How to Hystericise a Perverted Society?

Or: the challenges of thinking the unity of repetition and reproduction

“We (and particularly our unconscious) do not believe in our own death, that it is impossible to imagine our own death, for even when we do imagine it, we are still there, present as spectators.”¹

“Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!”²

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Psychoanalysis and its relation to social historical analysis has been for some time divided between two distinct psychic fields: the neurotic and the psychotic, with the line between the two demarcated by the presence (neurosis) or the absence (psychosis) of the Name of the Father in the place of the Other.³  This distinction is primarily upheld in analysis of the “Freudian field” sustained by the link between Jacques Lacan and Jacques Alain Miller, and in particular Miller’s well-cited text “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited”.⁴  The idea is that, while neurotics are struggling with the presence of the Name-of-the-Father which simultaneously grounds them in a negative relation to the reality principle, psychotics struggle with the absence of the Name-of-the-Father, leading them to “lose contact with reality”, where “reality” denotes the terms linking the subject to intersubjectivity via a “shared language”.⁵  If in Freud’s time we were definitively living in a “neurotic society” struggling under the Name-of-the-Father (or the Death of God qua transcendental Father), are we today living in a “psychotic non-reality or anti-reality” (where God only functions in its fantasmatic immediacy beyond the mediation of the Father)?  Here what cannot be avoided is the truth that the emergence of psychoanalysis itself is linked to the ambiguous social decline of patriarchy and traditional religious identification as a structure, which is perhaps furthermore linked to the emergence of postmodern philosophy, from Nietzsche to Derrida, which tends towards the deconstruction of master signifiers and totalising One-All structures conventionally associated with masculine logic and performativity.     

However, what this dualism (admittedly) “leaves to the side” is the status and nature of perversion, and the “God therein”, which is, like neurosis, also operative intersubjectively (in contrast to psychosis).  When we include perversion as a third clinical structure alongside neurosis and psychosis is the possibility that we have not flipped from a society under the “negative presence” of the Name-of-the-Father (i.e. repressed society) towards a society under the “positive absence” of the Name-of-the-Father” (society of foreclosure), but rather find ourselves in a society under the unconscious “positive presence” of the Name-of-the-Father, i.e. a society that disavows the Father that it worships.  What we would find here in the decline of patriarchy and religious identification, as well as postmodern deconstruction, is not a positivised world of immediacy without a shared relation to language, but rather the immediacy of an obscene language and an obscene master who takes what he wants as his own in total disregard for any shared world.  If we seriously consider this possibility, excluding perversion from social analysis could be a big mistake for the way we think of psychoanalytic theory and its theopolitical relationship to social history on the level of the Name-of-the-Father.  

In this context, Hegelian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has long represented an antagonism with the work of Miller’s Lacanianism, and specifically the characterisation of our society as having oscillated from a neurotic to a psychotic age, but rather as having entered into an unconscious short-circuit via perversion.  Žižek suggests that, especially as it relates to the emergence of the internet society mediated by artificial intelligence, we have entered an age of perversion, which does not foreclose the Father, but rather introduces the disavowed Father:⁶

“It is perversion (or pere-version, “version of the father,” as Lacan put it) and not psychotic foreclosure that characterises AI.  The Unconscious is not primarily the Real of jouissance repressed by a castrating paternal figure but symbolic castration itself at its most radical, which means the castrating of the paternal figure itself, the embodiment of the big Other – castration means that father as a person is never at the level of his symbolic function.  The perverse return of the obscene father (Trump in politics) is not the same as the psychotic paranoiac.  Why?  In chatbots and other phenomena of the AI, we are dealing with an inverted foreclosure: it is not (to repeat Lacan’s classic formula) that the foreclosed symbolic function (Name-of-the-Father) returns in the Real (as the agent of paranoiac hallucination); it is, on the opposite, the Real of the neighbour’s opaque monstrosity, of the impossibility to reach out to an impenetrable Other, that returns in the Symbolic, in the guise of the “free” smoothly running space of digital exchanges.  Such an inverted foreclosure is what characterises (not psychosis but) perversion – which means that, when a chatbot produces obscene stupidities, it is not simply that I can enjoy them without responsibility because “it was AI which did it, not me.”  What happens is rather a form of perverse disavowal: although I know very well that the machine, not me, does the work, I can enjoy it as my own…”       

The key distinctions Žižek is making in this quote reflect the hypothesis that the rise of an internet-mediated AI-society coincides with a perverted structure where what we really sacrifice for a “smoothly running symbolic space” (free of the neurotic friction of pre-internet-mediated Oedipal society), is the “real-impossible” of an “impenetrable Other” (a type of perverted Father who enjoys via his own self-instrumentalization (masochism) or via self-instrumentalizing the Other (sadism)).  

In order to make this concept more understandable or digestible, one of the reasons why I have emphasised the importance of building physical spaces in coordination with digital spaces, is precisely because it is this dynamic which forces the introduction of Oedipalised friction, not as a transcendental Father, but as a vanishing mediation (i.e. confrontation with the negativity of the Name-of-the-Father which haunts the infantile drive).  It is precisely this friction which might break the destructive loop of contemporary ideology which institutes “smoothly running symbolic spaces” in return for an “impenetrable Other”.  In contrast to this model, in building in a loop of physical-digital space, as well as to actively make oneself available/penetrable as an Other, one does of course not get rid of the “real-impossible”, but rather moves it to a location that can be tarried with or negativized as a part of the real of history, as opposed to kept separate in the aforementioned hegemonic binary.  Thus, what I would call the active seeking to negativise the loop of “smoothly running symbolic spaces” / “real impossible impenetrable Other” via the introduction of an “Oedipalized Name-of-the-Father”, is hystericising perversion.  

First, in this task, we must make a key distinction internal to neurosis between obsessional neurosis (a type of pathological clinging to an idea as a way to avoid the real underlying tensions and trauma at work in the infantile/drive sexuality) and hysterical neurosis (a type of bodily-somatic convulsion of an idea that needs to be released towards the void).⁷  While the obsessional neurotic clings to the Name-of-the-Father as a transcendental signifier, the hysterical neurotic tries to shake itself free of the Name-of-the-Father as a transcendental signifier towards its vanishing.  What we perhaps need to learn as a culture post-psychoanalysis, is that the hysteric is not only doing battle with the neurotic Father but also the perverted Father.  And in fact, the perverted Father is perhaps a more monstrous incarnation to battle than is the neurotic Father.  Thus, the act of hystericising perversion is perhaps one of the most radical acts we can accomplish today, as it opens us to an unexpected and paradoxical emancipatory dimension of theopolitical struggle.  While the Freudian age was engaged in the theopolitical struggle of the hystericising the neurotic Father (real-impossible of an obsessional clinging to the All, etc.), perhaps our age must engage in the theopolitical struggle of hystericising the perverted Father (real-impossible of an impenetrable instrumentalized All).  All of this is in service to one thing, not the postmodern tendency to actively deconstruct patriarchy and religion, but rather a more reflective relation to the ambiguous dimension of the Father as a vanishing in service of keeping the drive alive (as opposed to the Father of obsessional clinging or impenetrable instrumentalisation).  

This idea that we are living in an age of generalised perversion is not only promulgated by Žižek but also echoed by one of Žižek’s closest collaborators, Alenka Zupančič, in her latest book Disavowal:⁸

“[Disavowal] argues that the [psychoanalytic] concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation [characteristic of psychosis and neurosis, respectively], disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. [In other words, the structure of perverted disavowal] sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite[.] [This structure of sustaining belief and knowledge is becoming the] predominant feature of our social and political life[:] libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.”

What Zupančič means by sustaining belief by proclaiming knowledge of the opposite can be applied to the aforementioned loop between smoothly running symbolic surfaces and the impenetrable Other: “I know very well that the social structure of the AI-mediated internet is a prison-house of language, but… nevertheless I participate in it while also denouncing it (write articles, post videos, update my social media profiles, etc.)”.  We frequently see behaviour today which denounces the internet, artificial intelligence, social media, and so forth, which does so unreflectively by using the very medium that is being denounced.  Perhaps the archetype here would be the “traditionalist ‘porn’” of YouTube videos or blogs that romanticise a solitary life in the woods, making your own food on a rural farm in the middle of nowhere and so forth, while also using YouTube to make a lot of money marketing your solitary traditional life to people living alienated lives in the city.  The only proper hystercisation to such “trad-porn” is the challenge of thinking how to keep the drive alive in the context of the modern urban digitised city (i.e. how do we make cities more liveable, affordable; how to re-think complex long-term sociosexual relations and family building activities in modern urban areas; how to develop a new socialised ethics and relations between physical reality and our screen-being, etc.).         

Žižek has for some time, perhaps most notably in his work Living in the End Times, been making the claim that when it comes to the disastrous nature of the human species current relation to the commons, whether in the form of ecology, economy, technology, biology, or society, we operate by way of a fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well, but… [fill-in-the-blank]”.  Let’s give some archetypal examples to hammer home the idea:  

1. I know very well that human civilization is approaching basic ecological limits, but [I will still live or work in a way that disregards this ecological reality]; 

2. I know very well that capitalist self-reproduction is leading to social destruction, but [I might as well still organise my life in service of it without limitation]; 

3. I know very well that technological progress is threatening the very nature of being human, but [I will still use artificial intelligence to enhance my productivity].  

And so on.  

Why do we act like this?  I am not writing this article unreflectively: I am also “guilty” of basically all of the above, while also constantly reflecting the seeming impotence of acting otherwise, almost as if the structure of the intersubjective order is itself really perverted and no matter how hard I hystericise myself, it is hard to get my drive out of it.  Thus, just individualist liberal solutions cannot be the final word here, there has to be some larger scale political project that works with the impasses of liberalism to resolve the very world that liberalism has created, without regression.  It is the impossible task which is needed to keep the drive alive.  So again: why do we act like this, collectively?  Zupančič argues, following Freud’s work inspired by the joyfully self-destructive behaviour of “civilised men” during World War I, “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death”, that fetishistic disavowal functions as the predominant response to traumatic and disturbing events because, on the level of the unconscious, we do not believe that we as individuals, or as a collective species, actually die (but that we will persist and insist beyond any and all natural or artificial catastrophes).  In other words, on the level of the unconscious, we believe that we are immortal:⁹

“We (and particularly our unconscious) do not believe in our own death, that it is impossible to imagine our own death, for even when we do imagine it, we are still there, present as spectators.  Of course we know that death exists, and also “experience” it with others, with the pain and irreversibility that comes when people close to us die.  But this knowledge of death, and the capacity to talk rationally about death as natural, undeniable, and unavoidable, changes nothing of the fact that “in reality, however, [...] we behave as if it were otherwise.” [...] Our unconscious, states Freud, “does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal [...] there is nothing instinctual [drive-related] in us which responds to a belief in death.” The fear of death [...] is in this sense only secondary[.]”

