Perversion, Terminable and Interminable: Foucault, Lacan, and <em>DSM-5</em>

Abstract

Perversion, Terminable and Interminable:Foucault, Lacan, and DSM-5 H. N. Lukes (bio) In 1992, when the so-called culture wars and intrafeminist sex wars were waning in the United States and the term "queer" was hitting both the streets and academia, Emily Apter wrote the following for an entry on "perversion" in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary: "Though certain erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse (say, lesbian sadomasochism) may continue to be classified as perverse . . . , it is none the less unclear whether gender-revisionist psychoanalysis really needs a clinical definition of perversion in its lexicon. Perhaps the term will endure most successfully as a synonym for sexual subversion."1 In this essay I discuss the curious fate of perversion, with and without its proper nomination, twenty-five years after Apter's prognosis.2 After the following general theoretical introduction, the first section charts sexual perversion through its historical synonym "paraphilia" in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) recently revised fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The second section investigates how and why contemporary psychoanalytically inclined sociopolitical theorists are using the term "perversion" with only oblique reference to sexuality. My tracing of this split genealogy of paraphilia and desexualized perversion informs [End Page 327] this essay's ultimate thesis that recent trends in the academic Left have come to sublimate the logics of sex panic as a reaction to a generalized panic endemic to neoliberal risk societies. Two decades after Apter's assessment, her reservation about the subversiveness of consensual lesbian sadomasochism sounds dated and almost quaint—but then so does her implicit faith in the ongoing significance of "gender-revisionist psychoanalysis" and the political stakes of sexual subversion itself. Psychoanalytic clinicians who have responded to feminist and queer revisionist mandates provide the exception to the rule of psychoanalysis's already diminishing clinical and cultural influence in the United States.3 Recent queer and feminist work in and outside of American universities has also demonstrated less interest in either supporting contemporary clinical psychoanalysis or returning to its canonical texts. Since the 1990s, American LGBT politics have increasingly deferred to legal apparatuses of state-based inclusion and assimilationist cultural representation, leaving the antinormative aspects of "queer" an increasingly unmoored political category. Meanwhile, sexual transgressions have taken up locations that do not easily read as social subversion or arrange themselves clearly around the former left/right-wing battle lines of the culture wars. Among these are our current era's witness to such disparate advents as the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise's popularization of straight bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism (BDSM); a seeming proliferation of criminal sex offenders; and a renewed attention to rape culture that is currently focused on the institutional practices of colleges and universities themselves. In this context, it is conspicuous that some contemporary critical theorists have resurrected perversion to signify not the obvious "erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse" that Apter notes but rather the projected psyches and political platforms of those most wont to condemn these practices, including figures such as George W. Bush. This new application of perversion is the logical if unlikely end of a certain critical arc. After French feminism and Anglo-American film criticism had first delivered the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the U.S. academy in the 1970s, Slavoj Žižek and his fellow travelers as well as new English-language translations of Lacan's seminars from the late 1980s on enabled a return to Lacan that has been more attuned to broad understandings of contemporary politics and historical materialism than to specifically feminist applications. Among these newly available concepts has been Lacan's conversion of perversion from a tendency toward specific sex practices to a fundamental psychic "structure" [End Page 328] that defines the analysand's relation to the psychoanalyst, if not also to meaning and authority as such.4 If Lacan arguably refused the naturalized link between sexual minorities and moral condemnations of perversion in the culturally and historically specific imaginary, then he also refigured the pervert less as a sexy rebel than as a desperate reactionary calling on the oedipal father to complete his unfinished work of "castration...