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

 

Each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life. As soon as one is fully developed, the next begins to form; after a struggle, long or short, it will eventually succeed its predecessor.

— George Simmel

 

Luigi Pirandello, the Italian playwright, 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 in an existential and textual antecedence to the 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.

 

The work in this book illuminates the lines of flight of the Deleuzean conceptual personae and the Lacanian master signifiers of my own invention. These characterological traversals escape beyond this writer’s motives and intents. The exquisite charm of invention is that novelty takes on a life of its own. These inventions zig and zag apart and without the author, but they also retroactively generate 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 as 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?”

 

George Simmel, the turn of the century German social theorist, writes about the transformation of social formations as a “struggle” between the antecedent and the subsequent. Simmel underscores a “struggle” among the avant, and the après. In this study, the same “forces of life,” as Simmel says, are at work in the passage from the same to the Other, and from the extant to the alternative. What are the “forces of life” in this text of a Manifesto? Mostly, these are the theoretical innovations in French and German thought in the last two centuries — deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. I wield these forces in interpretations and applications of such limit-thought in the text of The Pervert’s Manifesto. The work in this book articulates new social modes of thinking, being, and living. My labor also wants to present a theoretical foundation for such forces in everyday life. What social forces encourage the advent of an otherness for selfhood and sociality? Simmel’s view of practical and conceptual change is neither rigorously dialectical nor invitingly diacritical. But the citation illuminates the existential — “forces of life” — content in which past forms yield to novel modes. In The Pervert’s Manifesto, the overlap of this process is the object of the critique of $-ism and the innovation of the Pervert as the figuration of the subjectivity and sociality of the future. My aim is to account for the “gnawing,” as Simmel says, of the “forces of life.” I also want to chronicle the positive effects of the recession of past configurations in the emergence of new arrangements. This quotation from Simmel demonstrates the duality of such a project. Simmel’s words indicate the layered and integrative structure that such an endeavor requires. The Manifesto destroys the extant in order to stimulate the maverick.

 

The will of this chapter is to situate the murder and resurrection of man as it is critically outlined in The Pervert’s Manifesto within the context of an academic tradition and theoretical legacy. This philosophical mise-en-scène frames the work of ruin and rehabilitation which animates The Pervert’s Manifesto. The death of man is a protracted discussion. It has never been clear which necessary mechanisms are required for putting man to death. In this chapter, I endeavor to situate my own Manifesto within the efforts of other theorists and philosophers. These thinkers have experimented with the limit-thought of an existence in the absence of man. I research the experiment to imagine life after the disappearance of the subject. The happy wager of the Manifesto is that the advent of the Pervert will usher man toward an alternative subjectivity and sociality of the future. This deferred arrival absolves man of the guardianship of the anxious borders of the self and the other — my soul, your heart, my house, your job, my wife, your children, my ideas, your sadness, and so on within the economy of le propre. These various commitments and responsibilities will finally abate in favor of an Other-Logic.

 

This Other-Metaphysics promises that the stupid cycle of desire/transgression will be substituted with the perverse Trieb of an aim(less) wander around the objects of a light and amnesic pursuit. I begin the chapter with an academic contextualization of The Pervert’s Manifesto, especially in relationship to Deleuze, Nietzsche, Barthes, and Foucault. I will then turn my attention to a close theorization of the Pervert and his distinct orientation toward castration. Freud identifies this Something is Missing as the linchpin of the development of all of Western civilization. The Manifesto will claim that psychoanalysis reproduces a (homosexual) Peniscentrism. However, this concern with anatomical difference in a Peniscentrism precisely occludes phallocentrism. Peniscentrism is the proper corrective to phallocentrism.

 

Phallocentrism rightly troubles feminist critics of psychoanalysis. The Pervert disavows the sexual difference between the penis and the not-penis (clitoris). Yet, this simultaneous acknowledgment and denial sustains the penis at the cost of the imposed and enforced hierarchy of the general equivalent. The Pervert’s Peniscentrism fundamentally contests the phallocentrism that otherwise structures the respective trajectories of the castration complex for the female junior and the male junior. The Pervert’s aesthetic of disavowal opens toward unexpected and rebellious relationships between identity and difference and toward singularity. These rapports not only resist the self-same and the self-identical. In addition, perverse disavowal also subverts the imperative of coherent symbolization altogether. If the Pervert does not know what he already knows — “I know very well, but nevertheless” — then what does his talented écriture admit to the reader? Can the Pervert and his penises speak? If so, what does he (we, they) want to say in The Pervert’s Manifesto?

 

In this chapter, I situate the critical and inventive project of this Manifesto within the history of the discourses of antihumanism and the discussion of the “death of man.” I historically and intellectually position my work in order to contextualize the theoretical moves and critical gestures in the Manifesto. This chapter will also focus on the emergent configuration of the Pervert and the fetishist as the archetypal revolutionary configuration of an emergent selfhood and sociality. I name this conceptual persona as the Pervert. The Pervert is the character whose talent for (il)legible symbolization enables him to approach the profound Unreason of the schizoid’s secret truth. This Unreason is the object of the this text’s insight into the Madness of Order. Unreason is the essence of $-ism, but this madness is schizoidly repressed — rejet névrotique — by the system. The schizoid’s Unreason illuminates the mechanisms by which the extant symbolic order reproduces itself within and as its own dysfunction. The pathologized Pervert is usually condemned to prisons, asylums, shelters, and the streets. How is he to emerge as a talented textualist and a skilled hand of écriture? How will he pen our past, pencil our present, and phrase our future?

 

Penmanship requires a proper temporality. Lacan discusses a perverse temporal form of Becoming as not only important for indices of temporality. Lacan’s work also instructs about the fraught and complex identity of the subject. A first queer approach to the je is that it emerges from neither the past of “what was,” of the definite form, nor from the “what has been,” of the future tense. Rather, Lacan’s emphasis on the temporality of the constitution of the subject is the future anterior or futur antériur — of “what will have been.” This tense (also Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s après-coup) opens the Becoming of the past into the present — but also with necessary reference to the not-yet of the future. The perfect past tense implies that “what was” is complete and unified, an action in the past, its deed. This deed is past in its action and its actor. Psychoanalytically, the past can never be forgotten as either complete or unified. The past persists because the mnemonic traces of its significance in the psychical apparatus — the mystic writing pad or a history textbook — promises eruptions of this past into the present and the future. Perversely, “what was” is also “what is” and “what will be.” These temporal moments intersect and overlap in the present and the future. The emergence of the self from “what has been” involves a halt of Becoming into the Being of presence. The past is past in a broken link between the present and the future. In contrast, the future anterior — “what will have been” — more closely approximates the temporality of the Becoming of the subject. In psychoanalysis, it is the future which retroactively (Nachträglichkeit, après-coup) determines the past and its movement into the present. The past happens in the future. If the future is always not-yet, out-standing, and ever-deferred — if the future is always the future — then the past of what “will have been” never precisely Becomes into Being, whatsoever. The past and the present are suspended between an inconclusive past and a delayed future. The past and the present are undecided between the departure and arrival of the letter in the signifying chain. The past has not happened yet.

 

A Becoming refers to a peculiar form of masochistic waiting — what Deleuze refers to as “patient waiting” in his work on perversion (1967). Masochistic waiting is the effect of the temporality of Becoming in the suspension of presence. We wait — but why? Nothing has happened yet. The Becoming of the subject is situated in this space and time of Nothingness in which the past desperately emerges in a future which slips and slides from presence. This metaphysics of presence would otherwise retroactively mark (Lacan’s point de capiton) the present in the future with a stable signification. Identity can only be marked as Being (what is) from the retrospective glance of the future toward the past. The sight of this retrospective glance backward to return forward is occluded in the very temporality of Becoming in the tense of the future anterior. The consequence of these temporal shenanigans for the subject is the suspension of the ego between an indefinite past and an inconclusive future. The present is strictly undefined. The ontological question — “What is? — cannot be answered in either the present or the present of the past or the present of the future. There is no proper language of Being. There is a potential for an unexpected quota of freedom in such a Being. This modality of an atemporality is precisely indicated in Freud’s reference to the “timelessness” of the unconscious. The Becoming of identity and essence in a future which forever exceeds the point de capiton of presence is the Time of the Pervert and the Time of the Schizoid.

 

In psychoanalysis, the dream is a system which veils a repressed desire, wish, or truth. This symptom represents — metaphorizes — the return of the repressed of negated desires, wishes, and truths. These secrets have been castigated to the realm of the unconscious because they are a threat to the system of the conscious, the society, and the extant symbolic order. The purpose of an analytic interpretation is to translate the manifest lunacy of the symptom into a coherent discourse. Interpretation articulates the forbidden desire and the secret truth. The crazed figuration of the dream consists of the manifest images that we recall upon waking up from the dream. These peculiar figures present the threat of the truth in the kooky form of the symptom. The symptom is the veil of desire. Freud claims that crazy dreams are ultimately the most profound. Translation of the dream into the latent truth of the desire in the unconscious illuminates the madness of truth. The Pervert’s Manifesto insists that the revolutionaries remember that truth itself is present to the manifest order of the extant symbolic system only as Unreason. Properly interpreted and performed by the Pervert, this Unreason is rational and coherent.

 

The analyst witnesses the profundity of truth in the expression of craziness. Man knows that truth has emerged when it makes no sense to him. Truth may have the structure of a “fiction,” as Lacan notes, but it also has the structure of madness. Society can only understand truth as illness. The truth is not crazy because it is profound. Rather, the truth is profound because it is crazy. Truth can only be spoken from the asylum, and this is the reason that psychoanalysis is the privileged domain in which truth can be approached and realized. My job is to articulate this crazed Unreason as the latent truth of the Western system. The signifying chain is itself crazy. As such, the signifier is the most “profound” of illuminations for an analysis of the Madness of Order. The effort to find the craziness in the profundity is my perverse occupation in this book. The study of the Madness of Order may be an articulation of a generalized lunacy of the Western system. But it is also a gesture toward the Unreason which is internal to the Reason of the system.