Is our unconscious belief in immortality correct?  To frame the problem as clearly as possible: in confronting death directly, as Hegel taught us, we find its opposite, not nothing, but an immortal spiritual process.  As reflected in a previous article on Hegelian ethics: when we are “torn asunder” in “absolute negativity” we find the true nature of our self-consciousness as a spirit that goes on and on.¹⁰  In psychoanalytic terms this is our “unconscious knowing” or the “subject of the unconscious”.  If we are to frame this in Christian Atheist terms, we might say that, after the “Death of God”, i.e. the collapse in any external guarantee for our belief in a transcendental signifier/traditional One-All, what we find is not “nothing” or a “nihilistic abyss” but rather its opposite: an immortal (undead) drive that (perversely) repeats itself even in the face of planetary or species-level catastrophe and apocalypse.  

This dimension is basically what allows Žižek to theorise the short-circuit between an oscillation of neurosis-psychosis with the dimension of perversion.  The dimension of the immortal/undead drive runs all throughout Žižek’s work as what either gets lost in the self-destruction of an obscene partial object or rather is sustained by the work of the drive in “Holy Spirit” qua “abyssal community of belief” “without transcendental guarantee” and so forth.  Thus, as we will see, Žižek’s theopolitics cannot be classified as either “liberal elitist” institutionalized affirmation of perversion, nor a “right wing populist” obsessional neurotic reactionary movement governed by obscene masters, but rather a sublation of the liberal moment towards emancipatory collectives without masters, or perhaps better: with vanishing masters/masters whom can vanish in service of the drive qua Holy Spirit.  To be clear, in this context, our contemporary society is not nihilistic, and the reinstantiation of traditional belief as a counterweight or countermeasure to nihilism, is not responding to what it thinks it is responding to.  The loop between nihilism and traditional belief is the repression of the fact that facing the core of our own drive is painful and disturbing, confronting us with strange and fascinating images that seem to undermine our egoic pleasures and pursuits, while at the same time, if we are paying attention, point us towards our own self-vanishing into the immortal spirit.  However, if we do not confront that drive directly, then it will continue to “act itself out” in a perverse structure.  Thus, to pose the question again, when it comes to the ethics of the drive: can we hystericise our perversion?  

In order to do justice to this question, we should go back to the drawing board on the role of perversion and fetishistic disavowal: what is the origin of psychoanalytic thinking about perversion?  At its zero-level, whereas neurosis is the negativity we endure to constrain ourselves to the pragmatic necessities of intersubjectivity (most notably the mechanisms involved in the biosocial reproduction of the species), perversion is about the non-reproductive repetition of libidinal enjoyment internal to intersubjectivity.  This is the truth we need to hystericise, not necessarily to instantiate a traditional reproductive constraint reducing repetition to reproduction (neurotic society), but rather to actually think about how we would like to repeat inclusive of reproduction (drive society).  Perversion is thus the “positive” of neurotic negativity, what we are left with as “God’s excessive remainder” in a post-Oedipal Death of God society.  On the other side, neurotic negativity arguably safe-guards the reproduction of the species under the institutional constraint or lawful mediation of the primordial God.¹¹  Here as an ever-present threat and disturbance, perversion disregards the practical concerns of the neuroses and affirms the immediate joy of its abyssal repetition.  As Freud first identified this perverted structure internal to psychoanalysis, it may help to note that Nietzsche, often viewed as a philosophical precursor to Freud, and the aforementioned origin of postmodern thought, seemed to celebrate perverted structure.  Consider the insane “life-affirming” repetitions of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra towards the end of the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the following basic sentiment is repeated by Zarathustra x7):¹²

“Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings – the ring of recurrence!

Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!  

For I love you, oh eternity!”   

We can use this quote to represent “the attitude of perversion”.  On the terms of a “non-reproductive repetition of libidinal enjoyment”, the structure is all there in this statement, most notably the disavowal of death for a relation to eternity (“Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings – the ring of recurrence!”), and the disregard for species-level reproduction for libidinal repetition itself (“Never yet have I found the woman for whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!”).  Nietzsche saw clearly the unconscious as an insistent wish-fulfillment or desire as this very “eternal pulsion” for enjoyment.  Perhaps psychosis enjoys this eternal pulsion outside of any intersubjective mediation, and perversion enjoys this eternal pulsion inside intersubjective mediation without ethical regard for this intersubjective mediation.  Whatever the case, it is this primordial eternal dimension of the immortal drive which gets sacrificed or negativised in the structure of neurosis, but also what remains as the excessive remainder after or if this structure is unreflexively discarded.  The weird logic at work here is the necessity for a mediated “ladder”, but also the question of the status of the ladder after the mediation itself.  

Let us stay with the challenge that Nietzsche represents for a moment, and specifically his general “affirmation of life” internal to philosophy as an “anti-philosophy” (in the form of being anti-concept or idea).  Here we do get a persistent issue for political philosophy today, specifically.  This issue of political philosophy is what I have already pointed towards under the distinction of the “neurotic” reproduction of the species and a “perverted” repetition of libidinal enjoyment disconnected from reproductive concerns.  This split is becoming a fairly salient political issue which has seemed to attract philosophical engagement on the level of the impulse to correlate perversion with a declining civilisation in need of relinking to the reductive politics of reproduction.¹³  Furthermore, in terms of the practical relevance of this topic to political philosophy today, consider that major political figures like Elon Musk regularly tweet about the issue of species-level reproduction as apocalyptic (“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”);¹⁴ it is also now common to read articles or books that “tarry with the negative” of developed countries fertility rates dropping below replacement level and the current impossibility of how to reverse the trend (>2.1);¹⁵ and many developed countries' governments are developing policies to explicitly address what is being referred to as a “fertility crisis” but no country thus far has successfully implemented a coherent, sustainable and empirical approach.¹⁶  In other words, the species-level unconscious discourse itself seems to support the Žižekian hypothesis that we are entering a technocapitalist (or technofeudalist) AI-mediated “perverted” age, where libidinal repetition in and for itself is supplanting or competing with the neurotic negativity involved in long-term familial reproductive commitments.  

Here a figure like Elon Musk — the richest man on the planet, and arguably the greatest benefactor of technofeudal conditions (with a net worth as of December 2024: US$486 billion), who has 12 kids with 3 different women, and constantly guilts and shames from an individualistic point of view, the West’s inability to collectively raise the birth rate — can only be seen as a perverse and obscene symptom of our current system.          

In the context of Nietzsche as a challenge, the structure of our society seems to be overdetermined by “thousands” of “mini-Zarathustra’s” affirming the unethical immediacy of our unconscious disavowal of death (“I love you, oh eternity!”), and the impossibility of finding a woman with whom we could reproduce, or becoming the woman as a figure of reproduction (“Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children”).  Moreover, as Žižek notes, this is technologically supported by a digital screen-being where we can easily find immediate libidinal satisfaction without real intersubjective mediation via artificially intelligent algorithms wired to fixate us within feedback loops that constantly reinforce excessive jouissance.  This is not only an issue with websites that explicitly market themselves as porn websites, but virtually all social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) are becoming overrun with content that basically functions as porn-based substitutes, perhaps to the level of undermining the social fabric of civilization itself.  In short, the space for long-term ethical fidelity to the mediation of intersubjectivity via language is breaking down and the threat of immediate exploitation by imagistic capture is higher than ever, as well as the temptation to the exploitation of imagistic capture which further undermines fidelity to the mediation of intersubjectivity via language.  

As of this writing, the phenomenon of “Lily Phillips” is going viral for not only sleeping with 100 men in 1 day for her Only Fans, but who plans to sleep with another 1000 men in 1 day.  There is nothing here to be reactively moralistic about: this can only be seen as a symptom of a much larger structural problem of a society conditioned to perversion.  As we will cover in greater detail later, if from the structure of a “man’s point of view”, perversion leads to the infinitely replaceable “one by one” of a carousel of women; from a “woman’s point of view”, perversion leads to one’s own self becoming a vessel or vehicle for “one by one” of a carousel of men.  This is a structure of total disconnection of sex from reproduction.  And on the other side, may we be setting the conditions in an AI-mediated society, for the possibility that we are preparing for a world where we combine AI with genetic technologies for reproduction, where reproduction may continue without sex (i.e. in vitro fertilisation, artificial wombs, genetic designer babies, etc.).  Is the solution to a perverse society towards the drive the embrace of perversion and technological automation that allows us to totally by-pass the neurotic structure of the Father in the mediation of long-term relationships and family building under the totalising One-All of the Oedipal complex?  As a philosophical aside: were Deleuze and Guattari, inspired by Nietzsche and transgressive regarding Freud’s reading of the unconscious, correct in Anti-Oedipus to suggest that we look for emancipation in processes of individuation in rhizomatic assemblages of multiplicity separate from any notion of the One-All?  Is then the challenge of hystericising perversion via the vanishing Father committed to the ethics of the drive stabilising an obscene object in Holy Spirit, simply an unnecessary project?    

