Lacan's Cruelty
Book review of Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion Beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic
I’m pleased to share my book review of Meera Lee’s new edited collection of essays entitled Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion Beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic, a modified version of this review will be out soon with the Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society journal. The book is a wide-ranging introduction to Lacan’s teachings on perversion over the course of his oeuvre,1 and it is published with the Palgrave Lacan series, which also published my first book on the family. After reading each essay carefully, I believe this book marks an important contribution to Lacanian studies because the text manages to cut to the root of the perverse structure; the authors isolate Lacan’s important reflections and insights into perversion finally making them coherent.
In what follows, I want to lay out the argument of this book for the purpose of systematizing this very complex concept and structure. First, an overview of the main essays: it includes essays on Lacan’s theory of perversion and contemporary queer theory by Frédéric Baitinger, a rich discussion on Lacan and Derrida on cruelty by Jean-Michel Rabaté, an analysis of the Marquis de Sade by Gregg Lambert, as well as a brilliant clinical analysis of perversion that cuts to the heart of the perverse structure in Tracy McNulty’s “The Anxiety at the Heart of Perverse Experience: A Clinical Perspective.” Meera Lee’s essay in the collection, “Perversion After Freud: From the Cruel Father to the Joycean Clinic,” describes the ways that Lacan modifies his theory of perversion after he turns to the later period of Seminar XX and the “Joycean Clinic.” A short piece, “‘The Pornography of His Eyes’: A Vignette of Perversion” by Derek Hook and Benjamin Strosberg presents an interesting case study of perversion based not on a clinical observation but from a prison education context. Stephanie Swales’s essay “Neoliberalism and Liminality: Perverse Cruelties in the Age of the Capitalist Discourse” considers the way that Lacan’s notions of the capitalist discourse generate perverse effects in social life.
My objective in this review is threefold: 1) I begin by incorporating the various insights across these essays into a clear breakdown of Lacan’s clinical point of view regarding perversion; 2) I invoke the philosophical lessons of perversion through the Marquis de Sade and Kantian ethics with a particular focus on how Lacan helps us understand what is distinct about perversion and how it relates to capitalist dynamics; and 3) I provide an analysis of perversion in social and political life based on these essays and briefly discuss how the concept of perversion changes in Lacan’s later work based on Lee’s important essay on the concept of perversion in Lacan’s later teaching.
What is Perversion?
In its most general structural form, we can already intimate the important link that perversion has to social and political issues given that perversion involves resistance to normalization, i.e., the perverse act is a form of protesting social norms. This fundamental insight links the perverse structure, at least in a homologous form, to a type of social protest, which makes perversion a sort of sister to the other structure of revolt in psychoanalysis, namely hysteria. But unlike hysteria, which protests a master while concealing a secret dependence on that master, the pervert resists the other, while concealing a secret dependence on the mother. But before we understand the way the Oedipal relation is structured in perversion, we must understand the most basic fact that the pervert castrates the other by making the other into a fetish. Lacan will famously make his mark on the psychoanalytic understanding of perversion by pinpointing this logic of converting the other into a fetish, by showing how this is equivalent to turning oneself into an instrument of the other’s enjoyment. Additionally, Lacan will argue that “fetishist disavowal” is the main mechanism at work in perversion. Fetishist disavowal is a type of resistance that covers over reality in the very repetition of what it disavows and what is disavowed in perversion is castration.
Perversion is one among the three primary structures—neurosis, psychosis, perversion—and each has a distinct type of negation in Lacan’s analysis: the neurotic represses, the psychotic forecloses, and the pervert disavows. In the act of castrating the other, which can come through the gaze of the pervert or through more blatant sexual acts, the pervert resists their own castration. This means that the pervert enacts castration on the other by making themselves into the instrument of the other’s jouissance, and this reduces the other to a pure fetish. But if the other is reduced to a fetish in perversion, why is there a disavowal of the other? As Tracy McNulty shows in her essay in this volume, the disavowal at work in perversion originates from the pervert’s attempt to demonstrate to the mother that she is not castrated, i.e., it is a demonstration that the pervert’s jouissance need not be limited by or dependent upon the desire of another person. Perversion thus addresses an other that is bound up within the structure of the Oedipal drama, situated between the mother and the father, a point that Lacan insisted upon throughout his career against many psychoanalysts who insisted that perversion constitutes a pre-Oedipal regression.
