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Faces of perversion Volume 88, issue 1, Janvier 2012

Author
Historienne, directrice de recherches, université Diderot–Paris-VII (UFR-GHSS, laboratoire ICT, école doctorale 382-EESC)

The perverse person, since the appearance of the word in the Middle Age, is considered to be someone who enjoys evil and self-destruction or the destruction of others. However, if the experience of perversion is universal, each epoch will consider and treat it in its own way. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between good and evil. The history of the perverse in the West is complex; since medieval times to the present day, that are distinguished by singularities and systems: Sade invented perversion in the modern sense while the 19th century isolates three major figures of perversion: the masturbating child, the homosexual, and the hysterical woman. In the 20th century, Nazism became the very essence of a perverse type of an exterminator system: not only paradigmatic subjects, but also the introduction of a law and a state for which the figures of right and wrong are reversed. Our epoch has pretended to believe that science will soon allow us to do away with perversion. But who does not see that in pretending to eradicate it, we risk destroying the idea of a possible distinction between good and evil, which is at the very foundation of civilization?