Research funders increasingly require integration of future climate projections across health, agriculture, fisheries, and development economics, creating perverse incentives: institutions demand what current climate science cannot reliably deliver. I use “perverse incentive” here in its standard economic sense: an incentive that unintentionally produces counterproductive behavior, rather than implying ill will on the part of funders. Climate models designed for global, long-term analysis are being misapplied for short-term, regional uses beyond their validated scope. This paper identifies three problems arising from this (...) mismatch: maladaptation in scientific labor allocation, erosion of trustworthiness through representational overextension, and representational risk from harmful signaling and normalization of inappropriate methodological norms. Researchers include climate projections not because they are justified, but because they are required, transforming models from tools of inquiry into performances of compliance. This threatens both scientific integrity and the legitimacy of science underwritten by democratic norms. Three institutional reforms are proposed to realign incentives with epistemic responsibility and ensure climate science serves as a reliable policy foundation rather than mere signaling. (shrink)

This article examines the concerns and debates that have arisen in African philosophy over the last few decades, and asks whether it continues to be necessary for African philosophy to take on what the author calls “perverse questions” or “perverse preoccupations” with the West. The author argues that to engage and respond to questions about the intellectual capabilities of African thinkers or the possible existence of philosophical resources in African cultures is to respond to perverse questions. To engage in academic (...) dialogues implicitly or explicitly guided by a request or a felt need to justify and defend the very possibility of African philosophy or African rationality is to engage in perverse and unnecessary dialogues. Because these perverse debates often precede, prevent, or condition the formulation of what count as necessary debates, it is important that they be identified and critically assessed, and when possible, dispensed with. Only then can African philosophy pursue necessary and fruitful debates. (shrink)

Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...) The road to Hell, or to horrors on Earth, is paved with good intentions. Finally and more importantly, I want to demarcate what meaning perversions are. This, I hope, can help us assess the moral and political legitimacy of revisionary projects. (shrink)

The so-called duty to take up the slack states that willing compliers have a duty to shoulder burdens left by noncompliers. J.L. Cohen has argued that the duty to take up the slack creates perverse outcomes, since otherwise willing compliers will be tempted to withhold their contribution if this does not affect the final outcome. While Cohen’s objection reveals that this duty has a limited scope of implementation, it has been argued that it leaves the normative status of the duty (...) intact. This paper uses game theory to demonstrate that the problem of perverse outcomes is preceded by the different, and more pervasive, problem of perverse incentives. I argue that perverse incentives – understood as a structural effect on the choice architecture facing potential duty-bearers – increase the risk for perverse outcomes, threaten to undermine expectations of reciprocal behavior necessary for duties of justice to arise, and allow for the domination of some potential duty-bearers by others. My conclusions shed new light over the implications of accepting the duty to take up the slack, and cast doubts over its status as a duty of justice. (shrink)

This article discusses the views of Immanuel Kant on sexual perversion (what he calls "carnal crimes against nature"), as found in his Vorlesung (Lectures on Ethics) and the Metaphysics of Morals (both the Rechtslehre and Tugendlehre). Kant criticizes sexual perversion by appealing to Natural Law and to his Formula of Humanity. Neither argument for the immorality of sexual perversion succeeds.

This article examines certain motifs from Luis Buñuel's late bourgeois trilogy-- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie ( Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972), The Phantom of Liberty ( Le Fantôme de la Liberté, 1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire ( Cet Obscur Objet du Désir , 1977)--in order to show how they anticipate key trends in contemporary post-Marxian philosophy. In doing so, it draws upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose Lacanian revision of Hegel has provided a (...) model of ideology critique that preserves the structure of dialectical thought while avoiding the impulse to project a closed vision of subjectivity and historical change. In particular, such a model offers a means of reconsidering Buñuel’s concern with the perverse . Rather than having a singular ideological content (i.e., the repressed desire for freedom within bourgeois consciousness), the perverse in Buñuel’s films serves as a more volatile index of ideological conflict: freedom becomes perverse from the perspective of law, and law becomes perverse from the perspective of freedom. To recognize these dialectical reversals not only offers a means of appreciating Buñuel’s sense of humor, but also sheds light on how the late films situate "bourgeois" and "revolutionary" impulses in a much more complex, interdependent, and dynamic relationship with one another.  . (shrink)

