Massimo Recalcati – Perversion
The Clinical Lesson of Jacques Lacan: Madness, Neurosis and Perversion (third session). IRPA, Associazione Accademia Pons, Jonas Onlus, Order of Psychologists of Lombardy, Enap
[Lacan says: ] “The aim of the pervert is to provoke anguish in the other, […] but even more so, it is to provoke anxiety in god.” […] Said, moreover, by a pervert – who is an atheist without god […].
That perversion means causing anxiety in the other is quite clear in its meaning: it means that the pervert is not simply someone who inflicts bodily harm like a sadist, or who mistreats, or who humiliates the other; no, the aim of the pervert is to make anxiety arise in the other. […]
For example, if I say to you, “I have material that might interest you, that concerns your private life.” If I say this to a public figure, what am I doing, exactly? I generate anxiety; and I place them in my hands, I hold them in my hand – there is the master. […] Or, we can also take the example of anorexia, which is more serious, when an anorexic subject lets herself die in order to throw their partner – the parents, for example – into absolute anguish. There is a perverse core in anorexia that coincides with the blackmailing dimension of the anorexic: I let myself die in order to make fear, anxiety, arise in you. And thus to have you in my hands. […]
In some respects, much of contemporary art is based on this principle of perversion. […] A part of contemporary art displays horror in order to make the viewer lower their gaze, to cause anxiety in the viewer.
[As for causing anxiety in god: ] not simply causing anxiety in someone, but in the place of the other, represented by god. In the place of the great other. […] The pervert aims at nature, aims at the uncontaminated origin – why? Because he rejects language. Language separates us from nature and casts us into exile. The pervert seeks to defy the law of language in order to access nature. In the pedophilic form, or in the Pasolinian form of reclaiming the body in its innocence. […] While language empties us of enjoyment because it introduces lack into us, constituting us as subjects of desire, thus as lacking subjects, the pervert wants to reject language in order to make us full of enjoyment, to make us whole, to fill us with enjoyment. In this sense, the pervert is always against language; he believes that language is a betrayal of being, a form of alienation from being.
So then, what does it mean to make god anxious? Well, if god were the pure, uncontaminated other of language, He would be a lacking other, and I must fill him with enjoyment through the path of anguish. To place enjoyment in the other means to make the other anxious.
[…] We are deprived of enjoyment, we no longer have the breast in our mouth; if we are to speak, we no longer have the breast in our mouth. […] The loss of the breast is caused by the cut of language, by the snip, says Lacan – coupe de cisailles. […] Thus, through god’s anguish, god reveals himself not so much as “the heavenly father,” but as one who has a body: he reveals himself as a being of enjoyment; he trembles. He becomes anxious as humans become anxious, as the anorexic’s mother becomes anxious.