Monaco Philosophical Meetings: Perversion

Monaco Philosophical Meetings with the theme Perversion will be held on Thursday 11 December 2025 at 7 pm in the Princess Grace Theatre.

Perversion exists only in relation to an order—religious, political, social, moral, or sexual. At the end of his Tristan, published between 1155 and 1175, the Norman poet Thomas salutes the lovers, dreamers, sentimentalists, voluptuaries, and “pure” souls who have listened to his verses, and speaks of Tristan and Isolde as “pure lovers,” precisely because, bordering on “madness,” their union goes against all the laws of society and perverts the “right order” represented by the court of King Mark.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante uses the term “perverse people” to refer to pagans, led astray from the religious path, and names Lucifer “perverse,” for he has flouted all orders by flouting that of God. Generally speaking, perversion—from *per*, indicating “crossing” (to cross, to go astray, to drift, to take the wrong way), and *volgere*, to turn—is a deviation, a “detour,” a departure, a more or less deliberate abandonment of prevailing social norms, largely shared, cemented by principles, and conveyed by tradition, or even an alteration, deemed harmful, if not pathological, of a psychic process, a feeling, or a behavior.

Customs, values, and lifestyles constantly vary, however, so do norms: romantic relationships with children were hardly considered “deviant” in ancient Greece, but today pedophilia is considered a perversion. A study of the linguistic uses of the term would show that its semantic spectrum is extremely broad: thus, one can speak of a perverse mechanism, in sociology of the “perverse effects” of a theory (uncalculated, unaccounted for, unexpected), of a perversion of taste or smell caused by certain pathologies, of a perversion of judgment, of a perversion of democratic principles, and give “perverse” the meaning of malicious, diabolical, erroneous, villainous, depraved, disturbed, hostile, painful, infected, violent, heartbreaking, etc.

It is its sexual meaning, however, that has become hegemonic. At its inception, medical science often judged sexual perverts as potentially degenerate, deranged individuals, carriers of hereditary anomalies, akin to those considered constitutionally malignant or criminal. It was only at the end of the 19th century – nine years before Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 – that in his famous Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing established the list of all known perversions (introducing, by reference to the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the notions of sadism and masochism), a work which, it should be remembered, is written in a deliberately “learned” language (some passages are in Latin) likely to discourage any unhealthy curiosity, which was intended to serve as a reference manual for forensic doctors, criminologists and magistrates, and which contains certain “statements” or postulates which one can hardly believe are those on which Freud says he “based” his own in the Three Essays: “The male member is intended to be inserted into the vagina. If, instead of the normal instinct, there is another that does not harmonize with the anatomical conformation of the genitals, there is a disparity that makes the case appear not only abnormal, but also pathological. We can therefore understand that the category of perversions, defined – before Freud – “according to the object” (homosexuality) or “according to the aim” (sadomasochism, fetishism), can be long, populated by sex criminals, masturbators, voyeurs, sadists, fetishists, coprophiles, transvestites, sodomites, urophiles, exhibitionists, sniffers, zoophiles, zooerasts, pedophiles, gynecomasts, mixoscopophiles, “frotteurs”, necrophiles, and so on. Richard von Kraft-Ebing never abandoned his commitment to scientific rigor, but his bestselling book literally “surpassed” him, transcending the specialist audience and becoming an inexhaustible archive of sex, which everyone searches and consults to unearth, beneath the perversions of pleasure, the pleasure of perversions.

Then came Freud, psychoanalysis, the “polymorphous perverse” child, “pregenital” sexuality, perversion (neurosis? psychosis?) in adults as a result of insufficient psychosexual maturation and fixation at infantile developmental stages, or of regression, a return to supposedly outdated infantile behaviors. Within this constellation, more recent times have inscribed the elusive and formidable figure of the “narcissistic pervert” (Paul-Claude Racamier). There is no real agreement on the origin of perversions, nor on their classification, especially since almost no one wants to include erotic and sexual practices that mutually consenting adults are free to engage in for their pleasure.

From then on, the “narcissistic pervert” attracts more attention because what is revealed is less a clinical disorder than a relational pathology in which anyone who comes into contact with them can be “caught up” in it, and where “respect for the other” does not exist. If the subject were merely narcissistic, they would only esteem themselves, indulge in self-indulgence, and overvalue themselves—but, being perverse, they devalue others, exploit their feelings, whether of friendship, love, or collaboration, use every strategy capable of making their loved ones responsible for their unhappiness, their own suffering, and revel in it if they succeed. Where this type of perversion flourishes, all possibility of “being together” perishes.

Robert Maggiori