Das Perverse ist im Denken Roland Barthes’ ein wiederkehrender Begriff von zentraler Bedeutung, was sich auch in entsprechender Forschung niederschlägt. Der Terminus ist vielseitig aufgestellt und lässt sich kaum mit einer simplen Kurzdefinition fassen oder gar auf rein sexuelle Assoziationen reduzieren. Wichtig für Beobachtungen rund um den Begriff der Perversion sind indes vor allem die Texte Sade, Fourier et Loyola und Die Lust am Text, in denen das Konzept wiederholt auftritt. Aber auch in der autobiographisch gefärbten Schrift Über mich (...) selbst und in Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe kommt die Perversion zur Sprache. (shrink)

The classic formula of disavowal given by Octave Mannoni, “I know well, but all the same,” undergoes interesting and far-reaching permutations in today’s social context. When it comes to dealing with and (not) responding to various crises, we usually point the finger at deniers and their “irrational” attitudes. However, far more common and socially problematic is the attitude that combines full recognition and denial in the same movement. Moreover, knowledge of a problem not only goes seamlessly with ignoring it but (...) seems to make ignoring it possible in the first place. Saying that “we know well” often enables us to ignore the real of that knowledge. Disavowal thus takes a doubly perverse turn, which is the focus of the analysis in this article. (shrink)

The idea that there is a coherent and morally relevant concept of sexual perversions has been increasingly called into question. In what follows, I will be concerned with two recent attacks on the notion of sexual perversion: those of Graham Priest and Igor Primoratz. Priest’s paper is the deeper of the two. Primoratz goes methodically through various accounts of sexual perversion and finds difficulties in them. This is no small task, of course, but unlike Priest he does not (...) attempt to provide any diagnosis of why any attempt to analyse the concept of sexual perversion must fail. Priest argues that sexual perversion is an “inapplicable concept”: the presuppositions that would allow us to make sense of the notion have been rightly rejected. Without the theoretical backdrop of an Aristotelian moral teleology, we cannot provide a satisfactory account of sexual perversion, for only such a teleological world-view allows us to give some sense to the idea that a sexual practice might be morally wrong because it is unnatural. Priest surveys accounts of perversion that don’t appeal to any idea of unnaturalness and rejects them—rightly I believe. But, Priest argues, Aristotle’s own moral teleology is part and parcel of his wider views about purpose in nature. This natural teleology has been shown to be explanatorily superfluous. Though some sciences still talk of functions, this can be understood in terms of contributions to evolutionary survival. Though there is considerable disagreement about the details of the right account of function, all versions of this scientifically respectable teleology are morally neutral: it would not follow from the fact that homosexual intercourse does nothing to propagate the agents’ genetic material to future generations that it is therefore morally wrong. Here too I think Priest is right. He also considers what he calls “Aristotelian revivalism” in Roger Scruton’s account of sexual perversion. I think Priest sells Aristotelianism short. I have no interest in defending Scruton’s own understanding of the Aristotelian moral framework nor his particular account of sexual perversion. I shall, however, argue that Aristotelian moral philosophy provides a more useful framework for thinking about these issues than Priest implies, and attempt to defend an account of sexual perversion within the context of this framework. (shrink)

For an agent to be motivated by a normatively perverse reason is to be motivated by a normative or evaluative thought as such which, if true, would count as such against the action that it motivates the agent to perform, or against the attitude that it motivates the agent to take. For example, that an action is morally wrong or prudentially bad counts, as such, against performing the action. When the thought that an action is morally wrong or prudentially bad (...) motivates me as such to perform the action, my motivating reason is normatively perverse. If being motivated by normatively perverse reasons is possible, then what, if anything, is wrong about it? I present and reject some accounts of what may be wrong about normative perversity. In the course of this discussion some desiderata emerge. Then I defend the suggestion that normative perversion is socially undesirable, in that it undermines certain valuable interpersonal and intrapersonal relations. Entering and maintaining these relations is constitutive of valuing people as beings to whom reasonable justification is owed. I show how this account satisfies the desiderata. (shrink)