 

The Unreasonable dream that Freud uncovers as the “royal road” to the unconscious must take a detour at Reason. Reason and its profundity are structurally internal to the craziness of the Unreason for which it distances itself. It is the (con)figuration of the Pervert who makes the transition between Reason and Unreason, profundity and craziness, possible for the neurotics of the culture. Madness is not that the patients are running the asylum. Rather, the profundity is that the doctors are running the asylum. This precisely indicates the simultaneous parallactic overlap of the cliché and its obverse. The joke is that the doctors are running the asylum. The proper response can only be: what else is new? The Pervert’s talent is to make Unreason reasonable for the neurotic subjects of a $-istic culture. These neurotics are yet to experience the “profundity,” as Freud lauds it in a word, of the “craziness,” as he says, of the dream. The doctors are running the asylum. What else is new? The gays are enjoying sex. What else is new? The threat of the eruption of the unconscious truth in the system of the conscious is easily visible. Unreason approaches Reason. In this proximity to madness, the mastery of Reason and its precepts, concepts, and logics cracks under the pressure of the profundity of an otherness. This alterity is not yet assimilated by and recuperated into the system of Reason. The unrecuperable surplus in deconstruction is the transcendental signified. The unassimilated excess in Marxism is the materiality of labor. The distant extra in psychoanalysis is the negativity of the clitoris. What else is new?

 

William Cole, the American politician, presents flippant and snide advice: “Someone should tell Germans about hyphens.” I refer to this wry quotation about German grammar because it signals the subversion of the proper in the project of this Manifesto. In the German language, speakers and writers enjoy the freedom to combine existent words into novel signs in the creation of new references for speakers and writers in the language. Creativity facilitates interconnection in the play of words and vocabularies. In translation into English, the process of the transference of one code into another is more difficult. The creative extensions of German vocabulary rend transcription an arduous task. The hyphenated German extends and subsumes various formalized signs into each other in connections of the unexpected. The translation of the fetishized hyphen in German speech can only be imperfectly illuminated for an English readership. Cole’s cheeky advice that the Germans be instructed about the hyphen is a minor dig from the perspective of other languages which do not enjoy such resignifying capacities in their arsenal. But the hyphen as an abstract symbol is instructive for this project of the Manifesto. The hyphen is a symbolic alternative to the ubiquitous backslash (/) which is au courant in the disciplines of theory, but the backslash (/) also demonstrates opposition and binary. These two opposed signs — - and / — are at a distance from each other in time and space. The hyphen and backslash are apart from each other in identity and essence. In my work, the effort is to transform hard and fast opposition (/) into light and amnesic difference (-).

 

Lacan transcribes many of his concepts into algebraic expressions. The lozenge (<>) well articulates the circuitous and recursive (counter)transferential relationship between patient and analyst. Lacan even claims that the $<>a model of the lozenge is the formula for Praxis. Such Praxis is the work of all concerted human action. Every gesture in the world is reducible to the abstract sign of <> between a split subject ($) whose symbolization approaches the Real of the object (a). This objet petit a evades capture in thinking, being, and living. The German hyphen (-) and the binary oppositional backslash (/) and the psychoanalytic lozenge (<>) — these symbols indicate that deeply complex relationships can be quickly and hastily summarized in accessible symbolization. These simple symbols can represent particular manifestations of identity, desire, and so on — but from within the pedagogical function of universal abstractions. Cole’s up-slap to the Germans is simply a friendly tease. The hyphen (- and / and <>, and so on) is a formalized and general mechanism for the articulation of concrete and specific theses. These abstract symbols (<>, $, a, /, and so on) are indications of sublimely unrepresentable systems of Unreason. This algebra articulates the basal impossibility of representation. These abstract notations disrepresent systems in which Being and presence are forever under erasure. Cole may otherwise intend is: someone should tell the Germans about the Real. Or — has the Real already been symbolized as its condition of return to the system? Are we already speaking the Real?

 

At the aperture of this chapter, I want to cite Lacan’s eery words about slavery that illuminate the Real of the Madness of Order and its deconstruction of identity/difference and the system of essence. Lacan says,

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.

Lacan’s words about identity, difference, sameness, and slavery invite a rethinking of the theoretical and practical orientation toward otherness. Lacan suggests that there is a moment — “now,” in the citation — in which the self and the other, and the subject and the object, approach an exact “sameness.” It is significant that Lacan resists reference to “identity” in his description of the approach of the self toward the other in this configuration of sameness. The word “identity” is the philosophical correlate to “difference.” Both of these words denote the speculative return to a totality. This totality elides an Outside to its internal organization. In contrast, the complementary word to “sameness” is “otherness.” An “otherness” designates alienation and division. This “otherness” is an exteriority which haunts the “sameness” as its deviant Outside. Lacan’s use of the words “exactly the same” to describe the relationship between the self and the other implicates a moment — “now,” as he says — in which the self and the other are entirely indistinguishable. At the same time, the subject and the object of “sameness” are unfixed in a totalization.

 

The other side of Lacan’s claim is that divisive otherness between subject and object is the source of the imaginary stage of narcissism and aggressivity. Lacan’s reference is to the Hegelian battle to the death in which one of the bodies, either master or slave to become, must submit to death. The imaginary scene is the brutal organization of interpersonal strife. Violence can be transcended by the authoritative but peaceful intervention of the mediatory third term of the symbolic order.

 

However, in this citation Lacan indicates that an approach to “sameness” between self and other alleviates the imaginary tensions of the duality of competitive specularity. As such, this “sameness” releases the subject and the object from domination and submission to each other. The only remnant of authority after the dissolution of the fictions of the imaginary ego is: death, the “absolute master,” as Lacan says. The first conundrum which besets a rearrangement of imaginary affairs is the crucial question: how is otherness reduced to sameness, and an “exact” sameness? Lacan claims that it takes a “certain time” for the slave to recognize this basal sameness between self and other. The uncomfortable reason for the persistence of imaginary strife is that the subject is “much too happy being a slave” within the symbolic order of combinatory pairs of privilege and disprivilege. The subject resists a turn toward the liberation from the master because of his enjoyment of his own subordination. Any transition from the domination of mastery and slavery toward a sameness will meet with the resistance of the happy slave. The horizonal image of death as the sole principle of mastery in the socius may be practically unimaginable. How would subjective engagement be organized in the absence of a foundational dynamic of domination and submission? The key to the dilemma is the joyful submission to domination. So it seems, the slave enjoys his subordination to a social mastery which exceeds the limits of death. This subject is the price for his happy “difference” — race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, nation, and so on. Any “exact sameness” which liberates man will take a “certain time” for the slave to recognize and even covet. But what is the source of the slave’s and our own extant cathexis to humanism?

 

This Manifesto begins with the dreamy insight — Marxist, in discipline — that the fundamental symptom which reigns over Western culture is $-ism (pronounced “SCHIZ/em”). $-ism is economic foreclosure. It refers to the exclusion of the population — almost seven billion men, women, children, and the rest of us by some estimates — from the money economy for lack of currency. It is a simple concept. Perhaps that is the reason that it has never been properly symbolized. However, $-ism symbolizes beyond economic foreclosure to include a series of Western values. These mores can be summarized in the French term le propre. The word le propre denotes the proper, property, ownership, possession, and mineness.

 

The symbolic coincidence between my deployment of $-ism for economic foreclosure and Lacan’s use of $ for the barred subject of desire is instructive. Both $-ism and $ involve this French term le propre. The word le propre has been popularized by Derrida in his critique of the Western philosophical system. This metaphysics divides concepts by the rule of the Logic of Identity. This is a system of ownership in which division structures the isolation of concepts from an otherwise confused imbrication with each other. Lacan designates an aneconomy of porous boundaries and permeable borders — and here and there and — as “extimacy.” The rule of $-ism in Western thinking, being, and living also represents the symptomatology of oedipality. These pathologies include narcissism, aggression, and anxiety. Such symptoms are uncovered in psychoanalytic theorization. The scene of identification in the imaginary register posits Gestalt totalities. The ego is bound and discrete. The ego is divided from its alter-ego. This gap incites the violent and desirous relationship of what Lacan names as “aggressivity.” Either the one or the other will dominate.

 

In addition, the symptom of $-ism is also a sinthome. The sinthome refers to the organizational center for the subject and the system. The rule of $-ism invisibly organizes the enjoyment of masculine idiotic jouissance. This jouissance is the paltry sum of pleasure which is accessible to those who live under the reign of $-ism. The scant division or “minimal difference,” as Zizek puts it, between the system and the symptom involves an elision which must be overcome. The Pervert’s Manifesto illuminates the system apart from the system “itself.” This work requires that the parallactic gap which divides the system from “itself” be theoretically and practically transcended. The truth of the system will be made visible. The system is $-ism, except that “is” or Being is an inadequate copula for the representation of this coincidence and overlap. This is the reason that the symptom and the latent/manifest division are invisible. system and $-ism — s and $ — are continuous. They are a parallactic gap as the “one” and the “same” structure: system and symptom. The perspectivalism of the observer determines whether this minor but vast (non)coincidence is illuminated. How does the Pervert see both/and, and the neurotic view either/or? What is the Pervert’s difference?

 

The rule of $-ism schizophrenically forecloses constructionism and relationality. The rule of $-ism is operative in effects on both the subjective and Spiritual dimensions. $-ism is also indicative of pathology on both the social and systemic levels. The critique of $-ism closes the gap between the system and “itself.” I must intuit and textualize s qua $-ism. The Manifesto does so in order to illuminate the coincidental overlap between the system and its underside. I want to make visible the gap which separates the system from “itself.” This project gestures beyond the economic foreclosure of discriminatory practices such as sexism, racism, and nationalism. Beyond these maladies, the Manifesto looks toward the revelation of a framework whose critique is informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and Marxism. Far from so-called “social constructions,” these are necessary and essential structures. These foundations organize the system which structures existence.

