Authors: Elisabeth Roudinesco
Our Dark Side (13 page)
Notes
1
Cesare Beccaria (1738â94), Italian jurist, associated with the Encyclopaedists, and author of the famous
Dei delitti e delle pene
(1764), in which he established the basis for modern thinking about penal law. He was a convinced abolitionist.
2
Mutilation (the amputation of the fist) and branding were, however, reintroduced for parricides.
3
Witness the cases brought against Baudelaire and Flaubert by the public minister in 1857 (pour
Les Fleurs du mal
and
Madame Bovary
). It was only in the second half of the twentieth century, after another case was brought against the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert that the works of Sade could at last be published. See Pierrat (2002).
4
Zoophilia, necrophilia, exhibitionism, paedophilia, coprophagy, transvestism, voyeurism, onanism, sadism, masochism, etc. The list of practices is by definition endless. The
Encyclopaedia of Unusual Sex Practices
(Love 1992) comprises five hundred entries and one hundred illustrations.
5
The best study is Georges Lanteri-Laura's
Lecture de perversion
(1979). The first medical use of the word âperversion' appears in 1842 (
Oxford English Dictionary
, 1933, vol. 7, p. 732). In France, it was first used by the psychiatrist Claude-François Michéa (1815â82) in 1842, in his account of the case of Sergeant Bertrand, which was reported by the French psychiatrist Ludger Lunier (1822â85). Although he had been charged with rape and with mutilating the corpses of his victims, the sergeant was found guilty of desecrating graves. Lunier protested against the judgment of the court, arguing that the magistrates had failed to see the sexual nature of his crimes. The use of the word âperversion' then became standard in all European languages.
6
Cf. Foucault (1984: 43): âThe sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species' cf. Michéa (1849).
7
Under legislation on public indecency and affronts to religion.
8
Similar comments could also be applied to Proust, Poe, Dostoyevsky and, of course, Wilde.
9
The term was coined in 1869 by the Hungarian doctor Karoly Maria Kertbeny (1824â82) to describe all forms of physical love between individuals of the same sex. The term entered general usage between 1870 and 1910, replacing older terms such as sodomy, inversion, uranism, pederasty, sophism and lesbianism. It then became a pendant to the word âheterosexuality', which was coined c. 1180.
10
In order to ridicule mental medicine, Proust adopts the term âinvert', rather than homosexuality, to describe the devotees of sodomy as an âaccursed race' or a ârace of queers'. He projects on to his
jeunes filles en fleur
the most delicious aspects of adolescent homosexuality, reserving the term âaccursed race' for mature men, even though both cities â Sodom and Gomorrah â are under the same curse. The Baron de Charlus is the prototype: he is refined, feminine, arrogant and haughty, but he is also cruel and half mad. He hides his vice, has an escort of
apaches
and beggars, is exploited by Morel and has himself whipped in Jupien's brothel. In
La Recherche
it is, according to the Proust who was one of them, the Jews and inverts who make up the âpeople of the perverse, or a chosen people who are capable of the highest degree of civilization, but they are also an accursed people. See
Sodom and Gomorrah
(Proust 1996). Cf. Compagnon (2001) and Painter (1959).
11
Johann Ludwig Casper (1787â1864), Albert Moll (1862â1939), Iwan Bloch (1872â1922), Havelock Ellis (1859â1939), Alfred Binet (1857â1911), Richard von Krafft Ebing (1840â1902), Carl Henrich Ulrichs (1826â95), Caril Westphal (1833â90), Magnus Hirschfeld (1868â1935), Cesare Lombroso (1836â1909). Many books have been devoted to the sexologists. See in particular Sulloway (1979).
12
Cf. David Lynch's film
Elephant Man
(US, 1980), with John Hurt (John Merrick) and Antony Hopkins (Frederick Treeves), and Davidson (2001).
13
In all, 475 cases are described.
14
[The French translation of 1969 is based on the much-expanded sixteenth and seventeenth editions. The English translation [Kraffft-Ebing 1926] is based upon the twelfth edition, which does not include this case].
15
On the different terms used to describe homosexuals (inverts, urnings, the third sex and so on) see Murat (2006).
16
Republished with a preface by Georges Vigarello as
Les Attentats aux moeurs
(Tardieu 1995).
17
On all these questions, see Carol Bonomi's interesting study (2007). These remarks are partly based on the preface I wrote for it.