In the most hysterical stance possible: How are we to think about the ethical social complexities of this situation?  Is the political rhetoric about fertility collapse a clear symptom pointing towards the aforementioned historical hegemonic inversion of Western society, or even Global society, mediated by new digital technologies from a neurotic-norm to a perverted-norm (as opposed to the idea that we now exist in a psychotic culture)?¹⁷  If so, how are we to respond politically to this structure?  How seriously are we to take this problem?  Here I will start with the presupposition that this seeming inversion from social neurosis to social perversion is that liberal progressive culture has certainly lost its counter-cultural edge in (intentionally or not) making perversion itself socially normative.  Consequently, there are now many regressive or reactionary anti-liberal political tendencies.  This is a huge philosophical political challenge: is there an uncomfortable or impossible truth in this hegemony of perversion?  Should we re-actively attempt to reverse the inversion?  Or is there another route?  Here we should note that in contrast to “liberal elites” who seem to control academia, politics, media, etc. and in a certain sense embrace the perverted inversion (or are at least unconscious about the issue), the “new counter-culture” has taken on a distinctly conservative mode.  This mode is a regressive form that could be labelled as a “right wing populism” which explicitly rejects liberal institutions for localist organisation, and implicitly forms international alliances with anti-democratic authoritarian figures of technocracy like Trump and Putin.¹⁸  Is the contemporary emergence of populist right movements already the correct response or at least pointing in the right direction in the failure of liberal democracy?  Or are these movements fundamentally also perverted symptoms supporting the immediacy of “obscene masters” capable of sustaining themselves via simplistic scapegoats?   

Žižek’s response is here properly hysterical: this constellation between “liberal elites” and “new populist right” represents a false dualism and signals a political crisis on the level of theopolitics, where emancipatory political thought can no longer resist or reject the role of theology in political issues.¹⁹  Here Žižek explicitly challenges the left to rethink itself, and especially on the level of woke moralism and its intersectional matrix of privilege and oppression.  What short-circuits this political structure, for Žižek, is specifically Jewish identity, where privilege and oppression no longer overlap in structural subordination of black and brown bodies, but rather explodes in the desire for the extermination of Jews as secret privileged Masters pulling the strings of White Christian society.²⁰  Consequently, for Žižek, anti-semitism breaks the coherence of standard interpretations of intersectionality: anti-semitism not only functions for right-wing populism as a primitive distortion of anti-capitalism, but also functions internal to the progressive left’s anti-capitalism as a potential mask for anti-semitism.²¹  Thus, for Žižek, when the right wing represses the “Judeo” aspect of “Judeao-Christian” society it becomes a form of pagan Christian populism, sustained by the fantasy of the perfect couple under God; but when left wing progressivism represses its entire implicit theological dimension to emancipatory politics, we find ourselves unable to think universality in the impossible tensions of our current political moment (as in the explosions of violence between Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine).  

In order to better understand this theopolitical challenge for emancipatory politics, let us first think about the psychoanalytic notion of truth.  Žižek ends his latest work Christian Atheism with an explicit philosophical call in this direction: “The Need for Psychoanalysis”.²²  Here we first need to make the distinction between a pseudo-theopolitical notion of truth or a notion of theopolitical truth cut from any psychoanalytic insight.  When we think about truth cut from psychoanalytic insight we find ourselves in a form of the truth conceived as gradually approaching an “X” (holy destination/promised land) in an “infinite process of approximation, without ever reaching it”.²³  This process of approximation is always sustained by a scapegoat as obstacle-enemy and the real truth of its spurious infinity.  Whereas when we think about truth from a psychoanalytic perspective we are challenged to think about a repressed truth that is “always-already here in its effects”, “as a symptom which undermines the hegemonic structure of our symbolic space”,²⁴ as in the structure of neuroses and psychoses which disrupt smooth frictionless processual function.  The reason why this distinction is so important for theopolitics is that it prevents us, or even immunizes us against capture by a prophetic figure (a “transcendent Father”) guaranteeing us the way to a promised land actualised as wholeness or completeness (i.e. a figure of the big Other who knows the truth of wholeness or completeness etc.).  Here we cannot help but think about a figure like Jordan B. Peterson whose performance always gives us the appearance of a “transcendental Father” (as opposed to a Father oriented towards his own vanishing), whose project and coordination with the Daily Wire ultimately promises us the archetypal right wing populist vision of “Make America Great Again” with a Christianised commodification, and with a clear external enemy as scapegoat: the “Woke Left”.   

In contrast to this mode, to be attentive to the truth (after the Death of God), is a constant work or arduous labour located in the cracks that potentially threaten the illusion of completeness and wholeness.  Here we are confronted with the real structure of a shattered and disjointed totality that will never be complete and whole but which we can cultivate a perspectival shift on this very ontological incompleteness and fractured totality.  In Freudian terms, the truth of this real is only revealed in jokes, dreams, and slips of the tongue, and via a perspectival shift we can become better at working with this truth.  The resulting theopolitical challenge is clear, if difficult: it is easier to follow a transcendent Father who guarantees for us the way, then it is to think speculatively about the truths in the cracks of the real.  As it relates to the Left and the way it currently conceives the matrix of oppression and privilege, what could be more difficult than confronting the way its own anti-capitalism function as an unconscious anti-Semitism; or what could be more difficult than thinking about the way anti-capitalism too easily reacts against the problems and struggles of living in the real of a technocapitalist or even techno-feudalist reality?  Or even more difficult: what about thinking about the constitutive and irreducible problems that block the way towards a new way of conceiving of socialism or communitarianism as it relates to human nature itself (i.e. the way in which the human is fundamentally riddled by aggressive self-destructive spirals in jealousy and envy, or the way our libido does not find itself in a harmonious One but irreducible antagonisms)?            

This psychoanalytic distinction on truth has major consequences for not only proper theopolitics but also for the historicity of science.  There is a fundamental distinction between scientific truth and psychoanalytic truth, which constitutes a mega-historical tension between the two fields: in science, we are dealing with the “reality principle” based on repeatable experience (isolated experimental procedures for replication); while in psychoanalysis, we are dealing with the “repetition automatism” of the signifier itself (the subject’s own repetition compulsions and the content-form that they naturally isolate).  Consider the difference in relation the aforementioned quotes from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: science would reduce Zarathustra to the “reality principle” in the sense that it would not be interested in repetitive joy of eternity (dismissing it as an illusion); whereas psychoanalysis would see this very same content and its position of enunciation as the ecstatic ineffable truth which refuses to submit to the “reality principle”.  Consequently, in their ideality, science privileges a type of collectivised substance or systemic-view that can lose contact with the real of subjectivity; whereas psychoanalysis discards with a coherent view of reality for an attentive listening to subjective singularities and the excesses of their drive.²⁵  

This distinction is so formative with regards to the conflict between the sciences and psychoanalysis as it brings us to the difference between Darwinian reproduction (of the “species substance”) and the Freudian repetition (of the “enjoying subject”).  Thus, when we think the truth of science to its evolutionary limit, we find that it implicitly subordinates libidinal enjoyment to a problem of the reproduction of the species, and does not understand (or does not want to understand) libidinal enjoyment on its own terms.  Perhaps this is why, as Jordan B. Peterson notes, evolutionary science itself has emphasised the cold blindness of natural selection, and de-emphasised the excessive and ecstatic visions that mediate sexual selection?  Of course, as mentioned, for a Freudian, the terms of libidinal enjoyment are the terms of the repetition compulsion, and an expression that finds a terminus through the pleasure principle towards narcissism in the death drive (the beyond of the pleasure principle).  The challenge here internal to psychoanalysis, and also expressed in this paper, is that it has yet to be raised to a theopolitics of the enjoying subject and its relationship to species substance.    

First, staying with the issue on the Darwinian side: this science externalises its understanding of conflict and death to a species-level reproduction, but has yet to think about the individual and collective psychic effects and consequences of being-in-such-a-world (outside of the way evolutionary theory was abused in unreflexive fascistic political policy).  Thus, Darwinian scientists, with Richard Dawkins acting as its ideal archetype, calmly and cooly present the empirical data of how the natural world operates independently of human beings, or as how the mechanism of natural selection function as if human beings are reductive mechanisms of this process.  All the while evolutionary scientists pay little attention to the historical emergence of psychoanalysis or the theopolitical crises and antagonisms of the 20th century, and the way they point towards the way in which the human being struggles to come to terms with this very same reality, or even how our systems point towards the attempt to undermine the mechanisms described by evolutionary science.  Moreover, as has been already emphasised, what we see in the current world is the very unleashing of the problem of species-level reproduction on the level of theopolitics in the sense that we can no longer simply repress the repetition compulsion of subjective enjoyment to species-level reproduction (as mentioned, no developed country has yet to successfully reverse the fertility crisis based on this presupposition, and perhaps such policies should be read as just symptoms of a much deeper structural issue).  At the very least, any evolutionary science that is interested in this problem from a non-reductive point of view, would have to take the sexual visions, dreams, and fantasies of the subjective singularities of the evolutionary process seriously, if it is to meaningfully address the issues we find therein.  

Thus, and in contrast, from the Freudian side of the equation, for a truly psychoanalytically inspired theopolitical approach, we need to think how the repetition compulsion can be recoupled to species-level reproduction via the drive (which, as Lacan infamously claimed, accomplishes satisfaction without repression).²⁶  To be clear: this means that repetition cannot be reduced to reproduction (which can result in a type of neurotic deadening), but rather reproduction must be stabilised internal to repetition itself.  Or said in a different way: repetition itself must be the term that we reconcile with if we are to lift reproduction to a stable level or a new equilibrium.  A tentative hypothesis: if our day to day repetitions are stuck in a state of political-economic slavery, then there is no incentive for reproduction to continue; but if our day to day repetitions can be raised to true political-economic freedom, then it is likely that the natural incentives for reproduction to continue will take care of itself (suggesting that, as mentioned, policies designed to incentivise reproduction directly are symptoms of a deeper structural issue).  Here by true political-economic freedom, I am explicitly referring to a Hegelian model that includes at its ground, not just voting within a parliamentary democracy, but property rights and a social contract that allows for the re-actualisation of an ethical system (i.e. entire generations are now more productive and educated than ever, but less and less able to own property or escape debt slavery etc.).  In terms of Leftist politics, what we usually find here are lazy ideas about automating work and issuing a universal basic income, but this does not go deep enough into thinking about the spiritual dimension of our work or labour, as well as how to actually work through the dialectic of capitalism, internal to its own logic, towards socialism in a higher order tension (as Marx’s work on capitalism suggests).  