Marking a ground-breaking moment in the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics," Elizabeth Grosz's Space, Time and Perversion contends that only by resituating and rethinking the body will feminism and cultural analysis effect and unsettle the knowledges, disciplines and institutions which have controlled, regulated and managed the body both ideologically and materially. Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and--in a controversial way--queer theory, Grosz shows how these fields have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal (...) traces of their production as bodies. Her tour de corpe investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz considers their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Begining with an exposition of the epistemological implications of bodily and sexual difference, Grosz examines the effects such knowledge have on the reception of meaning. She looks at the relationship between the knowledge of difference and the way that knowledge validates, affirms, avows and valorizes subjects. Grosz then extends this analysis to an investigation of the relationship between space, time, bodies and the spatial "arts" such as architecuture, urban planning and geography. In the last section, Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity. Controversially showing the ways in which "queer" theory fails to offer a truly transformative conception of bodies and their politics, Grosz finds "queer" a reactive category "which sees itself in opposition to a straight norm and thus defines itself in terms of this norm." Consequentially, "queer" theory inherits the acceptance of an entire range of sexual practices, without "asking what they share and without taking into account the profound tension that may exist among these practices." Grosz's Space, Time and Perversity is a diverse and incisive collection of essays from a renowned feminist philosopher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lack, Perversion, ShameJustin Garson, PhD (bio)I am extremely grateful to the commentators for giving me so much food for thought. Space considerations prevent me from engaging with all of the interesting points they raise, or responding at the length they warrant. For that reason, I chose to structure my response in terms of three recurring themes or distinctions: lack/perversion, madness/mental illness, and shame/pride. Hopefully, the philosophical richness (...) of the commentaries has already indicated the fruitfulness of returning, anew, to the Late Modern distinction between madness and idiocy.Lack and PerversionSeveral commentators directly challenge my characterization of the distinction between idiocy and madness as one between a lack, and a perversion, of the ordinary powers of reason.On the one hand, commentators point to the extent to which Late Modern theorists of madness still frame madness in terms of a lack, rather than a positive being. Jeppsson points out correctly that the Late Modern theorist still insists that madness stems from a lack of some sort or another: “one lacks proper premises to draw conclusions from, lacks a proper appreciation of reality.” Madness is not merely a different mode of reasoning about the world, but one that issues from a certain absence. Kusters, similarly, points out that the projects of Locke and Heinroth “remain insufficient because they remain focused on the mad as lacking something…a lack that prevents them from being part of the communal,” although he thinks Kant’s Aberwitz comes closest to a genuinely positive account. Tsou minimizes the relevance of the distinction between madness and idiocy by pointing out that both represent deviations from (hence they both “lack”) “normal psychological reason.”On the other hand, Banicki points out that even to construe madness in terms of a “lack” or “failure” (a failure of function, of reason, of action) is to presume, at least indirectly, a positive account of madness: after all, the mad person can only properly be said to “fail” in the exercise of their reason because they are the sort of being that participates in reason. A tree or a stone cannot be said to “fail” in the exercise of its reason (as Gipps puts it, “a baobab cannot jump to conclusions”). These commentators have helped me to clarify and sharpen the distinction between lack and perversion and the way they intersect with the categories of idiocy and madness.To put my view summarily: idiocy is, in its essence, just a way of lacking reason, in the same way that being poor is, in its essence, just a way of lacking wealth. But madness is not, in its essence, [End Page 327] a way of lacking reason. It is a way of exercising reason, but via perversion, where perversion must be understood as having the resonance both of excessive and also of driving toward an unexpected end.As I indicated in the paper, the distinction between lack and perversion is easiest to think about in terms of sexuality. A person may lack sexual desire: They may find themselves for long stretches of time with little to no desire for sex, the absence of sexual fantasies, and the inability to stimulate themselves or be stimulated by others. Crucially, being devoid of sexual desire is not a way of being sexual, any more than being dead is a way of being alive, or being a fish a way of being a mammal. By contrast, having a meager sexual desire is a way of being sexual, but via a lack or diminution: It is a way of not having much of it around.In contrast, one can have what is called a “perverse” sexuality: Sexuality infused with the desire to dominate, or be dominated, or to be watched from afar, or to couple with beasts or machines. This is a way of being sexual; it is even a kind of rampant sexuality. One talks of “harnessing” their sexuality, “restraining” it, “unleashing” it. For some, perversions may be terrifying to contemplate, almost unthinkable, even revolting. For others perversion is ecstatic; it transports one to another world in which one sees everything differently; the one who exercises her perversions morphs into an... (shrink)

