"Masochism, Coldness and Cruelty" by Gilles Deleuze | Notes/Summary
These
are the notes that I took while reading Gilles Deleuze’s “Masochism: Coldness
and Cruelty”. Jotting down my immediate thoughts on paper functioned not only
as a brief summary of the work, in order for me to not forget what I have read
by trying to summarize most of the important ideas, but also by adding my own original
commentary where I disagreed with Deleuze or just felt like I had something to
add, or to make a reference to some other psychoanalytic work from him or
someone else. I don’t guarantee that I properly understood the last two
chapters, I just brainstormed out loud in this word document.
FOREWORD
Deleuze starts the book by
explaining how Masoch’s work has been overshadowed by that of Sade in most psychoanalytic
works regarding sado-masochism and perversion, in general. There has been a
(wrong, in Deleuze’s theory) assumption in psychoanalytic theory that sadism
and masochism are somehow dual or complementary, two sides of the same coin –
therefore, psychoanalysts of that time simply studied sadism and the work of
Sade and assumed that masochism must function in the same way as long as we “reverse”
a few things here and there. Deleuze is set on demonstrating that the two have
little to do with each other. He also suggests that while works about sadism
had always included a literary analysis of the novels of Sade, works on
masochism at the time did not pay enough attention to the literary works of
Masoch, which he seeks to correct in this book.
CHAPTER 1: THE LANGUAGE OF SADE AND MASOCH
“In
principle, violence is something that does not speak, or speaks but little,
while sexuality is something that is little spoken about.”
– Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze
analyzes the basic structures of the language used by Sade and compares them to
the language of Masoch. According to Deleuze, the language of Sade is “demonstrative”
and it points to the impossibility of a synthesis between the two speakers, at
the very inconsistency of language itself. Its point is not to communicate, but
to demonstrate a gap, a rupture in language itself. Deleuze calls this a demonstrative
use of language, quote: “nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than
the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate. (...) He is not even
attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related
essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author. The point of the
exercise is to show that the demonstration is identical to violence.”.
Perhaps this “demonstrative” use of language is related to what Lacan called
the signifier of the lack in the Other (impossibility), that we also find (albeit
differently) in hysterical neurosis?
Deleuze
compares this to the language of Masoch, which has an educative character.
Masoch is contractual, Sade despises and destroys contracts. Sadism is
supported by institutions, masochism by contracts. Masoch collaborates with his
‘victims’, since ultimately, masochism itself is a form of asserting power by
degrading yourself (recall here the joke about the three rabbi priests often said
by Derrida and Zizek – “oh lord, I am nothing!”). Deleuze explains how
Masoch instructs his women on how to instruct him, in a sense, he is ordering
the other on how to be ordered. This is why Deleuze calls Masoch’s use of
language not “demonstrative” but dialectical. He associates Sade with
the work of Spinoza and Masoch with the work of Plato and Hegel. For Masoch, it
is important that the relationships of power are reversible, that things may contain
their opposite.
Ultimately,
Deleuze here is discovering what Lacan is also suggesting about the
relationship between sexuality and language – sexual surplus-enjoyment is
ultimately linguistic/semiotic in nature. What is so daring about BDSM is not
that it pushes sexuality to its limits, but that it pushes language to
its limits. The part about Masoch’s contractual and collaborative nature: didn’t
Masoch predict the infamous ‘consent form’ that is often made fun of today? Notice
the ironical nature of a contractual, planned out in advance kind of intercourse
(that Deleuze notes of Masoch, where the sexual act had to be talked about
in detail in letters before it was actually done) – if the psychological part of
the sexual enjoyment is not from the physical rubbing of two bodies together,
but of getting someone to agree to have sex with me, then once
the other signs the consent form, why bother even doing it? I already got my
boost in self-esteem by convincing someone into having sex with me, might as
well go home.
I
find Deleuze’s case to be a bit weak here however when seems to imply a
generalization on how sadism and masochism are in general. After all, he is
looking at two case studies, not at all sadists, and he does not control for an
important variable such as consent. From what I know, in Sade’s novels,
the sadist is raping his victims. In Masoch’s novels, the protagonist is closer
to what we today call “BDSM”. Maybe the reason Sade was less ‘communicative’
with his victims had nothing to do with sadism per se and more to do with rape.