On this political level of thinking reproduction-repetition, the Freudian project is here absolutely indispensable to Marxism, and a key ally, as Žižek notes, against the forces of psychiatry, behavioural science, and woke feminism;²⁷ as well as traditionalist fundamentalisms.²⁸  What these forces conspire to distort is the real of the divided subject and its repetition compulsion with biochemical reductions (psychiatry) abstracted from social context (behavioural science) and the constitutively problematic nature of sexuality itself (woke feminism/traditionalist fundamentalisms).  To give a concrete example, when the subject is struggling with the repetition of its enjoyment, often times or as a rule the only thing our society can do is respond with pills to numb the pain, or explanations about the suffering that have no relation to Oedipal tensions or political-economic impasses, or ideologies about sexuality that do not recognise the impossibilities of relation therein.  In contrast, and what psychoanalysis foregrounds, is precisely what is most difficult for liberal society to internalise: the dimension of the subject’s death drive and creative sublimation (the real of life-death, creation-destruction).  The Freudian project would of course not be what it is if we were to subordinate libidinal enjoyment to the pragmatic efficiency of work that supports species-level reproduction.  Psychoanalysis rather entertains the truth of what disrupts pragmatic efficiency: the lacks-excesses of libidinal enjoyment which pursues the contradictory logic of the pleasure principle towards its own real and excessive “surplus” (those sexual visions, fantasies and dreams of “the Other” as “One”, of the suspension or cancelling of the sexual non-relation).  While extremely difficult to think about, this brings us to the deadlock of contemporary liberalism (where we find the perverted excesses of hedonistic exploitation and self-slavery).  Thus, in Lacan’s fidelity to the Freudian moment, he claims that if we do not pursue the truth of this logic we will find ourselves in the religion of “hedonistic apathy”:²⁹  

“This dimension of jouissance [...] is so ambiguous in the speaking being who can also theorize and make a religion of living in apathy, and apathy in hedonism. [...] What animates [Freud], what preoccupies him, what makes of him an order of knowledge different from this harmonizing knowledges [...] is the function of surplus jouissance as such.”    

In other words, this “surplus jouissance” where as find images of the Other as the One but in the real we find disruption of harmony is what the normative adult psyche in general does not know what to do with, opting for illusory “harmonising knowledges” as opposed to the disorienting “objet-a-ontology” of the drive as such.  “Harmonising knowledges” are insufficient and will leave the issue of species-level reproduction where it currently is: drowning in a disorienting and unmediated surplus jouissance and screen-being.  At the same time, raising psychoanalysis to a theopolitical project, means confronting the way we are “condemned” to an oscillation between religious enthusiasm (surplus jouissance) and practical day-to-day negativities (long-term mediation).³⁰  Almost anyone can do one or the other: get lost in the excess of religious enthusiasm but be unable to mediate it via practical day-to-day negativities; or get lost in the practical day-to-day negativities but be unable to sustain contact with the excess of religious enthusiasm.  But sustain the excess of religious enthusiasm and mediate it with practical day-to-day negativities?  Now that is the real challenge of lifting reproduction to the level of repetition as opposed to reducing repetition to reproduction, or letting repetition undermine reproduction.    

Consequently, this mediated commitment to the excesses of the drive can be seen as not only the starting point for the Lacanian fidelity to the Freudian project (in continuing its work from the rupture “beyond the pleasure principle”), but also the key to its radical theopolitical core for analysing our world today (outside of conventional clinical analysis).  Such a theopolitical commitment is the point at which Lacan might claim that Freud did not understand the consequences of his own disruptive discoveries which might point to the limits of liberalism as opposed to strict identification with it.³¹  At the same time, as Žižek notes, the Lacanian project does not resolve the theopolitical issues of the big Other and emancipatory collectives.³²  Instead we find that work in the Lacanian tradition after Lacan finds itself in “cartel logic” which operates as an (arguably liberal) “one by one” of singularities, but without the capacity to interface with universality.³³  This is why we need the philosophical moment of psychoanalysis: to think of the way the logic of singularities can move towards the logic of a real emancipatory universal network which is not a reduction of repetition to species-reproduction, but rather a lifting of repetition to include within itself species-reproduction.  To see how Lacan explicitly keeps our focus on this problem, consider this statement we find regarding ineffable surplus jouissance and its fascinating image as the realest coordinates, which might sound foreign to an orthodox Freudian who tends to the “science” of conformity to the “reality principle”:³⁴

“On the basis of the confession we hear from the neurotic or pervert of the ineffable jouissance he finds in losing himself in the fascinating image, we can gauge the power of a hedonism that introduces us to the ambiguous relations between reality and pleasure. If, in referring to these two grand principles, we are tracing out the direction of normative development, how can we not but be struck by the importance of fantasmatic functions in the grounds for this progression, and by how captive human life remains to the narcissistic illusion with which it weaves, as we know, life’s “realest” coordinates?”

Lacan is here suggesting that the “realest” coordinates are neither to be found on the level of the pleasure nor the reality principle, but in, again, the contradictory logic of the pleasure principle, and its “neurotic/perverted” extreme in the “fascinating image” and the “narcissistic illusion”.  Of course, we are not to remain trapped on this level, but rather must mediate it via the death drive to the beyond of both pleasure and the structure of narcissism.  As mentioned, on the level of neurosis and perversion we are dealing with the structure of pure opposites: while the neurotic is the structural “negative” of this “fascinating image”, the pervert is its structural “positive” expression.  But since the unconscious “knows no no” (it is this pure erotic affirmation of life, libido, etc.), what we actually find in this “positive” expression is not a deviation from a neurotic norm, but the constitutive ground of infantile (or drive) sexuality itself (what Freud controversially called “polymorphous perversity”).  In other words, perversion is the “norm” or “starting condition” and neurosis is its secondary or cultural modification of this norm (the negativised constraint/ladder of polymorphous perversity).  Here we perhaps find the truth of liberal culture raising perversion to a normative standard beyond species-level reproduction in the sense that it is affirming our starting condition or the first cause of subjectivity (even if it fails to think of the truth of the impasses it brings us to).  In Freud’s time, however, this perversion was not the norm.  Consider the way in which Freud originally thinks about the perversions and their relation to the neurotic norm:³⁵

“Here, then, are factors which provide a point of contact between the perversions and normal sexual life and which can also serve as a basis for their classification. Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.” 

Of course, he later discards this language which presupposes a norm from which the perversions can be classified (which is also the underlying reason why Lacan starts to think of the clinical terms like neurosis, psychosis and perversion as structures).  Freud does recognise that the perversions are never really overcome in relation to the presupposed norm or final sexual aim, but which, structurally speaking, we never really overcome but must always tarry with.  And to be fair, we already see the seeds of this idea in Freud on the very same page where I take the previous quote:³⁶

“But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions’.”

Here when we think “most normal” Freud is referring to a “heteronormative couple whose copulations result in offspring” (i.e. reproduction).  In contrast, what Freud means by “rudiments” are the singular tics qua compulsions of subjective enjoyment that speak in analysis (i.e. repetition).  The challenge I am outlining here is safeguarding these singular tics as the motor of the drive, both individually and collectively, without repression (either neurotic or perverted).  As it relates to contemporary philosophical theory informed by psychoanalysis, Alenka Zupančič outlines the consequences for this shift from perversion as deviation to perversion as ground in What Is Sex? with recourse to the distinction between instinctual sexuality (which both religious and scientific discourses embed within a normative cultural framework or law), and drive sexuality (which is left unthought until the rise of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis):³⁷

“The difference between drive sexuality [...] and instinctual sexuality [...] is essentially related to different partial drives and their satisfaction; [drive sexuality] is not innate, not object-based, and not procreative.  It refers to autoerotic, polymorphous, perverse, non-gendered constricted, protean sexuality.  Instinctual sexuality, on the other hand, is hormonally based, and more or less preprogrammed. This is the type of sexuality that arrives after prepuberty, that is, after drive or infantile sexuality.”    

As it relates to the tension point in our political ideology, Zupančič’s psychoanalytic reading stresses that we must avoid a moralistic political binary between the affirmation/negation of a chaotic multiplicity (polymorphous perversity) of drives (characteristic of unmediated infantile/drive sexuality) and the affirmation/negation of a unified normative sexuality (heteronormative coupling/copulation to reproduction) characteristic of a mediated instinctual repression.  Zupančič claims both positions are “much too simple”.³⁸  Basically, we need to recognise the truth of the ground as something we never get rid of (polymorphous perversity), while at the same time recognising the necessity of normative constraint as a possible self-overcoming (unified coupling), while at the same time recognising that the perverse ground is indestructible as well as the constitutive vital source of the normative constraint.  In this context, perhaps this is why Zupančič work focuses on the “ethics of the real” where we must see our sociosexual identities (whether man, woman, transman, transwoman) as in constitutive struggle with the truth as such (and not a “promised land” governed by “genital satisfaction”).  This struggle could be with: 

1. Polymorphous perversity itself, 

2. Self-overcoming in normative coupling, or 

3. The oscillation between polymorphous perversity and normative coupling internal to the couple itself.  

This struggle could be further linked to the aforementioned dimension of “religious enthusiasm” and “practical day-to-day negativities”:

1. Polymorphous perversity qua religious enthusiasm 

2. Self-overcoming in normative coupling qua practical day-to-day negativities,

3. The oscillation between polymorphous perversity and normative coupling internal to the couple itself qua unity of religious enthusiasm and practical day-to-day negativities 

At the same time, what Zupančič refers to as the “much too simple” discourse of course appears very clearly at the site of the tension between the reproduction of the species and perverted libidinal enjoyment in the split between conservative concerns about plummeting birth rates in developed countries (mobilizing a paradox internal to Darwinian scientific discourse) and progressive affirmation of idiosyncratic and non-reproductive sexual expression (mobilizing a paradox internal to Freudian psychoanalytic discourse).  What both of these positions obfuscate is that the sexual drives (chaotic multiplicity) and their oppression (heteronormativity) are “inextricably linked”.³⁹  In this link “freedom” itself is being worked out on the level of the “realest” coordinates of the “fascinating image” mediated by an “ineffable jouissance”.⁴⁰  Moreover, if we cannot think of freedom on this level, our political discourse can easily become captured and misrecognized, becoming slavery, as I suspect it does in both unreflexive conservative and progressive ideologies.  The conservative ideology can easily find itself repressing ineffable jouissance in an image of the perfect couple under God as well as acting out historical behavioural patterns that are totally discordant with the lived reality of the subjects.  In contrast, the progressive ideology can easily find itself disavowing ineffable jouissance in a type of unmediated capture by a spurious multiplicity where subjects unreflexively jump in a “one by one”, treating the others mechanically and as infinitely replaceable.  

