On the Pleasure Principle In Culture by Robert Pfaller

Author:Robert Pfaller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Even if diverse forms of sexuality may appear in this variegated confusion, genital heterosexuality (for example, in the cited acts of adultery) is by no means excluded. And from the perspective of drive theory, one can hardly harbour any objections to these heterosexual acts, at least not in the sense of judging them to be cases of regression. For nothing about these procreation-conforming examples of genital sexuality reveals a shortcoming or a regressive deviation with respect to the other, socially more accepted heterosexual acts – monogamous marital ones, for example.

Only the sacrilegious intention that the libertines pursue with a sense of duty (the obedience to self-imposed stipulations) could be noted as a difference from the consummation of a marriage. However, in drive theory this intention does not make a difference; it is only a symbolic distinction. The libertine derives pleasure from performing a completely normal heterosexual act – provided that this can be understood as directed against the social norm (which, for instance, bans incest or adultery). Like the obsessional neurotic, the libertine commits in full the act which he forbids himself from doing. He does so in full scale, provided he has only one threshold symbolically depicting the act as a counter-act.

Unlike obsessional neurotics, perverts do not hide their pleasure from themselves. For only neurosis, as the ‘negative of perversion’, distorts the subject’s experience of pleasure so that it no longer appears as pleasure. Perverts, in contrast, experience their counter-acts as highly pleasurable. The fact that they can only attain pleasure if they see it as likewise fulfilling their self-imposed sacrilegious duty – that pro is only possible in the form of con – has, in this case, the effect that they experience their pro (together with the con) as an emphatic pro, and pleasure (including its defence) as a quantitatively greater pleasure.

Like neurosis, perversion also produces a greater amount of energy emanating from an unconscious conflict.44 That which is compulsion in neurosis is thus fixation in perversion. Fixation does not consist merely in the exclusive and detailed specification of certain sexual objects or goals, but also in a greater amount of energy (that is unknown to normal sexuality) by means of which such objects are sought and goals are pursued. In this case, too, the surplus energy is the product of an addition resulting from an unconscious conflict between two forces. Like obsessional neurosis, perversion also prohibits certain acts, fabricating instead compulsively detailed substitute acts that have to be performed at all costs. Perversion gladly contributes through substitution to the success of both sides: the defence and that which must be fended off.

Like obsessional neurosis, perversion works through the process of displacement. It builds a symbolic threshold and thus enables what is on the other side of the threshold to also appear on this side – by giving it the facilitating signs of ‘non’ and ‘contra’ thanks to the threshold.

If one questions the plausibility of Sade’s libertines as an illustration, since it is taken from the realm of

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