The difficult position Benvenuto seeks to maintain is illustrated in his complicated relationship with Lacan’s thought. Elsewhere, he wrote of this relationship:
I confess: with regard to Lacan I seek a sort of optimal distance-closeness, which is just what Lacan did with regard to Freud. Lacan, despite his claim of being more Freudian than other analysts, convinces us precisely because he does not follow Freud à la lettre… Precisely because Lacan saw things in a completely new way, by après coup Freud appears to us as very different from the Vulgate that Freudians, and Freud himself, have given of psychoanalysis. (Benvenuto, 2017, para 9)
The distance Benvenuto (2016) achieves from Lacan is nowhere more evident than in the central thesis of his work on perversions: the primary distinction between the non-perverse and the perverse sexual act is the presence or absence of caritas. ‘In the carnal union, each partner enjoys offering the other what the other lacks’ (Benvenuto 2016: 11). This seems quite distant from Lacan’s famous dictum, ‘There is no sexual rapport.’
This distance from Lacan, however, is not without its own closeness. Benvenuto acknowledges that Lacan, more than anyone has appreciated and theorized the difference between the other, the imaginary counterpart, and the Other, of the symbolic order, and with this distinction the central importance of the Law in the vicissitudes of subjectivity. He continues, however, that Lacan, like Freud before him in his effort to create a new science, fails to account within his theory for the phenomenological other-subject-like-me, a juridical and ethical concept of the other subjectivity with whom I am interchangeable before the Law, equally protected and equally bound. To the extent that this other-subject-like-me is excluded from psychoanalytic theory, it is a perverse theory. Indeed, a concept of the other-subject-like-me, Benvenuto argues, is essential to an understanding of the perversions, as it is precisely what is missing or refused (caritas) in perverse sexual relations. He dubs such a disavowal of this other-subject-like-me hetero-dystonic, as it refuses the desire or enjoyment of the other-subject-like-me (in opposition to the ego-dystonia of the neuroses or the socio-dystonia of the psychoses).
It seems to me that Benvenuto’s atopic approach has a profound impact on the structure of his book. A contrast case is informative. Stephanie Swales’ (2012) Perversion: A Lacanian Approach to the Subject is another recent psychoanalytic contribution to the study of the perversions, and the differences between Swales’ and Benvenuto’s texts could not be more obvious, beginning with Swales’ self-localization in the very title of her work. Swales was a student of Bruce Fink, and the text was developed from her doctoral dissertation. It is certainly the case that no product could be more reflective of the University Discourse than its emblematic dissertation but Fink himself generally occupies such a discourse in his translation of Lacan’s work – both in its obvious intralingual sense and in its inter-lingual one.
Swales’s book dutifully unfolds from an introduction to Lacanian theory, to the etiology of perversion, to an explanation of the fundamental fantasy and its workings in the perverse structure, to the longest chapter on the substructures of perversion (exhibitionism, voyeurism, masochism, sadism, and fetishism), to two case studies, before concluding with treatment recommendations. The structure of Benvenuto’s book, on the other hand, is much less systematic, with chapters titled: ‘What Are Perversions?’, ‘The Pervert’s Pain, ‘Masochism: Ways to Power’, ‘Sadism: “Punishing Women’”, ‘Perverse Women’, ‘Weaning from Perversion’. As a reader, it is easiest to find one’s bearings in the chapters devoted to specific perverse presentations – masochism, sadism, and perverse women – while Benvenuto is at his most interesting and elegant in the opening chapters and the concluding chapter on the perverse cure. In these chapters, Benvenuto seems to be at his maximum distance from Lacan, the Master, as well as from the University.