Elisabeth Roudinesco, Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion

Abstract

Historians of perversion must confront the issue of how capaciously to define the term. On the one hand, while a wide casting of the net will make perversion seem ubiquitous, when perversion is everywhere it might as well be nowhere. The analytical reach of the term diminishes in inverse proportion to its capaciousness. On the other hand, if a narrow definition offers precise conceptual tools, it threatens to marginalise perversion or mistake one historical manifestation of the term for all manifestations. Roudinesco argues that in all the various forms perversion takes, it clusters around ‘negative image[s] of freedom: annihilation, domination, cruelty and jouissance’ (p. 4). Throughout her incisive study, perversion becomes versions of ‘our dark side’. Like Freud, who intimated that we humans were all perverts in either sexual object or aim, she goes so far as to insist that ‘be it a delight in evil or a passion for the sovereign good, perversion is the defining characteristic of the human species’ (p. 4). Some philosophers like Arnold Davidson who argue that the pervert is the invention of a nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse would take issue with the looseness of this definition (Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality, 2001). But if Roudinesco's viewpoint allows her to see his thesis about the pervert as one of only many symptoms of the perversion that is humanity, it runs the danger of emptying out perversion of anything interesting. If humanity is perversion, then, what makes perversion worth thinking about? What structures its form in any given moment? Roudinesco's answer is that perversion is what defines the species difference between animals and humans. Her reasoning is that ‘animals never experience the slightest delight in evil’ (p. 101), and that animal sexuality ‘is devoid of complex symbolic language’ (p. 127). Given that animals are now credited with tool-making, language and culture, we will have to see if this distinction holds water. When she claims that ‘for Darwin, there was no difference between man and the higher animals’ (p. 59), however, she has got her Darwin wrong. Darwin recalibrates the difference between humans and animals in terms of degree, not kind, but this is not a doing away with difference.