Subjective Boundary of Consent: Does the Perverse Aggressor Not Realize Himself or His Abusively Satisfied Drive? (2024)

Subjective Boundary of Consent: Does the Perverse Aggressor Not Realize Himself or His Abusively Satisfied Drive?

Published online, February 2024.

The systematized silence profitable to perverse dominants (aggressors and associates) is shaken: women testify more than ever, always more numerous, stronger with each passing day. Sisterhood rises in full light and is illustrated in the media to denounce horrors long kept under wraps; traumas are brought to everyone’s knowledge. How does this happen, for an unthinkable and almost unspeakable experience to emerge from the morbid silence where flesh and feelings rot? Only one possibility: the breaking into discourse of a cry charged with vigorously rupturing everything that prevented the expression of speech hitherto abolished. The sound barrier must be crossed to break that of silence.

It denounces predators, it reveals crimes and offenses, it speaks with the greatest possible precision the sordid details and modus operandi, the psychic processes at play, the irreversible wounds and partial healings. It grates on ears, it moves, it revolts, it irritates, it frightens, it shocks! No other option is possible, when conditions of access to equitable speech are compromised by bourgeois conventions of propriety captive in the hands of a few. It is never correct for a dominated/abused person to break the guarantee of incorrectness of a dominant, but it is logically necessary, and it gives pleasure to no one to re-traverse this. Denunciation is not a strategy (omertà is one); it corrects and establishes a new balance of voices; it does not merely activate a right of citizenship by untying the prohibition of speaking, it also reforms the City.

Now, the underlying discourse becomes readable for all, while horror is indigestible for each. It cries out, it makes itself heard, what ordinarily escapes all possible speech. Everyone knew, now everyone can make knowledge of it, provided they want to.

What do these publicized affairs teach us about The Malaise that Freud said was in culture, the patriarchal one?

Quick answer: patriarchy no longer suits respect for others as it is revealed to be flouted today.

Less quick answer: our blinded belief in our cultural model charged with regulating what escapes us of ourselves has only begun to crack where it maintains, for too long, an imaginary sexual hierarchy.

And they remind us that desire cannot be spoken, only pinned down by its identification beyond consciousness which believes it holds its truth from the simple fact of having a thought about it. What an error! The unconscious desire, the one that interests psychoanalysis, is not that which is enunciated by the mouth of someone believing they can express it. This desire, let’s call it ordinary or conscious, pertains to wanting or craving: it is mentally illustrated where the drive finds an object of satisfaction more or less identifiable in reality. The subject’s unconscious desire is what leads them of which they only perceive the results on the path of accomplishment of what they believe to be their desire, as if it could be singularly isolated as their own, while it is before anything else the desire of the Other, where the subject divides from themself requiring their reflection to understand what is at play about them to the detriment of others in what they believe to be their self entitled to want. There are no good or bad ways to desire (unconsciously speaking), but there are many ways to ignore its nature to confuse it with a right to obtain, cross, transgress, conquer, seduce, enjoy or even love, despite/against the other who always makes more indirect the possibility of an accomplishment of the subject aiming to restore their fantasmatic unity.

Because of this, each sentence ending should be weighted with what Justice demands for our democracy: the presumption of innocence; completed by a supposedly legitimate precaution to preserve what denunciations might risk accomplishing excessively. To courageous testimonies should be opposed reactions, highlighted denials, from presumed perpetrators demanding the moderation charged with amending the landslide eroding these unseemly ones.

This forgets that if about unconscious desire we can only pursue its meticulous and slow elucidation through analysis or sufficient elaboration of thought, about the drive we know a bit more, which carries us to the act that only happens by choosing it.

So, let us be brief to answer the underlying question: does the presumed innocent carry as a legal precaution the innocence once stolen from abused women, which should be granted to him with the help of the debate that the truth of distress carries in its waves? No, he claims it as a due in the same nauseating vein that made him believe in his right to blind enjoyment at the time of his acting out, where about the drive he wants to know nothing that would have engaged him toward another relationship to the other, to his sexuality, to his desires on the path of an understanding of the desire that leads him through the aisles of his existence.

It does not seem possible to me, from my experience, that an aggressive or aggressor body cannot be informed by another body – with which it has entered into relationship or contact for purposes of seduction, excitement or effective sexual practice – of its refusal, its reluctance or its resistance addressed in response to the outrageous interpellation. Every aggressive or aggressor body knows what it can know of itself, and the subject who occupies it chooses to acknowledge it according to various possibilities including the one envisioned here of pure negation of the other through denial recognizing the veracity of non-consent in presence, doubled by its simultaneous covering through its unilateral transgression, guarantee of a surplus enjoyment which the aggressor refuses to renounce.

