Perversion the Social Relation

The Masochist Social Link 121subject? This aspect was developed in detail by Diken and Laustsen, intheir outstanding "Enjoy Your Fight!," the most representative analysisof Fight Club:The normalised and law abiding subject is haunted by a spectraldouble, by a subject that materializes the will to transgress the lawin perverse enjoyment. . . . Thus Fight Club is hardly an "antiinstitutional"response to contemporary capitalism, just as creativity,perversion or transgression are not necessarily emancipatorytoday.... Rather than a political act, Fight Club thus seems tobe a trancelike subjective experience, a kind of pseudo-Bakhtiniancarnivalesque activity in which the rhythm of everyday life is onlytemporarily suspended The problem with Fight Club is that itfalls into the trap of presenting its problématique, violence, froma cynical distance. Fight Club is of course extremely reflexive andironic. It can even be said that it is an irony on fascism. 9The ultimate ground of this irony is that, in accordance with the latecapitalistglobal commodification, Fight Club offers as an "experientialcommodity" the very attempt to explode the universe of commodities:instead of concrete political practice, we get an aestheticist explosionof violence. Furthermore, following Deleuze, Diken and Laustsen discernin Fight Club two dangers that invalidate its subversive thrust. First,there is the tendency to go to the extreme of the spectacle of ecstatic(self) destruction, so that revolutionary politics is obliterated in a depoliticizedaestheticist orgy of annihilation. Second, the revolutionaryexplosion "deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to stop deterritorialization,to invent new territorializations": "In spite of a deterritorializingstart, Fight Club ends up transforming into a fascist organizationwith a new name: Project Mayhem. Violence is now turned outwards,which culminates in a plan for 'organized' terror to undermine the foundationsof the consumerist society." These two dangers are complementary,since "the regression to the undifferentiated or complete disorganizationis as dangerous as transcendence and organization."Is the solution really the "just measure" in between the two extremes,neither the new organization nor the regression to the undifferentiatedviolence? What one should problematize here is, rather, the very oppositionbetween de- and re-territorialization, that is to say, Deleuze'sidea of the irreducible tension between the "good" schizophrenic-