Search

After the publication of his pioneering book Sexual Excitement in 1979, Robert Stoller devoted the last 12 years of his life to the study of the pornographic film industry. To do so, he conducted an ethnographic study of people working in the industry in order to find out how it produced ‘perverse fantasies’ that successfully communicated sexual excitement to other people. In the course of his investigation he observed and interviewed those involved in the making of pornographic films. He hypothesized that the ‘scenarios’ developed and performed by people in the porn industry were based on their own perverse fantasies and their frustrations, injuries and conflicts over sexuality and gender; and that the porn industry had developed a systematic method and accumulated a sophisticated body of knowledge about the production of sexual excitement. This paper explores Stoller's theses and shows how they fared in his investigation.

The concept of the ‘island’ constitutes a unique theme in Deleuze's thought: desert islands and perversion, continental islands and isolated islands, the connection between the emergence of life and orogeny, the relationship between imagination and islands (we can see these themes not only in the articles of Desert Islands and in the appendix of The Logic of Sense on Michel Tournier, but also in Difference and Repetition), and the sea as a rhizome. To think from this point of view on Japan, it is neither an isolated island nor an oceanic island in Deleuze's sense. Rather, it is a place where a unique stratum of thought has accumulated like a multilayered plateau. Japan has often been portrayed as a malignant kind of rhizome, as an oriental land, a land of animism. However, the Japanese islands, as part of the Pacific Rim island arc, and, on the other hand, as a place which bears the forces from the continent, can also be depicted as a manifold location, bearing the rhizome called the sea in a unique way. Not only does it have only a virtual signifier = signifiant of One-ness, but it can also be said to hold multiple strata of signifiers = signifiants within its arc between the continent and ocean. My aim in this paper is to explicate this place called ‘Japan’ as a case study of what Deleuze calls geophilosophy in his last book with Guattari, What is Philosophy?

As philosophers from Jacques Derrida, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to Alain Badiou have shown, the concept of border entails a logic of exclusion that sustains itself on an empty place. In the absence of this empty place, what does the contemporary experience of being ‘without boundaries’ imply mathematically? This paper suggests that if the Anthropocene confirms Deleuze and Guattari's insight that the older, ‘castrative’ logic of the border-cut is extinct, this does not require us to abandon the categories that traditionally inscribed us as subjects altogether. Rather, it helps us to understand how the Symbolic Law is being logically inscribed. One often talks loosely about the ‘perversity’ of the Law, but this analysis of three parables of climate change enables us to pinpoint more precisely the structure of how the Law presents today. It suggests that to try to ‘diagnose’ the contemporary experience of the Law, we should look not to perversion but to the ‘prime zero’ of a specifically ‘feminine’ psychosis.

In the long line of French Sade studies, Deleuze's essay Coldness and Cruelty marks out a special place. By discussing Masoch both in addition to and in contrast to Sade, Deleuze reveals the stakes of his book: he wants to unmask the concept of sadomasochism as a clinical nonentity. In their paper, the authors explain the arguments supporting this project and show their relation to Deleuze's reading of Bergson. They then argue that there is a second, similarly Bergsonian criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis operating in the background of Coldness and Cruelty. This more wide-ranging criticism takes Freud to task for conceiving perversion, like neurosis, in Oedipal terms. This conception, Deleuze holds, forgets that perversion and neurosis represent two different worlds that essentially have nothing to do with each other despite crossing in clinical experience.

Blackwood's in its earliest numbers was a staunch admirer of Lord Byron. But when he published Beppo, it damned him in a June 1818 review as a hypocrite and a reveller, and thereafter the magazine lurched between celebrating him for his genius and castigating him for his perversion of it. Byron objected to the uneven treatment he received at the hands of the Blackwood's critics, but in ‘Some Observations Upon an Article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine’ he echoes their views on several contemporary poets, and seems to reconcile himself to the exuberant unpredictability of the magazine.

Michel Tournier's novel Friday is the subject of an important essay of Deleuze's, in which he presents the concept of the ‘a priori Other’. Alice Jardine and Peter Hallward have offered critiques of Deleuze via readings of this essay, but neither takes into consideration the full significance of Tournier's novel or Deleuze's commentary. Jardine and Hallward provide divergent and only partial perspectives on Deleuze. If there are several Deleuzes, each defined by a critical point of view, there is also a single Deleuzian problem that informs the Tournier essay and Deleuze's thought as a whole.

