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The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire

Author(s) : James Penney

Reviews and Endorsements

The World of Perversion" promises to be an extraordinarily important book, a major intervention in the worlds of queer theory, psychoanalysis, and French philosophy. Moving far beyond a psychoanalytic critique of queer theory, Penney persuasively and compellingly shows how a psychoanalytic understanding of perversion inheres in late medieval, early modern, and modern French philosophical and juridical thought. Penney also offers a refreshingly new and subtle understanding of the old knotting of power-knowledge-sex, one that effectively displaces paradigms set by critics like Jonathan Dollimore, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler. The result is a fascinating and persuasive book that transforms how we can conceive philosophy, the history of sexuality, and gay politics." - Graham L. Hammill, author of "Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon"

James Penney is Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University.

Table Of Contents:
Acknowledgments
1. Epistemologies of Perversion
Perversity and Perversion
Perversion as Power
Perversion as Structure
Fetishism, Sexual Difference, Homosexuality
Worlds of Perversion: A Reader's Guide
2. Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite
Meet Gilles de Rais
The Spectacle of Perversion
The Tragedy of History
An Innocent Transference
Radically Evil?
The Perverse Sacrifice
3. Cleopatra's Nose
Pascal's Modernity
The Tragic Absolute
From Sin to Infinity
Ideological State Automatons
A Distracted Dialectic
Grace, or the Act of Faith
4. This Whole World of Perversion
Dialogue and Dialectic
The Cynical Other
A Revolt against the Negative
Wealth and Power
Hysterical Pantomime
The Beyond of Perversion
5. The Guardian of Criminal Being
Lacan contra Hegel
Ethical Beauty
The Real of Destiny
Pleasure Unbound
Suffering for Beauty
Artfully Screwed
6. Concluding (Un)Queer-Theoretical Postscript
Perversion and Its Discontents
A Dynamic Perversion
The Minoritarian Temptation
Hysteria in the Shadow of the State
The Paradox of Desublimation
The Subject of Sex
Notes
Index