18
It was translated into sixty languages and went through thirty-five editions before 1905.
19
Michel Foucault (1984) associates these three figures to the extent that they embody a sort of infernal trio that subverts the procreative order.
20
The word âcircumcision' is sometimes used to describe all forms of sexual mutilation, including excision.
21
See chapter 5 below.
22
Bernard de Mandeville (1670â1733),
moraliste
, freethinker and author of a fable that describes a flourishing society of corrupt individuals. After accepting the need for moral reform, they become virtuous, but their community quickly sinks into poverty.
23
Traces will be found in the correspondence with Fliess (Freud 1985).
24
As I have said, Lacan describes this as the real.
25
In
The Human Comedy
, Vautrin is the nephew of Jacqueline Collin, whom Balzac describes as the former mistress of Marat. Known as Asie, she is a representative of the underworld. With the encouragement of the secret police, she becomes involved in the poisoning of Célestin Crevel, a repulsive libertine who has married his female counterpart Valérie Marneffe. After a long illness, her body putrefies as though it were mud. As I have already noted, Proust's Charlus is Vautrin's heir.
26
He was especially fond of the brothels of Lebanon and Egypt. In Beirut, very young girls were procured for him. In Esneh, he met the famous prostitute Koutchouk Hânem: âHer cunt polluted me with its velvety folds. Inside it, I felt fierce ⦠An imperial buggeress with big tits, fleshy, and with flared nostrils ⦠Her breasts smelled of sugared terebinth ⦠I sucked her furiously. As for the fucking, it was good. The first fuck was above all furious, and the last sentimental' (Flaubert 1973: 605).
27
This remarkable issue of the
Magazine Littéraire
was coordinated by Pierre-Marc de Biasi.
28
The trial took place on 24 January 1857. Although he won his case, Flaubert was both shattered by it and disgusted at having âsat on the bench of shame', And yet he thanked his lawyer for having given his first novel an unexpected authority.
29
âDepartures from a Rouen drenched in sperm, tears and champagne ⦠the savage way she undressed, throwing everything down ⦠blood on Léon's thumb, which she sucks â a love so violent that it turns into sadism â pleasures of torture' (cited
Magazine littéraire
4001: 27).
30
She was described as a hysteric, and her name gave birth to a pathology â Bovaryism â that was adopted by mental medicine (Roudinesco 1982; ce Kauffmann 2007).
31
Flaubert defines stupidity as absolute evil (a
bestial
evil), as the cardinal sin of the advent of bourgeois democracy, and therefore as the implacable enemy. Flaubert was the first to describe stupidity as a perversion by identifying it with the power exercised over the people by received ideas, public opinion and the ideals of bad science. The perverse figure of Homais is its spokesman, whereas Charles Bovary is the embodiment of foolishness (cf. Biasi 2007). Jacques Lacan picks up this thesis in his unforgettable formula: âPsychoanalysis can do anything, but it is powerless against stupidity' [
connerie
].
32
âEvil has taken up residence inside him. It is in his capharnaum that Emma finds the arsenic in the form of a flask that looks just like her: blue glass and a seal of yellow wax. These are the colours she prefers to wear. Inside, there is something as white as her own flesh: the beautiful arsenic. That Homais is a devil is clear from his first appearance: âA man in green leather slippers' (Flaubert 2003: 69). Who has a green skin? The novel's last words are to be taken literally: âHe is doing infernally well' (Flaubert 2003: 327) (Michon 2007: 354â5).
33
Hugo describes the
barricade
â which lies beyond the
barricades
â as a historical subject and likens the sewers of Paris to Leviathan's intestine. On the âbarricade', see Derrida (1994).
34
He is known as Monsignor Bienvenu. When he dies, Valjean, who has become Monsieur Madeleine, mourns him.
35
The Thénardiers have three children: Eponine, Azelma and Gavroche.
36
Bamtabois insults Fantine whenever he passes her in the street. She never replies. One day, he creeps up behind her, scoops up a handful of snow and thrusts it down her back between her bare shoulders. She screams, scratches him and swears at him. Impassive, Javert shows no pity and sends her to prison, despite her pleas. He is not interested in the fact that she has even sold her teeth (Hugo 1982: 177) to pay for Cosette's board with the Thénardier.
37
Hannah Arendt (1994) uses the expression to describe the type of criminal in such circumstances that it is impossible for him to feel or know that he had done wrong.
