Our Dark Side (22 page)

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 hermaphrodites
⁴⁵
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):

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 transsexuals
⁴⁸
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):