To resume again...

The Worst Perversion
S
TUART SCHNEIDERMAN

In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

The Right Man And The Wrong Woman
R
ENATA SALECL

Getting Daddy Do It for You
R
ENA GRANT

4/sometimes murder
C
HRIS TYSH

Understudy
G
EORGE TYSH

Interview with
Jane Hammond

Interview with
David Salle


























        

To resume again...

 

Josefina Ayerza

Perversion — Pervertere — the word's etymology forwards ideas such as inversion, subversion, reversion...
Oscillation takes place between the barred subject in the signifying chain and its fading. A lethal movement, it conveys what the subject lacks as to think himself exhausted in its reflection, that is the unthinkable.
The case is that there is a hole. There is a hole and an oblivion. Yet in this blank, empty space, dwells a signifier. Consigned to oblivion, this signifier slides, escapes, calls on another, and this other one is never the right one. The neurotic loathes the void and therefore invades it with metaphors after metaphors, images after images, turning and re-turning around the hole. With the psychotic, why look for this signifier? Trampling over the mother's voice resounding, echoing, it drowns the hole out of all virtual sense, leaves nothing to be desired.
Furthermore, oscillation may be traced in drive; in its reversing drive turns back on itself. Thus the subject will become this object lost, forgotten, absence... The subject an absence, what else is there to the voyeur becoming but eyes? Whose eyes?
A splitting of the gaze — a time to look and a time to see — when one says "I see," this means one has stopped looking. Instead the voyeur will not "see," because he doesn't stop looking: the couple in the park makes love; the voyeur hiding behind the trees is looking, and he will continue to look till the couple discovering him, throws stones at him, insults him, runs away. Although the next day the voyeur will feel miserable, he wants the couple to find him, to harass him. Their neurotic fantasme awake — the voyeur, their eyes, an absence over an absence — may turn the couple into exhibitionists. In the same pattern the exhibitionist may make the neurotic into a voyeur.
Perverse, the hole in the structure embarrasses us, yet we lean on it: the fantasme arises in the real — there's no cleavage — it's all or nothing, the immediate. In the fantasme phrasing may include, "no..., without... " "No" obliging "without" brings about destitution, which is alienation. This subject barred, divided by jouissance, will unfold as the object cause of desire: <> a.
Perversion inverts the formula a <> , as will drive. But drive does not amount to perversion; rather it may play a part in it. Drive partakes of the analytic relation, which is an erotic relation. The analyst, a semblance of this object — a part body, the cause of desire — falls from it; so analysis ends.
As Slavoj Zizek
1 states, the perverse subject doesn't act for his jouissance, rather he assumes the role of the objet a in service of the Other qua-Supreme-Being-of-Evil. The split is thereby transposed onto the other, the victim. What differentiates the analyst from the perverse subject? The discourse being the same, the analyst emerges from the patient's split, but the analyst is not a sadist since he keeps the objet a empty. Although this empty object provides for the plus-de-jouissance arising in the Other, this jouissance, again mere semblance, does not reach the analyst. Furthermore this Other is not all — non supreme — thus the analyst undoubles, for he may in turn relate to the symbolic phallus.
In perversion the fantasme and reality become the same: Gilles de Rais
2 kills and gets killed. The mother had it, didn't have it; the fetishist covers the hole with the shoe, the curl, the piece of underwear, as much as Gilles de Rais covers it with his victim's blood. Stuart Schneiderman emphasizes Gilles de Rais getting a kind of blessing not only from his fellow men, but from the very parents of the victims. Perverse logic is phallic logic. Between being and having, yet from the side of being, artifice tricks the subject to the point of misrecognition on the part of its own desire as desire of the Other. Identified to the lack in the Other — the m/other — the perverse subject is enclosed in the representation of a non-symbolizable lack. How to articulate the relations between the Other of the signifier and the object falling from it? The subject's paradox, its alternating current over the object's absence, regains possible worlds through fiction, the myth of creativity, in the figure of Bluebeard.
Feminine perversion has its controversial side. Does motherhood redeem women? Rena Grant
3 will introduce the matter through the "stolen goods" contingency, more akin to women than men, thus structural in the figure of the kleptomaniac. Renata Salecl's4 article discusses feminine psychosis as it may be produced by default or by reflection.
In Seminar XI Lacan said that there' s no way to follow him without going through his signifiers, although this imports a sense of alienation which furthers one into the "certain difference," at the risk of loosing track. The use of jargon is a question in the US; how far can one go in its translation? Authors in this issue write the theory from different points of view.

 

 

Notes
1. Slavoj Zizek, "In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large," lacanian ink 6, p.25. back up
2. Stuart Schneiderman, "The Worst Perversion," lacanian ink 6, p.7. back up
3. Rena Grant, "Getting Daddy Do It for You," lacanian ink 6, p.55. back up
4. Renata Salecl, "The Right Man and the Wrong Woman," lacanian ink 6, p.43. back up

 


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