The Pervert's Manifesto

Citations of Epigraphs

By Michael Williams

 

The pervert is a master of — slave to — textuality and the series of metaphors and figures which decenter the literal and denotative dimensions of the signifying chain of signifiers, signifieds, and signs.  As a fetishist, the pervert makes meaning and garners pleasure in the substitution of les mots et les choses — props and costumes — in the place of the retroactively fabled maternal phallus.  The pervert recognizes the storied loss of the past — the mother — and the series of metaphors and figures which he substitutes for an imaginary plenitude.  Past looking, the pervert gestures and motions toward the syntagmatic explosion of the metaphors which happily strive to suture the wound of this loss.  Future looking, the pervert cites and notes an absence whose textualization — Praxis of the symbolization of the Real of sexual difference and the maternal totality — is mapped by the bricolage of the metaphors and figures of poetry and prose.

 

The pervert takes pleasure in textuality, and he enjoys the substitution of words for words, phrases for phrases, sentences for sentences, paragraphs for paragraphs, and bright presence for dreary negativity.  The structure of metaphor forces an identity between difference — “My love is like a red, red rose” of which “love” and “rose” are distinct and opposed signs.  The pervert gets off on the simultaneity of identity and difference.  He enjoys the parallactic overlap and gap of the speech and writing of symbolization.  The pervert’s jouissance is the pleasures of the differential repetition of citations.  The pervert is the figured persona of a thinking, being, and living of metaphor and its space and time of the slash and wound — and suture and swaddle — of the break between the word and its differed and delayed signification.  The pervert occupies the space in-between the past word and its future articulation — and the future word and its past articulation.  The Trieb of the pervert mobilizes toward the distant and veiled horizon — à venir — of the destined retroaction of this past (present) and present (past) and future (past, present), and beyond.  The willed citation of metaphor is the pervert’s alphabets, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on — of notes.

 

A set of cited epigraphs to a book is like the trailer for a full-length feature film.  The themes and motifs — but also plots, characters, twists, scripts, and surprises — are revealed in a few borrowed words which precede the text itself.  In this first chapter of this work, I want to introduce the central concerns and key matters of the book as a whole.  As a preview, I will unpack the various quotations with close readings in order to relate the brief citations to the intellectual breadth and depth of the project.  My hope is that such a preview, like a movie trailer, will tempt the audience to return to the theatre with an impression of the book which can only be enjoyed — money shot, included — for full price.

 

***

 

Is there no other solution besides the functional disturbance of neurosis and the spiritual outlet of sublimation?  Could there not be a third alternative which would be related not to the functional interdependence of the ego and the superego, but to the structural split between them?  And is not this the very alternative indicated by Freud under the name of perversion?

— Gilles Deleuze

 

To start, the first citation of the epigraph is by the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.  He presents a succinct and stark articulation of the decisive choice for the neurotic of psychoanalysis: either the symptomatic disruptions in conscious discourse of neurosis proper — such as the mysterious cough, the disturbing dream, the phantom limb, the slip of the tongue, the sexual frigidity, and the generalized set of pathological manifestations of the subject of narcissism, anxiety, and aggression — or the uneasy transition of neurotic sexual repression into the sublimational achievements of culture — such as this book.  Instead of pathology or success, of sickness or triumph, Deleuze names a third alternative which will be my object: perversion.As Deleuze says, neurosis is organized by the uncomfortable interdependence between the harsh conscience of the superego in conflict with an executive ego whose authority is under duress by the forces of instincts, morality, and the world.  In contrast, perversion invites a nuanced split between the ego and the superego.  This structural split is a process and activity which generates the perverse aesthetic and fetishistic sensibility.  The gap between superego and ego marks the perverse distance from neurosis as a psychical structure; both neurosis and perversion are distinct and opposed orientations toward selfhood and sociality.  The perverse split between ego/superego opens space to an Outside of the symptom which otherwise haunts the neurotic and the sad cycle of the repressed of desire and its return as symptom.  Deleuze says that the radiant alternative to traditional psychoanalytic suffering is the choice object of study: perversion.

 

Following my work in Pervert-Schizoid-woman (2016), I elaborate and evaluate perversion under my neologism, “Pervert-Schizoid-Woman.”  The pervert of the future displaces the harsh superego — but not as an unrecuperable riddance.  The third alternative to neurotic ego disturbances and achieved cultural sublimation is neither the one nor the other, neither sickness nor health — but both.  Our variant of perversion is itself a sublimation of disturbances.  Deleuze’s turn toward perversion invites a turn toward a thinking, being, and living which transcends the otherwise bedrock neurosis of the phallocentrism of the psychoanalytic playbook of diagnoses, of evaluation and treatment.

 

***

 

Now, each time the other is exactly the same as the subject, there is no other master than the absolute master, death.  But the slave requires a certain time to see that.  All because, like everyone else, he is much too happy being a slave.

