We are right now in a moment when the roaring twenties of our time have finally begun to roar. And the weltgeist is screaming at the top of its voice, about a perversion which we have allowed to fester among the members of the ruling class through our conformity for much too long. We have forgotten to remind them of our dissatisfaction. Thus every screen and newspaper now displays for all to see Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten.

Lacan said once apropo hedonism that there is nothing subversive about losing one's shame. He did this to counter a prevailing myth of his times. It was believed by many in the 60s that perversion was more subversive than hysteria. The idea was that a pervert in his lack of shame can show you how man really is. Unrestrained by normative emotions about right or wrong the cynic tells a higher truth, and makes the great escape from the law without getting caught. 

But analysis showed that perversion was not “simply an aberration in relation to social criteria, an anomaly contrary to good morals, although this register is not absent, nor is it an atypicality according to natural criteria, namely that it more or less goes astray from the reproductive finality of the sexual union. It is something else in its very structure.

The exhibitionist, the pederast, or the sadist does not care about the wishes of the other, the prostitute, the child is a puppet in their fantasy. Authenticity is neither an issue nor a problem in perversion. Only the neurotic and the psychotic worries whether the Other's desire and manifestation of lust is authentic. 

Freud, who through his practice had been granted access to an empirical archive which contained statements and confessions of the vices of the Wienese ruling class, had drawn a similar conclusion. Practicing analysis with non metaphysical entities, that is to say bodily analysands with real trauma. Hurting people rather than eternal archetypes of human nature or dolls in the astral realm he realised that; “never is the unconscious as inaccessible as in perversion.” 

For how could they learn about their own becoming when love is an unfortunate project of wanting to be that which the beloved loves, and they instead in their isolation never take the time to wonder what the others might dream about.

At the same time that Freud came to these conclusions Arthur Schnitzler's a few blocks away in 1926 wrote the short shorty Traumnovelle which was the basis for Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Here the primitive horde dressed in black tie organises enjoyment around the violation of a prohibition, trying to gain access to an impossible thing, Das Ding, a tabu driven jouissance. But this totem feast only fixes the tabu as to identify the violation of the prohibition and libidinally charge it, it does not transcend it and the pervert never breaks free, hears instead the name-of-the-father even more intrusively, hears his law as if it was his own.  

The rituals performed in the manual of Crowley or the Saturnalia brotherhood are a para-praxis, they are pseudo activities, designed to fool the perpetrator. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" simply means that the pervert tries to resolve the conflict between desire and Law by making desire the law of his acts.

The pervert's enjoyment consists in challenging the law, but not with the intention of changing it. The pervert is not a revolutionary.

The masks, the capes, the jargon and the carnivalesque celebration of the forbidden, obfuscates and eventually forbids the unconscious symptom from expressing itself, that the masters are slaves to their own desires by choice. The time has come to take off their masks and lead them with eyes wide open to the real name of the father that is not the analyst's couch but the guillotine, the garrote of the people that must slowly press against the marrow structure of this exploitation.