Our Dark Side (19 page)

It comes as no surprise to find that the inventor of such a perverse system has become an apologist for zoophilia (Singer 2001). He bases his arguments on the thesis of the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers, who has written a book on bestiality (2000) advancing the aberrational idea that animals are sexually attracted to human beings. Likening the power of scents to actual desire, he calls for the removal of the taboo that supposedly surrounds zoophilia and claims that sexual relations between animals and humans should be regarded as just as normal as relations between humans, on the grounds that animals can be consenting partners. According to this argument, zoophiles should be treated in the same way that homosexuals are now treated. They should be free to live with their favourite companions, and even free to marry them.

Singer's support for such theories brought him under attack from his own side when animal rights groups accused him of barbarism. Using perverse theories to deny that human beings are by their very nature carnivores is, after all, no way to improve the fate of animals or to get out of the vicious circle that Lévi-Strauss describes so well. And besides, if we adopt Singer's egalitarian stance, how can we prevent humans from eating animals without at the same time preventing animals from eating their fellow animals? Do we have to turn all carnivores into herbivores?

We know that, as a result of the development of mass society and industrial slaughter houses, human beings now eat more meat than their ancestors, who lived in a rural world in which only the nobility enjoyed the right to hunt. But that does not necessarily mean that they should be prevented from eating meat. In democratic societies, the decision to give up eating meat must be a matter of individual choice, and not the result of the sectarian indoctrination that promotes yet another ‘new man' ideology. If we act on the basis of that principle, we will one day have to ban any way of exterminating certain animal species that damage crops or pose a threat to human life.

While the question of animal protection has become an essential feature of contemporary debates about ecology, the question of zoophilia is an important influence on changing views of animality.

It would of course be a mistake to try to reintroduce the crime of bestiality, which was removed from the statute book over two hundred years ago, into contemporary law. But the fact that we no longer persecute those unfortunates who indulge in private in carnal habitation with their favourite animals, does not mean that we do not have to rethink the contemporary problematic of zoophilia.

Pornographic photographs are posted on the internet. Animals trained for sexual purposes can be bought by mail order. Dogs, cats, birds and snakes are trained to perform ritual acts of fellatio or anal penetration, and are killed and tortured. Domestic pets are mutilated in various ways.
²¹
Such is the face of contemporary zoophilia.
²²
The cruelty is legal but, like pointless laboratory experiments, it can be described as a form of slavery.

We have to conclude that the worldwide distribution of pornographic images of sex between human zoophiles and trained animals is the modern expression of a perverse system that is both collective and anonymous, and that it is much more perverse than the actual sexual relations that peasants had with their animals, or that city dwellers had with their pets. In the one case, practising or potential zoophiles are encouraged to indulge in a cruel addiction that leads them to treat animals as commodities; in the other, they act instinctively, but without any mediation from an institutionalized third party.

In more general terms, we can say that today's mercantile civilization is becoming a perverse society because it identifies with an ideal that fetishizes the bodies and genitals of both human and non-humans on a globalized scale, and because there is a widespread tendency to erase all boundaries between the human and the non-human, between the body and the psyche, between nature and culture, and between norms and the transgression of norms. Such fetishism is encouraged both by the distribution of images and by the development of a virtual pornography that is refined, clean and hygienic, and that appears to do no harm. In a sense, this society is even more perverse than the perverts it can no longer define. It exploits the will to
jouissance
so as to repress it all the more. As for the anti-speciesist theories on animal liberation that, like to many other theories of this kind, parody the ideal of progress and enlightenment, they are no more than the puritanical face of this domesticated pornography.

The example of these representations of zoophilia and their various narrative supports once more demonstrated that, as in the nineteenth century, the discourse of psychiatry is providing contemporary society with the morality it is looking for.

The goal of the old sexology was to classify various types of perversion, to give names to the infinite variations on what was judged to be an abnormal sexology, and to stigmatize the dangerousness of the masturbating child, the hysterical woman and the male homosexual. We are now seeing a reversal of that perspective. Just as anti-speciesists and fanatical behaviourists want to liken men to apes and deny the existence of any species barrier, psychiatry claims to be abolishing the very idea that perversion might exist by refusing to pronounce its name.

In 1974, and under pressure from gay and lesbian liberation movements, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) resolved, on the basis of a referendum, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The decision caused a scandal. It in fact indicated that, being unable to define the nature of homosexuality in human terms, the American psychiatric community had given in, in demagogic fashion, to the pressure of public opinion by asking its members to vote on a problem that had nothing to do with any electoral decision. Thirteen years later, in 1987, the term ‘perversion' – like ‘hysteria' – vanished from the international vocabulary of psychiatry without any theoretical debate, and was replaced by ‘paraphilia'.
²³
Homosexuality is not included in that category.

One can, of course, take the view that this event, which took place in two stages – the declassification of homosexuality and then the removal of perversion from the list – marked a decisive victory for movements for the emancipation of minorities. After having suffered so much persecution, homosexuals, who had the support of most of the ‘people of the perverse', had finally depsychiatrized their sexuality and convinced the legislators and representatives of medical science that same-sex love could easily have the same status as love for the opposite sex without plunging society into chaos. The legal decriminalization of homosexuality in the West – which had gradually been going on since 1975 – quite logically went hand-in-hand with its depsychiatrization because the psychiatric discourse that coined the term ‘homosexuality' had never, from the late nineteenth century onwards, been able to do anything more than turn inverts into mental patients.