— Jacques Lacan 

 

This next epigraph (of epigraphs), Lacan’s eerie discussion of slavery, gestures toward key concepts on the horizon of this book.  Like Lacan, I theorize a time in the future of what I refer to with my neologism of the “Spirit of the System” in which the other is exactly the same as the subject.  How is such sameness between the division of identity/difference possible for man, in either theory or practice?  The parallactic overlap of sameness between self and other is neither a continuity nor a coincidence between identity and difference.  Sameness is profoundly distinct from the diacritical and dialectical tension between identity/difference.  Lacan claims that at a certain theoretical and practical moment — not-yet, in time — the self and other emerge as a sameness, as exactly the same.  The division between identity and difference (A = A) is supplanted by a sameness which exceeds the Reason of the division between identity and difference.In this book, I refer to this peculiar sameness — neither equality nor inequality — with my neologism, “Sameness+.”  This Sameness+ is the suspended referent to the switches and swaps — metaphors and figures — in the system of signification (or value).  Any system (linguistic, economic, libidinal, and so on) whose final referent is the Sameness+ of identity and difference is the Outside qua system to the machinations of the general equivalent of the sign, currency, phallus, and father.

 

The objects of exchange — comparison and contrast — of (un)equalized signification (value) in a system of referenced Sameness+ are fundamentally singular because they cannot be reduced to a common substance of comparison and contrast.  The referent in linguistic exchange is the positive unity of the sign and its stabilization of the chaos of materiality and ideality in signifying relations.  The referent in economic exchange is currency and its quantification of quality. The referent in libidinal exchange is the phallus and its mediation of sexuality to the masculine parameters of size and visibility — penis against clitoris — in phallocentric sexual difference.  The referent in social exchange is the father and his exchange of jouissance and the body for désir and the ideal.At such a theoretical and practical point in the time of the future, the relationship between self and other will not be organized by hierarchy, privilege and disprivilege, or dominance and subordination.  Lacan says that upon the historical arrival of sameness, the only master will be the absolute master, death.  Rather than the mortal Hegelian battle to the death between mastery and slavery, a time will emerge in which the threat of death in the conflict between self and other, master and slave, will be displaced by the mortal confrontation with the absolute master — death.

 

This encounter with mortality — same skirmish — is the ends of the thinking, being, and living of all of the same slaves.  The urgent pursuit is the advent — presence — of this sameness.  At what historical moment will the supersession of identity/difference with Sameness+ become possible in Western civilization?  What ideological conditions are necessary for the arrival of a reconfiguration of identity/difference into an exact sameness and their confrontation the deferred absolute master, death?The work in this book will invent concepts and ideas which gesture toward this overthrow of subordination and dominance.  In this study, Sameness+ refers to oppositions like white/black, gay/straight, man/woman, penis/clitoris, neurosis/perversion, capitalism/communism, lack/plenitude, castration/fullness, and so on.  Lacan’s pivotal caveat to a Sameness+ between self and other is that the slave cannot fathom the recondite and paradoxical sameness between subjects within the extant symbolic order.  Later, at another time, the security of the absolute master, death, will become visible as the security of the future of man.  As Lacan makes clear, the slave (all of us) enjoy our slavery.  The slave’s idiotic jouissance is not simply of subordination.  Nor is the slave’s happiness an index of his proud self-reflection in the object of his labor.  Rather, contented slavery is the tendency of man to cheerfully suffer the structure of binary opposition which organizes the system of what I refer to in my neologism “$-ism.”  Binary logic is patterned into cognition, like the 1’s and 0’s of computer code.  Lacan’s point is that the slave needs time to intuit identity and difference — even a sober equality — as a sameness which is free of all mastery but the absolute master, death.  The slave needs time to unravel the elusive theory and practice of Sameness+.

 

My book is a contribution to the pedagogy of the slave, the master, and our relationship to subordination, domination, and a freed future whose only horizon is the necessity of the absolute master, death.  Soon, the mastery of domination/subordination will be supplanted by a happy submission to this absolute master, death, together.  Momentarily, only the promise of death and its beyond will rule as the master of the galaxy.  In this book, I claim that the neurotic suffers happy slavery and hierarchical binary; the schizoid intuits the Unreasonable Sameness+ in the universe; and the pervert writes the schizoid’s secret Unreason which is the alternative to the neurotic choices of repression and sublimation at the ends of death.  This book wills Thanatos or the Freudian death drive toward destruction and dispersal.  This destruction is the proviso of a utopian confederation of Eros.  Together, the slaves revel in a jamboree of a future selfhood and sociality — slavery and mastery — which supersedes the phallocentric and capitalist logics of comparison, contrast, and exchange.  A union of Eros is a thinking, being, and living which is the Outside of the general equivalent of calculation and evaluation by an arbitrary but conventionalized medium and criterion of exchange.  This Outside is the afterward of the “certain time” during which the slave trades slavery and mastery, identity and difference, for the exact sameness of a selfhood and sociality whose conflicts are not with each other but with the absolute master, death.

 

***

 

Something is missing describes the principle characteristic of the female genitals.