There is the truth of subjective experience lived by perpetrators of sexual offenses or crimes. That their consciousness is more or less deprived of it at the moment of responding, contradicting or justifying their acts, must be heard as one of the side effects of this resolved interior decision to accomplish in the name of an individual trajectory the radical domination of others and their use as object; the preconscious, it does not doubt its motives; the unconscious harbors the true stakes.

There is no boundary between self and one’s body so thick that it entirely prevents this connection, delicate and often difficult, to the point of establishing a barrier justifying in its name for defense, the acts committed (except for some rare characterized mental pathologies of which it remains possible to attest to the abolition of judgment). Since it is necessary, at minimum, that the other body (the abused one) be perceived for the indomitable desire/excitement to emerge in the one who is about to commit their misdeed: something of the other is experienced, but denied (by the graces of an internal politics founded on and at the same time), this summons the subject’s responsibility before society and justice.

The path of perverse denial, that is indeed what we are dealing with here, is characterized by being the least costly version for its author, the laziest in a sense, the lowest quality. Consequent logic, the entirety of the cost is borne by the person who had to endure, to live with their body and mind, the indelible forcing of the fundamental breaking-in of an abusive sexual acting out, for life, on behalf of the subjective relief of the pervert refusing to have to lose a bit of their enjoyment.

Other possibilities than the so-called perverse one exist. They are not all symmetrically opposite to the one mentioned above, but some orient themselves toward the happy recognition of the other as subject, even though sexual life so often exposes us to experiences and events whose effects we must continue to question, sometimes sought, of abandonment of self, gift of self, absorption of bodies, copulation, and enjoyments, abolition of subjective boundaries nourishing the paradoxes of human sexual life. This is all the continuous effort that our hope demands to increasingly civilize what the sexual does to us, to us other speaking beings. We seek something there which escaping us in part overwhelms us, granted, but why not accept this state, and make of this sexual defect inherent to humans a support point for the erotic progress of our species?

We all undergo (as subject) the breaking-in of the sexual, psychoanalytic experience knows it better than others. No one is forced, however, to accommodate it softly or defend against it by only returning the attack always non-consented to, by all beings to exist in the sexual landscape common to all others, against another who would have to bear the price, the weight, the death wish that the immature maneuver of aggression inscribes at the heart of being. An effective elaboration is possible, desirable, alone capable of ensuring for anyone the psychoaffective development necessary for living together and better, or further, the invention of an ethics of desire aiming to welcome all the torments and vicissitudes of sexuality to be shared as symptoms, among us all rather than on the exclusion of some reduced to the rank of objects: what could be an authentic sexual liberation not yet achieved to this day – not only its liberalization of the 1970s having opened to broad daylight the unheard-of complexion of enjoyments. This demands efforts, education, consultation, relationship, speech, listening and much humility, recognition of our sexual fragility common to all.

This demands efforts, education, consultation, relationship, speech, listening and much humility, recognition of our sexual fragility common to all.

Of this effort the aggressor knows nothing for lack of welcoming this loss of oneself lodged in things of sex; he refuses castration so well said by Freud at this point. The one that speaks the experience of loss, of a lack in being, of the subjective defect isolating the atmosphere of said executioner from the airs and currents shared by those who recognize its existence before saying no to it while desiring, with or despite the other, but not against the other, not without some others: where the pervert isolates himself by being unable to welcome it through the exclusive of his refusal.

Because this drive violence presides over the subject who deals with it, the demanding illumination of unconscious stakes is unavoidable. Not that all should lie down to speak. That some dedicate themselves to it may suffice to illuminate others, not to convince them, but to infuse into the porosity of all, those confused with perversion included, the bite of knowledge to be invented on the sexual in universal echo to its innate sentence.

Thus fantasy is apprehended in all its depth as remnant of trauma caused by the sexual, sometimes redoubled by its refusal, sometimes reified to the rank of prosthetic aim, often carried along year in year out at the mercy of concessions and impasses, openings and amorous creations relieving themselves of sex at risk of its infestation.

To not inflict more trauma than there already is for each, taking care of one’s own is a meritorious prerequisite, profitable to Relationship. To avoid additional capital divisions. And to grasp that if the sexual life of youth in particular appears in decline there is no reason to be surprised, and above all, no interest in bringing back into labored analyses the idea of a decline of the supposed sexual freedoms of their elders, those erected as models by said discursive system making possible abuses excused in the name of romantic, therefore sadistic, torments, of loves perverted by the liberalization of enjoyments where suspended the demand of requirement claimed by the crowd under the cobblestones of an imaginary beach, always from the past.

And to tackle a task: to cure love of sex, this sex of which we know only the night.

V.B.