Abstract

This paper explores Deleuze's conception of masochism in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. The author investigates Deleuze's ideas about the essential relation between the literary and the clinical as a way to disentangle the confusion between sadism and masochism, as it is found in psychoanalysis. By first focusing on the formal differences between Sade's and Masoch's writings, a more fundamental difference comes into view: while sadism is a rationalistic programme based on the destruction of the personal sphere and the promotion of a cold apathy produced by pure reason, masochism is the art of suspense and suggestion, aimed at a radical de-genitalization of sexuality and the production of a world without Other, where the pervert finds another sexuality, a photographic erotics of pure intensities