"The only true awareness of our subjection is the awareness of the obscene, excessive pleasure (surplus enjoyment) we get from it. This is why the first gesture of liberation is not to get rid of this excessive pleasure, but to assume it actively."--Slavoj Zizek, from his chapter, "The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link"

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Beneath the Skin: Perversion and Social Analysis / Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis Foster 1
Fatal West: W. S. Burrough's Perverse Destiny / Dennis Foster 15
Perversion / Bruce Fink 38
“I Know Well, But All the Same . . .” / Octave Mannoni 68
Exotic Rituals and Family Values in Exotica / Nina Schwartz 93
The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link / Slavoj Zizek 112
Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite / James Penney 126
“As If Set Free into Another Land”: Homosexuality, Rebellion, and Community in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner / Michael P. Bibler 159
Contamination's Germinations / E. L. McCallum 187
Works Cited 211
Contributors 217
Index 219

Molly Anne Rothenberg is Associate of English and Co-Director of the Literature Program at Tulane University. She is a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of Re-Thinking Blake’s Textuality.

Dennis A. Foster is Frensley Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is author of Confession and Complicity in Narrative and Sublime Enjoyment.

Slavoj Žižek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of many books, and editor of Cogito and the Unconscious, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (coedited), and Tarrying with the Negative, all published by Duke University Press.