Lacan showed that perversion is bound up with the Oedipal drama as it involves a fundamental disavowal of castration, specifically the desire of the father. As McNulty puts it, the desire of the pervert’s eventual partner (the father), but also their own desire, is what is disavowed, and this makes the pervert subordinated to the script of the mother’s desire, or to the signifier of the mother’s desire as the cause of their subordination. Now that we have located the heart of the logic of disavowal, what drives the disavowal mechanism to repeat? Why does the pervert repeat this instrumentalizing operation on the other’s jouissance? McNulty convincingly shows that it is anxiety over jouissance, defined here not only as enjoyment but also as any bodily or emotional response that exceeds the subject’s control, that is the beating pulse of the repetition at stake in perversion. This explains the vignette from Derek Hook in this volume of the prisoner who turned everything he saw with his gaze into a fetish and thus initiated the instrumentalizing everywhere he turned. Perversion becomes a strategy for coping with the repetition of monstrous forms of jouissance that haunt the body.
How does Lacan think the sexual act at stake in perversion wherein the two most common forms, either sadistic acts onto the other, or masochistic acts onto oneself? One would think that because perversion entails an instrumentalizing of the other’s jouissance, that all perverse acts are fundamentally sadistic, however, Lacan complicates this assumption. He argues that in the sexual act the pervert makes themselves into the objet a, or the object cause of desire, and this happens through the fantasy of an undivided sexual union. By reducing the other to a fetish object, the pervert castrates the other in order not to face the consequences of their own castration, and this has the consequence that the pervert manages to merge both the being and having of the phallus.
From the Clinical to the Philosophical: The Importance of the Marquis de Sade
To explore the social and philosophical underpinning of perversion we must begin with the godfather of libertinism in modernity, the Marquis de Sade. As a nineteenth century French libertine republican who wrote libertine novels that depicted sexual sadism, de Sade became one of the most widely read authors of subsequent sexual libertines and various avant garde movements. In Gregg Lambert’s essay on de Sade, “Rights of Jouissance,” Lacan’s famous seminar “Kant avec Sade” from Seminar VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis is given greater historical context. We learn that the Marquis de Sade likely read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason while imprisoned in the Bastille prior to the French Revolution. This is important background and context because de Sade promoted a social order wherein the universal basis of the social contract of the French Republic be flipped on its head such that the rights to free enjoyment of sexual pleasures and bodies is converted to a universal right of all.
In his analysis of de Sade’s political writings, Lacan develops the counterintuitive insight that Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy—in which reason is now brought into a status that is independent of sense empiricism—is inverted by de Sade into a new conception of the moral law of society. Whereas the ancient moral philosophies of the stoics and the cynics located the primary conflict between reason and the sensibility in the inhibition of one’s own bodily pleasures and displeasures, modern morality after Kant directs this conflict toward the view that each person must be subjugated by a pure will (p. 71). What de Sade reveals about the post-Kantian situation is that citizens can no longer privately enjoy their own well-being as was the case with the stoic conception of happiness as self-sufficiency or what Freud might call secondary narcissism.
Kant’s Copernican revolution and his notion of the categorical imperative, namely that people should act in a way that they would want others to act in similar circumstances, is importantly detethered from the empirical situation of the political community. In other words, it is the abstract moral law, not one’s good sense or personal experience that grounds this process. And this has the effect of making the moral law into what Lacan calls an impossible real or “pure waste.” It is this precise pure waste of the moral law that de Sade inverts in his libertine and perverse social contract, i.e., it is the empirical and pleasure-based stakes of the actual social situation that swaps out the universal moral law. But Lacan says that both systems produce the same result for the subject! This is why Lacan remarks that it is Kant with Sade, it is not Kant and Sade. In both systems of social contract, it is the moral law itself that is affirmed in each person committing to an imperative, which at the level of desire, has the same outcome.