Let’s take a stupid recent novel such as “Fifty Shades Of Gray”: the characters
there are just as contractual as Masoch is in his novel, despite sadism being
involved as well. Perhaps it’s just semantic differences and Deleuze is talking
about a specific kind of sadism that is not the one we usually think of today.
CHAPTER 2: THE ROLE OF DESCRIPTIONS
The
language of Sade is obscene, repetitive and apathetic. Deleuze explains
how for Sade, brutal and explicit descriptions of the sadistic torture are presented
in language for shock-value, what he calls a “demonstrative” use of language. Since
sadism is oriented towards describing the very impossibility of escape, Sade
uses repetition that almost “de-sexualizes” the sexual act, the “in your face”
descriptions are used again and again to the point where they lose their
shock-value through time by over-exposure. Ultimately, Sade is oriented
towards negation, but not dialectics. Deleuze connects this to Freud’s theory
of the death instinct (Thanatos), and distinguishes between two types of
negation: a partial negation of a particular part-object, and an “absolute, transcendent”
negation of life and the universe itself, which is possible only in theory,
hence the “delusional” character of sadism.
For
Masoch, language is used in quite the opposite way. Masoch is not obscene and
is incredibly decent in his descriptions, he has a romantic and allusive use
towards language: everything is implied, nothing is said explicit. There would
be nothing to censor since Masoch already self-censored himself everywhere. He
has a very masterful use of creating suspense and tension – in this way, he is
the opposite of Sade who gives it all at once “in your face”. Whereas Sade is
oriented towards releasing tension, Masoch is interesting in creating
tension that may never be released properly. Deleuze says that there is a much
stronger connection between fetishism and masochism, this I am more skeptical
of, Deleuze’s reasoning is that since Masoch has such as “mythical” use of
descriptive-language, the object of pleasure is always displaced onto something
else, it is never sex itself that is of sexual pleasure. But isn’t Deleuze
mistaking fetishism for surplus-enjoyment here? This book was written in
1967, Lacan introduced his concept of surplus-enjoyment in the seminar of 1969-1970,
perhaps this is why.
Deleuze’s
magnum-opus, “Difference and Repetition” was released only one year later after
“Masochism”, where he elaborates on his conception of repetition as the
ultimate repetition of difference (repetition is always repetition of the new,
not of the same) that he already started describing in his earlier book, “Nietzsche
and Philosophy” (where he postulates that the eternal return is the eternal
return of difference). He connects this concept to the work of Masoch as well: “Repetition
does occur in masochism, but it is totally different from sadistic repetition:
in Sade it is a function of acceleration and condensation and in Masoch it is
characterized by the "frozen" quality and the suspense.”
What
both Sade and Masoch have in common in their use of language is that
descriptions are never descriptions of reality, but the negations of reality –
they put world historical and political events in their sexual writings but by
describing precisely that remainder or lack that was not present in reality,
they are the mirror of the dark unseen of reality (Lacan’s objet petit a?).
CHAPTER 3: ARE SADE AND MASOCH
COMPLEMETNARY?
A
masochist says “hurt me” and the sadist replies “no”. Deleuze indicates
that this is a stupid joke since a true sadist would never accept a masochistic
victim and vice-versa, giving a few examples from the novels of the
beforementioned authors. I assume this may be true of the non-consensual,
clinical type of sadism.
Deleuze argues against
Freud’s theory that sadism and masochism are two sides of the same coin, and that
they are actually both part of the same “sadomasochistic” libido. Deleuze warns
against this approach to syndromes, to lump into the same categories two
entities simply because they are similar. He gives analogies to biology,
that two organisms that end up extremely similar in form could be produced by
two entirely different causes, hence giving us the illusion that they are the same
when they are not: “To assume that there is an underlying common
"substance" which explains in advance all evolutions and
transformations is surely to proceed by abstraction. Even though the sadist may
definitely enjoy being hurt, it does not follow that he enjoys it in the same
way as the masochist; likewise the masochist's pleasure in inflicting pain is
not necessarily the same as the sadist's .”
CHAPTER 4: THE THREE WOMEN IN MASOCH
Deleuze
distinguishes between three types of women (mother-figures) in Masoch’s work.
