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Rating: 
Summary: Barely worth it
Review: You'd think that it would be impossible for an essay-compilation on perversion to crash and burn, but this one pulls it off! I own and enjoy the three other installments in the 'Sic' series ("Gaze and Voice as Love Objects", "Cogito and the Unconscious", and "Sexuation"), so the incredible awfulness of this offering came as an unpleasant surprise. You can't blame me for looking forward to a book on perversion, especially since it belonged to a decent series and was co-edited by one of my favourites (Slavoj). Unfortunately, editors Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and the Z-Man have haphazardly thrown together a collection of weak, watered-down essays on perversion and its partnership with social relation. Bruce Fink (best known for his translation of Lacan's seminars), contributes a painfully general piece which is appropriately titled "Perversion"; Nina Schwartz's "Exotic Rituals and Family Values in 'Exotica'" subjects Egoyan's film to the standard boring reading demanded by the film. Zizek's "The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link" is downright embarrassing - while I love Zizek and often jump to his defense, there's nothing worth defending in this essay. It consists mostly of bits cobbled together from some of his better works which don't connect to one another in any meaningful way. We all know that Zizek can be (and often is) arrogant, pretentious, self-plagiarizing, WRONG, and occasionally completely stupid - but this paper was the limit. In somewhat better news, James Penney's "Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite" is okay (but it's just okay), and the book also includes Octave Mannoni's "I Know Well, but All the Same..." (we can thank Mannoni for giving us the catchphrase "Je sais bien, mais quand meme" to explain the fetishistic split). So there's a plus. An insignificant plus, but still a plus. I'd recommend borrowing this one at the library first, so you can be disappointed for free.
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