38
Both his superiors and Valjean see Javert's suicide as an act of madness.
39
At Waterloo, he pretends to save Marius's father so that he can strip his corpse, and then passes himself off as a hero.
40
Rebaptized âbio-power' by Foucault. Cf. Weindling (1989).
41
The Communist ânew man' had to regenerate himself through manual labour.
42
Max Nordau (1849â1923), German writer, philosopher and politician and, with Theodor Herzl (1860â1904), founder of Zionism. For a selection of his writings see Bechtel, Bourel and Le Rider (1996).
43
Lebensborn
: fountains of life. Institutions designed to procreate pure Aryan subjects. The first was opened by Heinrich Himmler in August 1936, see Hillel (1975).
44
This was the nosology: schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile dementia, syphilis, idiocy, encephalitis, Huntington's chorea, and other terminal neurological disorders, sexual deviants. See Kogon, Langbei and Rukerl (1983) and Van Platen (2001).
45
Bernadac (1977), Kogon (1950). One of the greatest destroyers of homosexuals was Heinrich Himmler (1900â45), the head of the SS and the Gestapo who was given the task by Hitler of the implementation of the Final Programme. Speaking at Bad Tölz on 18 February 1937, he stated that, because homosexuals could only live among themselves, they were responsible for the general corruption of the state. He added: âSexual deviations lead to the most extravagant things one can imagine. To say that we behave like animals is an insult to animals, because animals do not do that sort of thing' (cited Boisson 1988). Having tried to make contact with the Allies, Himmler was recognized by the victors. He took cyanide to avoid having to appear before the Nuremberg Tribunal.
46
The Damned or the Twilight of the Gods
(La Caduta degli Dei),
dir. Luchino Visconti, 1969, English language. With Dirk Bogarde (Frederick Bruckmann), Albrecht Scoenals (Johachim von Essenbeck), Ingrid Thulin (Sophie von Essenbeck), René Kolldehoff (Konstantin von Essenbeck), Helmut Berger (Martin von Essenbeck), Renau Verlay (Gunther Thalman), Umberto Orsini (Herbert Thalman), Charlotte Rampling (Ãlisabeth Thalman) and Helmut Griem (Achenbach).
47
âGenealogy' derives from
genos
. In Greek tragedy, and especially in the great Sophoclean trilogy (
Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonna, Antigone
) Oedipus destroys the
genos
without realizing it by murdering his father, marrying his mother and becoming the brother of his children. He thus makes it impossible for the lineage of the Labdacides to be perpetuated.
4
The Auschwitz Confessions
The famous
Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1973), which was written while Horkheimer and Adorno were living in exile in the United States, includes a long digression on the limits of reason and the ideals of progress. Being thinkers of the dark Enlightenment, both authors had internalized Freud's idea that the only thing that could limit the death drive â in the form of delight in evil â was sublimation, which was the only thing that gave men access to civilization: âMen have gained control over the forces of nature that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man' (Freud 1929: 145).
The example of Germany did indeed show that the ideals of progress could be inverted into their antithesis and lead to reason's self-destruction. To support their argument, the two Frankfurt School philosophers associate the names of Kant, Sade and Nietzsche, and see
Juliette
(Sade 1991) as the dialectical moment in the history of Western thought when the enjoyment of regression (
amor intellectualis diaboli
) metamorphosed into the pleasure of attacking civilization with its own weapons (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 94).
Far from claiming, as some were to do, that the works of Sade could be read as a prefiguration of Nazism, they argued that Sade's inversion of the Law meant that the history of the totalitarian movement had already been written. Although they loathed âthe divine marquis', they say, in substance, that the followers of positivism had repressed their desire for destruction only to borrow the mask of the highest morality. They therefore began to treat men as things and then, when political circumstance lent themselves to it, as filth that had nothing in common with normal humanity, and finally as mountains of corpses.
Horkheimer and Adorno use the historical caesura of Auschwitz
1
â the paradigm for the worst possible perversion of the ideal of science â to argue that there is a great danger that humanity's entry into mass culture and the biological planning of life will generate new forms of totalitarianism if reason does not succeed in becoming self-critical and overcoming its destructive tendencies.
In 1961 Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the
New Yorker
. He was found guilty of the elimination of over five million Jews, sentenced to death and executed by hanging on 31 May 1962.
