The world of perversion: Psychoanalysis and the impossible absolute of desire

"The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire" attempts to situate recent controversies in antihomophobic criticism in wider historical and philosophical context. It examines formulations of the concept of perversion that predate the classification of sexual behaviours in nineteenth-century sexology. Its premise of departure is that Foucault's critique of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality refutes Freud's contention about the status of the subject as a subject of the unconscious by reducing sexuality to a function of discourse and power. Foucault eliminates in this manner the possibility of recuperating perversion as a political category. Psychoanalysis, in contrast, distinguishes between perversion understood as a term descriptive of the nature of human desire, and perversion viewed as a psychic orientation predicated on an ethically and politically problematic renunciation of subjective sovereignty.;"The World of Perversion" discusses four cases drawn from French cultural history that illustrate precisely this distinction between the two senses of perversion the psychoanalytic tradition upholds. First, Georges Bataille's consideration of the trial of medieval 'sodomite' Gilles de Rais provides an example of a social dynamic in which the case of a sexual criminal is mobilized as a means of reinforcing the political status quo. Second, in his text Pensees, Pascal recuperates the subject's freedom of conscience from 'perverse' concupiscence by formulating the tragic structure of the subject. Third, Hegel's reading of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau illustrates a dialectical logic in which the cynical, perverse discourse of the Nephew presents a radical indictment of late ancien regime culture that nonetheless fails to articulate itself in an explicitly political manner. And finally, Lacan's formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis through his reading of the Antigone of Sophocles formalizes a view of ethical, non-perverse heroism accessible to all subjects regardless of their historical and discursive circumscriptions.;"The World of Perversion" concludes with a reconsideration of recent theories of sexuality---those of Jonathan Dollimore, Jeffrey Weeks, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and the Lacanians Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec---that attempts to highlight the more desirable political consequences of the psychoanalytic position on perversion with respect to the Foucauldian one.