The first one is the libertine, independent, free-spirited and adventurous woman
(the “uterine, hetaeric mother”). The second one is the woman who is sadistic
and cruel but only when prompted by a man, a third (father) figure. Between
these two extremes we find the third type of woman which is “the ideal” for the
masochist: the cold and indifferent woman (the “oral mother”). Deleuze warns again
to not confuse sadism and masochism for the same “sado-masochistic syndrome”
since even though we find coldness in the sadistic hero for Sade, it is a
different type of coldness than the coldness of the women in Masoch. For Sade,
coldness had to do with “apathy”, in order to provide the impartial rigor of
analysis, to kill all emotion and all enthusiasm. For Masoch, the coldness’
purpose was not to kill emotion and to instill apathy, but to kill sensuality: “it
is not the negation of feeling but rather the disavowal of sensuality. It is as
if sentimentality assumed in this instance the superior role of the impersonal
element, while sensuality held us prisoner of the particularities and
imperfections of secondary nature.”
Notice
here the play of signifiers in the unconscious of Masoch: just as he was most
attracted to “cold” women (in cold environments – they would wear fur for
utilitarian reasons and they would often sneeze), his writing style had a
tendency to create suspense and tension, hence “freezing” a moment in
time.
CHAPTER 5: FATHER AND MOTHER
Deleuze
here starts by introducing the commonly-held psychoanalytic view (ex: Freud)
that the punishing sadist in the masochist’s fantasy is the father-figure. He
summarizes Freud’s theory like this: From this viewpoint the masochist would
start by wishing to take the place of the father and steal his potency (the
sadistic stage); a feeling of guilt would then arise, and with it the fear of
castration, leading him to renounce the active aim and take the place of the
mother in soliciting the father's love. But in order to avoid the new onset of
guilt and castration fear to which the passive role gives rise, he would now
replace the desire to be loved by the father with the "desire to be beaten,"
which not only represents a lesser form of punishment, but is a substitute for
the love relationship itself. But why is it the mother who does the beating and
not, as we should expect, the father? We are given various reasons for this:
first the need to avoid a choice which is too blatantly homosexual; second the
need to preserve the first stage where the mother was the desired object, and
graft onto it the punishing action of the father; finally the need to present
the whole process as a kind of demonstration or plea addressed solely to the
father: "You see, it is not I who wanted to take your place, it is she who
hurts, castrates and beats me..."
Deleuze
argues against this hypothesis, suggesting that in masochism, it is not the
father who is doing the punishment, but the father who is being punished and
beaten. He contrasts sadism and masochism like this: in sadism, the masculine
father is idealized and put in the place of the law while the feminine is negated.
In masochism, the masculine/the father-figure is disavowed and invalidated (“thus
returning later in the real, in hallucinatory form”, here inspired by Lacan)
and the mother is idealized and put in place of the law. According to Deleuze,
there is no need to equate “the law” with “the father”, as Lacan and Freud do. For
Deleuze, the masochist’s fantasy is of a complete and whole mother-figure which
stands in for the law which is acted upon the father. Hence, it is not an
unconscious wish to be punished by the father out of guilt (which is then transferred
onto females in order to preserve heterosexuality), but an unconscious wish for
the mother to punish the father. The masochistic subject introjects the
father-figure in order to punish him. A feminist gesture against phallogocentrism
on the part of Deleuze? Perhaps. You can already start to see the beginnings of
his rejection of the “Oedipalization” of society that he developed 5 years
later in his collaboration with Guattari (Anti-Oedipus). Like they say in Anti-Oedipus:
“The woman’s liberation in movement is right in saying: we are not
castrated, so you get fucked”.
In
addition, the punishing mother is not viewed as a “bad” mother, in fact she is
idealized, there is nothing in the masochistic fantasy to suggest hatred
towards the feminine figure who is dominating the subject. The ideal “oral”
mother is the “pendulum who swings between the two extremes” of the sadistic
and hetaeric mother – here again we can see the beginning of another concept he
develops five years later with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, the disjunctive-synthesis.
To quote Anti-Oedipus: “A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that
still affirms the disjoined terms, that affirms them throughout their entire
distance, without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the
one, is perhaps the greatest paradox. "Either ... or . . . or,"
instead of "either/or." The schizophrenic is not man and woman. He is
man or woman, but he belongs precisely to both sides, man on the side of men,
woman on the side of women. (...) He is and remains in disjunction: he does not
abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of
elaboration; instead, he affirms it through a continuous overflight spanning an
indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual, or between the two, or
intersexual. He is transsexual. He is trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild. He
does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same; he affirms their
distance as that which relates the two as different.”
