In popular culture today, everyone knows what a pervert looks like. It is clear from literature, television, social media and so on that perversion consists of nothing more than a subjective, personal mode of enjoyment. As the pervert assumes a position of political power – think of the popular image of the emperor Caligula, for example, or Shakespeare’s Richard III, or President Frank Underwood in the Netflix drama series House of Cards – we see that their perversion is thus mostly interpreted via the leader’s personal pathology, which seemingly has nothing to do with structural causes. To be more precise, the political pervert’s perversion is understood as a pure excess that deranges or decomposes the supposedly ‘normal’ functioning of power and, more precisely, of the democratic social order. However, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis has taught us that perversion is a much more ambiguous phenomenon, and one that is actually based on a structural and strictly ‘non-personal’ enjoyment. If the popular (and populist) idea of the pervert in power is usually the cruel and sadistic despot who wields absolute power for their own personal pleasure, for example, the Lacanian pervert instead assumes the role of the bureaucrat, professional or even the executioner, who coldly, carefully and meticulously performs their assigned task or mission allegedly without any enjoyment whatsoever. In this more specialised sense, perversion may represent a productive point of entry into the question of what forms contemporary power takes, how it works and why we acquiesce or submit to its authority.
It is only necessary to return to the early Lacan’s theory of perversity here to appreciate why perversion can never be reduced to a simple exception to, or deviation from, some alleged (libidinal, social or political) ‘norm’. As he argues in Seminar I, for instance, perversion ‘is not simply an aberration in relation to social criteria, an anomaly contrary to good morals, nor is it an atypicality according to natural criteria, namely that it more or less derogates from the reproductive finality of the sexual union,’ but rather it ‘is something else in its very structure’ (Lacan & Forrester, Citation1988, p. 221). To re-read this early claim with the benefit of hindsight, we can already find Lacan’s subsequent theory of perversion contained syllogistically here at the very beginning of the seminars: what perversion is ‘in its very structure’ will, of course, turn out to be nothing other than ‘structure’ itself. For Lacan, Freud’s theory of perversion can be more or less detached from its sexual content to become (together with neurosis and psychosis) one of three main clinical structures of subjectivity itself. In Lacan’s account, the pervert is famously characterised not by the pursuit of their own personal pleasure but by the operation of disavowal [Verleugnung] (and in particular the disavowal of castration by the father) which leads them to become the impersonal object or instrument of the other’s (in the first instance the mother’s) enjoyment.
To explore perversion and power today, then, we must move beyond a critique of power that primarily contents itself with observing and correcting power’s personal or subjective ‘abuses’ – which is to say the political leader’s enjoyment of power for its own sake – and instead address the real systemic violence that is presupposed by the wholly normal, professional functioning of power together with the systemic enjoyment generated by power’s own inner contradictions. It is precisely the ideology that ‘power is only good if nobody enjoys wielding it’ – which insists the powerful must sacrifice or renounce any personal enjoyment of power in order to serve some allegedly higher or more noble cause – that is the real core of political perversion in the contemporary moment. As Lacan famously claims, of course, a certain power still resides within the act of reducing oneself to the impotent instrument of the other and, more importantly, a surplus enjoyment still takes place even or especially within the personal renunciation of enjoyment. If what we might call ‘perverse politics today’ may thus seem antagonistic to the kind of right-wing political populism that now holds sway around the globe – whose leaders are all deemed to enjoy power too much, or to enjoy it in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons – it perhaps also paves the way for a different understanding of populism which moves beyond simple questions of personal morality, pathology or the shameless enjoyment by obscene populist leaders. In the figure of the populist leader, who allegedly enjoys power purely for themselves, we can nonetheless find a wholly other source of systemic and a-personal traumatic enjoyment.
In this special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research, we thus address the relationship between perversion and power – which is to say both the power of perversion and the perversion of power – in contemporary politics, philosophy and culture. It is our aim to explore the relation between power and perversion today from a range of theoretical perspectives including genealogy (Nietzsche, Foucault, Agamben), libidinal economy (Deleuze) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan and Žižek) and via a range of cultural material from the obscene figure of the populist leader to everyday voyeuristic or exhibitionist practices in social media, reality television shows and folklore incantations. To be sure, the contributions that follow are all very different but they are all predicated on the basic axiom that perversion is a structure (which is to say something irreducible to a personal style or pathology of individual perverts) that enables an insight into how power works today. Firstly, Arthur Bradley returns to Freud’s original theory of ‘perversion in general’ to re-imagine the field of sexual taxonomy from Krafft-Ebing to Foucault as itself a species of perversion. Aleš Bunta offers a new genealogy of Nietzsche’s famous or notorious claim that western civilisation does not so much preside over the abolition of cruelty as its internalisation or sublimation via Dostoevsky and Masoch. Agata Bielik-Robson re-casts Giorgio Agamben’s theological genealogy of modernity as a case study in biomorphic perversion whose privileged symptom is the fantasy of never being born. Adrian Johnston continues his revolutionary psychoanalytic reading of Marx’s historical materialism by re-imagining Marx’s little-known theory of interest-bearing capital as a species of Freudian screen memory that both reveals and conceals repressed material. Boštjan Nedoh reads the Chicago Police Department television series as a staging of the perverse self-instrumentalization of the subject to the logic of the superego whereby we preserve or uphold the law precisely by breaking it. Finally, Saša Babič furnishes a psychoanalytic critique of Slovenian folklore which argues that it reflects a fear, not of a particular object, but of an objectless fear itself. If this special issue seeks to move beyond the popular understanding of perverts and perversion in contemporary discourse in many ways, what follows can nonetheless be seen as a contribution to a growing body of literature that canvasses for a libidinal – and particularly perverse – account of the formation of modern social relations from Marx’s commodity fetishism (Tomšič, Citation2015) to the virtual forms of late capitalist modernity (Jameson, Citation1998). In its synthesis of political economy and libidinal economy, this special issue seeks neither to ‘psychoanalyze’ politics nor to ‘politicize’ psychoanalysis so much as to reveal the inhuman field of force that generate and sustain both: perversion.
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References
- Jameson, F. (1998). Cultural turn: Selected writings 1983–1998. Verso.
- Lacan, J., & Forrester, J. ( Trans.). (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 1: Freud’s papers on technique, 1953-4. Cambridge University Press.
- Tomšič, S. (2015). Capitalist unconscious: Marx and Lacan. Verso.