversion the discursive act that exposes, in the other, precisely the ways in which gender does not correspond to the destiny of anatomy. Queer theory, in that sense, cannot function without a “victim” and for that reason refutes identity politics, gay solidarity, and a false sense of complicity among marginals. The essentialist bent of feminist theory is another target for queer theory, because, far from helping the cause of women, it instead obscures the fluidity of gender and its subversive potential.
Queer theory equally enjoys exposing the so-called neutrality of psychoanalysis as a sheer cover for its latent heteronormative intent. Yet if the effects of queer theory are highly instructive for its victims (if the latter only bothered to recognize its profound acumen, as some feminists and psychoanalysts have done), queer theory itself cannot function without the jouissance of a protagonist. This leaves little room for the elaboration of ideas, unless such ideas are directly part of the project of debunking neurotic compromises, whether these be theoretical, cultural, or personal.
For the pervert, there is no comfort in the success of his operation. The fun is in the process, not in the result. A neurotic can derive a sustained pleasure in calling upon a fantasy to keep him company; a pervert does not have that luxury. He must work all the time on behalf of his drives, with a limited amount of outlets. One of the most powerful examples of this very process can be found in many passages of Nabokov. Nabokov, in my view, represents the best example of the art of perversion in action.
Let us consider a famous passage from Lolita. Humbert has unwittingly precipitated the death of his wife, Charlotte, after she discovered his diary, in which he calls her “the Haze woman, the big bitch, the old cat, the obnoxious mamma.”4 Charlotte runs out of the house and is killed by a car. Humbert’s monologue triggers in the reader an unacceptable feeling of marvel:
Had I not been such a fool – or such an intuitive genius – to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would have not blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu Marlene! . . . And I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury – I wept.5
So here we are, unable to get furious at Humbert, tempted to agree that Charlotte is “a cow,” yet knowing only too well that Lo has just lost her mother and that she will now, with no escape in sight, be the prey of Humbert’s lust. And yet we marvel, caught in our own jouissance, exposed at the very place where we – cultivated, moral, highly socialized readers – we almost weep because fate has been so aesthetically kind to Humbert. And if by chance we choose to be horrified, how come we keep on reading? Can we really convince ourselves that literature exonerates us from our own pedophilic voyeuristic tendencies? But what about Humbert himself? Once he has overcome this hurdle, can he enjoy himself for more than a few moments through his tears of bliss? No; the next page tells us as much: “One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a prospect of delirious and unlimited delights before me, I would have mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of delicious relief. Eh bien pas du tout!”6 Poor Humbert is back at the drawing board. The fantasy is not in the mind but in the making. More anguish, more plotting, more scenarios . . .
It is very difficult to imagine the order of perfect bliss that the pervert seeks beyond his contempt for social life, social lies, cultural comforts, and agreeable received notions. In his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov remains our neighbor because we can follow him almost to the end. And yet there is something in his approach and his beliefs that gives us a sense of the strange world of perverse logic.
We could almost suggest that Nabokov gets as close as possible to giving perversion a quasi-sublimatory quality. His talent lies in our impression that he has attained a certain level of contentment because he has found, in the world of nature, the very law that can transgress social conventions. For him, nature almost replaces the enigma of the real of sexual difference.
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.”7 Nabokov claims to find through fiction an alternative to truth: art informed by neurotic desire is never sure of anything. “Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature” (p. 5). Here Nabokov finds a pole of identification that defeats the paternal metaphor and its unbearable division: Nature is truly the phallic mother who has elected Vladimir as an exclusive member of her constituency. Nature always deceives, and so does the phallic mother; isn’t the pervert aware that she also lacks? “From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature [written with an upper-case N, of course] a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead” (p. 5).
He can, this fortunate individual, believe in the wiles and spells of the phallic mother without risk of being swallowed by a wave or falling into a ravine. But Nabokov pushes his logic further. He finds in nature – that is, in the magic of literature – the space that permits him to elude the mystery of sex.
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter . . . To the story teller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space and time. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia . . . Finally and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius.
(pp. 5–6)
This may be related to my own moronic French patriarchal education, but I confess that Nabokov has thrown a dart in my jouissance! I can only feel ashamed for having loved the tale of The Three Musketeers, for having been “morally” brainwashed by Sartre, for trying to learn about sex with Madame Bovary or, even worse, with Maupassant. With Mr. Nabokov as my teacher, I would not have fared very well, but his “perverse” intent may have saved me many years of psychoanalysis. “It seems to me,” Nabokov writes, “that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (p. 6). This is a beautiful perverse twist that tells a truth that we often resist.
“In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle, even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached, when reading” (p. 6). This is the place, of course, where the neurotic may choose passionate curiosity over aloofness and catch in his net not butterflies but rather those very sexually charged signifiers that in turn would lead him where Nabokov refuses to venture. He continues: “Then with a pleasure which is both sensual” – the purity of a drive detached from the horror of castration – “and intellectual” – unadulterated for him by the pressure of the enigma of the desire of the Other – “we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass” (p. 6).
Here we have it: an order that is both nonenigmatic and solid, an order that has transcended the pathetic reality of history and of human beings’ neurotic, debased aspirations. There is, then, such a thing as a perfect perverse montage. But let us not be lured by perfection, because once the page is written the work starts all over, with no respite and, worse, with no reliable starting point.
My essay is not an apology for perversion. It is simply an attempt to demonstrate that, thanks to both Freud and Lacan, we have been given the tools not only to demystify the distinction between the normal and the pathological, but also to understand how the mystery of sex is at the heart of human intelligence. The avenues leading to the forever unknown land of sexuality are obstructed by unexpected hurdles. Even if they cannot be overcome, the struggle to get over them requires that one develop those qualities of determination and creativity that are writ large in analytical – and indeed human – history.
1. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” trans. James B. Swenson Jr., October 51 (Winter 1989), pp. 55–75.
2. “[W]e were driven to the conclusion that a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct” (SE VII, p. 231).
3. SE IX, pp. 207–26.
4. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 95.
5. Nabokov, Lolita, p. 103.
7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (San Diego: Harvest, 1982), p. 5. Further references will be made parenthetically in the text.