The Chameleon Language of Perversion

Abstract

This paper offers two understandings of the perverse structure's attack on meaningfulness and liveliness: the first one relates to perversion as a chameleon language, which adopts the other's discursive characteristics in order to invade and subjugate him or her. According to this understanding, the perverse subject's exact identification of the other's needs is not a true identification of one's internal reality, but rather a pseudo-identification that relies on the perverse ability to adopt the other's discursive features. The second understanding refers to perversion as emerging from an empty and hermetic primal scene, which is not an imaginary scene between three (a mother, a father, and a child who imagines them in his or her absence) but rather between two: a child and a dead object whom she or he conceives in order to be born. A detailed analytic case study demonstrates how the primal perverse scene is reenacted and worked through within the analytic scene.