But there is a difference between de Sade and Kant, namely that the social link is absent from the Kantian community, because the truth of the community is founded on an “impossible real” of the moral law (p. 121). As a pervert, de Sade formulates a complete inversion of Kant’s impossible real by introducing a moral law that does what Kant’s cannot do; namely, castrate the other. This means that de Sade achieves the social link that Kant was unable to achieve by repurposing Kant’s categorical imperative by applying the perverse structure directly to the social contract. It also means that de Sade’s community proves the same meta-psychological point as Freud develops in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, namely that there exists no natural rapport between pleasure and any conception of the social good. Lambert sums up the stakes well when he writes that Lacan’s fundamental insight in his text, “Kant avec Sade” is that,
the Sadean moral universe is no less moral than the Kantian one, since both are conditioned by the concept of freedom and equality of all reasonable beings, given that sexual satisfaction is no longer determined as a private end of the individual, but rather as the necessary and universal good of the community. In the end, the only difference between the Kantian maxim of the moral law of monogamy and the Sadean maxim of universal jouissance is the principle of law that guarantees the right over another’s individual’s body as the will of the community. (p. 79)
Lacan insists that de Sade was not a sadist but a masochist because perversion for de Sade was not about the pleasure taken in cruelty, but about a submission to the law of the mother’s desire that gives rise to a “morality of strict obedience” wherein the moral law becomes based on the maxim that, “we must enjoy, it’s an obligation.” We can thus see the Marquis de Sade through a more classic Oedipal lens (we remember that Lacan insists that perversion be analyzed as housed within an Oedipal desiring system). Like any pervert, de Sade aimed to demonstrate to the mother that she is not castrated and that her jouissance need not be limited by or dependent upon the desire of another person, and this is the structure of the moral law that de Sade inverts from Kant.
Tracy McNulty makes the interesting observation that when de Sade asked to be buried, he insisted it be an unmarked grave with acorns spread over it so that his memory will completely disappear and fuse with mother nature. The final victory of the pervert is the refusal of castration to the end. Lacan concludes that de Sade achieves the Kantian universal moral law even though he upends Kant’s restrictions on pleasure and empirical motivations as grounding of the categorical imperative that is to govern society; and in this way de Sade, like Kant retains a non-pathological account of the moral law. What de Sade shows is that the right is not to pleasure but it is to jouissance. As Lee aptly summarizes the lesson of Sadean ethics:
Sadean ethics ultimately illustrates the impossibility of the real insofar as the lawless legislation engenders jouissance in excess. The real emerges precisely from the impossibility of the actualization of the Sadean fantasy, which is to say, it is not that the real itself is impossible, but it comes from the impossible. (p. 121)
Social and Linguistic Valences of Perversion: New Insights
Lacan only discusses perversion in Seminar VII and Seminar XXIII and in his written text “Kant with Sade,” but he never developed a focused seminar on the structure, and yet implicit in his teachings are a series of highly novel insights into perversion. Meera Lee proposes that Lacan identifies a desexualized form of perversion that can be isolated at the level of language rather than at the level of sexuality. Lacan reverses Freud’s claim that sadism and masochism are separate phenomena by arguing that they are both two sides of the same coin (p. 113). More precisely, Lacan argues that if the superego is sadistic and the ego is masochistic, the universal moral law is itself perverse in structure. This means that perversion is inscribed into the law, a law that erases or destroys itself beyond the pleasure principle, and this is where de Sade with Kant becomes so central. To reiterate, Lacan argued that de Sade proves that the law is indexed to the real that is sustained by both the symbolic cause (or form of law) and the imaginary fulfillment of fantasy, aimed towards the “right to jouissance.” What de Sade reveals in Lacan’s synthetic analysis of Kant is, as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, that “this voice is not nobody’s. It is the very same voice as the voice of the drives. That is, it is the voice of the sadistic superego. It is the voice of the devilish characters” (p. 119). Lee writes:
Lacan’s construction of perversion in his reading of Sade is predicated on the voice with an empty reference outside the signifying chain whereby the symbolic is foreclosed, a thesis he did not articulate in his essay in “Kant with Sade” until much later in his late conceptualization of the Name-of-the-Father in the sinthome. In this sense, perversion, I maintain, is structured at the level of the equivocation of speaking and not at the level of the obscenity of sexuality. Simply put, perversion is in the Joycean clinic, appearing as a symptom. (p. 126)
Overall, Lee’s essay marks one of the most important pieces in the book as her work presents a compelling analysis of how the later Lacan, in his turn to the Joycean clinic incorporates a completely new understanding of perversion, one in which perversion is even more bound up with the structure of desire as such.
Stephanie Swales’s essay “Neoliberalism and Liminality: Perverse Cruelties in the Age of the Capitalist Discourse” introduces several compelling ideas on perversion and new directions in understanding Lacan’s famous notion of the “fifth” capitalist discourse. Let us first start by noting the striking fact that, for Marx, fetishism is the primary logic of a society subordinated to commodity exchange according to Marx in Capital, Volumes I, II and III. For Marx, fetishism entails a veiling procedure in which the subject has a core of their reality covered over as an effect of the logic of exchange value eroding domains of social life. For example, in a lesser-known reflection on fetishism in Capital, Volume III under the section entitled, the “Trinity Formula,” Marx describes how classes, from the capitalist class to the wage laboring class to the property-owning class, each form fetishist perspectives that prevent their accessing the way that the system of capitalism is interlinked.
