Perversion the Social Relation

noNina Schwartzcharacters, the rituals they engage in hold their lives together by stagingthe emergence of a comfortingly consistent rule. Each character is enabledat the club—or in Thomas's case, at the ballet—to enact the ritesthat call into being the only sustaining order and consistency in his orher life. These rituals are clearly not progressive and do not promisetheir performers any eventual transcendence of their need, but neitherare they judged within the film as wrong, immoral, or diseased. Nonetheless,the rituals and their sustaining framework are limited, for theywould have the potential to damage the girl Tracey if she had not beenable to extricate herself from her role in Francis and Harold's relationship.In exposing those limits, the film suggests its own commitmentto the preservation of the symbolic order. Insofar as the film introducesits own subject matter as a mystery—a logical trauma—that threatensto overwhelm the world of stable meaning, it necessarily motivates theinterpretive work of viewers to understand the mystery, to resubmit thematerial to the symbolic order and thereby render it no longer mysterious,but merely sad—and safe.Notesi Mannoni's essay is included in this volume; all parenthetical page citations followingquotes from Mannoni's essay refer to its appearance in this volume. This quotationis from pg. 91.v z"So in growing to adulthood, and thereby becoming positioned within sexual difference—masculineor feminine, with each of these governed by a prescriptive heterosexuality—perversedesire is not eliminated but transformed, via repression and sublimation,into other kinds of energy which civilization then draws upon—indeeddepends upon" (Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud toFoucault [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 105).3 Jacques-Alain Miller, "On Perversion," in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Returnto Freud, eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: SUNY Press,199e), 311.4 Ibid., 310.5 Ibid., 311.6 Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961),21:154.7 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacaman Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 180.8 Ibid., 176.