I argue that there are perverse actions, in the sense that they are acts performed in the belief that they are wrong. They are also, however, acts done in the belief that they are right. What makes them perverse is, not only that they have conflicting motivations, but that the motivation that wins out is not in accord with reason. That is, a perverse act is one resulting from one's strongest motivation but not based on all one's available reasons.

The last section of Seminar VI is largely devoted to articulating desire and fantasy in the various clinical structures. We will begin with perversion.

The Islamic Republic of Iran punishes homosexuality with death but it actively recognizes transsexuality, and partially funds sex change operations. This article aims to examine how this seemingly progressive stance on transsexuality is connected to the IRI's larger oppressive apparatus of gender. It will first provide an overview of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality under the Islamic Republic's rule, and will then discuss the confluence of religious and medical literatures that led the Islamic Republic to adopt its new (...) discourse on transsexuality despite – or perhaps rather because of – its sex/gender politics. The article does not deny that this emerging discourse has been somewhat empowering for those transsexuals who genuinely desire surgical transformation. But empowering as it might have been for such transsexuals, the emerging discourse is still deeply troubling since it systematically regards homosexuality and more generally any sexual or gender non-conformity as unintelligible, perverse, and punishable by law, except for those willing to transform their "wrong bodies." The article will, therefore, demonstrate that the IRI's permission of transsexuality and sex change operations is motivated by a goal that is more about assimilating gender atypical individuals into the heteronormative order than about broadening horizons for sex/gender possibilities. The article ends by discussing how this discourse is making non-surgical trans/multi-gendered identity illegible and illegitimate not only as a publicly recognized possibility, but also with regard to transpersons' own self-perception and self-constitution of their gender and sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

One of the most disturbing problems of social decision making and indeed quite difficult to resolve is the need to reconcile individual rationality with that of society. While individual rationalizing rules indicateways to maximize benefits without any restriction, the collective point of view tilts toward the limitation of individual maximization. This is the very core of the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma which is but a formalway of saying that there is good reason for every individual to defect on a bargain; the (...) ‘good reason’, that generally takes the gentler form of a self-exception, is that if a player defects and his opponent does not, then the former profits. The purpose of this study is to show the highly erosive character of this self-exceptions and also to make evident its perverse normative power. (shrink)

William Egginton argues that the notion of the ethical cannot be understood outside of its relation to perversity—that is, the impulse to do what one knows and feels is wrong. The allure of the perverse, moreover, should not be understood as merely the necessary obverse of ethically motivated behavior; rather, from the perspective of a psychoanalytic understanding of the ethical, the two drives are structurally identical. This discovery leads the author to engagements with deconstructive thought and with contemporary gender theory. (...) In the first, he shows that the insistent resurgence of the ethical fault-line inevitably drives even the most stalwart atheism to a theological moment. In the second, he argues that while “female philosophy” has successfully repudiated the subject-centered exceptionalism of “male philosophy,” it is precisely to the extent that it is understood to offer a kind of release from the perversity of ethics that it must fail as ethical utterances. (shrink)