The concept of ‘perversion’ is introduced, with all its resonances from the vocabulary of psychopathology and more generally in critical philosophy, in juxtaposition to the philosophy and values of the Enlightenment, following Adorno and Horkheimer's evaluation in the light of the monstrosities of twentieth-century history. The author considers recent perverse developments in the culture of late twentieth-century science, in particular cognitivism, in their relation to the psychoanalytic tradition and the vision of humanity found in these competing traditions. The paper finally considers three modern test-domains: contradictory responses to prostitution; pornographic therapy; the borderlands between the animal, the robot and the human.

Derrida's public struggle with the spectre of Artaud began in the 1960s ‘La parole Soufflée’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ and continued forcener le subjectile (1986) and Artaud le Moma (2002). The texts are read as attempts to break with the dominant critical/clinical readings of Artaud inaugurated by Jacques Rivière and as beginnings for a search to secure Artaud-immunity, protection for and against his words and works. It argues that Derrida's readings of Artaud systematically underestimate the power of his deliberate perversion of Platonism and his intimations of an affirmative metaphysics issuing from the replacement of the idea of the One by that of Chaos. The underestimation of the affirmative drive underwriting Artaud's work led Derrida to uncover a suicidal motif in Artaud-immunity that would eventually compromise his own understanding of auto-immunity.

The work ofjin-de-siecle writer Rachilde has been described as 'un breviaire de I' amour decadent'. 1 Indeed Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) was frequently condemned as irredeemably perverse, even pornographic, by her mostly male contemporaries. However, more than one hundred years after the publication of her first novels, Rachilde' s work can be reclaimed, demarginalized and re-read as an insightful and innovative insertion into language of the once unspeakable and unwriteable subject of female pleasure. With reference to a number of Rachilde's early novels, namely Monsieur Venus (1884), La Marquise de Sade(1887),L 'Animale (1893) and La Jongleuse (1900), I will be suggesting that Rachilde' s texts use references both literal and metaphoricalto decorative obj ects, as a means of articulating the powerful urges of the female body.2 By displacing the expression of female desire away from the body onto flowers and ornaments, Rachilde signals the troubling sexuality of her heroines without overt description of it. Instead she leaves a series of clues in her texts for the careful reader to pick up as s/he goes along. This examination of her heroines' relationships to the objects both animate and inanimate which surround them, will enable a greater understanding ofRachilde's project to write the sexual body in language. Rachilde's perceived perversion has led to her inclusion in a tradition of male erotic writing which can be traced from Sade and Laclos, via Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautreamont, to Gide and Prouse Yet any reader turning to Rachilde for titillation is likely to be disappointed. The novels of this 'Mademoiselle Baudelaire' contain very few explicit references to sexual acts. Indeed one reader of Monsieur Venus has suggested that asexuality could be considered the greatest perversion of the novel's heroine Raoule de Venerade. Other, more optimistic, readers see true love, a rare thing indeed injin-de-siecle literature, as the main perversion detailed in the novel,5

was to commemorate this landmark in Scottish historical writing by exploring what some of the previous generations of Scottish historians, from the earlier Middle Ages to the twentieth century, actually did to Scottish history: in other words, to consider how they treated the nation's past, and discuss what effects their treatments actually had on that past itself. The symposium's proceedings are now published, in the form of revised versions of the papers that were delivered there.1 What the readers of this issue of the Review will have to imagine, however, is the warmth of the appreciation that the original papers received and the lively discussion to which they gave rise, both on the floor of the meeting and informally in its interstices. A day of that sort is an occasion for historians to reflect not only on the work of their predecessors but also on how we carry out our own task of understanding and interpreting the Scottish past. There was plenty of evidence of the antiquity of an unhappy tendentious tradition: back to the compilers of the Pictish king lists with their hidden agenda of stretching out the history of the Scottish kingdom for two millennia in order to defeat English pretension; and forward to the agenda of the Enlightenment historians and Sir Walter Scott, anxious to make the past either more barbarous or more picturesque than modern times. Yet tendentiousness is only a perversion of an ambition which in