 

These spheres, the subjective and the objective, cannot be properly separated because the Spiritual is “extimate” — the internal-external or the external-internal — to the systemic. The division between the individual and society, or the subject and the Other, cannot be sustained as a problematic antinomy in need of tidy resolution. The rule of $-ism enforces the division between the Spirit and the system. The nefarious work of $-ism is to divide man and world into binary oppositional pairs. This structure understands man and world as separate and distinct. Yet, ontologically, man and world are conjoined and immersed. But it is also crucial to maintain the “minimal difference” between system and $-ism in order to reveal its coincidence as “itself.” This will to simultaneously open and close requires a psychical structure which intuitively opens and closes this gap. This clinical type is the perverse fetishist. The neurotic is the heir to $-istic thinking, being, and living. The economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership, possession, and mineness) frames and enables the worldview of the neurotic. Neurosis is the psychical structure which is organized by the system of $-ism. Perversity, schizophrenia, and femininity animate a field of alternative thinking, being, and living. This tout autre is the object of a pursuit which is outside of $-ism but from within this system itself. Other-Logic is transcendent of the violent mistakes of the $-istic framework.

 

The effort in the Manifesto is to indict the constitutive Madness of Order. Systematic craziness obscures the maximal coincidence and minimal noncoincidence of the system and $-ism. The “minimal difference” between s and $-ism is minor but vast. But my hope is that the revelation in The Pervert’s Manifesto of the Madness of Order will illuminate the dismal practices of $-ism. The clinical categories — neurosis, perversion, and psychosis — provide an evaluative criterion for the arrival of an elusive Pervert. This (con)figuration will eventually displace the order of $-ism. This pathological set of parameters organizes the schizophrenia of the structure. $-ism has heretofore never been symbolized in such a form. Why? — for the reason that it has already been symbolized as the system “itself.” This is the subtext of this book. The visibility of $-ism in this text reveals $-ism “itself.” $-ism is coincident with my own critique of le propre and the Madness of Order. This regime of private property is the fundamental symptom of the schizophrenia of the system.

 

The work of $-ism is to divide the subjective and the social, and the Spiritual and the systemic. It does this in order to sustain the regime of le propre which dominates Western politics, economics, and culture. The motive of $-ism is to enforce a schism of $-ism. This break is a breach and cut between entities and the world, including subject and society, and Spirit and system. The historical situation in which I write enforces the $-ism. This imposed $-ism is specifically the -ism, at the most foundational level of individuation and differentiation, and separation and exclusion. I must distinguish between levels of subject and society, on the one hand, and Spirit and system, on the other. I want to articulate a future in which those signifiers will be fused in a paradoxical totalization with neither closure nor end. This book’s discussion of the arrival of the future of the Pervert must itself be in order to become true to a future. This work heralds this horizon which has not yet manifest except as the latent thought of this text. The purpose of this work is a theorization of an alternative set of selves. I work to invent an outside to the violence of $-ism. This $-ism organizes Western culture. Any shift in subject and Spirit requires change in society and system. The fusion between subject and society, and Spirit and system, will be presupposed in this book but exaclty before its practical and theoretical appearance. Marx will be the mostly unspoken latent text of this book. The center of this text will be what I name as the Madness of Order. This madness<>order is the condition of possibility of the Becoming of the Pervert and the Becoming of an awesome Marxist future. The conscious discourse of deconstruction and psychoanalysis comprises the bulk of the text. These theoretical paradigms will be forever linked to the fundamental latent truth spoken under the name of Marx. But can Marx even speak if his words beckon beyond the system of signs of the general equivalence?

 

The Death of Man

 

The project to destructure man is an often attempted effort. But how does the hottie undo an unsexy concept such as “man”? This old man has already been deconstructed as his own condition of possibility. Such deconstruction of man has been a repetition of failure. How does the writer consolidate his text as either author or reader if such symbolization is the work of his “own” dismantlement? As writer and reader, we are suspended in an aporetic presence between a past (or a future) and a future (or a past) which is always out-standing, not-arrived, and not-yet. The past (future) happens in the future (past) — what Lacan designates as après-coup and what Freud isolates as Nachträglichkeit. The future (past) is forever deferred (part deux du différance). Man continues to actively wait for the future (past) to retroactively signify the past (future). Nothing has happened yet. We are still waiting for history, for an event to take (its) place. Who comes after the deconstruction of man if man himself has yet to happen? What is the object of critique if man has yet to appear in history? How is historicism possible if we — “who, we?” as Derrida asks — still ambivalently await the arrival of the past in the deferred future? What is the constituted object of genealogical inquiry if the object of such critical interrogation has yet to appear? There is no such das Ding as history. This oscillation in the suspension of the phallic function would otherwise halt — “No!” — the infinite (pro/re)gress of the signifying chain. This recursion emerges between a past becoming “itself” in a not-yet future and a future becoming the past in the will not have been of the past. These negativities endlessly unfurl without arche or destination. These knotty nots make the deconstruction of man both as yet impossibly unsteady and as ever completely done.

 

These questions about the death of man have been broached by thinkers of what has been named as the “antihuman” and the “posthuman.” These theoretical orientations and projects have persisted for decades, if not centuries. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written 1883, makes the explicit effort to will a sensibility beyond the petty resentments of the “individual.” I retread familiar theoretical territory in this Manifesto. But the crucial difference in my project is an original exegesis of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In my work, I am committed to an innovation of an otherwise to and elsewhere than subjectivity and sociality. It is appropriate to refer to several authors — Deleuze, Nietzsche, Barthes, and Foucault — who variously announce a death of man. This destructuration of the individual also catapults my efforts outside of the strict projects of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. A sufficient gesture toward those thinkers whose work contributes to the chorus of critiques of man and his symptoms is a necessary precondition of any analysis of man and the innovation of his future. A time will emerge — or a temporality will begin — in the future. But when? This time will herald an artistry which supplants the eyesores and symptoms of man with a new subject and society and a different Spirit and system. I must diagnose and renovate man — what Nietzsche wills in his efforts as a “philosopher-physician.” This investigation of the sickness of man is necessary for a reinvention of society. The empty signifier for this horizon and future in this Manifesto is the Becoming of the Pervert. The Pervert is the “master signifier.” Forms of perversion, schizophrenia, and femininity will emerge beyond a foreclosed madness that otherwise fetters man. As extant, the symbolic order minimizes the potential fiery fury of man. He is silenced as a stillborn neurotic of weakness. This infant is consigned to navigate a schizoid order. The system of $-ism has put the lion under the thumb of a mouse.

 

In theory, The Pervert’s Manifesto assumes that humanity as it is $-istically imagined and empirically practiced fosters a regrettable existence. This trauma is the conscious reality (ideology, fantasy) of life as it is experienced by most of us. Almost seven billion men, women, children, and the rest of us survive on less than ten dollars a day. This concretely demonstrates the massive cost of the economic foreclosure of the system of madness. This crazed economy of fabricated scarcity — material and psychical — precedes the Becoming of the Pervert. Other forms of violence of $-ism are based on the ideology of scarcity in capitalist economics and the protection of private property, and in castration anxiety in the trauma of sexual difference. These relations of le propre contain and constrain the wild potential of a man who would otherwise be unleashed from this divisive system. Man is the produced effect or manifest symptom of a bleak existence. A stale life is organized by the latent madness of the symbolic order. As a manifest representation of symptom, man is a disguised version of the truth of himself. The effort of this book is to make manifest the latent truth of this strange representation of — man.

 

Deleuze’s Nietzsche (1962) posits that “ressentiment, bad conscience and nihilism are not psychological traits but the foundation of the humanity in man” and that “the principle of human being as such.” Note that Deleuze’s summary of the Nietzschean critique of existence emphasizes “humanity.” Deleuze’s Nietzsche is the arch-critic of subject and Spirit rather than society and system. A diseased subjectivity and Spirituality of “humanity” is the foundational “principle” of “human being as such.” Deleuze’s Nietzsche intuits that the crux of the difficulty is the sour state of man. Man is an animal that Nietzsche wants desperately to redefine. Deleuze’s man or “human being as such” is essentially defined as dysfunctional. The radical “constructionism” of Nietzsche’s philosophy deplores the fictions of the symbolic order. The philosopher-physician’s efforts target a seemingly indestructible essence. This essentialism obstructs the invention of an Outside to the oppositions of morality, such as good and evil. Man is this animal of essence. But I emphasize the schizophrenia of the system rather than the sickness of man. This triaged man is merely the effect of the mad order. He is structured by a castration. Only the Pervert can contest this burdensome negativity in both theory and practice. The Pervert mobilizes the fury of the Unreason of her signifier against the staid domestication of the signifier in the sign. Deleuze’s Nietzsche seeks the overman. This other-than-human is the heir to a radically redefined system.

 

The Social and the Individual

 

Deleuze’s revision of the Nietzschean critique identifies a symptom of Nietzsche’s own work. This conceptual aporia is that the symptoms and problematics of the system are situated in the locus of the individual. This is so even if they are “not psychological traits.” The inscription of the responsibility of symptoms and problematics on the site of the individual demonstrates the dominance of le propre in Western thinking, being, and living. The individual is the $-istic anchor of an individualist morality. This moral system must be displaced by a social and systemic — diffuse and decentered — responsibility. The psychological may be unavoidably foundational. But such theorization organizes symptoms at the site of man. This mode of thought puts man at the center of the structure even in the very same gesture in which the constitution of man from the Outside is elaborated and affirmed.

 

Westerners have inherited a schizoid system. This psychosis is dominated by the individual as the origin of the world. Such presence is criticized by deconstructionists who otherwise rupture the concept of man. Deconstruction views man as a consequential effect of trace. Presence is also undermined by psychoanalysts who disperse the ego in the displaced locus of the Other. Psychoanlaysis intuits man as the effect of the desire of the Other. This decenterment is especially evident in Lacan’s work. He posits that the unconscious is equivalent to a signifying chain which is neither here nor there but beyond the metaphysics of presence. This deconstruction of presence mimes the decenterment of all of signification by the regime of discourse. The presence and origin of man are central principles of le propre as a system. The enforcement of private property divides the inside from the outside (self/other, man/woman, and so on) as simple and discrete oppositions. Binary terms invariably wage battle against each other: gay activists against homophobes, Christians against Muslims, liberals against conservatives, modernists against postmodernists, black activists against white supremacists, feminists against chauvinists, the sex police against me, and so on. Saussure describes this organization of binary opposition as a system of the sign (opposition, distinction, positivity) as opposed to the play of the signifier (difference, negativity). Man is the invention of a schizophrenic system within the signifying chain.