In what arrived belatedly as an announced, but delayed, preface to Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Jacques Lacan interrogates the relations Sade could be said to have had with, on the one hand, Sigmund Freud, and, on the other, Immanuel Kant.1 Despite the presuppositions at the time of its writing, the text was first published as “Kant avec Sade” in the journal Critique in 1963 and only later reappeared as the preface it had been conceived as: announcing the (...) dogma of de Sade as an introduction to one of his key works. What had happened in the meantime, Lacan cryptically suggests, is that his – Lacan’s – collection of lectures and essays, Écrits, had arrived with a certain acclaim on the French cultural scene, and what had at first appeared to the publisher as inconsequential ravings had morphed into a profound and potentially significant enframing of de Sade’s “philosophy.” -/- What is it we find here? It is stupid, says Lacan, to pronounce – as too many “literary types” do – that de Sade’s perversions prefigured Freud’s interrogation of sexual mores. True, they both have the appearance of schooling, and so serve to prepare, Lacan informs us, the way for a new science. To understand the difference between them we need to arrive at some conception of Freud’s ethics of pleasure. -/- With what is known as the pleasure principle – announced in 1911 – Freud ordained a mechanism whereby pleasure is maintained at the lowest possible level.2 Lacan elsewhere referred to this principle as a homeostatic device, since it seeks to secure the functioning of the organism with as little excitement as possible. -/- Freud’s principle is different from traditional ethics in that it doesn’t disallow some sexual practices that had hitherto been condemned as wrong. However, such a realization doesn’t relieve us from approaching the principle as ethical. To Lacan, Freud’s homeostatic device is what “preordains the creature to its good.” In other words, it is by indulging in just enough pleasure to avoid unpleasure, either by becoming abstinent or consumptive, that we maintain our experience of goodwill. -/- What is remarkable, Lacan notes in his foreword to de Sade, is that Freud did not find it necessary to explicitly refer to this principle as an ethical prerogative. The only reason we can find for this, Lacan claims, is the 19th century obsession with the theme of “happiness in evil.” -/- The “happiness in evil” – or, as we should say, happiness in the will – has its precursor in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which was published eight years prior to de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.3 To Lacan, de Sade subverts the Enlightenment directive inaugurated by Kant, and it is as such that it is possible to say that de Sade offers the truth of Kant’s Critique. -/- This “happiness in evil” becomes de Sade’s Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness. Recall that this is quite a different notion of perversion – of which the Marquis figures as the first and predominant example in Lacan – from that which reigned in the “literary” epoch, i.e., prior to Freud, as well as from Freud’s own inflection of the term. Perversion is no longer reducible to a catalogue of abominations – whipping, homosexuality, you name it – such as was the case prior to Freud, nor to a more select line of such – Freud famously excluded homosexual love from the list, while retaining sadomasochism. Lacan would draw the conclusion of Freud’s tentative first step by positing that perversion is a position, and specifically a location in relation to the phallus. -/- The novelty and force of this perspective should become clear to those who study the present volume. It is not a clinical attempt, nor the final word on a philosophy of mind without psychoanalysis. Rather, it should be regarded as situated in between these two domains, and with eyes to both. (shrink)

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. (...) This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity. (shrink)

We argue and demonstrate that an emphasis on outperforming others may lead to perverse effects. Four studies show that assigning other-referenced performance goals, relative to self-referenced mastery goals, may lead to more interpersonally harmful behavior in an information exchange context. Results of Study 1 indicate that assigned performance goals lead to stronger thwarting behavior and less accurate information giving to an exchange partner than assigned mastery goals. Similarly, in Study 2 performance goal individuals more subtly deceived highly competent opponents relative (...) to lowly competent opponents, who received more blatant treatment. Finally, Studies 3 and 4 show in methodologically complementary ways that tactical deception considerations may account for the interpersonally harmful behavior of performance goal individuals. (shrink)

We argue and demonstrate that an emphasis on outperforming others may lead to perverse effects. Four studies show that assigning other-referenced performance goals, relative to self-referenced mastery goals, may lead to more interpersonally harmful behavior in an information exchange context. Results of Study 1 indicate that assigned performance goals lead to stronger thwarting behavior and less accurate information giving to an exchange partner than assigned mastery goals. Similarly, in Study 2 performance goal individuals more subtly deceived highly competent opponents relative (...) to lowly competent opponents, who received more blatant treatment. Finally, Studies 3 and 4 show in methodologically complementary ways that tactical deception considerations may account for the interpersonally harmful behavior of performance goal individuals. (shrink)

