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In this book, Sergio Benvenuto works his way to a new and compelling account of perversions. His method is complex. As he suggests, it is more like “bricolage” than conventional argument. Bricolage is a term borrowed from anthropology that describes a kind of construction made of bits and pieces, glued and fashioned together from myriad perspectives and elements. Benvenuto's mode of argument is transdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and social science and on aesthetics. But ultimately his work depends on psychoanalysis, and at the same time, more often than not, he critiques and undoes many features and shibboleths of psychoanalytic thinking, particularly its developmental aspects.
Perhaps most interesting of all, considering that the topic is perversion, Benvenuto's work, in this book, does finally depend on a deep encounter with questions of ethics. This is complex and tricky to do, as the whole topic of perversion has been drenched in moralizing and regulatory demands. One of the most demeaning and demoralizing misuses of psychoanalytic work on perversions has been to engage in and underwrite the whole project of heteronormative regulation. As many have noticed and written (Žižek, 1989, and within psychoanalysis, Dimen, 2003; Guralnik, 2016; and others), psychoanalytic writing and theorizing on sexuality can do the job of interpellation as skillfully as any policeman.
I start with a confession. From my own thinking and what I owe to feminism and through the strong influence of queer theory's approach to the history of thinking about perversion, I realized that I approached this exercise, writing a review of a book about perversion written by a European psychoanalyst, with ideological alarm bells ringing. For many North American analysts, particularly those grounded in critical theory and political analysis, European analysts too often appear to have held a moralizing and pathologizing view of homosexuality that has outlasted many efforts in other disciplines to p