Our Dark Side (10 page)

By about 1880, the terror inspired by this dangerous supplement had paved the way, especially in France and Germany, for a demented medical practice that was more concerned with eradicating the evils of the imaginary plague than with verifying the veracity of the hypotheses of Tissot and his disciples. All sorts of therapeutic devices were invented to put an end to the onanist plague: anti-masturbation corsets, chastity cages, devices to keep little girls' leg apart, warnings and threats of castration, handcuffs, charges brought against nurses accused of abusing the children in their care and, finally, surgical interventions on the ovaries, the clitoris and the penis.

But before such treatments could be applied, and before such threats could be uttered, proof of sexual excitation was required. Within families that were themselves in thrall to medical discourse, systematic attempts were made to detect any trace of this shameful activity. Every inflammation of the genitals was examined under a magnifying glass, as was every swelling, every oedema, and every sign of herpes or redness. Masturbation was therefore not just conceptualized as the fruit of a solitary practice; it was also seen as an anonymous pleasure that sometimes presupposed the presence of something else rubbing: an anonymous hand, a tactile or olfactory sensation.

It was also believed that anomalies in the urinogenital apparatus might cause the childhood hysteria that led to masturbation. Long after Pasteur's theses had been accepted, people still believed in the fable dreamed up by Tissot: the origins of all kinds of infectious or viral illnesses lay in the practice of masturbation.

The fact that masturbation was a dangerous supplement did not, however, mean that it was culturally induced. And even if that were the case, it was important to know whether children seduced themselves, or whether they were seduced by adults who corrupted and abused them. The entire debate about trauma on the one hand and childhood sexual theories stemmed from these two hypotheses, which were eventually abandoned by Freud, who also rejected any approach to masturbation that saw it as a ‘dangerous supplement'.

The world of childhood was not all that was at fault. Just as it was suspected that the child or adult seducer might be the source of the evil, questions were, as I have already stressed, also being asked about the nature of hysteria. While it was beginning to be thought that the origins of that nervous illness did not lie in an excitation of the womb (
uterus
), it was also beginning to be thought that it could be observed in pre-pubertal children and that, when it affected women, it might be caused by onanism. This belief was so strong that recourse to surgery (ablation of the ovaries) or the use of cocaine to desensitize the vagina were common forms of treatment – and were sometimes requested by women.

As we can see, the great surgical
furia
that raged across Europe between 1850 and 1900 affected both masturbating children and hysterical women. Like inverts, they were the most flamboyant users of the dangerous supplement that had so worried Rousseau. According to the new medical gaze, they at least had one thing in common: they preferred auto-erotic sexuality to procreative sexuality. It was therefore not so much the homosexual woman as the hysterical woman, together with the homosexual man and the masturbating child who became the support for all sorts of fantasies centred on the fear that the family and the procreative order might be perverted.
¹⁹

Thanks to a strange coincidence, this rapidly expanding medical science was reproducing old ancestral rites at the very time when it was being claimed that colonial conquest (and especially the French conquest of Africa) was bringing the curative virtues of civilization to supposedly inferior races. Among these peoples, and many others, the goal of excision had always been to place the female body – from childhood onwards – under the domination of male power – fathers, brothers, husbands. The underlying assumption was that the clitoris was the seat of such boundless orgasmic power that it was advisable to be protected from it (Erlich 1987) so as to encourage vaginal orgasms. It was often a woman who inflicted the mutilation: she took the clitoris between her thumb and index finger, and amputated it with a blade. Women in harems were excised in order to prevent lesbianism, and lived under the supervision of eunuchs.

The rite of circumcision,
²⁰
which was already practised in ancient Egypt, did not have the same meaning. Because it was a form of initiation, it marked the boy's transition from a world of childhood (which was dominated by women) to a world of maturity (which was governed by virile, warlike and male values). In the oldest forms of Judaism, circumcision was seen as a rite of covenant, and not transition, that allowed every male subject to re-enact the Covenant between God and the chosen people of Abraham and all his descendants. It followed that every man must bear its physical mark of pain on being excluded from the Covenant.

It was because the child was described by the sexologists of the late nineteenth century as the repository of a dangerous, or in other words perverse, auto-erotic and polymorphous, sexuality, that children came to enjoy special protection. No longer a passive creature, the child of bourgeois society – girl or boy – did not need to be sexually initiated by a master, in either the name of libertinage or some pedagogy. As a result, the paedophile, and still more so the incestuous paedophile who sexually seduced the child he had fathered, gradually became the most perverse of the perverse. He was the agent of an initiation into infamy. In some European countries and on the other side of the Atlantic, he was a figure of horror and was condemned to surrender his organ of
jouissance
by being emasculated or chemically castrated.
²¹
He replaced the homosexual as the focus of public hatred.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth, the notion of perversion gradually took on this meaning. The more it was defined as a pathology whose origins were biologically hereditary or organic, the less it was sanctified and seen as an essential part of civilization. The ‘people of the perverse', for their part, came to illustrate the endless catalogue of sexual perversions and were depicted as ill, half mad, tainted or degenerate, and likened to the proletarians of the so-called dangerous classes: they were a bad race. As I have already stressed, the perverse were therefore required to behave properly on pain of being excluded not from the
polis
but from the
human race
.

The emergence of the idea that perversion was a matter of object-choice – (perversions in the plural) rather than structure (love of hatred) – had the effect of bringing about a complete transformation of the organization of sex and subjectivity in Western societies. If the perverse were defined as ill, but as capable of reverting to the norm with the help of hygienics, psychiatry or sexology, it followed that civilization no longer needed them as a heterogeneous element or sanctified figure: they were nothing more than individuals who were sexually ill, proscribed and objects of either horror or compassion.

