Élisabeth Roudinesco
Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion
Paperback $185
ISBN: 97807456459334 Published November 2009 by Polity Press

法籍史學家兼精神分析學者Roudinesco（04年曾與德里達（Derrida）合著對談集：For What Tomorrow）在此新書大談「邪惡」的人類歷史！「邪魔」（perverse）這個名詞自中世紀發明以來，似乎每個年代都會走出几個「大魔頭」：中世紀殘殺兒童的藍鬍子Gilles de Rais、18世紀的色情文學家薩德侯爵、二十世紀的納粹主義，以至現今漸見普及的戀童癖及恐怖襲擊等等。

作者正視這一些歷史人物與事件，提醒我們在指責他們為妖魔怪物前，應該要了解這些悲慘事件發生的非偶然性。最後我們得承認，這些血與暴力，只是普遍人性共同擁有的黑暗面的一時顯現。與齊澤克（Žižek）的新著「In Defense of Lost Causes」（為敗局平反）收異曲同工之效，兩者均旨在告訴讀者（及一眾學者），其實我們難為正邪定分界。

In this provocative, timely, and engaging study of famous perverse figures, Élisabeth Roudinesco offers us a ‘dark mirror’ for human experience. She persuasively argues that because perversion is a uniquely human activity, it allows us to gain access to aspects of the human psyche that are normally hidden from view. By examining case histories of perversion throughout history, Roudinesco shows that perverts provide us with a disturbing reflection of the dark side of the very human societies in which they perform their extreme acts.
— Elissa Marder, Emory University

This fascinating book takes us from the question of the origin of the perverse through its semiotic displacements in Christianity and libertinism, by way of Freud as a thinker of the dark Enlightenment, into the emergence of contemporary biocracy and genocide as delight in evil. Required reading for all studies of the history of consciousness.
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

Where does perversion begin? Who is perverse? Ever since the word first appeared in the Middle Ages, anyone who delights in evil and in the destruction of the self or others has been described as ‘perverse’. But while the experience of perversion is universal, every era has seen it and dealt with it in its own way.

The history of perversion in the West is told here through a study of great emblematic figures of the perverse - Gilles de Rais, the mystical saints and the flagellants in the middle ages, the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century, the masturbating child, the male homosexual and the hysterical woman nineteenth century, Nazism in the twentieth century, and the complementary figures of the paedophile and the terrorist in the twenty-first.

The perverse are rarely talked about and when they are it is usually only to be condemned. They are commonly viewed as monstrous and cruel, as something alien to the very nature of being human. And yet, perversion can also attest to creativity and self-transcendence, to the refusal of individuals to submit to the rules and prohibitions that govern human life. Perversion fascinates us precisely because it can be both abject and sublime. Whether they are sublime because they turn to art or mysticism, or abject because they surrender to their murderous impulses, the perverse are part of us because they exhibit something that we always conceal: our own negativity and our dark side.

Élisabeth Roudinesco is Professor of History at the University of Paris VII - Denis Diderot.

伸延閱讀｜of related interest

Peter Burke
Cultural Hybridity
Paperback $160
ISBN: 9780745646978 Published September 2009 by Polity Press

The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips — recently voted the favourite dish in Britain - to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, “Bollywood” films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle these complex events and reactions; or that a variety of disciplines now devote increasing attention to the works of these theorists and to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization. In this concise book, leading historian Peter Burke considers these fascinating and contested phenomena, ranging over theories, practices, processes and events in a manner that is as wide-ranging and vibrant as the topic at hand.

Slavoj Žižek
In Defense of Lost Causes
Paperback $160
ISBN: 9781844674299 Published October 2009 by Verso

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should re-appropriate several “lost causes,” and looks for the kernel of truth in the “totalitarian” politics of the past. Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the “right steps in the wrong direction.”

Highlighting the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the entire story. There was, in fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics. Zizek claims that, particularly in light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this cause —even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Giorgio Agamben
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Paperback $145
ISBN: 9781890951177 Published October 2002 by Zone Books

In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors’ testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics. For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves. Indeed, I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way — perhaps the only way — to listen to what is unsaid.