— Sigmund Freud

 

Psychoanalysis is noted for three conceptual tid-bits, mostly misinterpreted by critical commentators: first, the unconscious; second, the Oedipus complex; and third, castration.  The unconscious subverts self-certainty and self-knowledge; the Oedipus complex situates early sexual experiences as foundational to later developments in sickness and health; and castration names the peculiar axiom of patriarchy that “a man has a penis and a woman does not have a penis.”  Smack in the middle of Freud’s definitive work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he makes the massively consequential observation of female lack.  The discovery of sexual difference is momentous because it comprises the child’s first encounter with difference itself and its complex relationship to comparison, contrast, and exchange.  The principle constituent of thinking, being, and living in the world is difference: here/there, this/that, mine/yours, table/chair, over/under, and so on.  The graphic “/” which symbolizes the rift between objects in the system of signification is the metaphysical principle of difference.  This graphic “/” represents the general equivalent criteria of valuation which separates — compares and contrasts — the objects and mediates qualitative and quantitative exchange between the objects in opposition.  The figuration of identity/difference is the template for the binary oppositions in the system, such as white/black, gay/straight, man/woman, penis/clitoris, neurosis/perversion, capitalism/communism, lack/plenitude, castration/fullness, and so on.  A coherent understanding of difference is the proviso for proper comportment in the world.Freud’s observation that the child’s first engagement with this precept of earth and world is of specifically sexual (penis/not-penis) difference rends desire and sexuality the pivot around which all selfhood and sociality turns.

 

 In the book, I present close readings and innovative interpretations of the significance of Freud’s discovery.  Freud’s tidy reference to the Something is Missing of the clitoris in the quotation evades an identification of the curious object of the clitoris with the veiled object of the absence.  What is Missing?  Freud mishandles the theorization of any positive and essential definition of female genitalia — and female subjectivity tout court — over the course of the entirety of his career.  But Freud rightly demonstrates that castration and absence are the paradoxical scaffold of not only his entire theoretical project but also of Western civilization.  Phallocentrism — Something is Missing — is the basal proviso of Freud’s project.  Society’s phallocentrism — patriarchy — is the cardinal principle of Western civilization.  Freud discovered phallocentrism in the Western unconscious.  In a brief sketch, I can say at this juncture that Freud’s observation that Something is Missing is an occlusion of the gaze itself: who is looking?  A formal analysis of the figure/foreground relationship of the clitoris to the mise-en-scene of the female body isolates this Something is Missing.A positive and essential content — “what is a woman?” — enables Something — “dark continent” — to manifest from the negative emptiness of the otherwise obscured clitoris.  For Freud, the peculiar and unimagined presence of the clitoris is invisible, but the positivization of such absence would make it possible to compare, contrast, and exchange the Something is Missing (clitoris) with the Nothing is Missing (penis).  The clitoris is the Something is Missing — but only from the perspective of the masculine phallocentrism of the patriarchal worldview.  The clitoris is itself the not of not-penis, and the woman herself is the not of not-man.  The woman is Nothingness, and she is symbolized in the order as the space and time of death.  The woman is the Outside of the symbolic order and the regime of general equivalence, and she is situated in the unimaginable postcapitalist space and time of plenitude, abundance, and Nothing is Missing.

 

***

 

It is impossible to leave a closed space simply by taking up a position merely outside it, either in its exterior or its profundity; so long as this outside of profundity remains its outside or profundity, they still belong to that circle, so that closed space, as its ‘repetition’ in its other-than-itself.  Not the repetition but the non-repetition of this space is the way out of this circle; the sole theoretically sound flight — which is precisely not a flight, which is always committed to what it is fleeing from, but the radical foundation of a new space, a new problematic which allows the real problem to be posed, the problem misrecognized in the recognition structure in which it is ideologically posed.

 

— Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar

 

The Marxist critics, Althusser and Balibar, write of a “closed circle.”  This enclosure is transcended in order to posit anew questions and problematics.  These political issues and concerns are otherwise obviated from this “closed circle” of doxa.  The circle is a tautological form of Reason.  As such, a conclusion is deduced even before the articulation of the question.  Any new question to be posed cannot be expressed from within the circle of ideology.  This “closed circle” deters intellectual meditation on new political vexations which are otherwise obscured by the extant ideological system.  The methodological strain for Althusser and Balibar’s speculative project is an articulation of the relationship between the ideological space of the “closed circle” and its Outside.This (Marxist) Outside is an advance space in which political theories and practices can be posed and returned from outside of the coordinates of the dominant system of ideology.  The Outside must be a profound exteriorized break from the abstractions, idealizations, and conceptualizations of the closed ideological space from which the critic flees. The Outside nurtures new questions, presumptions, vocabularies, and conclusions.

 

Beyond the “closed circle” is a space in which alternative frameworks for otherwise voiceless passions can be granted grievance.  Outside of the “closed space” is a respite from the onerous project of the ontology of Being — “what is?”  The sheer craziness of this Outside is intuited as madness from the ideological edifice of the circle of doxa.  The Marxist critic enforces a “radical foundation,” as the authors say, for this new space and intellectual meditations on issues which are considered Unreasonable — incoherent as questions, slurred as answers — from the space of doxa.Like Althusser and Balibar’s project to flee the closed space of ideology and to found an alternative set of theoretical coordinates, my book destructures the tradition of thought in humanism toward the will of an antihumanist and posthumanist selfhood and sociality.  This project is structured by a critical flee from the “closed space” toward an innovate Outside wherein the theorization of alternative problems and issues can be posed with an invented set of vocabulary.  The project considers the work of Marx on capitalism, Freud on sexual difference, and Derrida on the sign — in order to found an Outside — the pervert and his aesthetic of general equivalence and the singularity of the object.  My critique of the “closed circle” enables the world to violently found an Outside within which man’s questions may be posed, troubled, and answered from the attitude of perversity.

