Intimate cruelties: perversions, sexuality and the human animal

Abstract

Is perverse fantasy the same as perverse structure? Is perversion as pere-version more of a complex than a structure and how does it link with cruelty? There are multiple contexts and paradigms in which the Lacanian teaching on perversion appears. I will trace these paradigms by going through the shifts from the desire-of-the-mother to the Name(s)-of-the-Father. These threads cover perverse structure, neurotic's perverse fantasies, perversion of the drive, sexual non-rapport and perversion and perverse sexuality and pere-version. After establishing the Lacanian coordinates, I will offer a reading of Sandipan Chattopadhyay's Bengali-Indian novel Kukur Shamparke Du-Ekti Katha Ja Ami Jani (The One or Two Things I Know About Dogs, 1991) to deepen perversion and cruelty through a literary text that is aware of both its perverse vision of human sexuality and its psychoanalytic footprints. The novel radically underscores the problem of Otherness in the pervert subject's self-alienated jouissance where the dog becomes the non-human species-Other. It resonates with Lacan's reflection on cruelty and the Imaginary, but the inter-subjective dialectic goes beyond specularity in the novel. Perverse sexuality is envisaged as an intimate cruelty that engages both the Symbolic and the Real. It inscribes the interval between the human and the animal.