 

This system of meaning enforces the distinct separation of all of the objects in the structure. This system generates a general neurotic structure of repression and its return. The focus of this Manifesto is the Pervert and the psychotic who disrupt the Madness of Order. Oddly, it is the perverse fetishist and the sicko schizoid who diagnose the madness of the structure. It is no wonder that Marx theorizes “estrangement” and “alienation” as the key thematics of capitalist interpersonality. Humanism replaces theology in the post-Renaissance era. The consequence is the enforcement of an anthropocentric structure. This recenter of the structure is organized around man and his thinking, being, and living. This is the frame for Freud’s unconscious wish to be rid of humanist responsibility in the dream of Irma’s injection from the dream-book (1900). The post-Renaissance Western system is structured by and around man as the source of all meaning in the galaxy. The tropes of “mind,” “brain,” “neuron,” “genetics,” even “self” and “other,” mark man as the center of the structure. Yet, such popular tropes simultaneously decenter him as the foundation of this effort to center. It is difficult to find a galaxy without man.

 

Even Nietzsche’s work on the “will to power” is symptomatic of this humanism. But this central concept in Nietzsche is often misinterpreted as the return of vectors of force to a subject as opposed to a restoration of force to the signifying chain itself. The croquet mallet of the signifier is otherwise the latent truth of the manifest monstrosity of man. Deleuze’s intention is to redress this humanism. He wants to situate Nietzsche’s intervention in a posthumanist or antihumanist landscape. In order to do so, man must not simply be replaced by another presence or origin, such as Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” or Heidegger’s “Being” or Foucault’s “Power/Knowledge” or Derrida’s “Text.” Rather, man must be supplanted by what I refer to as the Pervert’s Logic or her aesthetic organization. This alternative sensibility — games and plays — restructures subject and Spirit, and society and system. Toward what? — a fresh modality which is different than the system as the condition of its “own” madness. This anti-$-istic Logic of the Pervert (A ≠ A) rather than the metaphysical structure of identity (A = A) must destabilize presence and origin. These metaphysical claims to an arche inevitably situate responsibility (or a generalized -ism) at the foundation of Western $-ism.

 

Man is structured as the seat of “consciousness,” “brain,” “mind,” “intention,” “agency,” and so on. This system relies on the logic of presence and origin. An alternative order of the Becoming of the Pervert gestures toward a transcendence of the lonely and somber trope of “humanity.” The anthropocentric metaphor of “humanity” is spatially and temporally anchored in the dysfunction of a man who is inside of himself. In the future, man will be outside of himself. Outside, man is happily dispersed and blissfully lost in the joys and blurs of the signifying chain and its institutions. This move toward decenterment implies the theoretical and practical break from the antinomy between subject and society, and between Spirit and system. The Pervert’s Manifesto wills an Outside to the antinomy between subject and object, self and other, and individual and society. What is the Anti-Logic of difference rather than opposition? What is the Pervert’s Logic of negativity and relationship rather than positivity and distinction? What is the signifier rather than the sign?

 

I borrow from Deleuze’s Nietzsche the conscious truth that the very foundation of what the human must endure is abysmal. The critic of the system views the foundation of man as itself abhorrent because the structure fixes presence and origin: what is, who is, where is, when is, why is, and so on. But for whom? — precisely, man and his coordinates in the presence of Being. This foundation in the Madness of Order must be radically critiqued and brilliantly reinvented for a future of the Pervert. This horizon is the sunny rise of the Pervert. Only the rare daft naïf cannot identify with Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) estimation of “the life of man” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But many of us — at least those of us who live on less than $10/day — recognize the essence of existence in the pessimism and cynicism of Hobbes’s infamous description of the human condition. For us — the poor and the alienated and the aghast — a clever recreation of the terms of posthumanity or antihumanity must be won. The word for this future liberation is: Pervert and her future. The Manifesto is committed to a perverse faith in a world which is exterior to the fundamental symptom of the West. This hopeful belief requires an effort to think the Outside of the madness of the symbolic order. This book reconfigures man’s extant thinking, being, and living. Man is neither cause nor origin. Man is neither point of arrival nor site of destination. Man is not the letter on and of humanism. Rather, man is the cruel effect and pathological symptom of psychotic foreclosure. This weird schizophrenia must be dismantled in order to wreck the neuroticization of self and other in every blink and breath. The system is a disorder in thinking, living, and being. Man must finally recognize the source of his dysfunction in the schizophrenia of the signifying chain. The Manifesto presents a mirror of the profound Unreason of the Madness of Order in discourse. How will the crack in the edifice be exposed to sad eyes? — and by whom?

 

A Look Back Toward What Will Have Been Looking Forward (to) Now

 

My book engages the critical project of critique and reinvention. The human condition requires shrewd diagnosis in a critique of the madness of the system. It also demands joyful invention in the creation of an alternative universe, such as the Pervert’s future. The Pervert’s forms may be approached but her contents remain suspended. No Becoming ever is, but the theorization of such a Becoming is an imagined possibility that I intend to realize in this work. The Pervert may arrive precisely at the moment of her collapse. This moment(s) of simultaneity is the appearance of the Pervert. Happy invention is the distant horizon of this Manifesto. Aesthetic creation is the horizon of the perverse sensibility. The task is massive: to critique the psychosis of the system on the levels of both subject and society, and Spirit and system, and to invent the future of the Becoming of the Pervert in another cosmos or distant future. This Other emerges from a forgotten past which is what it is not. As science, the system = $-ism. The Western values will disappear in a past which substitutes the Pervert’s Logic for the dreadful aesthetic of the schizoid system of the symbolic order.

 

The task is to both pronounce — demonstrate and theorize — the end of man and to herald — illustrate and invent — the past after the death of man. This project innovates experiments in practice: ways of being in the world, forms of engagement with and participation in social life, ethical relationships to others, progressive forms of political practice, and new metaphors for a conceptualization of the self, the other, and sociality. How is it possible to conceive of self and other apart from an economy of le propre? Can we understand man as intertwined like a torus rather than as alienated like a monad? At what moment does the self-same and self-identical flip into the obverse of an otherness — a sameness which is not identical? What is the sensibility of this moment? How an the gap between oppositional signifiers be played differently from the mad system of the West? How can we reintroduce and reinnovate as banter and play a galaxy which is otherwise organized as skirmish and battle? Can play emerge in the suspension of the phallic button-hole in either arche or presence?

 

For Deleuze’s Nietzsche, the “aim of critique” is “the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man” and “a different way of feeling: another sensibility.” How do we destabilize man until he disappears from the edifice of the structure? How does man emerge at the moment of his collapse? This revolutionary “sensibility” of the Other illuminates the alternative Logic of the Pervert. Other-Logic is based in relationality and constructionism. Perverse Logic invites the Pervert to supplant the dominance of the neurotic and his economy of le propre in the West. In its place, the scare quotes of this “itself” become visible to man in his thinking, being, and living. The paradox is that the subject must theorize its own demise. The trouble is that the man that the system effects reinscribes himself as “natural.” Ideally, a time-machine would propel man into a future in which he is socialized as Other. From the future, he would return to the present with the ideological means to produce this Other subject. This Other would have been this future in the deferred event in which the past understood itself as the past. The question for Deleuze’s Nietzsche is: who comes after man? What awaits after the history of man? Deleuze’s wager in his interpretation of Nietzsche is that it is beyond banal man which is the horizon of Nietzsche’s desire.

 

The Master Signifier and the End of Man

 

This Other Nietzschean horizon is also the Trieb of The Pervert’s Manifesto. The Pervert wills the disappearance of man. He forges the appearance of a “sensibility” which deviates from the rule of the extant symbolic order. $-ism is a psychotic system which conceives of itself as neurotic. This misinterpretation involves the simultaneous parallactic gap and suture, such as: System = $-ism. The (mis)recognized overlap of the system and its obverse, of S and $-ism, defines the Madness of Order. The theoretical edifice of relationality and constructionism will guide The Pervert’s Manifesto of the future after the death of man. Nietzsche wills beyond himself toward a subjectivity and sociality of a different order. History positioned Nietzsche as a thinker beyond the human but from within humanism. This is the situation that the Pervert inherits from the past as she moves toward the future. This victorious trace of the other-than-human within the human invites the Becoming of the Other — but of what?

 

Nietzsche was forced to think antihumanism from within humanism. Nietzsche borrows the resources from the tradition of the “all too human” in order to critique it and dream beyond it — but why? Quite simply, he does so in order to critique it and imagine its future. This cautionary advance beyond metaphysics is precisely the project of deconstruction. Grammatology only gestures toward the Outside with hesitation, caution, and caveat. But, Derrida makes clear, the passion of deconstruction is for the tout autre. History entrapped Nietzsche. His time enforced a structure of madness on his work. For instance, Zarathustra (1891) is decidedly human. But his animal companions gesture toward a form of life which is evolved from ressentiment, and so on. The enforcement of the codes of humanism can be summarized as essentialism, in theory. The rule of humanism is the imperative of the ontological question and answer of the “What is?” This essentialist imposition is devious because it enforces the outlawed on the entire signifying chain itself: qua presence. As structured, the signifying chain destructures all presence and dismantles all essence.

 

The schizoid’s resistance to language is his most progressive practice. Psychotic gobbledygook is also the gesture that most closely resembles humanity. The $-istic dominance of neurosis in the system is the effect of the simultaneous foreclosure of this madness of the symbolic order. The foundation of the order of man is the psychotic negation of this scaffold. Nietzsche’s work refers to man in order to criticize him. The effort returns metaphysics within and against metaphysics. Such an escape to an Outside in my Manifesto is compromised by the semantics and syntax of what Heidegger will identify as the value which is destructive of Being in the era of nihilism. The present and essentialist question of “What is?” joins Being to value and the signifier. This nodal interface between signifier and signified, and between Being and value, is the basis of nihilism in the Western tradition. The humanism of essence and presence is fundamentally nihilistic. The signifying chain enforces neurotic essentialism on itself and its subjects. The system does so despite the organization of the system qua madness. My book shares Nietzsche’s historical position, except that perhaps man is closer to his end — of the history of man — now than man was at Nietzsche’s time. What will we Become?