In order to avoid this capture and misrecognition, we must recognise that psychoanalysis is dealing with the truth as first cause, which takes us back to the locus of perversion as a problem for subjectivity on the level of infantile drive sexuality (the way polymorphous perversity appears at the site of a primordial gap, and the way it continues to reappear at the site of this gap in a structure that is in-itself never overcome).  Thus, what we find at this locus of perversion is not simply a polymorphous perversity (chaotic multiplicity) but also a lack in the (M)Other.  Consider Lacan’s explication of this dimension:⁴¹

“The whole problem of the perversions consists in conceiving how the child, in its relationship with its mother — a relationship that is constituted by analysis is not by the child’s biological dependence, but by its dependence on her love, that is, by its desire for her desire — identifies with the imaginary object of her desire insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus.

The phallocentrism produced by this dialectic is all that need concern us here. It is, of course, entirely conditioned by the intrusion of the signifier in man’s psyche and strictly impossible to deduce from any pre-established harmony between this psyche and the nature of it expresses.”  

Note again here how Lacan situates the problem around infantile qua drive sexuality understood not as a “biological” issue, but as an issue of “love” dependence on the level of “desire for her desire”.  This dependence on the lack in the (M)Other (the site of the ineffable feminine or Other jouissance) essentially “frustrates” and “alienates” the phallocentric dialectic in the non-correlation and non-correspondence between itself and the (M)Other (or the missing phallus, i.e. the fact that the (M)Other lacks).  

The neurotic subject deals with a lack of love by way of engaging in a conflict with the Name-of-the-Father over enjoyment and the mystery of the Other’s desire.  We could here give a practical concrete example in the popular performativity of Jordan B. Peterson qua “Wrestling with God” for the heart of Western civilisation.  In this context the obsessional neurotic subject reflects oneself as the hero in a dramatic antagonism with an external enemy-obstacle (“Woke Left”) where the world needs saving (“Cultural Christianity”).  In contrast, the perverted subject takes a different approach (albeit mirrored to the neurotic): the pervert disobeys the “No” of the Father (i.e. limit/prohibition) because it actually knows what the Other desires in its abyssal immediacy and enacts it as its law (i.e. enacting unmediated polymorphous perversity qua liberal hedonism).  Here we could give a practical concrete example with Sean Combs or “P. Diddy” and his “white parties” or “unethical-exploitative orgies” as an example of the pervert.  But I could give many other historical examples of actual people: for the sake of this article just consider any archetype of a celebrity, athlete or musician whose law acts out sleeping with a multiplicity of women at excessive parties/orgies as a good enough description of enacting the Other’s desire in its abyssal intersubjective immediacy.  While one is a “negative” (e.g. Jordan B. Peterson) and the other is a “positive” (e.g. P. Diddy), both struggle with a “lack of love” and neither actually end up living in love (the neurotic lives under conflict with the moral law, haunted by an obstacle-enemy; and the other turns immediate desire into law, haunted by the abuse and sometimes torture of the actual other).  

However, in the spirit of hystericising the pervert, let us reflect on its “archetypal” nature on display in the work of Lacan’s analysis of Sade, which offers the deepest window into the frustrated alienation from love experienced in the perverted structure:⁴²

“I chase you away in order to return to the function of presence in the Sadean fantasy.

This fantasy has a structure [which] jouissance petrifies in the object, it becomes the black fetish, in which can be recognised the form that was verily and truly offered up at a certain time and place, and still is in our own time, so that one can adore the god therein. 

This is what becomes of the executioner in sadism when, in the most extreme case, his presence is reduced to being no more than the instrument.

But the fact that the executioner’s jouissance becomes fixated there does not spare his jouissance the humility of an act in which he cannot help but become a being of flesh and, to the very marrow, a slave to pleasure.”

A few key points: the perverted fantasy petrifies/fixates a certain content of jouissance which either instrumentalises or is instrumentalised in a master/slave dialectic as a replacement for love.  In this way, what the neurotic negative of the phallocentric dialectic represses is the jouissance of “the black fetish”, “the god therein”, and the “sadistic executioner” for the reproduction of the species (e.g. Jordan B. Peterson).  In contrast, the perverted positive repeats precisely the jouissance of “the black fetish”, “the god therein”, and the “sadistic executioner”, as a replacement for love (e.g. Sean Combs a.k.a P. Diddy).  Thus, the fundamental fantasy for the neurotic is represented by Lacan as $<>a,⁴³ privileging the “negative” perspective of the barred subject (e.g. “Wrestling with God”); whereas the fundamental fantasy for the pervert is represented by Lacan as a<>$, privileging the “positive” perspective of the petrified object-cause of desire (re: “reduced to being no more than the instrument”) (e.g. “the eternal object” of “orgiastic sexuality”).⁴⁴  Here we could think about the logic of perversion finding its terminus in an unreflective death drive where one sacrifices love of the Other as the One (e.g. found in the archetype of neurotic pair-bonding or the “two-as-One”), for the repetition of perversion itself, and the Other becomes a totally replaceable and spurious aforementioned “one by one” without limit or end.

The stakes are here on the social level of freedom and slavery in the phallocentric dialectic (re: “cannot help but become [...] a slave to pleasure”).  The neurotic and the perverted subjective structures function as mirrors of each other in theopolitical tensions where the shared absence is love.  In these theopolitical tensions the neurotic self-sacrifices in the form of a self-imposed pain, archetypally represented by reducing oneself to one sexual partner and covering polymorphous perversity with a type of asexuality.  Archetypally, sexually conservative men will frequently express the “heroism” of their self-restraint as it relates to limiting themselves to one woman (as many men in Jordan B. Peterson’s recent Gospel seminar series hosted by Daily Wire express).  In contrast, the pervert self-sacrifices by way of becoming the object-instrument of the other’s pain, archetypally represented in becoming a type sexual servant for the Other’s fetishistic ideal.⁴⁵  Archetypally, sexually liberal men will frequently express the “power” of their capacity to not only attract many women but at the same time totally separate sex and love so that the women become a revolving “carousel” of “one by ones” (as many men who consider themselves, or are considered, “Chad’s” or “Tyrone’s” express).  

In this context, the neurotic religious negative operates by way of the formula “I know well I am castrated, so I must suspend the symbolic efficiency of my knowledge” (i.e. I could sleep with many women but I will suspend this capacity for the sake of the greater cause of the “God” of “Western civilisation” or something).  In contrast, the perverted religious positive operates by way of the formula “I know well I am castrated, so I can ignore it, because I am in a safe position of knowledge” (i.e. I know that there is no sexual relation so I can just exploit that absence and fuck around in the immediacy of the fascinating image where I can pretend I am or I am with “the god therein”).⁴⁶  For the neurotic religious negative we find a subject who retains an enjoyment it can bear without anxiety by concealing the “positive” “perverted” image from the Other (i.e. keeping private secret fantasies from the Other); and for the perverted religious positive we find a split into sadism and masochism, where sadism is represented by becoming an instrument of the Other’s enjoyment, and masochism is represented by becoming the object of an Other’s enjoyment (i.e. performing different positions of the object-cause of desire).⁴⁷          

As it relates to concrete theopolitical discourses in liberal hegemony, the pervert tends towards freezing pseudo-freedom in the slavery of the progressive discourse that allows for the reproduction and defense of the fetishised sexual relation, inverting the impossibility of the feminine jouissance (the lack in the (M)Other) into oneself as the sadistic executioner or masochistic slave (feminine jouissance as replaceable one by ones).  We can hypothesise that this may be represented as operating in the repetitive oscillation of “one by one” where every “one” fails, becoming “not-one” (repetitive oscillation: one / not-one), opening to a “new one” that will inevitably become “not-one” (in colloquial discourse: serial monogamy, i.e. “one by one”).  In contrast, the neurotic tendency can be framed towards freezing pseudo-freedom in the slavery of the conservative religious discourse that allows for the reproduction and defense of the normative sexual union.  Psychoanalytic theorist Lorezno Chiesa has suggested this as being equivalent to the phallic totalising jouissance turning feminine jouissance into the “angelic” “non-sexual” fusional One of the woman as not only definitely present but more importantly “in her place” (again: two-as-One).⁴⁸  In many ways, both are forms of phallic jouissance that refuse or fail to undermine itself for the “mystical” Other jouissance.⁴⁹  This mystical Other jouissance can become stereotyped as feminine but it is best represented as “Other” in the sense that both subjects with “male” and “female” bodies can embody this mystical dimension, as psychoanalytic theologian Mark Gerard Murphy has made clear with special reference to John of the Cross.⁵⁰  Žižek here locates the theosophical “night of the world” in the absence or gap of any sexual relation proper.⁵¹  The key to hystericising perversion is located at precisely this location of the absence or gap of the night of the world where the endless oscillation of one by one becomes the gap itself, where one neither labours under the negative (neurotic), nor performs a false positive (perversion), but rather positivises the negativity itself.  We would call this drive satisfaction which has mediated intersubjectivity and embodies a joy that does not require repression, and can potentially sustain reproduction.   

However, we still need to think more deeply on the mirror of perversion and neurosis.  While seemingly antagonistic and oppositional, what I have been emphasising here is that what they share as an unconscious presupposition, the absence of love, is more crucial and the reason why they become united via antagonism and opposition in the culture war.⁵²  To develop this further, both the unconscious presuppositions of perverted and neurotic structural positions claim to have found “The Relation”, as opposed to working with the negativity of the phallocentric dialectic towards drive (the working through of neurotic-perverted structure towards their mutual vanishing).  Here Zupančič frequently and explicitly refers to the phallocentric dialectic by way of the “minus one” as the constitutive “non-relation” (or what I call above, following Žižek, the gap as the mystical-theosophical “night of the world”).⁵³  Logically speaking, the minus one is the gap in the oscillation between one and not-one subordinating both the two-as-one and the one-by-one.  Moreover, the psychoanalytic sociologist Duane Rousselle suggests that this non-relation actually represents the elementary axiom for any sociology or paradoxical theory of the social bond: the raising of sexual non-relation to the social non-relation.⁵⁴  For example, without this “psychoanalytic sociology”, the “fascinating images” and “ineffable jouissance” –– which neurotics repress and which perverts disavow –– remains unthought on the level of philosophy and politics.  Philosophically we are left tormented on the level of Hegel’s “spiritual psychology” towards Absolute Knowing of becoming-other, and politically we are left tormented on the level of Marx’s “labour economism” towards World Communism of species-being.⁵⁵  In this precise sense, it is only when psychoanalysis is brought to the level of philosophy and politics, that we can disentangle or diffuse the culture wars provoked by the mirror images of perversion and neurosis, manifesting historical content in the most general sense on the level of serial dating culture and the traditional heteronormative marriage.  The key for both positions is not to fall into the trap of scapegoating the other, but actually seeing the way in which a dialectical treatment of both positions can strengthen our understanding of the stakes of love in the libidinal field.  At its most elementary this turns the “obstacle-enemy” into working with one’s own libidinal self-contradiction. 

