"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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