Perversion the Social Relation

■xetfcMtuateVahMtinNina SchwartzWe know that there are cases in which the subject has serious problems because of his fearof losing what he "knows well** that he doesn't have.—Octave Mannoni, "I Know Well,but All the Same" 1Atom Egoyan's 1994 Exotica explores an apparently accidental communityof people whose lives seem only arbitrarily to have overlapped at astrip and lap dance club, Exotica. The course of the film, however, revealsthat what actually links these figures to one another is a series ofstructurally if not literally similar losses or failures of family stabilityand order. The film thus also exposes how the most "exotic" or perversebehaviors originate in and reproduce familiar domestic settings.By now, following Jonathan Dollimore's work on the perverse, sucha claim may have the status of a commonplace. In his essentially deconstructiveanalysis of texts ranging from Augustine to Freud to Foucault,Dollimore demonstrates how the perverse inheres in and originatesthe conventional energies of normative culture that it ostensiblycontradicts or threatens^ Jacques-Alain Miller arrives at a similar conclusionabout the perverse: "According to Freud, children are naturallypolymorphously perverse. Thus for Freud, perversion is natural, that is,primary. Perversion is more primal than the norm, that norm being secondaryor even cultural for Freud—though not for Lacan." 3 But, Millercontinues: "In classical psychoanalysis, perversion is not a raw instinctualdrive; it is cooked, so to speak, not raw. It is a highly complexstructure which is as sophisticated and full of intricacies as a neurosis." 4