The Deleuzian model and the masochistic contract -- Masochism, feminine "goodness" and sacrifice -- Self-mutilation and (a)signification -- Transgressive reconfigurations -- Heterocosms, spectres and the world remade -- Postscrip.

(2009). Masochism and The Mother, Pedagogy and Perversion. Angelaki: Vol. 14, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part one, pp. 117-130.

That pain and suffering are unwanted is no truism. Like the sadist, the masochist wants pain. Like sadism, masochism entails an irrational, abnormal attitude toward pain. I explain this abnormality.

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the (...) enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness - these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism. (shrink)

This article argues for an understanding of the scream at the nexus of a pre-verbal, imperceptible and inaudible operation. The work of Jean-François Lyotard describes a figure that breaks with figurative, illustrative and narrative forms, and takes up an operative function. In aesthetic terms, this operative figure – the figure of the matrix of desire – is what Lyotard describes as “seeing” rather than “vision”. That is, a child-like look that does not recognise the world by which it might master (...) it, but which desires to surpass limited existence, to lose oneself and to desire everything incompossibly. “Seeing”, in other words, is an opening of the self to the world in the original sense of aisthesis. Such an opening describes a masochistic jouissance inasmuch as this is an eroticism that has no mastery in dialectical terms or in verbal expression. This article will examine the screaming, howling, whooping and wailing of characters in Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973) to understand the appearance of masochistic jouissance in cinema. (shrink)

Includes "Coldness and Cruelty," by Gilles Deleuze, a study of masochism and sadism, as well as "Venus in Furs," the original novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Being whipped, getting a deep-tissue massage, eating hot chili peppers, running marathons, and getting tattooed are all painful. Sometimes they are also pleasant—or so many people claim. Masochistic pleasure consists in finding such experiences pleasant in addition to, and because of, the pain. Masochistic pleasure presents a philosophical puzzle. Pains hurt, they feel bad, and are aversive. Pleasures do the opposite. Thus many assume that the idea of a pleasant pain is downright unintelligible. I disagree. I claim that cases of (...) pleasant pains are more common than many philosophers suppose, and that they have no essential connection to either sex or psychopathology. I review several attempts to account for masochism that preserve the intuition that nothing can be both pleasant and painful at once. These account for some, but not all, cases of masochism. The stubborn remainder, I argue, are sensations that are genuinely pleasant and painful at once. I give an account of how that might be, focusing on boundary-pushing aspects of masochistic pleasure that have been largely overlooked in the literature. I show how, properly understood, pain and pleasure can coexist—and also why it is very rare for them to actually do so. (shrink)

In 1993 the Law Lords upheld the original conviction of five men under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act for participating in sado-masochistic practices. Although the five men were fully consenting adults, the Law Lords held that consent did not constitute a defence to acts of violence within a sado-masochistic context. This paper examines the judgements in this case and argues that sado-masochistic practices are no different from the known exceptions cited by the court to the idea that consent (...) is no defence to violence (sport, parental chastisement and surgery). It also argues that if we can make sense of rape as a non-consensual, violent act, expressed through sex, then we can make sense of sado-masochism as a consensual sexual act, expressed through violence. (shrink)

My contribution to this series of articles in Telos is not that of an historian or a social theorist, and it does not deal with totalitarianism in anything other than a rather spectral sense. To this extent, it might seem a little out of place. This essay concerns itself not with the analysis of a specific historical society that might (or might not) be characterized as totalitarian, but with the way in which a certain sense of the totalitarian has shaped (...) the self-understanding of liberal Western popular culture. It starts from two very different points. At the level of theory,…. (shrink)

The four guiding principles of the Society of Professional Journalists express ethical tension that can be viewed as a conflict between the metaphysical concepts of the "One" and the "Many." Historically, the most satisfying resolution of this tension has been the doctrine of the Trinity. When studied as a philosophical construct, this model, drawn from religion, can demonstrate a way to resolve the tension inherent in good journalism. This study reduces this resolution to grids that can be used for plotting (...) ethical journalism. (shrink)

_Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau._.

_Provocative reading of the role masochism plays in structuring the aesthetics and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau._.

ONE Victims or Culprits? Reflections on Women's Behaviour My title, 'Victims or Culprits?', with its interrogatory inflection, may appear somewhat inane. ...