Human folly, it seems, traces not only to ignorance and impulsiveness but also to the power of wishes that the erring agent acknowledges as unfit to motivate him. The possibility of genuinely perverse preference can be either denied or explained. To explain it, sense must be made of how a person’s understanding of the choices before him could fail to decide his preference—how what convinces could fail to persuade. The question is how the influence a given consideration has over a (...) person’s choice can be other than a function of the beliefs he holds about its merits, so that as between competing considerations the one esteemed best doesn’t win, despite continuing to be esteemed best. (shrink)

By focusing too narrowly on consequentialist arguments for ecosabotage, environmental philosophers such as Michael Martin (1990) and Thomas Young (2001) have tended to overlook two important facts about monkeywrenching. First, advocates of monkeywrenching see sabotage above all as a technique for counteracting perverse economic incentives. Second, their main argument for monkeywrenching – which I will call the ecodefence argument – is not consequentialist at all. After calling attention to these two under-appreciated aspects of monkeywrenching, I go on to offer a (...) critique of the ecodefence argument. Finally, I show that there is also a tension between the use of cost/benefit analysis to justify particular acts of ecosabotage and the clandestine nature of those acts. (shrink)

Competition among scientists for funding, positions and prestige, among other things, is often seen as a salutary driving force in U.S. science. Its effects on scientists, their work and their relationships are seldom considered. Focus-group discussions with 51 mid- and early-career scientists, on which this study is based, reveal a dark side of competition in science. According to these scientists, competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of others’ (...) ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review processes, deformation of relationships, and careless or questionable research conduct. When competition is pervasive, such effects may jeopardize the progress, efficiency and integrity of science. (shrink)

Weighted voting involves weighting representatives’ votes by the populations that they represent. Such systems have been adopted in some legislative bodies as a remedy for malapportionment, and are sometimes used to elect candidates for the executive branch of government. But they receive little attention. This note observes the neglected vices of weighted voting systems: they violate intuitive conditions of monotonicity and participation. These vices count significantly against the use of weighted voting, and reflecting on why they arise improves our understanding (...) of axioms in social choice theory. (shrink)

When anti-racist protestors toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020, British political elites across the left-rights spectrum, despite acknowledging that a statue of a slave trader has no place in the contemporary politics, called to firm the application of law and order. Through the example of Edward Colston, the essay examines what Lacan’s idea of perversion can reveal about the power relations between political elites and anti-racist protestors. It opens by discussing the impossibility of ethics (...) in political contexts, before turning to the question of jouissance and its role in the creation of a racialised other and political institutions (and myths of white supremacy). If jouissance of the other racialises the other as deviant, pervert’s jouissance is de-personalised and made to follow “a greater good”. In doing so, the essay argues that perversion reveals the logics of racial hierarchies, which underpin and maintain modern society. (shrink)

Este es un estudio de caso de una selección de cinco artículos de prensa sobre el juicio de Oscar Pistorius por el asesinato de Reeva Steenkamp. Está basado en la tesis doctoral de la autora de 2021 titulada “Análisis lingüístico de artículos de prensa en inglés y español sobre violencia contra la mujer: el caso de Reeva Steenkamp”. Se defenderá que existen cuestiones que desvían el sentido del discurso con un giro perverso.

This article explores the possibility of an ethical intersubjective relationship through the reconfiguration of the body. The violence of Western culture derives from a particular gendered fantasy of bodily organization. The Western body is constituted through a fear of lack and of loss, or, in psychoanalytic terms, of castration. The subject defined by castration attempts to defend itself against these dual threats by folding in upon itself, thereby precluding any relation with an other. The belief in lack and its partner, (...) scarcity, informs the socio-political structures that mark the current era. However, there are other ways of imagining the body. By re-imagining the body, it becomes possible, not to avoid loss, but rather to alter its meaning. This act allows for a nonappropriative intersubjective relation to come into being. (shrink)

