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  • What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis by Sergio Benvenuto
  • Adrienne Harris (bio)
What are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis. Sergio Benvenuto. London: Karnac, 2016. 210 pp.

In this book, Sergio Benvenuto works his way to a new and compelling account of perversions. His method is complex. As he suggests, it is more like "bricolage" than conventional argument. Bricolage is a term borrowed from anthropology that describes a kind of construction made of bits and pieces, glued and fashioned together from myriad perspectives and elements. Benvenuto's mode of argument is transdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and social science and on aesthetics. But ultimately his work depends on psychoanalysis, and at the same time, more often than not, he critiques and undoes many features and shibboleths of psychoanalytic thinking, particularly its developmental aspects.

Perhaps most interesting of all, considering that the topic is perversion, Benvenuto's work, in this book, does finally depend on a deep encounter with questions of ethics. This is complex and tricky to do, as the whole topic of perversion has been drenched in moralizing and regulatory demands. One of the most demeaning and demoralizing misuses of psychoanalytic work on perversions has been to engage in and underwrite the whole project of heteronormative regulation. As many have noticed and written (Žižek, 1989, and within psychoanalysis, Dimen, 2003; Guralnik, 2016; and others), psychoanalytic writing and theorizing on sexuality can do the job of interpellation as skillfully as any policeman.

I start with a confession. From my own thinking and what I owe to feminism and through the strong influence of queer theory's approach to the history of thinking about perversion, I realized that I approached this exercise, writing a review of a book about perversion written by a European psychoanalyst, with ideological alarm bells ringing. For many North American analysts, particularly those grounded in critical theory and political analysis, European analysts too often appear to have held a moralizing and pathologizing view of homosexuality that has outlasted many efforts in other disciplines to push our understanding into a more humane and less frankly phobic stance. Too often, sexual difference and heteronormativity [End Page 235] are assumed necessary conditions to ensure hold on reality (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984). Prejudices unpacked in North American psychoanalytic theory, and pushed by political arguments of course, as well, have led to a different stance with regard to sexuality and its variations. Across many orientations this move to enlightenment is often anchored on the claim that Freud is our first revolutionary and equally often that he sets us on a problematic path. Benvenuto very determinedly holds both perspectives.

All of this is to say that I did not approach this book happily or with kindly fantasies, given that the author's work was not well known to me. So I write as an appreciative convert to the arguments and the style and qualities of Benvenuto's modes of thought and his writing. In so many ways, this is a brave and adventurous book. There are so many interesting theoretical developments that come because Benvenuto simultaneously liberates himself and us from the ordeals of reading psychoanalytic work on perversions and helps us to a new way of reading and considering perversion with a psychoanalytic lens.

One crucial element in his work is his distancing from the DSM-driven and psychiatric preoccupations with the suffering and discomfort of the perverse subject. (DSM, or Diagnostic Statistical Manual, is periodically revised and sets the rules for insurable, reimbursable psychological and psychiatric conditions, and this carries significant ideological and economic weight.) Benvenuto is pursuing an understanding of perversion that is both affective and cognitive; to my tastes he is more Bionian than Freudian, as he looks at the profound alterations of reality and psychic reality that underlie perverse thought and action.

Benvenuto sometimes flirts with but finally steers away from a blanket denunciation of the terms and ideas in which perversions have long been discussed. Often, as I read, I feared the arguments would implode or slide again into various versions of heteronormativity. It is a testament to the skill of the author, and his moral compass, that one can emerge from this book finding value and utility...

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