Freud never read much Sade but, without realizing it, he shared Sade's idea that human life was characterized not so much by an aspiration to the good and virtue, as by a permanent quest for the enjoyment of evil: the death drive, the desire for cruelty, a love of hatred, and an aspiration to unhappiness and suffering (Freud 1929; cf. Le Rider, Plon, Rey-Flaud and Raulet 1998). Being a thinker of the dark Enlightenment (Yovel 1991; Sternhill 2006), and not of the Counter-Enlightenment, he rehabilitated the idea that perversion is an essential part of civilization to the extent that it is society's accursed share and our own dark side. But rather than grounding evil in the natural world order or seeing man's animal nature as the sign of an inferiority that can never be overcome, he prefers to argue that access to culture is the only thing that can save humanity from its own self-destructive drives. In an article on ‘revisionist psychoanalysis', Adorno (1952) remarks that the dark thinkers who insisted that the evil side of human nature could never be eradicated and who pessimistically proclaimed the need for authority, cannot be dismissed out of hand, and that, in that sense, Freud is very close to Hobbes, Mandeville and Sade. He adds that such thinkers have never been welcome in their own environment.
²²

According to Freud, the destructive drive is the first precondition for all sublimation because the defining characteristic of humanity, if there is such a thing, is nothing more than the alliance, within man himself, between the most powerful barbarism and the highest level of civilization. It represents a sort of transition from nature to culture. As he wrote to Marie Bonaparte in June 1937: ‘One may regard … curiosity, the impulse to investigate, as a complete sublimation of the aggressive or destructive instinct' (cited Jones 1957: 494).

It can never be stated too often that Freud was the only scientist of his day who, after many hesitations,
²³
ceased to see the infernal trio of the homosexual, the hysterical woman and the masturbating child as the incarnation of a notion of perversion that was now meaningless. And just as he stopped trying to domesticate perversion by attributing its so-called stigmata to individuals who were excluded from procreation, he abandoned classifications derived from sexology and took the risk of no longer listening to the long litany of confessions the perverse made to mental medicine.

He therefore gives the structure of perversion an essentially human dimension – delight in evil, an eroticization of hatred – rather than a defect, a sign of degeneracy or an anomaly. In clinical terms, it becomes the product of a polymorphous disposition inherited either from a primeval sexual cult, an unbridled infantile sexuality, or a radical denial that there are anatomical differences between the sexes: ‘in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we have before us a remnant of a primeval sexual cult, which once was – perhaps still is – a religion in the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte)' (Freud 1985: 227). Elsewhere (1905: 171), he writes: ‘The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something
innate in everyone
, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity.'

Freud thus introduces into the psyche what might be termed a universal of perverse difference: all human beings have a potential proclivity for crime, sex, transgression, madness, negativity, passion, inversion, and so on. But no human being can be determined, for life and in advance, by a destiny that makes him or her incapable of self-transcendence.

Having initially described neurosis as the negative of perversion, Freud emphasizes the savage, barbarous, polymorphous and instinctual nature of perverse sexuality; this is a raw sexuality that knows nothing of the incest taboo, repression or sublimation. He will subsequently make a distinction between two types of perversion: perversions of the object and perversions of the aim. The former include sexual relations with a human partner (incest, auto-eroticism, paedophilia); the latter are divided into three types of practice: pleasure in seeing (exhibitionism, voyeurism), pleasure in pain and inflicting pain (sadism, masochism), and the pleasure that derives from the exclusive overestimation of a fetishized erogenous zone.

From 1915 onwards, Freud turns away from describing the sexual
perversions
and further refines his conceptualization of
perversion
. He then inscribes it with a tripartite structure; psychosis is defined as the reconstruction of a hallucinatory reality
²⁴
and neurosis as the product of an internal conflict followed by repression, while perversion is viewed as a denial of castration and a fixation on infantile sexuality.

To sum up, we can say that, until Freud, the sexual perversions were seen by the discourse of positivist medicine as deviations from a norm that could never be rectified. Because they were errors, accidents or regressions, they flowed into a biological sewer. According to the same discourse, the subject was nothing more than an object that had become lost in the turmoil of a classification that reduced it to insignificance and dispossessed it of its dark side.

With Freud, in contrast, the perverse disposition was seen as an essential moment in the transition to normality. The contours of normality were ill-defined, and every subject could be defined as a former pervert who had become normal after having internalized the principles of the Law as major taboos. From that perspective, it is pathology that sheds light on the norm and not vice versa (Canguilhem 1978; Lanteri-Laura 1979: 85–6): ‘The very emphasis laid on the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” makes it certain that we spring from an endless series of generations of murders, who had the lust for killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have today' (Freud 1915: 296).

According to Freud, perversion in a sense comes naturally to human beings. In clinical terms, it is a structure: no one is born perverse, and we become perverse because we inherit an individual and collective history that is a combination of unconscious identifications and various traumas. What happens next depends upon what every subject does with his or her potential for perversion: it can lead to rebellion, transcendence and sublimation or, at the opposite extreme, murder and the destruction of both the self and others. In that respect, Gilles de Rais and Sade are both the children of their times, and products of the family genealogy that made them what they became.

Once it had been accepted that God did not exist, perversion, defined as a psychic structure, was, thanks to Freud, integrated into the order of desire. Sade turned
jouissance
into a discipline; Freud was to replace a purported science of sex with a theory of desire. Sade makes pornographic desire incandescent; Freud ridicules the positivist ethics of a medicine of norms and horrors that turned the people of the perverse into a collection of things. By demonstrating that the perverse disposition is a human characteristic and that every subject is potentially perverse – and that the pathological therefore sheds light on the norm – Freud also asserts that the only thing that can limit the abject deployment of perversion is a sublimation embodied in the values of love, education, the Law and civilization.