 

Deleuze suggests that “thinking” from a Nietzschean sensibility “would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.” The Nietzschean critique of man invites “thinking” the overman. This über is the subject and the Spirit, and the society and the system. The Other will inherit history after the end of man. The system enforces divisions between human and posthuman, man and superman, and history and posthistory. The promise is that the future of the Pervert will undo and reset these binary oppositions. The Pervert shall inherit the earth. Deleuze recalls that the work of invention must be done. This toil will be a suicidal labor. The Pervert’s graft intends to destructure man in order to innovate the mask of the Becoming of the Pervert.

 

This effort is properly the work of the death drive (Thanatos) in psychoanalysis. The death instinct wills the self-destruction of man. His traces and ends gesture toward the tout autre yet-to-come in the Becoming of the Other (Eros) after death. The intervention of Eros cannot be divided from the death drive. Eros is the source of the possibility of the painful slog of Thanatos. My own “thinking” in The Pervert’s Manifesto follows such a trajectory. I want to antecedently theorize unforeseen modes of existence. These forms exceed man. My project seeks to farcically imagine alternative forms of life which are the Outside of humanism. This sweat promises to seductively tempt with Other economies. These futural transactions are transcendent of the structure of the Madness of Order. The travail is to strangely beckon toward structures outside of le propre. The project welcomes the ever deferred blossom of Becoming-Perverse and not, but nevertheless, and so on. The wager of the Manifesto is that such a radical transformation is not only desirable but even possible. The tout autre of the Other beckons from a slinky-like spiral in which both the upward and the downward gesture toward a futural horizon. We believe in the Becoming of this imminent object, on faith and on Spirit. The Pervert’s belief is that the future will arrive because the slip and slide of schizophrenic trace (is) presence for man. Faith is structured like Octave Mannoni’s patient and his archetypal perverse mantra — “I know very well, but nevertheless….” This fetishistic articulation splits knowledge from belief. Epistemology may be dour, but divinity is hopeful.

 

My riffs in this book are an overture to initiate this happy struggle yet again. The writer and reader agree to blindly enjoy this endless process. The reader will expectantly engage in an exaggerated “but nevertheless” faith. The question of the generation of the master signifier presents this question: which analyst solicits the innovation? Is the cuckold of Becoming the harried writer, the patient reader, or the Other whose sensibility has yet to develop? A possible answer to the question of the impossible arche of innovation — ex nihilo — is the system which is under scrutiny. Following Lacan, the analytic silence of the reader provokes the master signifier of the writer. This writer presents the master signifier to the reader whose analytic silence inspires the productive effluvium of this master signifier. Paradoxically, this effect of the master signifier is also its cause. The origin of the Madness of Order is the hysteric’s question. The origin of the master signifier is ontological interpretation, or simply: “What is?” The Outside of the system is the effect of the system itself.

 

Epistemology and divinity, knowledge and faith, and science and religion — these oppositions must be reconciled with and as each other in a modality which sustains each orientation. This divine belief colors deconstruction’s passion and hope. Faith has no present basis in knowledge because it is Becoming toward a future which is as Becoming — but of what? Precisely, belief organizes the simultaneous point de capiton of the emergence of the past into the future. Faith is an anticipatory disorganization. Faith is an aesthetic which entreats to collapse the structure as the parallactic gap of its own organization. The Pervert as master signifier is entirely empty except for its metaphoricity. The purpose of this master signifier is to be the absent center — albeit named — of the hegemonic struggle to generate signification in its lost semblance. The future which never arrives at its signified begins in the past. The past is yet to happen. The project of The Pervert’s Manifesto is to change our own possibilities. For what else is there to keep hope?

 

Antihumanism

 

Many theorists have submitted the subject to radical critique. Many authors have committed their work to the fundamental deconstruction of man. Yet, man seems to survive his own basal internal disturbance. The tradition of critiques of man have been mere external bothers to man, both as a practice and a theory. The end of man has been pronounced for centuries. But man is still here. He awaits his decenterment before the arrival of innovations in society and system, and in subject and Spirit. The Manifesto positions man as the object of critique and reinvention. He is the figure of an ambivalent disavowal of the project of the Being of man himself. The subject is an object. This is the reason that he is an object (“as such”) of much critique. The signifying chain is the objectification of man. The very source of the life of man in discourse is simultaneously the origin of his death in Being. It is a strange reversal that we refer to ourselves as “subject.” It is even more curious that academic structuralists also refer to this otherwise “effect” as a “subject.” What does society become in the absence of man or the absence of absence? What becomes of man after capitalist private property and psychoanalytic castration? How does man relate to his other after the dissipation of the anxiety of boundaries and after the dissolution of losses? The transition from Something is Missing to Nothing is Missing consists of a transformation from the man of loss and anxiety to the Pervert who lives after the death of humanism.

 

Barthes’s Reader

 

A brief excursus of Barthes’s seminal essay on authorship and readership invites a meditation on the losses but also the gains in the nascent emergence of the Pervert. This persona is the supplement to the death of man in the history of recent scholarship in the humanities. In “The Death of the Author” (1967), Barthes claims that the death of the author provokes the “birth of the reader.” This “birth” implies the antecedent absence of the reader. Where was the reader during the era of the dominance of the author? How does the “birth” of the reader reorganize textuality after the “death” of the author? The history of man is the time of the author. The end of man promises the arrival of the reader. The author is historical. The reader is posthistorical. The author is the symptomatic avatar of man and the system. The reader is the invention of the Pervert. The Pervert neither authors nor reads. The Pervert not only reverses the opposition authorship/readership but suspends in an instant this division which is “itself” in abeyance as this suspension “itself.” The subject of the alternative Other foreswears the “I” of authorship and readership altogether.

 

In Barthes’s text, the subject is denied the traditional privileges of originality, authorship, and ownership. The man of Reason is also stripped of the classical traits of the human: “the reader is without history, biography, psychology.” The man without history eludes the burden of the responsibility of history. This is isomorphic to the signified which escapes presence and Being. The posthistorical reader intuits that nothing has yet to happen. Man is even still waiting to wait himself, and so on. Rather than an occurrence in the past, history is an emergence in an elusive future. Barthes’s reader is eschatologically open to the advent of a new history of the future. In such a time, man will be otherwise than himself. He will be reader rather than read. He will be reading rather than read. This is a time in which neither history nor its naturalization will be possible.

 

The man without biography is free from the tethers of the self and its pressures. After biography, essentialism will quietly retreat. Biographically, this essentialist regime of identity is impossible to escape in a system of the sign. The postbiographical man enjoys himself without himself. Outside of biography, the existence of man is unmoored from the chronology and succession of traditional narratives of existence. The postbiographical man cannot textualize an existence into the logic of the system of the sign. After biography, existence can only be summarized in the Real and its resistance to the word of the biography.

 

The man without psychology eludes the imposed “inner resources” and “interior sanctum” of the psyche. The postpsychological man thinks and lives in the outside of himself. After psychology, there is no mysterious depth. There is no hidden treasure trove within the heart and soul or the brain and mind of man. Lacan distances the unconscious from any semblance of ownership, such as borrowed private property which is yours or mine. Instead, Lacan insists that the unconscious is structured like a language. The signifying chain is a presence which is dispersed outside, here, there, behind, below, around, near, and so on. The unconscious is the precisely anti-psychological spaces and times of the negative and differential interplay of signifiers. The unconscious is not psychological private property but linguistic public paparazzi. Like the signifier, the discourse of the unconscious of the Other resists presence. There is no subject of the unconscious. If anything, the unconscious can be understood as transindividual, between self/other, patient/analyst, symptom/desire, conscious/unconscious, you/me, and so on. Any discrete division of the signs of these binary oppositions profoundly fails to understand the discursive constitution of not only the unconscious but also of the psychoanalytic mise-en-scène and its concepts. The subject inscribes itself in the outside of himself in the texts of the culture. Such points of anticipatory identification submit this ego to the reader’s enjoyment (in-process, in-action) simultaneously. The reader without psychology is disburdened of bad conscience and ressentiment, to use Nietzsche’s diagnostic vocabulary.

 

The man of history, biography, and psychology finally loses himself in the text. The author becomes the reader. This author-reader is otherwise organized in this context as the Becoming of the division between author and reader in the textuality of these subjects. The text overwhelms man. Readership enables the death of man. Both reader and author finally Become the same difference, a sameness which is neither identical nor different. History, biography, and psychology dominate man under the rule of le propre: her “personal” history, her “private” biography, and her “individual” psychology. At the moment of man’s death, Barthes implies that the tedium of the history of the individual ends. The creativity of authorship and the joy of readership — sans objet — erupt in the absence of individualized history, privatized biography, and personalized psychology. Otherwise, in our time, history, biography, and psychology secure the reader-author to the empirical world of necessity. These values tether the author-reader to the ideological machinations of the private property of ownership and the capitalist ideology of the exchange-value of commensurable commodities.

 

The end of man unfolds at the End of History. These ends usher in an alternative posthistory that we are yet to possibly imagine. These ends are beyond the philosophically popular dreams of Hegel’s civil society and Absolute Knowledge and Marx’s communism and liberation of the forces of production. After man, a temporality which is beyond chronological succession emerges at the end of time. This Other clock ticks and tocks in a torus-like bend of time. This temporality reorganizes the progressive telos of a consecutive order. The future returns to the past in order to Become during the enduring (of) the presence of what is. The true culprit of the orientation and balance of the structure is the gerund grammatical form. The gerund lies and fibs in its very occupation as a static noun rather than a transformative verb. But the nodal point of structure is the preposition and its invisible organization and orchestration of desire. The temporality which surfaces in the wake of the End of the History of man is not a retroaction. Retroaction would be either what Freud names as Nachträdlichkeit nor what Lacan refines as après-coup. What time does the preposition take?

