Neither Loss nor Mourning, but Perversion

Abstract

Diana Kamienny investigates the relationship between the denial of loss and emergence of perverse jouissance in the work of two artists, Pierre Molinier and Ryū Murakami. Molinier’s repetitive photographic re-staging of legs, fetishized, elevated to the status of an objet d’art, signify a foreclosure of mourning and the emergence of an object of jouissance suggesting perversion. Murakami’s novel “Melancholia” represents an analogous failure to symbolise loss, albeit in a fictional representation. In each case, in contrast with perversion which provokes the jouissance of the other, there is a perverse use of jouissance: not only is the loss not symbolized but it remains absent from the subject’s imaginary. What results is artistic production that can take the form of a perverse practice.