Uses of Perversity: Commentary on Saketopoulou’s “To Suffer Pleasure”

Abstract

This commentary on Avgi Saketopoulou’s article develops her startling claim that sexual perversion may be psychically useful. It does so by elaborating the twin concepts of ébranlement (shattering) and enigmatic signifier that Saketopoulou derives from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche in order to consider an analogy between the work of perversion and the work of psychoanalysis. If sadomasochism holds a psychically transformative potential comparable to that of clinical analysis, then on what grounds should one practice be prioritized over the other?

Notes

¹ In “The Frozen Countenance of the Perversions” (Dean, 2008), I discuss at length how Lacanian psychoanalysts hold on to an invidious notion of sexual perversion against all reason and evidence. The principal culprits in this particular form of clinical atavism are Jacques-Alain Miller (1996) and his American disciple Bruce Fink (1997). In my view, Saketopoulou lets Žižek and associates off the hook too easily on the question of perversion (see Rothenberg, Foster, and Žižek, 2003).

² In “Punishing Parents,” Phillips (2013) tackles this issue from another angle by describing the relationship between parents and children as sadomasochistic (“Every child unconsciously believes that whatever else his parents are they are sadists; and every child, as a way of managing this unpalatable fact—and of sustaining his vital and vitalizing connection to the parents—has had to become, among many other things, a talented masochist” [p. 363]). Here sadomasochism is universalized as a developmental response to the asymmetrical power relations between parent and child rather than being seen as constitutive of sexuality’s ontology, as Saketopoulou has it. Phillips’s essay is highly illuminating, especially when read against Saketopoulou’s, yet I suspect that sadomasochism as a set of erotic practices holds greater transformative potential than he is prepared to concede.

³ There are various ways of describing what could be construed as Freud’s deconstruction of perversion but, in my view, the best account of this process is given in Davidson (2001). Nobus and Downing (2006) provide an excellent compendium of writing from various psychoanalytic schools on the topic of perversion and include a range of feminist, queer, and Foucault-inspired critical perspectives on the subject.

⁴ In “The Biopolitics of Pleasure” (Dean, 2012), I develop this distinction in terms of the bifurcation of pleasure into self-confirming and self-dismissing trajectories. Foucault’s (1978, 1985) late work on pleasure, in his History of Sexuality, has much to offer psychoanalytic thinking on this subject.

⁵ In Homos, Bersani (1995) formulates the point like this: “Psychoanalysis challenges us to imagine a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject—or, in other terms, to dissociate masochism from the death drive” (p. 99).

⁶ Appreciating Laplanche’s influence on Bersani entails acknowledging how it is not only the antirelational concept of shattering that has been important for him but also the relational possibilities initiated by the enigmatic signifier. This is most evident in Caravaggio’s Secrets, where Bersani and Dutoit (1998) lay out very clearly the enigmatic signifier’s conceptual priority for their rethinking of relationality.

⁷ Saketopoulou’s article is so rich and generative that it seems churlish to ask for more. Yet what I long for in psychoanalytic writing is a finer grained descriptive specificity about erotic acts in their full diversity, not least as a counterweight to the long tradition of pathologizing nonnormative sex—and to what often feels like a certain squeamishness about sex among contemporary clinicians.

⁸ In “Toward a New Perversion: Psychoanalysis,” Hoens (2006) engages this analogy from a Lacanian perspective, arguing that “the similarity between the analytic discourse and perversion … is striking and puzzling, but it is too often and too quickly dismissed as something that certainly cannot/should not be the case” (p. 98).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Dean

Tim Dean, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he is also a professor of English. He is the author or editor of six books, including Beyond Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Unlimited Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Porn Archives (Duke University Press, 2014).