2
She asked the same question as Horkheimer and Adorno. Eichmann was neither a sadist, a psychopath nor a sexual pervert. He was not a monster, and displayed no visible pathological signs. The evil was within him, but he displayed no signs of any perversion. He was, in other words, normal. Indeed, he was terrifyingly normal because he was the agent of an inversion of the Law that had made crime the norm. Although he admitted having committed atrocities by sending millions of individuals to the gas chambers, he dared to state that he was merely obeying orders and even to deny that he could have been an anti-Semite.
3
It would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster ⦠Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ⦠that this new type of criminal ⦠commits his crimes under circumstance that make it well-nigh impossible to know or feel that he is doing wrong. (Arendt 1984: 276)
That is why Arendt took the view that the actions of such a criminal defied justice and that it was absurd to punish someone who had committed such monstrous crimes by executing him. And besides, that is precisely what Eichmann wanted: to be hanged in public and to enjoy his own execution so that he could believe himself to be immortal and the equal of a god. At the foot of the gibbet, he defied his judges, telling them âwe shall meet again' and forgot that it was his own funeral: âIt was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught him â the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying
banality of evil
' (Arendt 1984: 252).
It is, then, because he was so extremely normal that Eichmann was the embodiment of perversion at its most abject: a delight in evil, a lack of emotion, automatic gestures, implacable logic, meticulous attention to even minor details and an incredible ability to take responsibility for the most odious crimes by dramatizing them so as to demonstrate how Nazism had turned him into a monster. He was telling the truth when he claimed to have lived by Kant's moral principles (Arendt 1984 [1963]: 135) because, according to Arendt, the wickedness of his orders was nothing in comparison to the imperative force of the order itself. And so he became genocidal without feeling the slightest guilt.
In a preface written for
Justine
in 1961, Lacan picks up the thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer and dismisses both Sade and Kant without pronouncing in favour of either of them. He was doubtless familiar with the pages Foucault had just devoted to the âdivine marquis' in his
History of Madness
: âAfter Goya and Sade, and since them, unreason belongs to all that is most decisive in any oeuvre: anything that the oeuvre contains which is murderous or constraining' (Foucault 2006: 535).
Lacan is wrong to argue that Sade did not anticipate Freud, âif nothing else, as a catalogue of the perversions' (2006: 645), but he is right to see Sade's works as the starting point for âthe insinuating rise in the nineteenth century of the theme of “delight in evil”.' Sade is, for Lacan, the author of âa new theorization of perversion', and his work is âthe first step of a subversion' of which Kant as the âturning point'. According to this interpretation, evil, in the Sadean sense, is an equivalent to Kant's âgood'. Both authors enunciate the principle of the subject's subordination to the Law. According to Lacan, however, Sade introduces the
Other
in the person of the tormentor and reveals the object of desire (
petit a
), whereas, for Kant, the destruction of desire is reflected in the moral law, and it reveals the object by outlining a theory of how the Law makes the subject autonomous. Sade's discourse stresses the imperative âThou shalt come' â and desire remains subject to the law because it is a voluntary instrument of human freedom'. In Kant's discourse, in contrast, the extinction of desire is translated into the moral law: âthou shalt free thyself from pathology'.
4
According to Lacan's interpretation, Kant's morality derives not from a theory of freedom, but from a theory of desire in which the object is repressed. That repression is then âilluminated' by Sade's discourse. There is therefore âa symmetry between Sade's imperative dictating jouissance and Kant's categorical imperative' (Roudinesco 1997: 313).
In their various ways, all these authors â Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Arendt, Lacan and many others, such as Primo Levi â use Auschwitz as a way of explaining a new form of perversion that derives both from reason's self-destruction and from a very strange metamorphosis in the relationship with the Law that authorized apparently normal men to commit the most monstrous crime in the entire history of the human race in the name of obedience to a norm.
The purpose of the crime committed at Auschwitz was to domesticate the selection of species to such a degree that it could be replaced by a race science based upon a purportedly biological remodelling of humanity. The Nazis therefore assumed that they had the right to decide who should and who should not live on planet Earth. Their radical evil was therefore the product of a system based upon the idea that man as such could be deemed superfluous. Saul Friedländer (1993: 82â3) describes it thus:
This, in fact, is something no other regime, whatever its criminality, has attempted to do. In that sense, the Nazi regime attained what is, in my view, some sort of theoretical outer limit: one may envisage an even larger number of victims and a technologically more efficient way of killing, but once a regime decides that groups, whatever the criteria may be, should be annihilated there and never be allowed to live on Earth, the ultimate has been achieved. This limit, from my perspective, was reached only once in modern history: by the Nazis.