 

The ridiculously naïve object of genealogical investigation of an object by a subject must be continuously rehistoricized beyond “presence.” The subject of investigation and the object of scrutiny have never stopped Becoming (not) themselves in the past, the present, or the moment of their destination in the instant of the blink which interrupts this identity. The object of “social construction” has yet to be constructed. The past has yet to happen because the future awaits arrival to retroactively mark the past as such.

 

Barthes’s work contributes to the theoretical dissolution of the subject of the system of lack and castration. Barthes’s work also encourages the destabilization of presence and origin. However, Barthes’s work finally reinscribes the authority of the undone author in the place of the newly glorified reader. This is so even if the two positions are marked by merely a minor spatial and temporal difference. Barthes’s move is a simple displacement rather than a destruction of the subject in the text.

 

This substitution of the reader for the author demonstrates the relationality and constructionism between these two signifiers, author and reader. Barthes opposes author/reader as a “death.” But his text simultaneously merges the author and the reader as an identical function. Barthes’s text indicates that the author is the reader because neither function is coincident with itself. The difference between the two opposed words — authorship and readership — is essentially nil and fundamentally moot. The gap between author/reader is not as qua of qua or in qua. Only a minimal difference marks their deviance. Why was this overlap of Unbecoming Being not visible to Barthes at the arche of the text?

 

The death of the author entails both the birth of the reader and the death of the reader — why? Both textual fictions of the author and the reader approach speculative identity precisely at the instant of their eclipse. This is the Pervert’s truth: the author is the reader (A = B) because neither word is coincident with itself (A ≠ A). What is the demonstration that this structural cleavage illuminates? The marked “is” returns to the Heideggerian “Being” or “qua” or “as such,” or “by definition,” or “by necessity,” and so on. Presence is an inadequate mark for the unsteady relationship between opposed words. Any discrete division is countered by the deconstruction of the relationship between oppositional signs. This destabilization is sublimely unsymbolizable and blindly unrepresentable in any copula. Derrida generates several signifiers for the inadequacy of “Being.” The most notorious of these metaphors is différance. Heidegger puts Being under erasure as the “nullity,” as he says, at the foundation of all Being.

 

The Pervert is beyond both authorship and readership. The Pervert’s time and space are antecedent to the postant of this distinction. The reader cannot be determined as presence or origin. Neither can the future of both not Becoming a self and Becoming a world and not Becoming a self and not Becoming a world and Becoming a self but not Becoming a world and not Becoming not Becoming and Becoming not Becoming Becoming “itself” and the obverse — and several unimagined Becomings beyond this opposition. None of these permutations of the future can be present or original. These Other Becomings are internal to the oppositions themselves in the past or the future — but not in the instant of the present.

 

Nietzsche’s Abortion

 

Well before Barthes applies concepts of authorship and readership to the decenterment of man, Nietzsche focuses on discourse and its destabilization of the Enlightenment concept of the individual. The word as such decenters the subject from the center of the system. Like Derrida’s emphasis on sign and substitution, Nietzsche’s thought illuminates the displacement of the subject in relationship to the autonomy and spontenaeity of the signifier. An exegesis of a short passage from Nietzsche’s work will illuminate a constitutive aporia in man’s relationship to langue. My interpretation will also contextualize the framework through which The Pervert’s Manifesto will articulate the Madness of Order. This psychosis of the signifier must be transcended by novel selfhood and original sociality. In essence, the signifying system is profoundly schizophrenic. This is a claim that I will elaborate throughout the study of this Manifesto. At the same time, this madness understands itself in function as ordinarily neurotic. As such, the system must neurotically foreclose (rejet névrotique) its own psychosis. This schizophrenia returns from the Real as the destabilization of the symbolic order. This destabilized return of the negation is the symbolic order itself in its (dys)function.

 

Nietzsche’s work passionately and exhaustively strives to overcome the “all too human” that he diagnoses in his work. The human is to be affirmed, such as in the aristocratic evaluations of noble morality. The human is also to be denigrated, such as in the fierce denunciations of the slave of bad conscience and ressentiment. The affirmation of the eternal return is Nietzsche’s redemptive transcendence of nihilism as a system of value. But this affirmation can only emerge from a system of value. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche laments that “our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the ‘subject.’” Language fools its speakers. Language is a magic trick. Speakers are gullible children of the prestidigitation. Man is deceived into becoming man. Discourse and the system of meaning-making beguiles man into becoming himself. Man does so despite the concomitant alienation from his own identity. Man is different from “himself.” A différance persists which translates self-identity and self-sameness into an unsettled otherness — $<>a. Subjectivity is only achieved in and as a circuitous route. This roundabout confronts the Real. A traversal suffers the resistance of the symbol to the sublimely unrepresentable Being at the center of the system. The signifying chain dupes man into Becoming himself as precisely not himself. Man is a conjured trick of the system. Then, inexplicably, man takes responsibility for himself and the world: “doer” and “deed.” If Freud’s wish is to be rid of responsibility for Irma’s pains, then is the unconscious desire of man his own death?

 

Rather than God, man is the effect of his avatars — but of which masked men? In the history of contemporary philosophy, such costumes include: Derrida’s “Différance,” Heidegger’s “Being,” Foucault’s “Power/Knowledge,” Freud’s “Unconscious,” Lacan’s “Phallus,” Levinas’s “First Ethics,” and so on. From the perspective of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1973), each of these master signifiers is a mere sign-substitution for the function of the center of the structure. Each word is easily displaceable from its center. The subject is an effect of language. The spoken object of man is coded into the system of semantics and syntax. This system of words and their substitutions and combinations comprise an elusive signifying chain. This structure of discourse contributes to the madness of the system and the return of the foreclosure of the structure itself. This foreclosure is the system in its essential structure.

 

As an effect of discourse, the subject can never be the subject of the speech. The locus of speaking, writing, and thinking can be neither the mouth, nor the tongue, nor the brain, nor the synapses, nor the heart, nor the soul. None of these supposed origins, advents, or arches speak from the position of the subject. The mouth is an effect of a chain of discourses which inscribes the mouth in the place of man. Same for the tongue, whose wag is a mere effect of fables about the tongue and its placement in the cavity of the mouth. The brain is a mere effect of the arbitrary renditions of truth in the human and natural sciences. The synapses may fire and speak, but they do so only insofar as they are the spoken effects which are fired from yet more primary fits of electricity. The heart and the soul, while lovely and persuasive metaphors, cannot be determined in a presence which does not otherwise refer to various arteries and Spiritualities as their effect.

 

Man qua an effect displaces him from any position of action, agency, authority, intention, will, and all of the subjective traits which constitute man as such. The foreclosure of the system returns as the murder of man. Thankfully, the brain is dead. Discourse invents man as the prop for the syntax and semantics of the system of vocabulary and the structure of speech. In the system of $-ism, man is the arche and origin of a series of signifiers. These signs of the advent of any adventure include mouth, tongue, brain, synapse, heart, soul, and so on. Man is the sign-substitution for a series of marks in the system. These centers are otherwise oriented, balanced, and organized by the functionality of the structure. Man is the origin which is fixed in its functionality. This man is at the center of the neurotic foreclosure (rejet névrotique) of the system. This negation returns as the suicidal gesture of man and its system of neurosis. Man is both the effect and cause of this schizoid negation. The coded system of language ejects man from the foundation of the system at the same time as it positions him as the principle of the system. The scaffold returns as the rupture of the structure. This infrastructure surrounds man in an otherwise vacant system. The signifying chain does not need man. But man needs the signifier in order to position himself within space and time. The subject finds himself at the center of a structure. Yet, this system could otherwise organize itself in the profound absence of this disposable object. Why does absence sustain man as its cause if this man is in essence its effect?

 

Nietzsche identifies the means for this treachery against the subject. The abettor is the magical work of the fairy. This Tinker Bell substitutes a “changeling” for the child of the parents. Nietzsche elaborates the labor of substitution. This toil involves the exchange of the original child for the substitute child. The Pervert’s Manifesto intuits this substitution as exemplary of the function of metaphor in language. The vehicle for this travail of one for another, of changeling for child, is metaphor. The substitution involves the exchange of one signifier for another signifier and for another signifier, and so on. Metaphor bobs and weaves — like and unlike — according to the rule of metonymy. The “changeling” cannot be “disposed” — but why?

 

The duped parents misrecognize the counterfeit prop for the real deal. This meconnaissance is the structure of the signifying chain. As Lacan says, mistaken identity returns the message in its “inverted form.” The principal of language is metaphor. This indicates that the principal of language is every word in the system of vocabulary. Nietzsche demonstrates that man cannot jettison the subject. The reason for this is that man refuses to recognize that he has already been discarded. The possibility of the disavowal of subjectivity is barred. Selfhood is already lost, yet it sustains itself despite this death. The subject cannot be displaced until the neurotics of the culture realize and recognize their absence from themselves. How does the dead recognize its own death? From whose perspective can death be witnessed? — and especially as ones own death?

 

Language inveigles man into the delusion that discourse is originary and present rather than secondary and deferred. The signifying chain is secondary and deferred. Man and his unique identity (and so on) are a delayed effect and then later development. The system of the signifier tricks humanity into the delusion that the subject is itself. The institution of discourse convinces man that he is present to himself (A = A) rather than mere traces of the Other. Nietzsche discovers the paradox that language robs man of the originality and presence that he seeks in syntax and semantics. The system and the subject implicate each other because the signifying chain requires a subject. The system requires the subject to organize. In turn, the subject wants language to express itself.

 

But the symbolic order would run smoothly in the absence of man. How so? — by the presentation of another sign-substitution to occupy the place of the center of the structure. Any other fetish could function as the center of orientation, balance, and organization of the system. The subject is divided from itself (A ≠ A). Man is separated from originality and presence. Man is the secondary and the derivative. Man claims the mantle of primacy and firstness, but it is the signifier which is principle and primary. The subject is a copy. Man is a trace of “centers” for himself in the structure. These sign-substitutions are strictly equivalent. The fetish-men of/for man are an infinity of metaphors within a finity of substitutions. There is a constitutive and structural subtraction of the function of orientation, balance, and organization. This banished center is the exterior to the series of metaphors in substitution. The Madness of Order is embedded in the signifier. Psychosis is expelled to the Outside. The schizophrenia disruptively returns to the structure. Structural schizophrenia enforces the division between subject and society, and between Spirit and system. These nefarious oppositions include the separations which are imposed by fraudulent institutions — but by whom?

