Our Dark Side (20 page)

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 minorities
²⁵
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:

Contrary to what one might think, paedophilia has always been seen as a transgressive with perverse overtones,
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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.