Deleuze
again emphasizes in this chapter that sadism and masochism are not two sides of
the same coin, they are not two parts of the same whole, neither are they ‘opposites’,
they reach a similar form in altogether different ways, they are asymmetrical:
“We might say that the masochist is hermaphrodite and the sadist
androgynous... They represent parallel worlds, each complete in itself, and it
is both unnecessary and impossible for either to enter the other's world.”
CHAPTER 6: THE ART OF MASOCH
Sadism
is marked by a cold realism and hyper-rationality, hence, “Sade needs to
believe he is not dreaming even when he is”. Sadism is hostile to fantasy.
Masochism is the exact opposite, it has an artistic and seductive nature based
on delay and anticipation. “The masochist experiences waiting in its pure
form”. Masochism is marked not by finding pleasure in pain but by
the constant contrast between the two. Waiting, according to Deleuze, is divided
into two halves: the anticipation of a pleasure that is always postponed,
always procrastinated, and the expectation of a pain that must be hurried.
Hence the constant play of words in the symbolic relations between the metaphorical
“coldness” of the mother-figure and the metaphorical “freezing” of a moment in
time.
Masochism
is, according to Deleuze, “neither moral nor material, but formal”. A
moral definition of masochism would imply notions such as guilt, a material one
would be focused on notions like physical pain and pleasure. Masochism is,
instead, oriented towards forms, not contents: it is appearance and aesthetics that
are prioritized (what I may also refer to as the personas sometimes).
Whereas sadism is preoccupied with tearing down appearances in order to see “what
is behind the mask” (hence “destroying the fetish object”), the masochist is preoccupied
with maintaining the fetish object alive, up to the point of idealization.
Deleuze here stresses again the importance of the contract in masochism,
which he relates to the attempt at “investing the mother-image with
the symbolic power of the law”.
For
sadism, what is important are institutions, not contracts. Sade despises
contracts and notes that the more institutions there are, the less laws there
are. For sadism, institutions are put on a pedestal above contracts since they
are “above the law”, according to Sade, imposing a sort of universal maxim that
would transcend all ‘local’ laws, a sort of “law above all laws”. Now, Lacan’s
association between Sade and Kant should be clearer.
CHAPTER 7: HUMOR, IRONY AND THE LAW
Whereas
Plato considered laws to descend from “the good”, Kant inverted this and considered
“good” to descend from the law. The law as transcendent, as form without
content, now becomes unknowable, we become agnostic as to its object. Hence,
the subject which obeys it no longer feels righteous, quite the opposite: he
becomes guilty in advance, before he even started, always in a state of being
symbolically indebted (as in the case of Oedipus or in Kafka’s universe). “The
more strict his obedience, the greater his guilt”.
Freud
resolved this paradox with his notion of the super-ego, where renunciation of
instinctual pleasures are not the result of the subject’s inner moral
conscience, quite the opposite: the moral conscience is the result of the
renunciation of pleasures, giving the retroactive illusion that it was the opposite
(what five years later, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze would call “se rabat sur”, to ‘fall
back on’ something, in relation to the body without organs and the miraculating-machines).
Hence why, the more we renunciate our pleasures, the more severe our moral super-ego
conscience is, in order to give a retroactive illusion that the effect was the
cause.
In a
similar way, Sade and Masoch provide two different ways of subverting and
ironizing the classically Platonic view of the law as dependent on the moral
good. For Sade, laws are retroactive justifications of power structures, “as
the expression of the rule of the strongest or as the product of the
self-protective union of the weak”. For Sade, the law does not stop tyranny,
it creates it – authoritarian regimes always use the law to justify their
abuses. Hence, Sade prioritizes anarchy and subversion of all laws other than
the law of pleasure. It’s precisely the universal application of the law that
makes it so dangerous for Sade: “I have infinitely less reason to fear my
neighbor's passions than the law's injustice, for my neighbor's passions are
contained by mine, whereas nothing stops or contains the injustices of the law”
The
masochist subverts laws through conformity. However, one shall not mistake the
masochist’s conformity to the law as his acceptance of them. The masochist
attempts to demonstrate the absurdity of the law by “accelerating” it,
destroying the law from within, in a properly Hegelian-dialectic
fashion. The masochist thinks that in order to show the stupidity of the law,
we must overly apply it, in order to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of
taking it too seriously. I am reminded here of Slavoj Zizek’s funny interview
in which he demonstrates a properly masochistic gesture of one of his journalist
colleagues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK9ewnKxPqE
I can
testify with even more banal everyday examples what Deleuze is saying: the
masochist strategy proves you almost immune or invincible to any harm and
insult when you simply accept it. Imagine the reaction of a bully when, after throwing
a bunch of insults to a masochist, the latter replies “jokes on you, I’m into
that shit”.
