Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 157mancer when he claims that François Prclati "came from a city where homosexualitywas widespread" (67).23 For a provocative introduction to the controversy surrounding this Kantian philosophicalmotif, see Joan Copjec's edited volume, Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996).24 Here we use the term transference in its strictly psychoanalytic sense. In Lacanianclinical psychoanalysis, the phenomenon of transference occurs when the analysandunconsciously attributes to the analyst knowledge about his or her desire. A moreconventionally Freudian understanding would consider the transference a projectiononto the analyst of affects—often, but not always, aggressive ones—that originatein psychical conflicts with parental figures. Both understandings share the acknowledgmentof a displacement of unconscious material derived from a "past event,"necessarily distorted or constructed by the subject's fantasy, onto the dynamics ofan inter-subjective encounter (one which Lacan would later describe as dialectical)occurring in the present. In Studies on Hysteria, Freud first described the transferenceas a "false connection" or "mésalliance" that dissociates the content of a wishfrom "the surrounding circumstances that would have assigned [the wish] to a pasttime" (SE II, 303). Later, Freud would underline how the transference emerges "preciselyat the moment when particularly important repressed contents are in dangerof being revealed" (J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,trans. D. Nicholson-Smith [New York: Norton, 1973], 458). In an early paper on theDora case, Lacan underlines how the transference halts the emergence of unconsciousmaterial when he describes it as "a moment of stagnation in the analytic dialectic"("Intervention sur le transfert," in Écrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], 225).25 Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," SE XVIII, 105.26 G. Bataille, The Trial, 278; 336-37.27 Joël Dor and Serge André describe Lacan's understanding of perversion as psychicstructure. See also Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis fora detailed interpretation in English of Lacan's contribution to the clinical understandingof perversion (this volume, 38-67).28 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction, reprinted in this volume, 49.29 This is precisely the moral tradition against which Pascal would launch his famouspolemic in the Lettres provinciales, ed. Louis Cognet (Paris: Gamier, 1965).30 A comment on our use of the term moral: We are not arguing in favor of moralismor a moralistic perspective on Gilles de Rais, which we would define as a structureof judgment or action that takes as its point of self-legitimation ambient, commonlyacknowledged criteria that inhere in any particular historical discourse. The wordmoral as we are using it here refers instead to the manner in which a subject rationalizesits thoughts and actions to itself in the context of a dialogue not between thesubject and "society," but rather between the subject and his or her Other, definedpsychoanalytically as the sociosymbolic network from the perspective of which everysubject views itself as worthy and unworthy, innocent and guilty. The moral realm, inother words, indexes the very nexus of the psychic and the social at which the subject"pays the price" for its narcissism. The psychical agency that allows us to view our-