If, however, we look more closely, we find that this victory was also the symptom of a disaster for medical science and its approach to the psyche. The disaster in fact occurred when the promoters of the famous
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM
) finally abandoned the psychoanalytic, psychodynamic or phenomenological terminology – which had humanized psychiatry over a period of sixty years by supplying it with a philosophy of the subject – and replaced it with behavioural criteria that made no reference to subjectivity (see Kirk and Kutchins 1992). The goal was to demonstrate that disorders of the soul were purely psychopharmalogical or surgical problems, and that they could be reduced to disorders or dissociations, or in other words motor breakdowns.

According to what is now a globalized approach – one which is accepted everywhere on the planet – the word ‘paraphilia' refers not only to what were once described as perverse sexual practices – exhibitionism, fetishism, frottage, paedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, voyeurism, transvestism – but also to perverse fantasies, which cannot be linked to perverse practices. Then there is the category of so-called ‘non-specific paraphilias', which includes phone sex, necrophilia, partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia, coprophilia, cliterophilia and urophilia.

As we can see, the term ‘paraphilia' does not cover acts that are legally defined as crimes, such as rape, sexual murder, delinquency, living on immoral earnings or terrorism (paedophilia and exhibitionism are the exceptions to the rule). And nor, finally, does it cover the addictions and exacerbated forms of narcissism that many clinicians see as forms of self-destruction: drug addiction, bulimia, anorexia and so on (cf. Racamier 1970; Sirotta 2003).

The disappearance of the word ‘perversion' from psychiatry's lexicon allows modern medical science to describe anyone as a ‘paraphile'. Both subjects who repeatedly have perverse fantasies (or in other words most of the world's inhabitants) and those who actually indulge in perverse sexual practices (legal or otherwise) can be so defined. While no one is a pervert because the word has disappeared, everyone is a potential pervert if they can be suspected of having been completely obsessed, on more than one occasion, with sado-masochistic, fetishistic, or criminal fantasies.

This recourse to a terminology that makes no mention of its dark side means that perversion no longer has any substance. The subject of medical science's new discourse is not influenced by the violence of his or her passions, but by a conditioning that is unrelated to language. There is also a danger that the subject will become the object of a permanent suspicion because his fantasies are seen as perverse acts, which have been rebaptized as ‘paraphiliac'. One day, there will no doubt be a call for fantasies to be systematically screened, evaluated, reified and included in the files in accordance with the most extreme logic of the domestication of the imaginary.

In a sense,
DSM
– a perverse classification of perversion, the perverse and sexual perversions – realizes Sade's great social utopia, but it does so in a deadly way: differences are abolished, subjects are reduced to being objects that are under surveillance, a disciplinary ideology triumphs over the ethics of freedom, the feeling of guilt is dissolved, and the order of desire is suppressed.
²⁴

But the comparison goes no further. As we know, Sade's utopia could have been dreamed up only by a libertine who never had any intention of realizing it in the real world. Sade was a tragic author who led the life of a pariah and spent most of it locked up with criminals and the insane. His narratives urge us to turn the revolutionary act into a deflagration. In his destructive fantasy, he imagines that this will hasten the transition between the old and the new. Today's behavioural psychiatrists, in contrast, are the puritanical agents of an anonymous biocracy.

The triumph of this new psychiatry of screening, evaluation and behaviour has brought about a shift from a system of knowledge to one of truth. Dispossessed of their authority for the benefit of a perverse system that makes them its servants, psychiatrists are faced with a situation that forces them to watch the therapeutic alliance without being actors in it. And as we can see from the petitions and declarations of practitioners who are exasperated by this development within their discipline – or even its disappearance – that never stop complaining about this.

As a result of this change, patients are now expected to describe their symptoms in public and to become experts on their own pathologies and pain. They therefore make their own diagnoses, which are no more than an expression of a vast tyrannical cult of confession.

At the same time, the audiovisual media have, as we know and with the consent of every protagonist in the great post-modern display of exhibitionism, become the major instruments of an ideology that is as pornographic as it is puritanical. All over the world, reality television, in which everyone is forced to put their private life on show, functions as the new asylum of modern times, and it is not unrelated to the spirit that inspired
DSM
's classifications. It is a vast zoological garden that is organized like a realm of never-ending surveillance in which time has been suspended.

A society that worships this kind of transparency and surveillance and that seeks to abolish its dark side, is a perverse society. But, and this is the paradox, this transparency, which the audiovisual media have turned into a categorical imperative, means that democratic states can scarcely go on concealing their barbaric, shameful and perverse practices. Witness, if need be, the history of torture. When, with the tacit approval of the French Army's highest authorities, torture was used in Algeria, it took years for eye-witnesses, victims and historians to prove what had happened. As we recently saw from the war in Iraq, the torturers are now the first to publicize their actions: they pose for photographs of themselves in action. The photographs are then distributed all over the world (cf. Douin 1998). It can never be stated too often that there are many facets to the perversion that both encourages civilization's advances and at the same parodies them or even destroys them.

While today's industrial and technological society has its perverse tendencies because of its pornographic fetishization of bodies, the puritanical medical discourse that abolishes the notion of perversion and the elaboration of insane theses about relations between humans and animals, the perverse have yet to be identified. Where does perversion begin, and what are the main components of perverse discourse today?

Excluded from the procreative order and stigmatized as the accursed share of human societies, the homosexuals of the past – Wilde, Proust and the characters in their novels – were recognizable, identifiable, branded and stigmatized. As we have said, they made up the famous people of the perverse: they were an ‘accursed race' that could, as Proust remarked, be compared with women or the Jews. They were an elite race that was capable of sublimation. Many European states that observe the rule of Law now acknowledge their desire to start families. And they are becoming even more of a threat to their enemies because they are less visible. As a result, it is no longer the exclusion of homosexuals from the family order that upsets reactionaries of all stripes; on the contrary, it is their desire to become part of it.