“The essence of
masochistic humor lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction
of a desire under threat of subsequent punishment is converted into one which
demands the punishment first and then orders that the satisfaction of the
desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment.”
CHAPTER 8: FROM CONTRACT TO RITUAL
The law
of the contract that gives rise to symbolic castration is usually thought in
psychoanalysis to exist so as to prevent incest. The masochist undermines symbolic
castration ‘from within’, in a properly Hegelian fashion again, by transferring
the law from the father to the mother-figure (in Lacanian language we could
perhaps say that the big Other is no longer barred?), hence using castration as
a way of encouraging incest between mother and son. The masochist shows again
how all laws have the opposite of their intended consequences, they mock the ‘name
of the father’ from the inside.
Since
the masochist is seductive and oriented towards personas, aesthetics,
appearances, fantasy and form, the contracts naturally give rise to rituals. Three
rituals appear in Masoch: hunting rites, agricultural rites and rites of regeneration
and rebirth. They correspond to the three before-mentioned mother figures: the hetaeric
and adventurous mother, the sadistic ‘Oedipal’ mother and the oral ‘good’
mother, respectively.
The masculine
figures present in Masoch’s work are Cain and Christ. Both of them share the
masochistic algorithm of needing to go through immense suffering before acquiring
redemption. Common in Masoch’s work is the idea of rebirth through the
archetype of a woman making him into a man. “Becoming-man” is thus a form of
masochistic self-punishment, since, ultimately, it is not a child who is being
beaten (like in Freud’s essay), but the father who is being beaten in
the masochist’s fantasy. The masochist needs to ‘kill his old self’ in order to
become “a new man”, and this punishment leading to rebirth that uses the law is
handed over to the mother-figure. The masochist, as previously said, introjects
the father-figure, thus punishing and having revenge over him by submitting
himself to immense pain. “There is no doubt that the masochist lives in the
very depths of guilt; but far from feeling that he has sinned against the
father, it is the father's likeness in him that he experiences as a sin which
must be atoned for. Hence guilt is turned completely upside down: it is both at
its deepest and its most absurd”.
CHAPTER 9: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE PROBLEM
OF MASOCHISM
Freud
maintained the primacy of sadism by affirming that masochism is simply a
sadistic impulse turned towards the self. Deleuze attacks Freud for presupposing
his own conclusions, seeking to Oedipalize everything (Chapter 2 of Anti-Oedipus
is definitely a continuation of this criticism of self-referentiality). To
oversimplify: Freud starts from the premise that the sadistic subject in
the masochist’s play is a father-figure, even if it’s disguised in a biological
woman, hence indirectly drawing the conclusion that masochism is an inverted
form of sadism, because the father-figure is involved… Deleuze stresses the
importance of fantasy in masochism, instead of the physical sensations
of the moral sense of guilt, which are only secondary, are only a product in
the staging of an entire scenario with a continuity, a beginning and an end. For
the masochist, what is important is the symbolic position in the story itself
of each character. It is the good mother who punishes the internalized father,
not a bad mother or a transferred father-figure. “Hence our contention that
masochism can be defined neither as erotogenic and sensuous (pleasure-pain),
nor as moral and sentimental (guilt-punishment): each of these definitions
implies the possibility of any manner of transformation. Masochism is above all
formal and dramatic; this means that its peculiar pleasure-pain complex is
determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its experience of guilt by a
specific story.”