That is what makes Auschwitz so different from all the twentieth century's other great acts of barbarity, such as Kolyma (the Gulag) or Hiroshima. Nazism invented a mode of criminality that perverted not only
raison d'état
but even the criminal impulse itself because, within this configuration, the crime is committed in the name of a rationalized norm and not as an expression of a transgression or an untamed impulse. From that perspective, the Nazi criminal is not Sade's heir even though crime is, in both cases, the result of the inversion of the Law. Sade's criminals obey a savage nature that determines them, but they would never agree, like the Nazi criminal, to submit to a state power that subjugates them to a law of crime. As Bataille once remarked, executioners do not speak, or when they do they speak the language of the state.
Such extremism therefore has to be given a name. Which is why the Nuremberg Tribunal, which had to judge four types of crime â crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and participation in the formulation of a common plan to commit all these crimes â adopted the term âgenocide'.
5
Coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, the neologism
6
would be used to describe a crime against humanity for which the penal vocabulary had no word: the physical destruction of a population that was regarded as undesirable because it belonged to some species, genus or group,
7
regardless of the ideas or opinions of the individuals who belonged to that population. In order to be described as such, the genocidal act had to be accompanied by the intentional, systematic and planned extermination. Mass murder, even when organized by states, obviously does not fit into this classification, which implicitly assumes the existence of extra-territorial persecution. Genocide is not just an attempt to destroy the
other
, but an attempt to annihilate the other's
genos
. Hence the idea of seeking out the population that is to be exterminated outside the state's territory and beyond its frontiers in order to destroy several generations: children, parents and grandparents.
To that extent, the genocide of the Jews was defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as the prototype for any other genocides that might subsequently be recognized by the new Charter of the United Nations Organization.
8
How does someone become genocidal? Who are the killers? Are they all possessed by absolute evil? What perversion forces them to become the collective murderers of the human race? Are they
born
monsters, or are they the products of a culture and an education? Are they intelligent or stupid? Are they capable of remorse and
prise de conscience
? What is the nature of their sexuality? Is there some specific pathology that characterizes the authors of genocides?
Nuremberg therefore marked the beginning of a new debate about the origins of evil. What, in this secularized world that had given birth to a perverse science, allowed these killers to see themselves as biological gods? Basically, the answer to this question had to come from a scientific psychology, and not from religion or morality.
A number of experts on psychiatry, psychology and neurology â including Douglas M. Kelley, Gustave Gilbert and Leon Goldensohn â were therefore asked to carry out tests on the main National-Socialist leaders who had been brought before this exceptional tribunal. Despite some differences of opinion, most of them explained that democracy was the only thing that could help to put an end to human cruelty, and that totalitarianism, in contrast, allowed human âsadism' to be exploited for criminal ends.
9
Turning to the specificity of Nazism, some of the experts insisted that the system had produced a new race of âmurderous schizoid robots' devoid of all emotions and normal intelligence,
10
while others claimed that the Nazi leaders displayed serious pathologies and great depravity, or that they had hatched a huge plot against the democracies.
In an article written in 1960, the Viennese psychoanalyst and former deportee Ernst Federn disagreed with the American psychiatrists and argued that, on the contrary, an analysis of the commandant of Auschwitz obviously showed that Hoess suffered not from a schizoid state, but from a âcompulsive character with an incapacity to form meaningful interpersonal relations; or a schizoid character with a schizophrenic core; or a character disturbance â as such people come to our family agencies and psychiatric clinics' (Federn 1986: 73).
11
Despite the importance of these eye-witness accounts, which are now a major historiographical source, all these approaches to Nazi criminality, which derive from positivist medicine and psychoanalysis, they are disconcertingly poor. Their major failing is that they attempt to prove that, if they could do such things, the authors of the Nazi genocide must, despite their apparent normality, have been psychopaths, mentally ill, pornographers, sexual deviants, drug addicts or neurotics. As a result, the representatives of French mental medicine, who insisted on describing Stalin as a paranoiac and Hitler as a hysteric with perverse and phobic tendencies, came up with the preposterous suggestion, at the famous Congress on Mental Hygiene (London 1948) that great statesmen should be given therapy in order to diminish their âaggressive instincts' and preserve world peace (Roudinesco 1990: 181).
