Perversion and the Law: From Sade to the ‘Spanner Case’ and Beyond

Abstract

Interrogating the relation between the law and changing notions of perversion, in society and in Lacanian theory, Colin Wright observes that modernity is marked by a progressive intertwining of perversion and justice. Through the problematic of the status of the concepts of consent and harm in liberal law he demonstrates that the ‘crime’ of ‘occasioning bodily harm’ between consenting adults at the centre of the so-called ‘Spanner case’ reveals a paradoxical attempt to govern the body of pleasure by protecting it against the risk of unpleasure, while demonstrating the impossibility of legislating for the body of jouissance that enjoys beyond the pleasure principle. Demonstrating that the alleged crime never took place did not prevent a guilty verdict being given, but guilty of what, precisely?