CHAPTER 10: THE DEATH INSTINCT
In “Beyond
the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud engages in properly philosophical reflection
(according to Deleuze) because he tries to grasp the transcendent. The
pleasure-principle can, in theory, account for every phenomenon, and yet we can
still not account why it accounts for certain phenomena in a certain way out of
all the possible ways. It is not a matter of finding exceptions to the
principle, it is perfectly possible for the pleasure and reality principles to
account for all behaviors with no exception, and yet we still do not find an
explanation for why it's precisely the pleasure and reality principles
out of all the possible principles that could also account for everything,
hence the question here is not one of exception, but that of transcendence:
“There are no exceptions to the principle but there is a residue that is
irreducible to it; nothing contradicts the principle , but there remains
something which falls outside it and is not homogeneous with it - something, in
short, beyond...”
Like
Hume, Freud correctly notes how we can separate experiences into ‘pleasure’ and
‘pain’, it is impossible to find some sort of pattern or principle that could
separate the two categories. What is also so mysterious about the pleasure
principle is its foundation – why does it mysteriously account for
everything?
It is
repetition that binds pleasure transcendentally. In experience, however,
the causality is reversed: pleasure is above repetition, since we repeat was is
pleasurable. Transcendentally, it is pleasure that is subordinated to repetition-as-concept
however, since without the ability to repeat an action, there would be no
pleasure, no release-of-tension. It is here that Deleuze shows his inspiration
from Bergson in his interpretation of Freud: “It should be understood that
repetition as conceived by Freud's genius is in and of itself a synthesis of
time - a "transcendental" synthesis. It is at once repetition of
before, during and after, that is to say it is a constitution in time of the
past, the present and even the future. From a transcendental viewpoint, past,
present and future are constituted in time simultaneously, even though, from
the natural standpoint, there is between them a qualitative difference, the
past following upon the present and the present upon the future.”
The
formation of the ego and the super-ego, according to Freud, imply a
desexualization: a quantity of libido is “freed” and becomes mobile and ready
to attach itself to a certain object through either idealization or
identification. Hence why Freud can maintain his wish-fulfillment theory even in
the case of unpleasant dreams, through the affirmation that a secondary gain or
benefit is always possible through sublimation. If, after an object is
desexualized, it is instantly resexualized, it is not the same as it was
initially, it is the very desexualization itself that is sexualized, then, this
structural split is what we call “perversion”. That’s why coldness is present
in both Sade and Masoch, “the deeper the coldness of desexualization, the more
powerful is the process of perverse resexualization”.
The
process of resexualization takes place instantly, “in a sort of leap”, hence
why the pleasure principle “retains its full empirical dominance” – regardless of
whether it’s the sadist who gains pleasure in other people’s pain or the
masochist who needs suffering as a precondition for pleasure. Since repetition
is the transcendent precondition for the existence of pleasure (and vice-versa,
empirically), no wonder that reiteration is present in both masochism (through
the “freezing” of anticipation, tension+release) and sadism (through the
monotone, apathetic repetitiveness of a “de-sexualized” sexual act).
It is
here that Deleuze paves the way for the beginning chapters of his next book, “Difference
and Repetition”: because of the process of desexualization and instantaneous resexualization,
pleasure and repetition ‘exchange roles’ and thus we do not merely repeat an
act that was previously pleasurable because it was so, but instead find
pleasure in the very act of repetition itself. Hence, when we repeat something,
it is never the same again, we have the eternal return of difference itself.
Hence,
the characteristic of perversion is the inherent link between repetition and
pleasure, not between pain and pleasure. There is only a correlation
between pain and pleasure that is mistaken as causality: “the mystery lies
in the desexualization process which consolidates repetition at the opposite
pole to pleasure, and in the subsequent resexualization which makes the
pleasure of repetition seemingly proceed from pain.”
CHAPTER 11: SADISTIC SUPEREGO AND
MASOCHISTIC EGO
Under
the orthodox Freudian assumption, if we assume the unity of a sadomasochistic
entity, then sadism implies a strong ego and no super-ego (no morality,
libertinism, no conscience that stops the sadist from hurting others, etc…)
while masochism implies a weak ego and a strong super-ego conscience that makes
them constantly feel guilty. But that would make the subjects neurotic, not
perverse, since if there is no paradox or ‘subversion’ then there is nothing
that is perverted (“inverted”). Hence Deleuze has to flip the entire logic on
its head: it is actually the masochist who has only an ego and a weak
super-ego, since the weakness and guilt of the masochist is only a tool (even
if authentically consciously felt) to put the woman into a certain position in
his fantasy (recall, yet again, Zizek’s joke about the 3 rabbi priests).