The central argument of this article lies in the intent to think, from a reading of The Invention of Morel, about the subversion possibilities, simultaneously discursive and operational, of certain structures of capitalism, carried out by discrete elements of society, regardless of their social standing. Discussing Morel himself and his invention, I postulate the hypothesis that Morel is subversive because he is perverse. As a preamble to this discussion, and in an attempt to turn it into a critique of current (...) times, a reading of Slavoj Žižek’s 2009 article entitled “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” will be undertaken. Through a comparative analysis of the rational underlying the four antagonisms which, in Žižek’s opinion, will prevent the indefinite reproduction of the current “naturalization” of capitalism in the global world, and Morel and his invention, one concludes the latter’s obscene perversity causes, through exaggeration, potentially destructive effects of the very mechanisms and capitalist subsystems which generated them, thus deconstructing their significant codes. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s note on ‘The Perversions in General’ from the 1905 edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. To summarise its argument, the article proposes that what Freud calls ‘perversion’ is itself to be properly understood as a form of sexual generalisation. It goes on to contend that Freudian perversion thus has larger implications for our understanding of the new sciences of sexual generalisation (sexology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, genealogy) that are (...) beginning to emerge from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. If perverse sexuality is arguably the defining libidinal object of Krafft-Ebing’s sexual taxonomy, for example, the article argues that perversion is already in itself a form of perverse sexual taxonomy. In conclusion, the article argues that Freud’s perversion is consequently a form of structural ‘dis-content’ that cannot be contained within the modern sciences of sex which extend from Krafft-Ebing’s sexology to Foucault’s history of sexuality. (shrink)

The global resurgence of right-wing radicalization presents significant theoretical and political challenges for critical thought. Contemporary neoliberal authoritarianism integrates diverse and often contradictory ideological elements, creating a complex and enigmatic constellation. This article examines the mechanisms of social aggregation underpinning neoliberal subjectivity today. Drawing on empirical findings from my study of the social appropriation of the concepts of “Law” and “Market” in contemporary Argentine society, I argue that authoritarian neoliberalism gains mass appeal by offering individuals symbolic frameworks of belonging. Central (...) to this process is the construction of a collective “We,” framed through an appeal to equality that paradoxically serves as a vehicle for punitive desires directed toward a phantasmic otherness. The case of these new modes of social aggregation highlights how the egalitarian principle retains legitimacy among social actors, albeit in a distorted form when tied to exclusionary political demands. (shrink)

Gaylin and Jennings tell us that we must change the everyday behavior shaping the landscape of modern American society. Our current culture of autonomy is predicated on rationality as the basis of human conduct. But, we are reminded here, man is not inherently rational; appeals to emotion are far more effective than logical argument in changing our conduct.

This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of (...) unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be “worse achieved”. In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety. (shrink)

Sexual perversity has traditionally been defined in terms of violating externally imposed criteria for natural or normal sex. The theory proposed here views sexual desires in terms of their own internal structure, such that perverse desires are those which are self-defeating because they are contradictory. Sadism, masochism, and certain private acts between consenting heterosexual and homosexual adults are shown to be perverse in illustrating the use of this hopefully nonideological method.

In "Perversion and the Unnatural as Moral Categories" (Ethics, 90:191-202, January 1980) David Levy argues against a number of theories of perversion by means of the method of counter-example. This is inappropriate since many familiar accounts are not attempts to provide a "one-over-many" formula for a core of clear cases. Rather, like Levy himself, many understand perversions as "unnatural" or "non-human" actions, i.e. as distortions of human nature. Here there is agreement on the intension of the term. Differences (...) in the extension arise in virtue of the relational character of the meaning. For what counts as a distortion of human nature depends on the paradigm of human nature one endorses. In these cases the appropriate way to decide between competing lists of perversions is to evaluate the competing paradigms of human nature on which they rest. Typically these paradigms embody important value assumptions. (shrink)

Ivan is a gifted pianist, but spends most of his time at the keyboard playing simple blues progressions over and over. Sarah is fluent in French, but avoids every opportunity to converse in that language. Greg lives in a household whose kitchen offers an assortment of tantalizing foods, yet he never eats anything except bagels and cream cheese. Melinda has many friends, with whom she would enjoy socializing, but she forgoes their company to devote all her free time to video (...) games. Clive is a champion mountain climber, but has lately taken to never venturing out of the house. Esther has a masters degree in comparative literature, but now reads nothing but Harlequin romances. And Phil is partial to the Allegros in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, but only as background music for dancing, not as something to listen to with attention. (shrink)