Perversity and Ethics (review)

The first chapter of this book is devoted to Freud's metapsychology. Drive, in Freud, is the elementary unit of psychical motive force; it is the innate tendency of an organism to reduce the energy it accumulates as a result of external stimulus, to discharge it through a motor response. Some of these drives function to preserve the organism. But other drives, which Freud calls sexual or libidinal, strive for diverse "organ pleasure," and eventually are synthesized in reproductive acts.

The neural and motor pathways through which an excess tension is released are "bound" by "secondary processes" which establish thresholds that build up a quantum of energy sufficient to effect a motor discharge. They are regulated by contact with the layout of reality, which will eventually include social constraints. Egginton calls this binding, this establishment of barriers to the free flow of energy, "institutionalization." Taking account eventually of social constraints, the codes or the law, the self becomes a moral ego. Barriers are felt inwardly in fear, disgust, and shame.

The libidinal or sexual drives seeking "organ pleasure" undergo "vicissitudes": reversal, turning-round upon the subject's self, repression and sublimation. An original active sadism is reversed into passive masochism, an original active scopophilia into passive exhibitionism. Masochism and exhibitionism are "perversions" of the original drives. There is then also a turning of drive back upon the subject, which thereby becomes an object, a "narcissistic ego." The original drives become perverse and also sexual when the subject seeks satisfaction by identifying with the object's passive enjoyment of his or her active drive.

If the internal establishment of barriers constitutes the ego, the libidinal or sexual drives acquire their independence by seeking to shatter these barriers, these instituted internal structures of the ego. Drives turned against the ego would be the original masochism, which, with Leo Bersani, Egginton says is intrinsic to, constitutive of libidinal or sexual drives. The libidinal drives seek pleasure in shattering the internal barriers felt in fear, shame, and disgust. Our libidinal drives seek, Egginton concludes, to shatter whatever norms of behavior, sociability, acceptability have been imposed on or integrated by an individual from his or her earlier history. Ethical injunctions are inherently perverse in the sense that there can be no ethical injunction that is not at once subject to its reversal.

The second chapter concerns Lacan, with some parallel themes from Sartre, Heidegger, Badiou, and Kant. Lacan would see two different attitudes we can take to the mutual imbrication of desire and the law. We can persist in our quest for the absent absolute object of desire, through the fetishistic exchange of one object or good for another. This attitude Egginton now designates as perverse (67). Lacan would propose instead breaking through fantasy to realize drive. Such a drive could not be made sense of, interpreted, or rationalized. It indeed threatens culture, interaction with others, laws and decency. "To be true to one's desire is to become aware of that desire's groundlessness and its imbrication with laws whose contingency undermine any notion of ultimate good or right" (73). There then is nothing in the ethics of psychoanalysis that can tell us what to do because it is good or right.

The third chapter deals with "Deconstruction and the Theology of Desire." Deconstruction, Egginton explains, produces a new account of being:

The verb "to be," attests to a void, or gaping, that opens up at its heart, and that poses a question for the subject; or, rather, as Lacan specifies, it poses a question with the subject as one might write with a pen or "Aristotle's man thought with his soul," suggesting that this void in being entails a with or an along-side, a relation to something that manifests itself as essential to human being—as soul, as subject—and that is revealed in the quasi-instrumental function of facilitating a questioning that emerges from that void, the questioning of identity, of the nature of that "A" to which I am equal, of what, how, why, and most fundamentally...