Similarly enough, the sadist is no ego and only super-ego, he identifies with
his super-ego, “he is his own superego and can only find an ego in the
external world”. Because the sadist
lacks a strong ego, his victims are the ego that he seeks to find in the external
world. The sadist reveals that the super-ego was sadistic all along by letting
it run wild: it gives us contradictory or impossible-to-fulfill demands and
then laughs in our face when we can’t meet its expectations.
In masochism,
what happens is not simply the opposite as what happens in sadism. The ego
triumphs over the super-ego, but the super-ego is not completely dead in the
masochist subject. Instead, it is projected externally onto the mother-figure
who punishes the subject, but only at a superficial level, as a mask concealing
the fact that the super-ego was disavowed from the start. When the super-ego is
retained internally but also projected onto the feminine torturer at the level
of the simulacrum, it is disavowed since it is the super-ego which punishes…
itself, the masochist tells to his super-ego: "You see, whatever you
do, you are already dead; you only exist as a caricature; the woman who beats
me supposedly stands for you, and yet it is in fact you yourself who are being
beaten in me . . . . I disavow you since you negate yourself."
This
is why Deleuze asserts that humor comes not from a strong super-ego, like Freud
thought, but from a powerful ego and a weak super-ego. The masochist seems to
have a strong super-ego conscience (“guilt”) only as a pretense, because what
the masochist is doing is ‘accelerating’ the super-ego’s destruction from
within, sublating it in Hegelian fashion. It is making the super-ego fight
against itself, resulting in irony. “Thus there is a pseudosadism in
masochism, just as there is a pseudomasochism in sadism. This specifically
masochistic sadism, which attacks the superego in the ego and outside it is not
in any way related to the sadism of the sadist.”
In
sadism, there is a movement from a negation of particular things to an
absolute, general absolute negation of reason itself. The de-sexualization of
the repetitive processes of torture culminate in an instant resexualization of the
cold and logical process of reason itself. In masochism, instead, we find a
process of fetishistic disavowal, which is not a matter of imagining something
which is not true, but of the fundamental transcendent precondition of
imagining and fantasizing other things in general. It is the disavowal of all
disavowals. The desexualization is at the level of the imaginary, which
manifests itself in the coldness of the characters present in the masochist’s
fantasy. “But even as masochistic desexualization reaches its highest point,
resexualization proceeds simultaneously in the narcissistic ego, which
contemplates its image in the ideal ego through the agency of the oral mother.”
The coldness of the pure thought of the sadist is mirrored by the “iciness of
the imagination” of the masochist. The death instinct “becomes an object for
thought in the superego in sadism and for the imagination in the ego in
masochism”.
Both
sadism and masochism ‘tell a story’, according to Deleuze. In masochism, the
super-ego is destroyed from within by pushing it to its limits, leading to the
formation of an imaginary ideal-ego and a narcissistic ego that allows the
masochist to gain pleasure from what the super-ego forbids. The internalized
father must be “killed”, this desexualization of the formerly idealized “ideal-ego”
followed by the narcissistic ego-inflation of what emerges.
In
sadism, the ego is rejected and denied and found externally in his victims, the
unrestrained super-ego now being de-sexualized and “modeled after the father’s
role”. Re-sexualization now occurs on the ego-ideal.
Finally,
Deleuze ends the book by summarizing his conclusions:
( 1 ) Sadism is speculative-demonstrative,
masochism dialectical-imaginative ;
( 2 ) sadism operates with the negative
and pure negation, masochism with disavowal and suspension;
( 3) sadism operates by means of
quantitative reiteration, masochism by means of qualitative suspense ;
( 4 ) there is a masochism specific to the
sadist and equally a sadism specific to the masochist, the one never combining
with the other;
( 5 ) sadism negates the mother and
inflates the father, masochism disavows the mother and abolishes the father;
( 6 ) the role and significance of the
fetish , and the function of the fantasy are totally different in each case ;
(7 ) there is an aestheticism in masochism
, while sadism is hostile to the aesthetic attitude;
( 8) sadism is institutional , masochism
contractual ;
( 9 ) in sadism the superego and the
process of identification play the primary role , masochism gives primacy to
the ego and to the process of idealization;
( 10 ) sadism and masochism exhibit
totally different forms of desexualization and resexualization;
( 11 ) finally, summing up all these
differences, there is the most radical difference between sadistic apathy and
masochistic coldness.
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