Perversion the Social Relation

94 Nina SchwartzMiller concedes, then, that much of what we call "perverse," belongingto the original energies of human sexuality, "throws into questionthe very notion of normal human sexuality," 5 but further claims thatthis definition doesn't take us very far in our thinking about the particularstructure of subjectivity that belongs to the pervert, a subjectivitythat is as much an effect of living in the world as that of the neurotic.He thus seeks to begin his own analysis where DoUimore effectivelyconcludes.In the Freudian definition of fetishism, the pervert copes with thethreat of castration—the sight of the female's genitalia—by disavowingwhat he sees and replacing the woman's missing penis with a nearby object,the fetish: the male child repudiates what he "knows" to be truethatthe mother is castrated—and persists in his belief in the maternalphallus. And yet, Freud says, "He has retained that belief, but he hasalso given it up." 6 Perversion here is thus one among other strategiesfor coping with castration specifically and, perhaps, with loss more generally.According to Bruce Fink's interpretation of Lacan, however, thepervert does not so much disavow the mother's castration (and therebyprotect himself from the threat of his own), but rather works to stagethrough his rituals the emergence of the law that would place a limiton his own (and his mother's) jouissance: "The aim [of perversion] is tobring the law into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving Other)exist." 7 The pervert's experience has failed to provide for him the crucialnaming of the mother's lack, and the child therefore perceives himselfas the real object of the mother's desire: "The pervert constituteshimself as what is lacking in the mOther; making himself into the objectof her desire, he constitutes himself as her object *." 8 The failureof the paternal function to bring the child fully into the symbolic orderand its facilitation of desire's displaceability subject the pervert to overwhelminganxiety at the mOther's demand, and the perverse ritual is hisresponse to the demand.This characterization of perversion seems consistent with Miller'sclaim that "perversion is when you do not ask for permission." 9 Desire,always presuming and predicated upon the experience of absence, asks,struggles with the question of what satisfaction may be, where it maylie; perversion in contrast seems to bypass the purpose of such questioningin its assumption that jouissance is directly available. Perversion is