 

***

 

Dialectics gives expression to a law which is felt in all grades of consciousness and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of dialectic.  We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being, and turn suddenly into its opposite.

— G.W.F Hegel

 

 Hegel’s dialectic is a notoriously complex and nuanced concept.  The inelegant triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis includes the key word for the elevation of the clash and conflict of Geist to its higher order of organization: the German word, Aufhebung.  This word is generally translated variously as synthesis, elevation, sublation, absorption, cancellation, reversal, resolution, nullification, and removal.  The signification of revolution in Hegel’s system (and in Marx’s dialectical materialism) is shockingly unsettled.  In the citation, Hegel says that dialectic “expresses” contradiction and reversal.  The dialectic as a logic and process has a series of cognitive, experiential, and affective consequences for man and world.  Dialectics (which is a word which dates back to the philosophies of the ancient Greeks) presents and evinces in man and world, and in all generalities and particularities of the life of the mind and spirit.  But this simultaneous generality and precision makes it burdensome to note the visible manifestations of the twists and turns of dialectics as an organization precept of the ontological order of the world.My work elaborates a perverse analysis and response to the extant system of neurosis and general equivalence.  I closely read the deconstructive interpretation of the symbolic and the Real in order to explicate the schizophrenic order of the world.  This system of $-ism is profoundly dialectical in its twists and reversals.  As a talented pervert, I symbolize these dialectical inversions.  Over the course of the book, I demonstrate that subject and sociality are the flips and twists that Hegel’s dialectic of Geist makes visible to man in the order of the world and its epistemology, ethics, and ontology.  Hegel describes the finite (what is at its limit) as both capricious and impermanent.  As such, this principle must “surrender,” in Hegel’s word, to its opposite.

 

As I will demonstrate in my interpretation of both Derridean structure and function and Marxist accumulation and commodification, I will claim a paradoxical (in)finity in which the precise infinity of the system is its simultaneous condition as finity.  I focus on Freudian displacements and condensations in the parallactic gaps of words, and I show that these metonymical and metaphorical movements rend continuous and coincident the otherwise incongruous and discordant.My crucial deviation from Hegel’s dialectics is that whereas dialectics posits a “surrender” from thesis to antithesis — and the prestidigous necromancy of the nebulous Aufhebung —  my own work of perverse diacritics conceives of the battle of forces and wills within and between opposites as a resistance to a final totalization in Absolute Knowledge.  Following Derrida, the system cannot be closed, the structure cannot be totalized, and history cannot be ended.  There is always an Other — a messianic not-yet — which promises to displace and undo the otherwise strict closure of the galaxy.  The futural Spirit of the System can only be a contingent approximation of a hope for the future whose essence is further condensation and displacement unto yet unimagined futures which cannot yet be spoken or written.  Dialectics indicates that Being and Nothingness are violently and paradoxically intertwined.  In the words of phallocentrism, the Something is Missing of the absent clitoris is inextricably extimate to the Nothing is Missing of the present penis.

 

***

 

That there is a nonhuman aspect of language is a perennial awareness from which we cannot escape, because language does things which are so radically out of our control that they cannot be assimilated to the human at all, against which one fights constantly.

— Paul de Man

 

Paul de Man, the Yale deconstructionist, offers a quick riff on language.  He posits an opposition between the sign and the human, and between language and reference.  De Man claims that there is a specifically inhuman dimension to what is otherwise considered the quintessential of the human.  If the human is evolutionarily distinguished as the animal of the signifier, then the human is at some discomfort with his own nature.  Man is at a disequilibrium with his own essence.  De Man’s bit beseeches the question of man: what is man? — and why is he at discordance with himself and his essential faculty?  In my study, I critique the traditional version of humanism and its customary theory of the sign.  I pose alternative versions of a perverse antihumanism and posthumanism.  These post-enlightenment and anti-$-istic critical discourses promise a uniquely perverted version of the signifier.  This reinvented theory of language not only specifies from within Reason the acutely Unreasonable precepts of our essence as animals of the signifier but it also facilitates a renewed negotiation of the otherwise schizophrenic structure of the discrepant nature.De Man rightly notes that the scandal of the sign is that it is man’s medium and instrument, yet it is also strictly beyond man’s own authority and mastery.  Rather than the speaker of the word, the word speaks man.

 

For my study, I inquire about the theoretical and practical consequences of the displacement of man from the center of the structure by the signifier of discourse.  Freudianly, Wo Es war, where subject was, there shall word come to be.  If the God-term of the structuralist galaxy is no longer man but the sign, then what is the role, in practice and theory, of a man who is no longer the animal of the signifier but signifier of the animal?  This book explains this unconscious displacement of the ego of man.  I hypothesize positive consequences of the mastery of the signifier and the slavery of man.  Crucially, what is man after the sign?  Our tired effort to conquer the signifier must be supplanted by a will to submit to the absolute master, the death of man and the writerly author and the birth of the signifier and the readerly word.Unexpectedly, the mastery of the signifier will free man of the miseries of the Judeo-Christian ethics of humanism: intention, agency, will, authority, responsibility, and on.  We need only meditate on the ur-dream of Western civilization, Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection in the dream book (1900), in which Freud discovers that the fundamental desire of Western man is to be free of responsibility — to be beyond good and evil and the capitalist debtor/creditor relationship of moralist exchange and obligation.  The dominance of the sign will release man from the sickness of the morality of responsibility in the Western world.  The inhuman mastery of the sign displaces man from the center.  But such slavery to the power of words invites man to renounce the slavery of morality unto a future of an as as-yet ethics of selfhood and sociality.

