The Perverse Organisation and Its Deadly Sins by Susan Long

Author:Susan Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

In many senses, some degree of perversity is “normal”. Lacan refers to socially required subjugation as “symbolic castration”.13 In being subject to culture, primarily through language, one is subject to the Symbolic field. This is what Lacan also terms the big “Other”. In this process of symbolic castration, much jouissance is given over to repression and the Other. The subjection (symbolic castration) that creates subjectivity, forever divides the human subject from his or her primal nature, because the world of symbols can only represent reality, not replicate it. Hence, the subject in the world of symbolisation, language and all that they imply, will lack something. This is the part that cannot be represented; the part that can never become part of the symbolic world wherein we mostly live. This part lies within the register of the Real. Experience registered in the Real cannot be represented in our normal everyday world. It is ineffable. So, in one sense, for the civilised person, jouissance is personally lost and is lacking. In another sense, it becomes part of the psychodynamics of community—linked into language and culture as well as into our sense of the ineffable or unknown, with all its awesome, wonder-full and terrifying characteristics.

In the perverse position, symbolic castration has failed. The perverse part of the personality is not subject to the greater good. The perverse process does not repress, evade or deny jouissance. But equally, in the perverse relation (which is a longer- term interpersonal or even social structure) jouissance is totally uncontained. It is incapable of sublimation, which requires subjugation to the wider social good, if we consider the establishment of culture as a wider social good. Jouissance is experienced without containment. Reality is held with ambivalence and relations of instrumentality dominate. Following Lacan’s analysis, in perversion no lack is felt. Omnipotence seems supreme. The positive is that the individual feels free from domination, especially the self-imposed domination of his own cultural creations. The negative is that this freedom has the price of the absence of real others who can provide love and recognition. In many senses it is a position of freedom from illusion. But, illusion is also the very centre of our creative existence.

Nonetheless, despite its freedom, the perverse position is needy in its narcissistic roots. Because the relation to reality is complex and an “other” is required, Hegel’s Master’s dilemma is present. The boundary between the perverse and the normal is a shifting territory between omnipotence and neediness; dominance and mutuality.

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