James Penney is Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University.

Acknowledgments

1. Epistemologies of Perversion

Perversity and Perversion
Perversion as Power
Perversion as Structure
Fetishism, Sexual Difference, Homosexuality
Worlds of Perversion: A Reader's Guide

2. Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite

Meet Gilles de Rais
The Spectacle of Perversion
The Tragedy of History
An Innocent Transference
Radically Evil?
The Perverse Sacrifice

3. Cleopatra's Nose

Pascal's Modernity
The Tragic Absolute
From Sin to Infinity
Ideological State Automatons
A Distracted Dialectic
Grace, or the Act of Faith

4. This Whole World of Perversion

Dialogue and Dialectic
The Cynical Other
A Revolt against the Negative
Wealth and Power
Hysterical Pantomime
The Beyond of Perversion

5. The Guardian of Criminal Being

Lacan contra Hegel
Ethical Beauty
The Real of Destiny
Pleasure Unbound
Suffering for Beauty
Artfully Screwed

6. Concluding (Un)Queer-Theoretical Postscript

Perversion and Its Discontents
A Dynamic Perversion
The Minoritarian Temptation
Hysteria in the Shadow of the State
The Paradox of Desublimation
The Subject of Sex

Notes
Index