 

***

 

I’m the end of the family line.

— Morrissey

 

In his song, “End of the Family Line,” the singer-songwriter, Morrissey, quietly announces that he is the end of the family line.  These words publicly announce not his own personal choice and individual destiny but of a violent attack on the family line and the heteronormativity of reproductive futurity.  Morrissey sets his voice against legacy, tradition, and continuity as a system.  To be the end of the family line suggests that lineage and legacy are finite and restricted.  There is a telos from start to end.  Morrissey is the final gizmo on the line of personal and social production.  The extant mode of production of the family will end and a new system of invention will displace the tedium of legacy, tradition, and continuity.  A configuration will arrive which is the Outside to the heteronormative family and the reproductions toward the future.  The line of the tradition will wither, and the zigzag of the newfangled will issue.

 

This book performs a break between the old and the new, the tradition and the novel, and the conservative and the progressive.  My critique of humanist $-ism and its transition toward the play land of perversion marks the end of the family line of man and the Becoming of the messianic tout autre of the not-yet.  This messianic arrival of the Other only be reborn in the ashes of the end of the family line.  What is the responsibility of this last man — Morrissey — as the final widget to arrive off of the conveyer belt in the happy accidents and tortured contingencies of his life toward the last breath of humanism and its antiquated man?  The futural death of the neurotic and his scattered ashes must be swept up into the glorious futures of the pervert and his sisters and brothers.  My work is a pedagogy of perversion.  The book instructs the simple neurotic in the talents and techniques — futures — of the Pervert-Schizoid-woman.  The end of the family line is the start of the — Other.  The dying last breath of man is the living first exhalation of the pervert.

 

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

— John Keats

 

The Romantic poet, John Keats, presents a brief dismissal of allegory — with reason.  Keats illuminates the terrible tedium of the pretentious edifications and ironies of such tropes.  Allegory involves lessons, pedagogies, points of view, agendas, and ironies.  Allegory involves a development of maturity in which the allegorist is ahead of his pupil, the writer is master of his reader, and the teacher is sovereign of the student.  The underlings — pupils, readers, students, slaves, workers, and the daft and sincere — can only anxiously strive to meet the mastery of the despotic masters of words and punctuation.  The allegorist foray into intentions, premeditations, and calculations calculates a carefully crafted design of storytelling.Keats mentions the tense talent to detect allegory and the secret communiqué.  This coded message from the other secretes a clandestine forethought and afterthought which can only breed what contemporary psychoanalysis would refer to as “delusions of reference.”  About me?

 

In allegorical storytelling, the subject and the object of the discourse are disordered and blurred.  There is a displacement in writer, reader, characters, and various thirds.  In contrast to the amnesiac unconscious and its haphazard significations which delight man with their unexpected punctuations, allegory mobilizes a displacement of writer and reader by techniques of the worst sort of humanist excesses: motivation, intention, will, agency, authority, control, responsibility, and so on.  An allegorist enforces a perspective and scheme with requisite snide irony and pretentious sardonicism.  Allegory is a trope which disengages from the free play of the signifier in the unconscious in favor of an aggressive return to the steely defense of the ego.At age, Keats remarks, he detected the presence of allegory at which point he renounced it as not worthy of attention.  The vexed talent to detect allegory manages to catch flares and flames which could otherwise escape the radar of readers whose passions are focused on the surprise of the unconscious rather than the devious intentions of an aggressive ego.  Keats finally disregards allegory with a caution and wariness.  My project displaces the postured airs of allegory with a jouissance.  The pervert’s ecstasy rips reference from sign — the precise reverse of allegory’s will to tether word to subject.  Perverse écriture wants to deviously split sign from reference, language from man.  The pervert splits world from earth in order to joyfully suture each other to each other because we are finally ruptured from ourselves.

 

***

 

Sex is boring.

— Michel Foucault

 