To get more historically concrete about the way perversion features and functions structurally in the political context of culture war, we only need to look more closely at contemporary American politics to see what global politics will become if there is an even deeper inversion from neurosis to perversion (or again, maybe this is already a global situation).  In any case, what we see in American politics is a dramatization of the social unconscious on the level of the universalisation of perversion as normative social liberalism vis-a-vis Oedipal relations, i.e. “Anti-Oedipus”; as well as universalisation of neurotic reaction as normative conservatism via cultural Christianity vis-a-vis Oedipal relations, i.e. “transcendental Fathers”.  What we see in this explicitly political discourse, on the side of normative liberalism, is basically the obsession with gender and race identities, stripped of any class consciousness or class antagonism, as circling a dialectic of slavery and freedom (e.g. “Black Lives Matter”, “LGBTQ+”).  We may suspect that what is really going on here is both the spiritual psychology and labour economism of perversion as it relates to the “black fetish” (this time with an explicit reference to the “black body” but potentially also related to the “transgender body”).  This occurs via the literal highlighting or foregrounding of “Black” as “positively different” as a way to “integrate blackness” into mainstream liberal “White America”, which is just the historical inversion of “Black” as “negatively different” as a way to “segregate blackness”.  What both the “positive-negative” “solutions” to the “black body” miss is of course the drive of the “becoming-other” on the level of “species-being” (where the repetition of enjoyment does not subordinate but contains the reproduction of the species).  Perhaps this currently challenges both traditional Oedipal conceptions of the reproduction of the “Black family” and the “White family” in the sense that we see the emergence of a “self-objectification” in relation to the Black body which inverts the negativity of the fundamental fantasy ($<>a) into a positive perversion (a<>$).  However, we have yet to consider to what extent this pattern may reproduce itself in other contexts, as well as what the political ramifications would be.

Of course, as counter-reaction in the American political context, we have in explicit discourse, on the side of normative conservatism, in the obsession with Oedipal relations — exclusive long-term marriage between one man and one woman — as a way to contain or sublimate this excessive and perverted otherness into capitalist commodification of Christianity, usually with images quasi-deifying the “White marriage” (as well as in the extreme reacting against interracial dating and marriages).  This reaction is framed in patriarchal norms, as a return to “real masculinity” or “white masculinity”, upheld by “good Christian values” and containing the liberal darkness of an overly feminized culture by way of a totalising phallic jouissance capable of keeping the woman in her place (re: the structure of “angelic” “non-sexual” fusional One).  This is all somehow connected to the fantasy of Blackness as the Other that threatens to undermine White society on the level of culture, morals, and normative standards, which has of course been a long-standing structural “taboo sickness” for American neuroticism, pervading all aspects of the American psyche and society.  Somehow connected to all this is the ideological structure of the “transgender body” as the image of perversion itself, becoming the ultimate threat of losing your children to the liberal culture (as perhaps best exemplified in the case of Elon Musk’s disappointment that one of his children has been “captured” by “transgender ideology”).  

The political challenge here is not in any way needing to undermine the desire for the reproduction of Oedipal relations (which is totally fine) but whether or not the reproduction of Oedipal relations necessarily requires an obstacle-other as an enemy in order to assert its own identity.  In other words, if you are reproducing within a certain structure of Oedipal relations and your identity requires an obstacle-enemy in order to assert itself (i.e. the fantasy of Blackness as undermining social values, or the fantasy of the transgender Other as undermining social values), this likely teaches you more about your own “negativised phallocentric dialectic”, than it does teach you about the actual nature of the Other.  In any case, these discourses are exploding today, and perhaps it is not a coincidence that Musk’s new platform “X”, is largely responsible for hosting the re-emergence of their proliferation.  This is not to say that the Left should re-institute or embrace any form of cancel culture, which just forces these discourses underground and for an eventual “return of the repressed”, but it is an opportunity to study the symptomatic narratives driving the populist right.  From my analysis what is clearly re-emerging in the populist right discourses is the tired but insistent idea that Jews are controlling society and undermining the sociosexual reproduction of White identity via encouraging the integration of White identity with “black and brown identity” whether in America or in Europe.  Ultimately there is the persistent idea that usually gets labelled something like the “great replacement” hypothesis.  Basically the question is how to discuss these issues without repressing the discussion via cancel culture which can immediately give the appearance of out of touch woke liberal elitism?                  

Here, while it is perhaps too easy to critique the neurotic conservative reaction against liberal progressive perversion with fears of a “great replacement”, we should remember that the pervert as a clinical subjective structure is no less repressed than the neurotic (they are equally repressed).  Indeed, the pervert too, especially in its acting out, is structurally repressed and still also defending themselves against the problems of jouissance.  Lacan indicates this as a key part of the libidinal-economy of the subjective dialectic:⁵⁶

“To return to fantasy, let us say that the pervert images he is the Other in order to ensure his own jouissance, and that this is what the neurotic reveals when he images he is a pervert — in this case, to ensure control over the Other. 

This explains the supposed perversion at the crux of neurosis. Perversion is in the neurotic’s unconscious in the guise of the Other’s fantasy. But this does not mean that the pervert’s unconscious is right out in the open. He, too, defends himself in his desire in his own way; For desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance.”

What we get here, again in reference to the aforementioned culture war battles, is two different “perverted” reifications of “The Relation”.  How does this dialectic of desire and the real of freedom relate to the libidinal economy whose final term is love?  Here Zupančič is helpful in her theorizing of non-relation and its relation to “The Relation” on the normative conservative side of the equation as related to the woman who “doesn't know her place” functioning as a “menace” to the “image of the relation”.⁵⁷  In this way, the conservative side of the equation emphasizes the oppression of women in the guise of being forced to play, or self-enforcing oneself to play, the role of “The Relation” (the traditional housewife, the loyal obedient servant to the actually castrated man, etc.).  However, the inexistence of the woman in relation to the normative symbolic order, and the nihilism that opens up the affirmation of a direct perverted performativity in the enslavement to pleasure (one by one), seems more difficult to address.  Zupančič acknowledges this:⁵⁸

“The (Lacanian) point [...] is not simply something like: “Let’s acknowledge the impossible (the non-relation), and instead of trying to ‘force’ it, rather, put up with it.” This, indeed, is the official ideology of the contemporary “secular” form of social order and domination, which has abandoned the idea of a (harmonious) totality to the advantage of the idea of a non-totalizable multiplicity of singularities forming a “democratic” network.  In this sense it may even seem that the non-relation is the dominant ideology of “capitalist democracies”.” 

This seems to suggest that the normative liberal affirmation of perversion is actually yet another “narrative of the relation” which leaves us in and as a “multiplicity of neutral singularities” doomed to our own “self-regulation” (i.e. capitalist “invisible hand of the market”).⁵⁹  As Zupančič herself notes, this would be fine if the invisible hand of the market, the pursuit of our own self-interest, did not turn into the “invisible hand job of the market”, where the market starts to enjoy its own self-reproduction.⁶⁰  On the terms of living not only in “capitalist democracies” but as “digital serfs” we can see this structure clearly in the appearance of modern and aforementioned “porn economies” like OnlyFans, which is a good example of freedom being misrecognized, ultimately becoming slavery.  This slavery exists most notably, perhaps not on the side of the inexistent woman who is commodified in exchange as a virtual avatar (and who can basically become an overnight millionaire at a very young age), but the idiotic stupidity of the repetitive enjoyment of the man whose unreflexive jouissance makes the entire platform possible.    

Now this is the point where the mirror breaks: today we cannot relate to neurosis and perversion equally, but asymmetrically.  In our historical context, the proper dialectical move in self-revolutionization must occur on the level of hystericizing perversion.  This involves something specific related to isolating the historicity of the void that perversion positivises, and inverting it into a dissatisfaction towards drive satisfaction:⁶¹

“in hysteria, [the] void is localized as a nothing, a specific dissatisfaction. What this means is that nothing is always a nothing within some specific frame­ work: there is nothing within a frame where we expected something.”  

For example, the fetishistic disavowal of the man who subscribes to OnlyFans is something like: “I know very well that this image of the woman I am masturbating to does not exist, but nevertheless I am going to waste all of my excess money pretending she is my significant Other”.  Of course, if you were to actually talk to any man who is engaging this behaviour he would not be stupid enough (or at least most would not be stupid enough) as to think that this will in any way resolve the issue of the absence of love at the heart of his life, but at the same time, it insists, the behaviour continues to go on repeating itself.  Here “hystericising the perversion” is to not only help this subject reconcile with what he already knows, but to actually also transform the behaviour in to the mode of the drive (i.e. to reconcile with the nothingness, the inexistence of the woman as a masturbatory ideal).   

In hystericizing perversion we may find deeper emancipatory possibilities due to its (1) contemporary hegemonic political status (as opposed to being a conservative reaction depending on its obstacle-enemy for support), as well as its (2) proximity to the subject’s first cause qua drive sexuality (as opposed to being a simple domestication of instinctual sexuality).  This is why Žižek’s theopolitics tends towards the self-revolutionising of liberal hedonistic permissive culture from within towards a new emancipatory collective via psychoanalytic research into the nature of our collective libidinal investments, as opposed to succumbing to the contemporary temptations of right-wing populism (where we find it has its own perverted enjoyment in obscene technofeudal masters (from Trump to Putin)).⁶²  However, to see how Žižek eventually reaches this theopolitical conclusion, let us first consider his thoughts on the problems of perversion and its hegemonic political status:⁶³

“The standard wisdom tells us that perverts do what hysterics only dream of doing, for “everything is allowed” in perversion, a pervert openly actualises all repressed content — and yet, nonetheless, as Freud emphasizes, nowhere is repression as strong as in perversion, a fact amply confirmed by our late-capitalist reality in which total sexual permissiveness causes anxiety and impotence or frigidity instead of liberation.”  

