Perversion the Social Relation

14 Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis Fostersocial relations, we not only risk missing the jouissance that binds us toothers, but we also risk falling prey to the far more dangerous politicalinjunction that we lose ourselves in the cause.Notesi Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997), 168.2 This double existence of the fetish, as positivity and as negation, is related to Freud'snotion of the splitting of the ego in Verleugnung; see Bruce Fink, "Perversion," in thisvolume.3 Jacques Lacan, "Kant with Sade," trans. James B. Swenson Jr., October 51 (1989):55-104.4 Richard Rorty, "Ethics without Principles," in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York,N.Y.: Penguin, 1999), 75.5 Even the most "radical" political theorists in contemporary cultural studies make thiserror, but it is particularly common among the Utopian theorists of the "subversion"of gender and sexuality, such as Butler, Bersani, and Dean.6 As Foster points out in his essay, Peter Sloterdijk has used this formulation to analyzethe functioning of cynical reasoning, and Slavoj Éizek's work is well-known forits elaboration of the proposition.7 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,1996), 310.8 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor,Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991), 31.9 Ibid., 28.