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, makes the audacious claim that “sex is boring.”  The plainly bizarre but also surprisingly veracious comment entreats a meditation on his work on the history of sexuality (1975) and the distinction between “sex” and “sexuality.”  As a critical genealogist, Foucault understands sexuality as node around which the relations of institutional power and expert knowledge circulate.  The effect of these vectors of force is constitution and assembly.  This production — rather than repression — of “sexuality” involves apparatuses of normalization, classification, organization, evaluation, structuration, separation, judgment, and so on.  The subject of “sexuality” — heterosexual, gay, bisexual, pervert, necrophilic, pedophile, hysteric, sado-masochist, polyamorous, gender queer, trans, and so on — is reduced to a pure object of power/knowledge of psychologists, social workers, sexologists, therapists, police, judges, doctors, nurses, scientists, police, wardens, and so on.Far from the liberation or freedom of “sex,” “sexuality” is the application of the powers of subordination on subjectivity qua objectivity.  This objectification of subjectivity and subjectivization of objectivity are a peculiar philosophical space between phenomenology and structuralism.  The twist of Foucault’s studies is that such subordination of/to “sexuality” is distinct from a repression of “sex” because the repressed can only be properly interpreted as the “repressed.”  The “repressed” is a word whose external constitution belies that its ostensible internal spontaneity is in fact an external imposition — a “repression” as effect of discourse rather than a repression as cause of an agent.  This “repression” is an assembled invention of a humanist intervention by power/knowledge which posits a negative deposit in the unconscious in order to liberate a positive identity.  The analyst hides the rabbit in the hat only to magically pull it out from its ears in a mystical emancipation from a repression whose reference is simply “repression” itself.

 

In contrast to Freud’s idea of repression, Foucault views “sexuality” as the genealogical ends of a social and historical series of twists and turns of discourse.  The uneven shenanigans of the apparatuses of the human sciences render man an object who daftly mistakes himself for a subject.  The subject is padlocked to an objecthood which is paradoxically the condition of its own emancipation.  Foucault’s historicist studies — on prisons, hospitals, science, sexuality, ideology, and so on — are of fascination to a lay and academic readership whose cheery cynicism enjoys the discursive deception of a subordination of man which masquerades as the means of his freedom.The crucial illumination in these studies of sexuality (et al.) is the sheer jouissance of subordination and objecthood.  Man takes pleasure in the exchange of the humanist tropes of will and agency for the posthumanist tropes of effect and deed.  Not only have we never been human, but we are happy in our alienation of the impossible Western ideals of the individual.  The famous “spirals of power and pleasure,” as he says in the first volume (1975) of his study of sexuality, refers to the magnificent allure of the complexities and unpredictabilities of production (“repression”) of sexuality.  For Foucault, “sex” is the measly minor effect of a colorful process and radiant apparatus of the arts and sciences of the self.  Any “sex” is the absent center of an array of glorious talents and triumphant techniques which make sex a boredom to be endlessly deferred.  Foucault says that “sex” is boring, but “sexuality” is an art of the details and erotics whose orgasm is forever deferred.

 

***

 

I am very sorry if I have caused any offense.  It was a poor choice of costume.

— Prince Harry

 

Prince Harry’s witty apology for the unauthorized photographs of his debauchery at a party in London reminds us of the significant difference between costume and body, thread and skin, and manifest and latent.  The “offense” caused by the Prince’s “poor choice of costume” was focused not only on the public display of the naked Royal body but also on the chaste boundary between thread and flesh.  Harry’s witty rejoinder that his naked body was itself a “costume” bespeaks the tenuous border between the body and its fabric, the secret and the veil, and the latent and the manifest.  Can anyone deny that thread is sexier than flesh, and that clothes are sexier than bodies?  We are all fetishists now: making love to J.Crew indigo denim, having sex with Banana Republic collared plain shirts, touching and tasting Frye leather boots, licking and cuddling with Club Monaco cashmere, and so on.

 

Harry’s wit uncovers the uneasy truth of the relationship between the veil of fabric and the nakedness of torso: the body cannot be shown.  The body is itself fabric and thread.  Harry’s body is a veil and a simulation of itself.  The latent is already the manifest.  The body is (un)masked.  Soma is both costume and flesh, both thread and physique, both fabric and flesh.The pervert’s fetish illuminates Harry’s rejoinder to public criticism of his “costume.”  A “poor choice of costume” for the unveil of the Royal naked body is a superior defense of fetishism.  The fetish is an (un)veil which both reveals and hides the object of desire.  The pervert’s fascination is neither the objet petit a nor the manipulation of desire for the object.  Rather, like Harry, the pervert demonstrates that the naked body is always already costumed.  For this reason, the body is strictly unavailable to touch.  There is no body, only the “poor choice of costume,” which in this instance is costumed nakedness.  The prudish uproar over Prince Harry’s debauchery missed the central point of his “costume” — the costume was already a fetish whose veil is both the mask of das Ding and the guard against its flaccidity in visibility.  Thankfully, the Prince wore his costume, but his detractors failed to intuit its peculiar latent content: the veiled itself.

 

***

 

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody’s got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died.

— Leonard Cohen

 

In his song, “Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen imagines the possibility of an Hegelian Absolute Knowledge.  This telos at the End of History is a time in which “Everybody Knows.”  Everybody now knows — the desires of the people, the truths of the society, and the entirety of the ontological of that which is as such.  The Hegelian system in which “Everybody Knows” is a closed chain of signification.  The subject is encircled by a series of common references and identical experiences.  The first lyric in the cited stanza that everybody knows is “the boat is leaking.”  This simple metaphor recalls lack and loss and the Something is Missing of the clitoris around which phallocentrism and capitalism encircle in the narcissisms and aggressions of castration and the scarcity and supply/demand dynamics of exchange.The next lyric mentions the captain who, we can agree, certainly “lied.”  But the precise essence of this fib is in question.  In this study, I will examine the pervert’s fetish which involves a (dis)simulation of knowledge.  Perverse disavowal enables this captain of the fetish to both acknowledge and deny a quantum superpositional perspectivalism which outlines a manifest lie.  This fib is generated by its simultaneity with its other.  The lie is not a lie, and it may be hazarded that the boat is not leaking.  The schizophrenic economy of the system is such that the captain may have lied — but only in order to tell the truth.  The boat may be leaking the Something is Missing.  The lack and castration of the Real hole in the symbolic is the essence of the system as such.