 

The subjective “changeling” and his work of subterfuge deny discourse any claims to truth apart from chicanery. Articulation is the prestidigitation which hystericizes the system. The wily signifier transfixes and entices neurotic subjects who cannot properly interpret the signifying system. At the same time, this symbolic order defines men in their constituted essence. The subject simply misunderstands the system which constitutes it. Man does not understand the world. Man is displaceable as the center of the world. The response of both system and subject is dysfunction and violence. Nietzsche’s critique of the subject is also a slap down of language. The signifier is a discourse which enforces the quackery of (dis/mis)recognition. Word deceives us into the illusion that the speaker, such as the author or the reader, is original and primary. The word posits the speaker as the origin, arche, advent, and so on of speech: “I speak.” Otherwise, man should be considered secondary. He is the mere effect of systems which exceed him in their excess. This fake-out position is the metaphorization of man as the sign-substitution which coordinates the system. What word surfaces when the signifier for man can no longer speak? The subject is a differed and deferred outcome of his own duped position. Why is man blind to himself as an effect rather than a cause?

 

Many contemporary philosophers question what Heidegger critically refers to as the subjectuum of the self as the center of the world. Foucault fibs that man’s entanglement with “Power/Knowledge” is at the “center” of the system of the human sciences. Derrida fools himself that “Text” is the primary principle as the “center” of meaning-making. Heidegger misreads the “Ontico-Ontological Difference” between Being and beings as the “center” of the world. Levinas mistakes “First Ethics” in the displacement of the otherwise primacy of epistemology and ontology as the “center” of philosophy. Nietzsche himself errs in his interpretation of the “Will to Power” as the “center” of the constitution of the universe of nihilism.

 

The system hoodwinks a crew of philosophers into the fantasy-reality that man and his principles are original and primary. What is “Text” if not an original proclamation about the structure of the system? What is “Power/Knowledge” if not a theory of the primacy of the outside of discourse against the internality of the psyche and the body? What is the “Ontico-Ontological Difference” if not a statement of the potential escape from inauthenticity in the care for Being? What is “First Ethics” if not a chronology of the antecedence of the face to knowledge about man? What is “Will to Power” if not a assertion of the truth of the force in the constitution of value and its effects? Not only is the system of language fundamentally schizoid. In addition, a profound psychosis is structured into our every breath and gesture. How is the mistaken neurotic to be confronted with his essential schizophrenia? And why has the system been profoundly misdiagnosed?

 

Only the Pervert and his Manifesto can break from the madness of the signifying chain. The Pervert demonstrates the secret truth of the Unreason of the psychotic — but what? Precisely, that the symbolic and the Real are coincident with each other. The “same place” to which the Real returns, as Lacan says, is each word in the system. I identify this parallactic overlap of the symbolic and the Real as the “Real Signifier.” Language is a system which dominates the subject. This symbolic order is subordinate to the Real. The resistance to and of signification ruptures the structure and the subject. Man is precariously situated qua neurotic within the organization of the system qua psychotic. The crazy situation of the contemporary subject of the signifying chain is that he is generated in his neurosis by a schizoid system. The repression of the system of its own psychotic essence returns to perturb the subjective neurosis of man. This economy of neurotic foreclosure (rejet névrotique) is the basal foundation of the symbolic order of the signifying chain. The neurotic effect of the return of the Real is the defense against this schizophrenia. This psychosis as it is diagnosed by the Pervert is paradoxically internal to neurosis.

 

Foucault explicitly announces the death of man at the close of The Order of Things (1966). At the dénouement of his narration of the birth of man in the human sciences, the death of this man is proclaimed. A genealogy is only possible in a structure which is organized around man at the center. This is the case even if the purpose of such a genealogy is to deconstruct man. The Pervert’s Manifesto resists the genealogical-historicist temptation. Perversely, the object is not present. The genealogist is implicated in the process of the Becoming of the Becoming (and so on) of the object. The “social construction” is always in-process and in-action of constitution. The historicist project is strangely ahistorical. Instead, I outline the organization of the system. I name this system as “$-ism.” I will outline the various neurotic defenses against the internal schizophrenia of this system. Psychosis can be glimpsed as the schizoid’s Outside of metaphysics. The madness can be discerned in the Pervert’s twisted representations of the ultimate sublimity of the chain of signification in the symbolic order. I want to resist an approach to a social construction which is the object or subject of a complete deed to be genealogically historicized in its transformative not-yet Becoming to a present static Being. My work entails the death of a “genealogy of morals” and of all historiographical practice. History disappears at the end of man. This is the case even if the purpose of history is to herald the arrival of the end of man. This is also the case even if the teleological development, such as the arrival of communism in Marx or the advent of absolute knowledge in Hegel, is the purported End of History.

 

The loss of man is the demise not only of history but of the historiography of all historical knowledge. The trace of the advent and the end of man is erased from the marks on the page. The vain promises of knowledge are kept by history itself. After history, the will to know the knowledge of man will recede from the foreground. At the end of the history of man, human knowledge and its insights will ease into a distant past. What comes after the utter exhaustion of all of epistemology? — what Hegel refers to as the telos toward Absolute Knowledge? Will we always be talkers? Or will we symbolize in a new perverse form? Is it possible that man’s long and tedious millennia-long monologue could expire at the same moment that the Pervert’s lyrics and the schizoid’s voice reaffirm the signifier as reborn otherwise?

 

After man, this violence of knowledge will desist as the common practice of willful and aggressive subjects against quiet and subordinate objects. At the end of history, biography, and psychology, the Pervert renews a communist (against: his, hers, mine, ours, yours, theirs) and metaphysical (against: presence) and feminine (against: castration) economy of the Pervert. This is the horizon that Heidegger imagines otherwise as the end of nihilism. After the peroration of the history of values, the Other blossoms from the underside of man’s domination of earth and world. Until this future, value qua nihilism has ruled subjects and objects in the world. At the time of the end of value, the sins of le propre will disappear into the ether of the past. The future promises a reinvented language of relationality and constructionism. This Other world transcends a system of signs of the exchange of comparable and contrastable (un)equal values of general equivalence. Instead, objects return as unique and incommensurable singularities. This irrecuperable excess of the system cannot be captured by the otherwise sublime representations — including even the copula — of the sign. But what is das Ding if the word retires? What are les choses sans les mots?

 

Foucault’s Beach

 

Foucault’s genealogical work enlivens the debate about the end of man. I will briefly discuss the conclusion to Foucault’s work on the invention of man in the human sciences. This bids an analysis of Foucault’s use of metaphor. What are the literary figurations through which the end of man presents itself? In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault invokes a time “when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not.” Foucault is the most celebrated example of a theorist of the death of man. Yet, he figures the time of the death of man as a past paradise. It is a lost Garden of Eden from which man has fallen in the discourses of the human sciences. Foucault’s point is that “human beings” precede “man.” This “man” is distinct from the “human being.” This “man” is an invention of recent date. It is an object which has been written by the human sciences. These sciences have invented him through the discursive practices of identification, subordination, production, normalization, regulation, and so on. Foucault claims that the death of the “human being” and its life-world is antecedent to the birth of “man” in its peculiar anatomy. In essence, this “man” of the human sciences is born already dead. At the same time as he is born dead, he is also simultaneously born free. How is man dead but free? Why is his birth the advent of subordination?

 

Man is then resurrected and reinvented by the liberal efforts of psychology, criminology, educational reformers, sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and so on. These dramatic personae of liberalism extract knowledge from the body of “man” in order to produce him as the body he purports to inhabit. This “man” is an object of extortion and exploitation. The system prepares his body to be the object of the bio-power of governmental welfare and corporate management. Foucault concludes his text on the genealogy of “man” with the claim that “man is an invention of recent date.” It is one that is, as he says, “perhaps nearing its end.” The necessary gesture toward this “end” is the illumination of the death of man. What made possible the transition from the innocence of the “human being” at the outskirts of the center of the structure to the guilty and shamed “man” of the invention of recent date?

 

The Pervert is the manifest representation of an heir to the ashes of this invented “man” of the human sciences. The Pervert does not need a psychiatrist. The Pervert does not need a social worker. The end of man heralds the future of the tout autre of the Outside of bio-power and its liberal minions. This Other approaches Lacan’s designation of the “something else” which is proper to the structure of perversion. This book innovates a critical and unique illumination of this “something else.” What, precisely, is this otherness which captures the essence of the Madness of Order, the organization of $-ism, and the dangers of the proper? How is the life and death of man — us — to be illuminated? How is the Pervert to be outlined as the heir to the demise of man?

 

Foucault titles his final paragraphs to The Order of Things (1966) “in conclusion.” This “conclusion” will, as he says, “open the way to a future thought.” This “future thought” is the thinking, being, and living of the Outside — but of what? Exactly, the project of The Pervert’s Manifesto is to think, be, and live at the outskirts of: possessive capitalism; identitarian, desirous, and anxious oedipality; continuous space and time in metaphysical presence; and the center of le propre as the organizational principle of institutional structures. The arrival of the future requires a “thought.” This idea retroactively invites the introduction of a Becoming in thinking, being, and living. The horizon of the theoretical work of this Manifesto is to think this “future” as the death of man and the birth of the Pervert. The presence of this destination is impossible. As soon as a projection arrives at its point of departure or destination, it must evolve and transform beyond itself toward the other. Toward the tout autre, theories and practices begin an endless foray in and experiment with willing having beening Becoming Being — but what? This object can only be the otherwise of “itself.” Neither can the Pervert approach in presence. The future of the Pervert is in its structure à venir, as Derrida puts the words to describe the impossible. This future will be forever reinvented. Like the man of the humanist tradition, the alternative subject of the future will be endlessly revised. The Manifesto promises a tout autre which must remain suspended in the aperture toward the future. It is structurally possible that the letter will not — and perhaps never can — arrive at its destination.