Thus, for Marx, capitalist social life generates a particular form of value through the act of exchange that obscures the interconnectedness of the system and prevents subjects from grasping the totality of the system. Capitalism erodes social life, reducing social relations to objectified and “thing-like” or fetishist exchanges. In Marx’s notions of commodity fetishism, there is a veiling that occurs in the act of commodity exchange, and a fetish process that conceals the socially necessary labor time embedded in the production of each commodity. This fetish process creates conditions in which other domains of social life outside the market exchange of commodities become subordinated to the same thing-like form of abstraction. At issue in what is veiled in this fetish relation is the true source of value in labor time that the exchange relation covers over to the agents in capitalist society. This makes the problem of value in capitalism into what Marx calls a hieroglyph, or an obscure symbol.
Lacan’s reflections on the capitalist discourse extend Marx’s insights into the logic of commodity fetishism, by showing how in this discourse, the subject is left bereft of resolving their split subjectivity because what is offered for the resolution of the more constitutive basis of subjectivity is a commodity form. The capitalist discourse is one in which a divided subject addresses the market for a solution to their division, and the market provides a solution in the form of a commodity, but this solution only produces a surplus enjoyment while at the same time foreclosing the question of the subject’s division (desire) thus recirculating surplus enjoyment back onto the subject like a game of roulette.
This process leaves the subject in a “liminal” state in which their experience is subjected to constant states of becoming, and Swales argues that this produces an unanswered guilt over the inevitable failure to reach and maintain the status of authentically enjoying and reinventing oneself. But the liminal state that capitalism leaves subjects in perpetuates cruelty because it has found a way around the non-rapport of the sexual relation, i.e., castration is rendered defective in the capitalist discourse. The subject is left with their own “rights to jouissance,” but this right is converted into an end-in-itself, and this creates a distinct form of guilt in which the subject is not permitted to process their lack, which adds a certain pressure on the liminal self, and this pressure is only accelerated because the lack in the other is disavowed. With ample examples of the perfecting of this process in which negative externalities are removed from the subject’s experience, Swales shows that liminality has bred a situation in which the subject is left with only their surplus jouissance to remediate their lacking condition. This creates pervasive feelings of guilt and although Swales does not mention it, there proliferate pervasive feelings of shame, that affect Lacan referred to as most indicative of the capitalist discourse.
Swales’s essay clearly shows how contemporary capitalism has in many ways become more insidious in its capacity to punish its subjects in these perverse ways; and how our era is far different from the sort of capitalism Lacan wrote about in the 1970s. Today’s capitalism has created what Swales calls a “commanded jouissance” in which commodification has eroded domains of personal life and this process, she notes,
does nothing to set limits on the drive—in fact, it does quite the opposite—contemporary subjects suffer its perverse cruelties through the transgression of the pleasure principle at the level of jouissance, linking jouissance to the cruel superego object a in the position of a surplus jouissance. (p. 196)
The liminal being is one who takes the neoliberal dictate “to thine own jouissance be true” seriously, and they thus put a high value on the constant innovation that enables standing out amongst rivals, and endlessly striving for a better, more authentically enjoying self. What we are dealing with is a cultural process of self-making that leads to anxiety ridden subjects who experience interior lives of guilt and shame and who feel the loss of desire, which is characteristic of a society in which they are encouraged to enjoy only their surplus jouissance.
Conclusion
Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a valuable contribution for a new generation of Lacanian scholarship. They manage to transcend much of the exegetical ambiguity in Lacan’s conceptions of perversion and thus open the possibility for clearer social, cultural, and political analysis utilizing Lacan’s insights into perversion. This is no small feat given that Lacan’s commentary on perversion is sparse throughout his oeuvre and given that scholars have spilled so much ink attempting to discern what Lacan meant in his various discussions on perversion. Lee’s collection of essays have helped us reach a new level of clarity on the topic, which is laudable.
Lee, Meera Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion Beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic Palgrave Lacan Series, 2011 Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland pp. 224, $109.00. ISBN 978-3-031-06237-7. (all page number citations reference Lacan’s Cruelty).