 

The next lyric about the “broken feeling” amidst the leak and the lie refers to man’s affective response to an Oedipal subjectivity which suffers its life and death in the wake of the Something is Missing of a leaky boat and a deceptive captain.  The artful brilliance of the pervert’s curious approach to sexual difference and castration illuminates that the lie of the leak speaks the truth of the future of the system.  For the neurotic, the boat is leaking and the captain lied.  This speaks the neurotic’s truth and its repressed which is structured by the reality principle.  In contrast, the pervert disavows — acknowledges and denies — in a creative approach to reality.  For the pervert, the boat is not leaking and the captain’s lie is a (dis)simulation of the freedom and necessity of a castration in the system.  This (dis)simulated castration is the proviso of the (mal)function of $-ism.  But the system certainly leaks, the father surely lied about its dysfunction, the rest of us patently feel unease, and all of us feel like our father or, as Cohen says, our dog, just died.

 

The explicit metaphorical note on which the lyric ends — “like their father or their dog just died” — returns to the title of the song: “Everybody Knows.”  The system of $-ism may be plain and simple, like Dupin’s note.  For sure, Everybody Knows.  Everybody knows the truth of the system: that the boat is leaking, that the captain lied, that we’ve got this broken feeling, like our father or our dog just died.  We know, Everybody knows.  The question is: why has this knowledge of the radical glitch in the system been disguised by us.  Why have we concealed our own truth?  Why doesn’t everybody know what everybody already knows?  My book endeavors to understand the strange blindness to our gaze.  Everybody knows — but why not?

 

***

 

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

— Oscar Wilde

 

I include the citation from the writer and wit, Oscar Wilde, on utopia because the horizon of my project is the creative design of the pervert’s playhouse.  My critique of the extant system facilitates the imagination of an alternative future of the tout autre .  This messiah will arrive as the deferred not-yet goal of the aim(less) will of the über-man’s Trieb.  Wilde resists an explicit description of utopia.  The happy utopic future cannot be identified in the mire of the present.  Utopia is a stand-in or a prop-for the Something is Missing in the system on the map of the world.   For Freud, the woman’s castration is the proviso of the man’s presence and positivity, but also narcissistic and anxious protection of his private property of the penis.  For Wilde, utopia can be viewed as the Something is Missing in a system of which it is already included.  The Something is Missing is simultaneously the Everything is Present.Theoretically and practically, utopia is a paradoxical absence of the Nothing is Missing.  The absence of utopia disappears upon its presence.  The parallactic trick is that this utopia of Nothing is Missing is coincident and continuous with the Something is Present of the system of $-ism.  Man’s dystopia is always already utopia, capitalism is always already communism, $-ism is always already the future.

 

This Unreasonable parallactic logic indexes the strict transcendence of utopia to any metaphysics of presence.  Utopia can only be a tout autre of the future in the present.  Utopia is a messianism of the present.  But why are the neurotic subjects of $-ism blind to this coincidence, of the overlap between past and present and future?Utopia beckons from a future that will only retroactively (Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s après-coup) become present in a future which emerges after utopia.  The contemporary moment is a present suspension of past and future in which the superposition is a parallactic overlap of dystopia and utopia, and capitalism and communism.  Wilde says that a map of the world without utopia is not worth a glance.  A map of the world must include the place of utopia — why?  Otherwise, the land mass of the world would be fixed, eternal, and stable in an economy of Something is Missing.  Utopia is the constitutive absent center of a fallen world.

 

The pervert and his future are present in their absence amidst the proviso of the deferred arrival of this utopia.  I am already writing utopia, and you have already this book.The paradox is that the world and its map can only imagine an absence of this absolute presence.  The world is structured by a Something is Missing of adulthood rather than the Nothing is Missing of childhood — in which Everything is Present.  This book shows that this utopia is present even in its absence.  As Wilde says, man is always “landing” at utopia.  I show the parallactic coincidence between $-ism and perverse futurity, between neurotic and pervert, between Something is Missing and Nothing is Missing, and between capitalism and communism.  Humanity lands at the utopia of the future in the present of this utopia.  Spatially, man is where he is not.  Temporally, man is when he is not.  Life is here, in space, where it is not.  Life is when, in time, when it is not.  Man is dislocated and decentered in time and space.  The self is where it is except in its space.  The self is when it is except in its time.  Man is the Outside of space, and he is the Outside of time.  The horizon of this work is to show that space and time are split.  In an expansive universe, time space displaces and time disperses.

 

***

 

The destructuring has just as little the negative sense of disburdening ourselves of the ontological tradition.  On the contrary, it should stake out the positive possibilities of the tradition, and that always means to fix its boundaries.

