In praise of perversion

Christophe started a thread at IPS by the above name. Following are some excerpts:

Christophe:

As part of my ITP Gold Star Shadow Module, I recently decided to study the meaning and non-meaning of Perversion in order to cleanse myself from any such dirty phantasmas, desires, dreams or anything else that has anything to do with this sick bastard crap shit called perversion. So I read a book, and watched a movie about said content to develop an opinion about it. The book being Janine Chasseguet-Smirguel's "Anatomy of human perversion" which gives a psychoanalytic account of the matter at hand. It was suprisingly boring to read this book. Only the original passages by "pervert"  artists (de Sade, Wilde, Carroll) provoked some bodily response in me (sic).

Lacan, as usual, gives a slightly different interpretation.


He (with Freud) describes the coming together of male and female, the presexual courtship, as drilling tunnels from two different directions: the males following the penetrating sexual drive, the female following the relational, narrational clearance. With Lacan, these two tunnels never meet in the middle: there's always a remainder. The only way to make the Loving Couple meet, is to bend the Law of the Father to create the short-circuit necessary for actualizing the sexual intercourse. This bending of the Law necessarily implies some form of perversion or another. Suffice it to say that for Lacan the normal healthy human being does not exist. We can only choose between more or less pathological coping strategies concerning the Real; all friction, no perfection.

theurj: (after a reference to the movie Caliga):

Loved Caligula. After seeing it with my date we immediately fucked and sucked in several perverse ways in her van right in the parking lot, making loud animal sounds to the chagin and delight of passersby. I have never outgrown polymorphous perversity. To the contrary, it has evolved in me. Like Trix it's not just for kids.

The thread reminds me of the “black swan” and “horror and spirituality” threads, in that the experience of “liberation” often comes in sundry forms outside the conventional norm. It seems almost necessary in fact to push the limits of our comfort zones to elicit such experience, unusual sex and drug abuse being the typical countercultural short-circuits. This post in particular seems to resonate here, with the ultimate perversion, suicide, being the most liberating of all.

kelamuni:

Interesting. This line: "Instead, the pervert phantasizes his own genital tool as being superior to the real genital Phallus of th Father. He must constantly convince himself and his surroundings that his feeling of superioriety is for real; the result is a certain pressure and defense mechanism against the truth... " This is what Korn's A.D.I.D.A.S is about, as revealed in the verses (lyrics 0:10 to 0:25 and 0:35- 0:50). Luv this tune. Here's another pertinent tune.

theurj:

Here are some snippets of de Sade's wikipedia entry. Sexual liberation goes hand in glove (yes, metaphor) with political liberation.*

Sade was in complete opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his "complete and continual denial of the right to property"...[and] his advocacy of a utopian socialist society.

Simone de Beauvoir... and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years.

One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behavior of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment. Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1966 essay "Kant avec Sade" that de Sade's ethics was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.

*
Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one your love honey
Love the one you're with

theurj:

I'm reminded of an Indian sweat lodge wherein I endured such extreme pain that I "transcended" into a blissful state. But without the extreme pain pushing past my tolerance I doubt I would have had that experience. Well, at least not without 1000 micrograms of LSD. Or perhaps a highly skilled blow job while pulling hard on her hair as she exclaims between gags: "Fuck my face and choke me!"

Related to my link above about suicidal apotheosis, and to perverse sexual practices like choking, death by auto-erotic asphyxiation is becoming more popular, or at least being reported more often, David Carradin being one of the more recent celebrity examples. "Yes grasshopper, the supreme moment of union with the universe is accomplished through our breath, or rather by the lack thereof."

As we and Frank Zappa knew only too well, catholic girls were the easiest and best lays in high school.*

There's nothing like a Catholic Girl
At the CYO when they learn to blow...

* Ok, and Jewish girls.