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→Creepy
Here enters the Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and the object-cause of desire, that which sustains our desire for the object. The creepy effect arises when we perceive that the subject in front of us is doing what he is doing directly for the object-cause of desire, remaining indifferent towards the object of his desire—in short, when there occurs a kind of short circuit between the object and object-cause so that the object becomes directly the object-cause. For example, what sustains my desire for a woman are the locks of her hair. So, what if I simply directly focus on that, forgetting about full sex and finding satisfaction in just caressing her hair? This short circuit defines perversion.
In the "revolutionary" 1960s, it was fashionable to assert perversion against the compromise of hysteria. A pervert directly violates social norms; he does openly what a hysteric only dreams about or articulates ambiguously in his or her symptoms. In other words, the pervert effectively moves beyond the master and his law, while the hysteric merely provokes her master in an ambiguous way, which can also be read as the demand for a more authentic real master. Against this view, Freud and Jacques Lacan consistently emphasized that perversion, far from being subversive, is the hidden obverse of power; every power needs perversion as its inherent and sustaining transgression."In the hysterical link," on the contrary,
"In the hysterical link," on the contrary, the $ over ''a ''stands for the subject who is divided, traumatized, by what for an object she is for the Other, what role she plays in the Other's desire: 'Why am I what you're saying that I am?,' or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet, 'Why am I that name?' . . . What she expects from the Other-master is knowledge about what she is as object. . . . What produces the unbearable castrating effect is not the fact of being deprived of 'it,' but, on the contrary, the fact of clearly 'possessing it'; the hysteric is horrified at being 'reduced to an object,' that is to say, at being invested with the ''agalma ''that makes him or her the object of other's desire. In contrast to hysteria, the pervert knows perfectly what he is for the Other: a knowledge supports his position as the object of Other's (divided subject's) ''jouissance''.13
So far from being a compromiser, the hysterical subject is deeply justified in resisting the temptation of fully throwing herself into the pervert 's transgression; what the hysteric perceives (or, rather, suspects) is precisely the falsity of the pervert's transgression, the way the pervert's activity sustains legal power. Kotsko therefore characterizes hysteria as:
a way of ''creeping out the social order itself''. And just as in the case of the individual psyche, the social order is only susceptible to being creeped out due to the creepiness it carries within itself. Under normal circumstances, the social order appears to be obsessive in structure, opting for certain acceptable desires while repressing or excluding others. Yet from the hysteric's perspective, the most salient fact about the social order is the way it is continually setting us up to fail, so that it can even seem that the social order ''needs ''transgression and the illicit, creepy enjoyment that it provides. The social order's wink and nod of unofficial permission toward our creepy indulgences simultaneously makes social constraints more bearable ''and ''binds us more closely to the social order insofar as it makes those creepy indulgences possible. In short, the hysteric is uniquely positioned to see that the pervert has a point. [''C, ''pp. 109–10]