 

In the Becoming of the Pervert, the difference between herself and humanity is marked by the parallactic gap between two perspectives on “one” and the “same” object. This object is an Uncalculable X, as I put it, or a Real parallax, as Zizek says. The emptiness of this Uncalculable X is approximated as the Pervert. This Pervert is an effect of the critique of $-ism. The deconstruction of $-ism promises the escape from all -ism. This -ism is the foundational level of individuation and differentiation, and separation and exclusion. This -ism is the ground of the Madness of Order. It is also the object of foreclosure by the system. It is the scrap which returns from the Real as the disruption of the system. The Pervert will be man “himself.” The Pervert’s Manifesto is the text of this revolutionary rupture.

 

Man can only be decentered from “himself.” The Woman will be the man. Man will finally be free to be different from himself. Man will be free from both space and time. He will be released into the field of the unconscious. He will think, be, and live in a galaxy without time, without knowledge, and without negativity. Man will forever be himself only after he reaches his end. For now, man is the trace between a distant origin — birth, womb, ideology, family, genetics, intelligence, and so on — and a deferred destination — birth, womb, ideology, family, genetics, intelligence, and so on — in the painful moments of reflection in guilt and remorse. Foucault claims that it is a “wager,” as he ominously writes, “that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the ends of the sea.” These loud seas recall the oceanic unity that Freud claims that we seek in religion. This nondemonitational divinity is the horizon of the end of man. At this end, man is the shore which beckons toward an unruly and unruled sea. These waves bob and weave beyond the strictures of $-ism. The salty undertow undermines the economy of property that the institutions on land enforce on man. The Becoming of the Pervert may involve a fundamentally empty signification — who, she? No matter — when man washes ashore this Pervert and her will toward the Other will become possible.

 

Messianic Hope

 

The death of the subject in antihumanism and posthumanism has been a primarily theoretical and academic concern. It is the hope of The Pervert’s Manifesto that the alleged death of the subject be put into practice. This death will be the forerunner to the future of Becoming-Perverse. The death of man enables the birth of a new subject and Spirit, and a transformed society and system. The death is antecedent to birth. This murder must be quickly forgotten. The murder was either mistaken or erred. The murder was fabled. It was not even a murder as such. Rather than succumb to the pessimistic conclusion that “acts of overcoming,” as Adorno says, “are always worse than what they overcome,” I embrace the perverse optimism of Peter Pan’s affirmation that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.” The passage from $-ism to perversity is the “big adventure” which organizes the work of the Manifesto. This death can only be approached in its form and content from the perspective of a life. But this critical lens is of an existence which is put under radical scrutiny. This book pursues an adventurous death through the framework of thinkers who precede it, in Marxism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. The question of the passion of this text is: how is death to be assimilated into life? How is Eros to enjoy Thanatos?

 

This study is animated by an affirmative and optimistic sensibility. This attitude is well captured in Molly Bloom’s final echoes at the closing of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1914): “and yes I said yes I will Yes.” What does this ternary “yes” affirm? Why do we say “yes”? And why is it repeated? Several theorists have written on this “yes.” The most famous orators are James Joyce, Molly Bloom, and earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche. Jacques Derrida also approaches the question of the “yes” in several publications toward the end of his career. In his reading of the Joycean “yes,” Derrida claims that the “yes” is the “transcendental condition of all performative dimensions.” The condition of the world is an open affirmation. This “yes,” as Nietzsche says, wills that the world come into being. The “yes” is necessary for the enactment and institution — “performative dimension” — of the world. Man must say “yes” in order to will the world into being. It is only the will to Nothingness which can eek out a sorry and exclusionary “no.” The affirmative “yes” installs the symbolic order. It is our space and time, together. This order includes earth, world, galaxy, universe, solar system, writer, reader, and so on.

 

Derrida suggests that every utterance and every saying presupposes and implies an affirmative “yes.” This declaration of “yes” ecstatically laughs in the face of Hobbes’s gloom and doubt. The “yes” implies the affirmation rather than the negation — and also both. This duality of affirmation and negation organizes the world in the unification and dispersal of Eros and Thanatos. The “yes” promises the enjoyment and pleasure of hope and faith, both of which are perverse tropes. This affirmative perversity contrasts with the anxiety and distress of the “no” of castration and loss. Lack is a neurotic cliché. The “yes” that Derrida finds underlying every gesture, call, and response implies an affirmative, open, and hopeful sensibility. Such an aesthetic beckons toward an other which is yet-to-come. John Caputo describes deconstruction’s passion as “a pact with the tout autre, with the promise of the difference, an alliance with the advent, the event, of the invention of alterity.” Derrida’s and deconstruction’s sensibility is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic. The hope of deconstruction is a break from nihilism and pessimism. This transgression is promised, yet Derrida’s cautious sensibility implies resistance to the temptations of either the blind reproduction of the structure or the wholesale break from the system. But how does “no” become “yes”?

 

Derrida’s messianic faith in the tout autre opens the work in The Pervert’s Manifesto to the Becoming of the Pervert. Her arrival is horizonal and futural. It is only the writer’s faith and reader’s belief that promises that an otherness which is worthy of the world will emerge. There is no epistemology of knowledge which can guarantee the value of this intervention of otherness. Deconstruction opens itself toward the tout autre which is yet-to-come. This wholly other is beyond man. The lost letter is the Outside of the economy of $-ism. At the same time, this analysis of the Madness of Order is made possible from within this schizoid system. The Other is present. The lost letter is found. The system of $-ism forecloses this otherness — why? For the reason that this unimaginable future is beyond calculation and return. This is so even at the same time as this extant structure is itself haunted by the psychosis of the very otherness that it seeks to negate. The Real is the essence of the system. This schizoid foreclosure of $-ism qua S is the foreclosure of its own critique. The schizophrenic foreclosure of the structure is at the same time the condition of the imaginary coherence and continuity of the system. Deconstruction can celebrate the wholly other because it need not calculate its return: “What is?” The Other is free to be different from itself. Derrida’s hopeful attitude animates the work in this book. I can embrace faith and belief but not knowledge and certainty in the value of my intervention. This project says “yes” to itself but also to a future in which the Pervert’s voice will transition to another modality of symbolization. How will we love each other in the future? This Pervert will say without saying. And yet, we will hear her, too.

 

Why does Molly Bloom in Ulysses (1914) repeat — and thrice — the affirmative aperture to the other in the performative condition? There must be an absence in the first “yes.” Presumably, there must be a loss in the second. The repetition — first, second, third — may be an escalation of jouissance. It may also be a requirement for Molly and the reader. The “yes” must be forever supplemented by a repetition. The “yes” must be reconfirmed by yet another word. At the same time, this peculiarly and obsessively repeated affirmation is simultaneously a “no.” Why? — for the reason that in order to say “yes” to the “yes” it must affirm the other words in the system — even “no” which confers the affirmation of the “yes” qua itself. At the same time, the “yes” says “no” to all of the other words in the system. At the same time, the “yes” says “yes” to these other words as internal to this specific word of the “yes.” The articulation of every sign involves both of these moments, of a “yes” and a “no,” of a “yes-ing” in affirming, and a “no-ing” in negating. The affirmation of “yes” enunciates affirmation as a performative function. But it also articulates a negation as this same function. This double affirmation-negation — “yes I said yes I will Yes” — is performed simultaneously, at once, and at the same time. The repetition of Molly’s “yes” is a repetition of this simultaneous performative functionality of affirmation and negation. This repeats the “yes” in the differed and deferred interval of space and time between the thrice of “yes.”

 

Simultaneity is differed and deferred. But it illuminates precisely the object of this repetition. The object of repetition is not a copy, not a repeat, and not a redo. The object of this repetition is also neither an affirmation nor a negation. Rather, the re-enunciation — first, second, third — is the orgasmic moment of our simultaneity, our at once, and our now. It is the simultaneity of time, space, the unconscious, and love. This simultaneity of the “yes” can be described with words which are borrowed from Nietzsche’s vocabulary: the eternal return of the same. The re-iteration in the final capitalized “Yes” at the conclusion of the orgasmic outburst in Ulysses (1914) is the instantaneous interval of the origin and destination of the orgasm. This “Yes” is the textual mark of the moment of the simultaneous advent and conclusion of the orgasmic (in/ex)clusivity of the meaning-making of the performative dimension as such. The performative function of the “yes” will yet be supplemented by an otherness. This reset of the “yes” returns to the regulation of the excitation (increase in displeasure, decrease in pleasure) of what Freud refers to as the pleasure principle.

 

The “yes” is the duration which sustains the orgasmic simultaneity of affirmation and negation. This perverse both/and simultaneity is the Time of the Pervert. The Pervert’s Time affirms-negates all of the binary oppositions in the system as at once in time the return of all of the words in the system. This orgasmic moment promises the collapse of the intervals of affirmation/negation, yes/no, increase/decrease, unpleasure/pleasure, re-iteration, re-citation, and so on. This is the eternal return of the same moment in which every word is the same word. The caveat is that this “is” (or Being) cannot be represented because of its profound sublimity. The proper representation of Molly’s final words is: yes yes Yes. Molly’s “yes” marks this moment which is both ephemeral and durable. This is the essence of diacriticality. Affirmation (negation) is peculiar to the structuralist interpretation of meaning-making. For Molly, the name for this isolated capture is the “yes.” The Pervert contrives other words which emerge as metaphors, figures, fetishes, centers, forms, names, shoes, laces, furs, jockstraps, penises, and so on. The crucial purpose of this “yes I said yes I will Yes” is a repetition to extend in space and time the horrific glory of the presence of the female orgasm. This space-time illuminates that “yes” — all words in the system — are implicated in the textual sex act of the eternal return of the Real. The messianic hope of deconstruction is the extension of this moment as a(n e)mergence with its own deliquescence. If orgasm screams the ecstasy of a “sameness which is not identical,” as Derrida says of the will of différance, then will the sense of this scream be forever clandestine? Can the schizophrenia of the system yet speak? Yes? I said, yes? I will, yes? Yes?