— Martin Heidegger

 

The work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, is considered the philosophical forerunner to deconstruction.  From the Black Forest, Heidegger innovated what he referred to as “destruction” (or destruktion, in the German).  This philosophical strategy returned philosophy to the profundity of the ontological question: What is?  The ontological question about the essence of objecthood is a presupposition of any further philosophical inquiry.  The ontological question is nearly primitive.  Heidegger powerfully demonstrates that in this primeval moment of conceptual and practical evolution it is impossible to even pose — let alone answer — the ontological question of essence: What is?  At our primitive historical moment in the early 21st century, the question and answer of the essence of an object is differed and deferred in the traces and chains of a discursive expansion in space and time which is beyond any conclusive Being or presence of what is as such.In this study, I illuminate the effect of the ontological necessity to put Being under erasure.  The radical destabilization of such splits wreck the extant symbolic order.  The limits of ontology chop words to smithereens.  But Heidegger also emphasizes the positive possibilities of the destruction of the ontological tradition.  Rather than a principally negative project of dismantlement and disfigurement, Heidegger enunciates an affirmative project whose effort is to fix and isolate the boundaries and borders of an emergent ontology.

 

My project pursues such work.  I spend considerable exegesis in a critical appraisal of the extant system of the psychoanalytic complication of phallocentrism, the deconstructive disruption of the sign, and the Marxist critique of capitalism.  But this labor of the negative is redemptively supplemented by the invention of the positive — what I discover in the figuration of the pervert.  The virtue of a critique of the extant system ($-ism) is to clear space for the assembly of an alternative infrastructure.  The positive work involves a network of cultural relations and social systems whose novelty for the future supplants the tradition of the past.  But both past and future are necessary — ontologically overlapped — as the proviso for opening scope from the past in order to establish coordinates for fixed boundaries and isolated division for the invention of the future.  A crucial caveat in Heidegger’s work is that a radical departure from the tradition is unlikely and even unwise.  The system is strict and necessary.  My passion as a pervert wills the wholly other — an effort that the late Derrida entreats — but I also settle for the delay of the à venir system.  Delay will be suspended.  But this is not reason to renounce the pursuit of the trace of this Other.

 

***

 

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

— Luigi Pirandello

 

Finally, the Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandello, speaks words about authorship and its born characters.  This illustrates my own relationship to the master signifier of this text: principally, the figuration of the pervert.  This conceptual persona anchors this study.  Certainly, I speak the pervert as author of this book.  But the pervert also speaks the author (and the reader) because the pervert’s words and wills escape the authority of this writer.  Pirandello notes characters who are alive before their author.  An author (writer) stands at a distance from his animate characters whose colorful and flamboyant selves present their aesthetics and sensibilities to the gaze of the writer.  The other valence of this statement is that the character is alive temporally antecedent (before) their author.  The character gives birth to the writer rather than the reverse.  Usually, we consider a primary author and his toil which gives birth to characters.  The animation of these characters is the veiled effect of the author.However, for Pirandello and for the work in this book, I will illuminate the lines of flight of the Deleuzean conceptual personae and the Lacanian master signifiers — traversals which escape beyond this writer’s motives and intents.  The exquisite charm of invention is that novelty takes on a life of its own.  Apart and without but also retroactively generative of the author himself.  Pirandello’s characters certainly enjoy a freedom which releases them from the will of the author and his designs and schemes.  At a relief, the author relaxes and simply follows, as Pirandello suggests, these characters in words, actions, and situations.  Not only are the characters exterior and removed from the author but they are liberated from the constraints of the author’s purposes.

 

The remarkable image that Pirandello presents isolates a tension between the autonomy of the character in his words, actions, and situations and the motive of the author who ostensibly follows these conceptual personae, master signifiers, and characters inside and outside of the text.  The characters pursue various conversations, actions, conflicts, plots, and so on.  Broadly, the tension can be conceived between the internal and the external, between the inside and the outside, and between the individual and the society.  Pirandello emphasizes the freedom of the characters and their pursuit of actions in contrast to the gaze of the author whose role is mostly undefined.  This model liberates the character as object from the author as subject.  The conceptual personae and master signifiers pursue their situations and plots, and the author enjoys a view from a distance.  Yet, undoubtedly, these characters are also objects — written and spoken.  As genealogical constructionism indicates, the subject is transformed into an object.  The subject is an effect of discourse, a product of institution, an object of desire, a design of knowledge, and so on.  Pirandello’s quick quip illuminates the paradoxical conundrum of a series of objects who nonetheless enjoy an unleashed freedom to speak their own words, take their own actions, and choose their own situations.  Pirandello asks us: how does the object speak?In my theoretical commitment to the antihumanist and posthumanist death of the author, I elevate man to a mute object of ontology.  If such is the current moment of a primitive humanity, then a evanescent image of a deed who does must — rather than a deed done by a doer — be welcomed by those of us who desire a peculiar hybridity of a pure objecthood of jouissance.  To close these riffs of bricolage, I want to say that the themes that I have mapped out in this aperture to the book will reappear in veiled metaphors and obscured figures — but I am pleased to introduce my book with the stolen words of others.  As I will make clear in the book, words are not themselves, ideas are not private property, concepts are not identical to themselves, and a written text can only be iterated if it reappears a second time around.