And equally important, consider Žižek’s thoughts on perversion from the perspective of its proximity to the subject’s first cause qua drive sexuality:⁶⁴

“Paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a sense much more radical, “noumenal”, monstrous even. The Freudian name for this monstrous [qua perverted] freedom is, again, the death drive.  It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the “birth of man” are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man is  [...]  “reverted”, “denaturalised”, “derailed” nature which is not yet culture.” 

In other words, and first, our hegemonic social culture is inverted to perversion causing us to become impotent and frigid (as conservatives worried about low birth rates constantly remind us).  However, and secondly, as “progressives” should become aware, to be properly “educated into freedom”, to give “birth to man”, we must confront this same “perverted” dimension of “infantile/drive sexuality” as a mediation as opposed to directly identifying with it (rather we must “hystercise it”).  

The trouble progressives find in confronting this dimension is that it can make us feel as if we are, not progressing, but rather “reverting”: “not yet cultural”, but “denaturalised” and “derailed” nature.  In other words, we must not only “climb the ladder” qua self-overcoming in normative pair-bonding, but also recognise that the ground from which we climbed is still irreducibly and forever with us in the “heights”, as a constitutive threat as well as, crucially, disorienting vital-libidinal source.  Moreover, the historical dimension of this confrontation – both in the context of American and larger Western culture, and in its attempt to psycho-spiritually reconcile on the level of labour and economy, with “libidinal global plurality” (human differences) – is something we have not yet learned how to think politically.  It is in this sense that the “leftist emancipatory politics” needs to “begin again” from “ground zero” before proclaiming the situation resolved from the top of the ladder (e.g. liberal elites).  In other words, we cannot go back to the phallocentric dialectics of Hegel and Marx without reconciling 19th century philosophy with 20th century psychoanalysis, that is, reconciling with the Freudo-Lacanian moment and the way in which it can help us think the historical oscillations of neurosis and perversion as an “indispensable couple” that mirrors the Other in its negative and positive historical determinations.⁶⁵  

There are two dimensions of perversion here that I will not expand on in this specific article, but which I think need to be thought internal to the future of a philosophy and politics that can incorporate the Freudo-Lacanian moment.  The first is the position of the Western world and its relation to the “idea of Blackness” (as is increasingly arising internal to post-liberal discourses of “Afro-pessimism”).⁶⁶  Leading Afropessimist theorist Frank B. Wilderson III suggests that the idea of Blackness is continually and perpetually haunted by the dimension of “slaveness” both dialectically and unconsciously, even internal to modern liberal sensibilities of inclusivity.⁶⁷  In other words, the dialectics of “Blackness” on the level of our spiritual psychology or labour economism are constantly tarrying with “master/slave” inversions, and irrespective of conscious liberal self-identification, the unconscious is still dominated by the social implications of racial differences.  Here consider Žižek’s attempt to situate the speculative philosophy of Hegel’s world history on the level of the problem of drive sexuality and the origin of man (which is African in nature):⁶⁸

“In Hegel’s Lectures on Philosophy of History, [consider the] role [...] played by the [...] “negroes”: significantly, Hegel deals with “negroes” before history proper[:] “negroes” here stand for the human spirit in its “state of nature”, they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous children, simultaneously naive and corrupted, living in a pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the cruelest of barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalised; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards.”    

Here we should be tempted, against the postmodern moralizations and relativist historicisations of Hegel, to actually think how world psychospirituality is still haunted by these images from within, and how these images massively complicate what appears on our world historical social horizon as progressive liberal inclusivity on the level of both gender and race.  Following Zupančič’s hysterical reading of Antigone, we should specifically challenge the Butlerian progressive liberal notion of inclusivity and its repression of thinking the monstrosity of exception.⁶⁹  In this context, “Afro-pessimism” may stand as a unique discourse, deeply indebted to psychoanalysis, and Lacan specifically, in bringing to the forefront a psychoanalytic notion of race that is both under-theorized, and functioning as a master signifier or quilting point that retroactively converts meaning on whatever is being spoken about.⁷⁰  Internal to “Afro-pessimist” circles this can be manifested in ethical calls to “embody/embrace the monstrous perversion” as the position of the Other and the “desire for desire” internal to Western culture.  Alternatively, there can be ethical calls to “Pan-Africanism” as the exclusionary unity of African identity internal to itself as a national or even “empire body” vis-a-vis its “otherization” internal to Western culture as such.  Neither positions are likely universal solutions, but does this contradiction not fundamentally structure the “American Empire” and its social historicity in both the “monstrous perversion” internal to the social body as well as its attempt to “segregate and exclude” this monstrous perversion as an inhuman dimension internal to the human body?  Even today under the banner of inclusivity, does this contradiction not appear internal to progressive liberal politics as the White body playing the role of the One who can include the Otherness of the Black body on its own often perverted terms?⁷¹ 

In its most extreme dimensions, the “Afro-pessimist” embodiment and embrace of the monstrous perversion and/or the ethical call to “Pan-Africanism” as a new national or empire body points towards the crucial and unsettling dimension that short-circuits Western liberal discourse.  Here for liberals to consider the “monstrosity of exception” is to reconcile with the fact that we are really not at the end of history but rather that the monstrous exceptions of history will continue to overdetermine and threaten our capacity to love the becoming-other of the species-being itself.  Moreover, internal to Afro-pessimism there is the challenge of the question, that is the question of the “norm” as it relates to the “human being”.  Internal to liberal discourses the humanist dimension is still unconsciously controlled by the form of “whiteness” (certainly a truth of the woke intersectional theorists), whereas “blackness” (as Frank B. Wilderson III notes) is still pathologically haunted by “slaveness” and strange unconscious dialectics on the level of both spiritual psychology and labour economism.  Thus, what both the embodiment and embrace of the monstrous perversion and/or the ethical calls to “Pan-Africanism” suggest is the redefinition of the norm from which we judge and think perverted deviations.  Such a thought in the context of this article should be thought vis-a-vis the historicity of the norm in the mirrored oscillation between neurosis and perversion that we find if we follow the threads of the origin of psychoanalytic thinking about this topic.   

The second dimension of perversion relates to the nature of screens and our now ubiquitous “screen-being”, where much of the structure of our perversion actually acts itself out or reveals its nature to us.  Consider Žižek’s attempt to theorize the relation between depths and surface in the context of our screen personas and our civilisational personas:⁷²

“What if, deep inside, I am a sadistic pervert who dreams of beating up other men and raping women; in my real-life interaction with other people, I am not allowed to enact this true self, so I adopt a more humble and polite persona — in this case, is not my true self much closer to what I adopt as a fictional screen persona, while the self of my real-life interactions is a mask concealing the violence of my true self?”

While this is a dramatic and extreme example, we are in the end talking about the real of perversion, and its relationship to the dialectical becoming or realization of our freedom.  The challenge is to actually think about what the fundamental fantasies being dramatized by the unconscious of our screen-being are actually telling us about our “true self”.  This is the horror of actually thinking on the level of hystericising perversion: the truth of our screen-being is that all social media platforms are becoming pornified, but on the other side of that equation, this means that the current nature of our historical subjectivity is structurally repeating this pornification, teaching us about our first cause and the form of our current historical void.  In the context of the current culture there is just this stupid oscillation between “porn as virtual void or not-one” where we find a spurious multiplicity of images and “anti-porn as religious substantial one” where we find the upholding of a neurotic norm of unified coupling without fundamental lack or negativity.  Here we should remember Lorenzo Chiesa’s basic idea about man and woman, or the masculine and feminine positions of the symbolic order, as the “two faces of God”.  Thus, man and woman are not unified by God, but are themselves the becoming of God as a not-two:⁷³  

“for Lacan, there are two faces of God as the two faces of structure or “God hypothesis.” Structure is not simply one, because of its oscillation between the (masculine) One and the (feminine) not-One. But, for the same reason, neither is it two, since the oscillation between the One and that which is Other than One produces a not-two.”

But I would suggest, following Žižek, that this oscillation between one and not-one is not the truth of the mystical-theosophical gap where we find not an oscillation but the drive itself.  The drive itself here is where we can actually learn about the violence of the true self as opposed to continually externalising it (as both the porn identity operating in the not-One, and the religious identity operating in the substantial One, arguably do, they are very likely structural mirrors of each other).                   

This all implies an even deeper reflection about the stability of the nature of the human being and the human as concept, as perhaps what we find in the dramatization of our fundamental fantasies on the screen are themselves invitations into the monstrous, the inhuman, the uncanny, the other to being human?  However, if this is the case, has not following the truth of this path always been at the heart of the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic project?:⁷⁴

““The core of our being” — it is not so much that Freud commands us to target this, as so many others before him have done with the futile adage “Know thyself”, as that he asks us to reconsider the pathways that lead to it. 

Or, rather, the “this” which he proposes we attain is not a this which can be the object of knowledge, but a this [...] which constitutes my being and to which, as he teaches us, I bear witness as much and more in my whims, aberrations, phobias, and fetishes, than in my more or less civilized personas.”                

In the same way that the hegemonic perversion of the social order leads to a paradoxical if terrifying invitation to reconsider our emancipation, so too does the hegemony of the screen offer us a window into the hysterical split or the gap between our whims, aberrations, phobias and fetishes, and our civilized persona.  Perhaps helpful in this direction is a recent publication from psychoanalytic theorist Helen Rollins, whose work Psychocinema, introduces the idea that we do not need to leave our analytic work in the clinic.⁷⁵  Rollins suggests that the narratives and fantasies that attract us on the movie screen, can, if we let them, function as a type of analytic work, helping us to traverse the fantasies that control us, while simultaneously helping us more deeply reconcile ourselves to the modes of our jouissance.⁷⁶  While Rollins notes the importance of cinema in this, perhaps we could generalize to other imagistic and narrativistic forms of screen-media (e.g. video games, pornography)?

