Perversion the Social Relation

Exotic Rituals and Family Values 95"a particular way of negating castration, or rejecting the necessary sacrificeof satisfaction. What Lacan is saying isn't very different when hequalifies the perverse operation as bringing jouissance back to the Other,restoring object J—which represents the sacrifice of satisfaction—to theOther; we can represent the Other as the body from which satisfactionwas evacuated." 10Such a reconceptualization of perversion may enable us to recognizeperverse strategies at work in subjects who are not themselves necessarilystructured as perverts. That is, in response to a particular trauma,an otherwise "normal" neurotic might cope with the failure or collapseof the symbolic order—the paternal function—by engaging in behaviorsthat seek to restage the law that has been rendered inoperative. InOctave Mannoni's words, "Freud saw in the crisis linked to castrationthe model for the kinds of panic that erupt later in life, when people aresuddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that 'Throne and Altar are in danger*" (74). 11 1 believe that Exotica demonstrates this process at work ina variety of otherwise unrelated characters. As the film unfolds, the relationsand similarities between and among the characters and their mysteriesbegin to emerge, ultimately revealing a set of family resemblancesamong the people and the family traumas that impel them. In suggestingthe relations among the characters by representing the familial origins oftheir losses, Exotica also suggests another connection operating in thisstrange and nontraditional community: each character, whether qualifyingas a structural pervert or not, engages in apparently perverse conductas a means of calling (back) into being a law that has previously failedhim or her. The club thus becomes the not-quite-arbitrary site of theirinteraction because it facilitates the enactment of the various mutuallyreinforcing rituals.These characters by and large eschew discourse—therapy or even conventionalnarrative—as a way of dealing with their traumas. Instead,they perform repetitions of activities and roles. Even the film's telling oftheir histories occurs in a fractured, fragmented, flashback-employingform that reflects the characters' repression of or lack of access to thestraight story of their lives. Their performances include a certain amountof talk, but such speech is almost entirely ritualistic: rather than invitingany spontaneous or unscripted speech of the other that might challengethe staging, the characters' language seeks rather to protect the event