This course poses the question: what did psychoanalysis do to perversion? Drawing primarily on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, but also upon a range of associated legal, literary, philosophical and theological writings, the key problematics include: is perversion a coherent category? A useful category? What is the sense and reference of the category of perversion? Is it a category we should dispense with or continue to use? What does it enable us to do or not do, for better or for worse? How does the category of perversion bear upon the possibility of thinking itself? Each week will take up these questions from different perspectives, from the genealogical to the genetic, examining the vicissitudes of perversion across a range of case studies.
Course Schedule
Week 1: Scenes of European Perversion
What are the linguistic, legal, literary and theological roots of the category of perversion as it has developed over the past 2000 years or so? Why and where does it emerge? What behaviours does it seek to characterise or explain? The focus will be on St Augustine and Descartes, especially their doctrines and practices concerning the will, knowledge and belief.
Readings
- St Augustine, Confessions
- Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988.
- Descartes, Meditations
- Dollimore, Jonathan. ‘The cultural politics of perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault.’ Textual Practice. Vol. 4, No. 2 (1990), pp. 179-196.
Week 2: Scientia Sexualis
It is usually considered that the 19th century gave a new, decisive characterisation to the concept of perversion. In Michel Foucault’s very famous characterization of this development, it is the first time a science of sex is established; this science, moreover, doesn’t function according to the logic of repression, but by the incitation of confession. The focus here will be upon the claims of Foucault’s work itself, while also adverting to a range of 19th century psychiatric writings by figures such as Krafft-Ebing and others.
Readings
- Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality. Volume One. Trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Week 3: The Freudian Rift
As Arnold Davidson points out in an important essay, if Sigmund Freud inherits the concept of perversion from the great project of scientia sexualis, he immediately seems to undermine it as a consistent category. In making a distinction between the aim and the object of a drive, Freud undermines any presumptions that there may be any straightforward ‘natural’ object for such a drive; moreover, in doing so, Freud also generalises perversion to the point that it becomes a fundamental feature of species-being itself, the infamous ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the human infant. Yet why then continue to nominate this ‘perversity’ at all — given that, rather than denoting a divergence from a norm, it has itself become the norm?
Readings
- Davidson, Arnold I. ‘How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1987), pp. 252-277.
- Freud, Sigmund ‘Fetishism,’ 1927, Standard Edition, Vol. 21, pp. 147-158.
- ----------. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, Vol. 7, pp. 135-72.
Week 4: Lacan and the Vicissitudes of the Object
By means of an extraordinary ‘return to Freud,’ which takes the form of a close attention to Freud’s own blunders, Lacan notoriously reopens the question of the structures of psychopathology in their relation to language. His new account of repression and foreclosure, neurosis and psychosis, as expressing different kinds of relations (or non-relations) to language also raise the question of the object again in new ways. The object of psychoanalysis will become the object a as cause of desire — raising new questions about the relations of disavowal and sublimation in a general space of perversion..
Readings
- Lacan, Selections from the Seminars
- Mannoni, Octave. ‘I Know Well, but All the Same…’ in Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Žižek. Eds. Perversion and the Social Relation. Duke University Press, 2003. pp. 68-92.
- Valas, Patrick. ‘Freud et la perversion.’ Ornicar ? No. 39, oct-de (1986), pp. 9-50. (French)
- Zupancic, A. Disavowal. Cambridge: Polity, 2024.
Week 5: Perverts of Time: After Psychoanalysis
In the wake of psychoanalysis, the status of perversion has become extremely unclear: a genuine diagnosis? A slur? An affirmation? A marketing category? Can we even consider the sorts of acts, behaviours and desires that were once bundled together under this name — fetishism, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, and so on — comparable to each other, let alone compatible with each other? This final session will focus particularly — but by no means exclusively — on the work of Giorgio Agamben, who has consistently returned to a number of these categories to rethink them with a political edge.
Readings
- Agamben, G. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. R.L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993.
- Krips, Henry. Fetish: An Erotics of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
- Saketopolou, Avgi. Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: New York University Press, 2023.