At the same time what looms over this article is the status of a future “progressive” or “leftist” theopolitics, perhaps with its core in America or the Western tradition, which does bring us to the question of the “church” as the embodied ground for the body.  In the radical theological tradition, here starting with the work of radical theologian Thomas Altizer, we find the idea that the original heresy of Christianity was the linking of “Christ’s body” to the “Church body” (perhaps most notable in the Orthodox theology).⁷⁷  The tradition of radical theology has been taken up actively by radical theologians like Peter Rollins and Barry Taylor, which ultimately explores the conditions of possibility, outside of the traditional church, of the “church of contradiction” where “faith” is itself “living the contradiction”.⁷⁸  Do the tensions and questions that this article embodies require a space like the “church of contradiction” and the mode of subjectivity that we could call “living the contradiction”?  Peter Rollins’ suggests, following figures like Žižek and Zupančič, that the rise of conservative traditional belief is not a new knowledge but a reaction against a hysterical knowing: the knowledge of our historical void.  In this sense the “church of contradiction” is not a place to go where we labour under the belief of a new big Other but rather the place where we might go to work with the knowledge of our historical void itself (where the big Other ceases to believe in itself).⁷⁹  If we are living in a perverted society that operates via fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well, but nevertheless”, we need a “church of contradiction” where we can say: “I know very well, and how might I live differently with this knowledge?”  In that sense, we are brought from “deadening contradiction” (perversion) to a “enlivening contradiction” which is the very ground for what Rollins would call the “drive denomination”.⁸⁰  

In “hystericising perversion” we are brought to the specific shape of a nothingness, but for Rollins’ idea of the “church of contradiction”, it is this very nothingness that “lives, binds, and saves”.⁸¹  If both the neurotic and the pervert share the unconscious presupposition of the absence of love, the “church of contradiction” attempts to embody the “absence of love” as the very condition of possibility for love between subjects who know that they lack (positivising the negativity).  This is the Holy Spirit as the community of belief after the vanishing of the Father of the transcendental signifier that sustains the obscene partial object or embodies the “objet-a-oriented ontology”.  Nothing lives in the sense that if we are constantly living under a full big Other we are suffocated by the guilt of our imperfect being and constantly attempting to purify ourselves of this imperfect being; nothing binds in the sense that what we all share independent of sexual or political orientation is nothingness itself, the lack/gap of the theosophical night of the world; and nothing saves in the sense that there is an emancipatory dimension in tarrying with the negative as opposed to thinking some Other will save you from yourself and your own unconscious.  Here Rollins’ builds on not only Hegel but also Kierkegaard as a model for how to interpret the Bible today.  Perhaps we should not read the Bible as a “wrestling match” where we can find “moral wisdoms” for how to live “the good life”, but rather we should read the Bible in a way that might help us stay with disorientation and dizziness of the real of otherness, that helps us stay with the horror that nothing can ever stop or resolve our desire.  Here Christianity becomes the historical joke that to be one with the absolute is to feel all alone after trying everything to be saved, and in the incompleteness of despair, in that complete darkness, we find that we are actually with God (who is also this same dizziness and despair and not some teleological end point that completely saves us as a wholeness).          

Does this or can this project be institutionalised as the actual ground for a new theopolitics that addresses the mystical-theosophical gap of our moment?  Is the radical theological claim that the original heresy of Christianity was linking Christ’s body to the Church body correct?  In creating the “church of contradiction” can it be anywhere and in any form?  That is, from the outside, from the point of view of external cognition, can it not look like a church at all?  Can true faith as living contradiction really help us to live into the negativities of our historical moment instead of finding a community of believers who share our self-similar identity?  These are all, of course, “meta-hysterical” questions, or questions emerging from the state of a hysterical subject.  Peter Rollins’ suggests we should not be antagonistic with institutionalisation but rather see them as necessary training grounds for flight.  When we view the institutionalisation process as antagonistic with flight or as an obstacle to flight we may be fighting against the very forces that can help us fly.  There are of course limits to institutions in the sense that you are dealing with real organisations and real people, but at the same time, is not an institution where you are forced to deal with real organisation and real people, the very training ground where the intersubjective dialectic of our moment can be hystericised?  For Rollins, such commitment over the course of years and generations will facilitate the transformation we need: that is the transformation of hystericising perversion, moving from a fetishistic disavowal of what we know, to living the contradiction of what we know.  

Finally, the point of this article is not so much to provide final answers to the questions of perversion and neurosis, the way they mirror each other, and the way they appear to structure contemporary culture war dynamics, but rather to demonstrate that it is only when psychoanalysis owns its own terrain can we really raise ourselves to the discourse necessary to approach these issues, both theopolitically and philosophically.  There is a theopolitical challenge here for what has historically called itself the Left: in making perversion the hegemonic norm and simultaneously instituting a moralistic cultural law around this universalisation in woke politicos, it has not only opened the door to right wing populism as the new counter-culture, but has betrayed its own emancipatory standards.  The challenge today is thinking how the hysterical mediation of perversion can lead to a new politics that does not regress as a negation of liberalism in populism, but can raise liberalism to its own deadlocks, and towards the real of global challenges.        

 

1. Zupančič, A. 2022. Perverse Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the End. Filozofski vestnik, Volume XLIII. Number 2. p. 89-90.

2. Nietzsche, N. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press. p. 187.

3. Aromi, A. & Esqué, X. 2018. The Ordinary Psychoses and the Others, under transference. World Association of Psychoanalysis. XI Congress. https://congresoamp2018.com/en/textos/las-psicosis-ordinarias-las-otras-transferencia/ (accessed: Dec 10 2024).

4. Miller, J-A. 2009. Ordinary psychosis revisited. Psychoanalytical Notebooks 19: p. 139-167.

5. Vanheule, S. 2024. Why Psychosis Is Not Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers. Other Press.

6. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 185.

7. Freud makes this distinction between obsessional and hysterical neuroses at the origin of psychoanalysis, see: Freud, S. 1896b. Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. In: Freud – Complete Works. p. 383-404.

8. Zupančič, A. 2024. Disavowal (Theory Redux). Polity.

9. Zupančič, A. 2022. Perverse Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the End. Filozofski vestnik, Volume XLIII. Number 2. p. 89-90.

10. See: Landian Exit and Hegelian Love (link)

11. Re: Freud’s “neuroses are the negative of perversion”.

12. Nietzsche, N. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press. p. 187.

13. Alamariu, C.V. 2023. Selective Breeding and the Origin of Philosophy. Independently published.

14. Musk, E. 2022. @elonmusk. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1545046146548019201 (accessed: Dec 15 2024).

15. Collins, S. & Collins, M. 2020. The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships: Ruthlessly Optimized Strategies for Dating, Sex, and Marriage. Pragmatist Foundation Inc., The

16. Yanatma, S. 2024. Europe's fertility crisis: Which countries are having the most and fewest babies? Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/09/28/europes-fertility-crisis-which-european-country-is-having-the-fewest-babies (accessed: Dec 15 2024).

17. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 185.

18. Ibid. p. 20.

19. Ibid. p. 1-2.

20. Ibid. p. 11-12.

21. Ibid. p. 13.

22. Ibid. p. 235.

23. Ibid. p. 25.

24. Ibid.

25. The point of my last book Systems and Subjects is to play at this tension point, see: Last, C. 2023. Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science and Philosophy. Philosophy Portal Books.

26. Lacan, J. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 165-6.

27. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 235.

28. Ibid. p. 248.

29. Lacan, J. 2007. Knowledge, a means of jouissance. In: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. (Ed.) Miller, J-A.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 50-1.

30. Žižek, S. 2011. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 202.

31. Lacan, J. 2005. Beyond the “Reality Principle”. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 58-74.

32. Slavoj Žižek, Personal communication.

33. Mark Gerard Murphy, personal communication.

34. Lacan, J. 2005. A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis and Criminology. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 122.

35. Freud, S. 1905d. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: Freud – Complete Works. p. 1476.

36. Ibid.

37. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 9.

38. Ibid. p. 12.

39. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 242.

40. Lacan, J. 2005. A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis and Criminology. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 122.

41. Lacan, J. 2005. On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 122.

42. Lacan, J. 2005. Kant with Sade. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 652.

43. $ = barred subject (from the cause of its desire); a = objet petit a (object-cause of desire).

44. Ibid. p. 653.

45. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 36-37.

46. Ibid. p. 37.

47. Ibid.

48. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 3-4.

49. Ibid. p. 19.

50. Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Palgrave macmillan.

51. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 26.

52. Here we should think again with Dimitri Crooijmans and his “Work of Love”, see: Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.

53. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 18.

54. Rousselle, D. 2024. Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond. Bloomsbury Academic.  p. 2.

55. Tucker, R.C. 2017. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Routledge. p. 160.

56. Lacan, J. 2005. The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 699.

57. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 25.

58. Ibid. p. 26.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid. p. 32.

61. Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 1: Vacillating the Semblances. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 68.

62. Žižek, S. 2011. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 242.

63. Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 305.

64. Ibid. p. 338.

65. Žižek, S. 2011. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 35.

66. Wilderson III, F.B. 2021. Afropessimism. Todavia.

67. Ibid.

68. Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso. p. 338-339.

69. Ibid. p. 140-141.

70. Again pointing to the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, his most popular work: Wilderson, F.B. 2010. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press.; Wilderson has also written from a Žižekian perspective, see: Wilderson III, F.B. 2020. Chapter 5: Afro-Pessimism: Traversing the Fantasy of the Human, or Rewriting the Grammar of Suffering. Žižek On Race. Bloomsbury.

71. Žižek, S. 2011. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 29.

72. Ibid. p. 352.

73. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 2.

74. Lacan, J. 2005. The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 437.

75. Rollins, H. 2024. Psychocinema. Wiley.

76. Ibid.

77. Altizer, T. 1966. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Westminster Press.

78. Peter Rollins, personal communication.

79. Peter Rollins, personal communication.

80. Rollins, P. 2024. DRIVE DENOMINATION (NOTHING LIVES, BINDS, SAVES). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/jkpdDpwuy18?si=D0Uj127Rc2IpGg6S (accessed: December 21 2024).

81. Rollins, P. 2024. The Profane Temple. Everyday Analysis.