There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, often involving either painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and Deleuze). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I instead propose a rather more speculative way of teasing out the (...) differences between them, interpreting them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s non-oppositional typology of sadism and masochism, as it is expressed in Difference and Repetition and ‘Coldness and Cruelty’. (shrink)

Discipline and passion: meaning, masochism and mythology in popular medical romancesThis paper is an interpretive analysis of the discourses within popular romance literature, with a particular focus on the genre that includes constructions of the images of nurses and nursing. An historical contrast is made along with examinations of the uses and meanings encompassed within this body of literature, and its messages for women as nurses as it reflectdcreates societal change. Deviations from the formulaic nature of these works are (...) explored. Discipline and passion are the recurring themes evident throughout in juxtapositions of romance and power differentials in the hospital/medical scene. The soft‐core, sado‐masochistic images evident in many titles are explored in a way that raises questions about sexuality, romance, nursing mythology, and the future of this sub‐genre of the popular romance. (shrink)

The paper is primarily devoted to Nietzsche’s account of cruelty, which represents an indispensable key to understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical project in many of its essential aspects. This study is complemented by parallels with two other outstanding intellectual figures of the late nineteenth century: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Dostoevsky wrote that “civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.” Nietzsche went a step further in this assessment: not only does civilisation not (...) make us immune to cruelty, but it must itself be seen to emerge directly from cruelty at every significant step it has taken. What brings Nietzsche close to Masoch, on the other hand, is the fact that these historical or even prehistorical developments that have shaped humankind and civilisation are not only related to cruelty, but must be observed as various forms of the internalisation (“spiritualisation”, “deification”) of cruelty. The core of the study is devoted to analyses of different forms and aspects of Nietzsche’s concept of the internalisation of cruelty (in relation to power-relations, subject-object relations, mutations of pleasure, and perversions). (shrink)

This essay explores why people sometimes act against their economic interests, and, more particularly, why people sometimes knowingly and intentionally support economic inequality even though they are disadvantaged by it, a phenomenon I call masochistic inegalitarianism. The essay argues that such behavior is an inherent and widespread feature of human nature, and that this has important though previously overlooked practical and theoretical implications for any conception of distributive justice. On the practical side, masochistic inegalitarianism suggests that any theory of distributive (...) justice with more than the most modest egalitarian aspirations is inherently self-defeating (or at least self-limiting) because it will naturally produce the background conditions necessary to trigger masochistic behavior among the very people it is designed to assist. On the theoretical side, masochistic inegalitarianism suggests that there are serious problems with any theory of distributive justice based on the idea of hypothetical consent. This is because people with masochistic tendencies would be unlikely to consent to the distributive arrangements these theories have presumed, and the arrangements to which they would be likely to consent would allow a far greater degree of economic inequality than we are prepared to acknowledge as intuitively just. Either we must rethink our intuitions, or, as I contend, there is something about masochistic inegalitarianism that robs hypothetical consent of its moral force. (shrink)

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's (...) own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity. (shrink)

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s and Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on the immanent creativity emergent from formal, impersonal life as a pathway for resistance to biopolitics. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explores masochism as the inversion of the sadistic, biopolitical use of the body which can bring forth genuinely new expressions. Agamben dismisses masochistic creativity because it leaves the dialectical ontology of biopower intact to conceptualize his form-of-life as a space of indiscernibility between ontological essence and legal-political actualization. For Agamben, (...) the form-of-life escapes biopolitical capture because it is absolutely detached from its relations. This article argues that the radicalness of this detachment calls into question the political capacity offered by the form-of-life to actively change the relations of biopower. Against this background, Deleuze’s masochistic eroticization of power offers an alternative conceptualization of relationality as external to its terms and productive of expressions which are both thoroughly immanent and genuinely creative. (shrink)

In taking up Deleuze's differential diagnosis by observing Masoch's literary practice and extracting his libidinal principles of imperatives, contracts, fetishism and rituals, I demonstrate Deleuzian libidinal symptomatology as a specific semiotics in the service of schizoanalysis. I shall argue that in Masoch the schizoanalytic curettage of the unconscious is executed as schizoid waiting where the fleeting outer symptoms of pain–pleasure reveal the masochist's desired inner splitting of the senses.Several critical-clinical inroads to the schizoanalytic project can be envisaged. Initially, Masoch's visionary (...) concept of sexualised world history is supported by his strategic move to the law of the oral mother, yet then extended by Deleuze's concept of (inter)maternal symbolic which speculates on the fantasised rebirth of a sexless or hermaphroditic man. Finally, the parodic enactment of eros and thanatos functions as technique of dialectical disguise within the masochist's scheme of practising libidinal liberation.Masochism considered as a state of bodily experimentation which turns the oedipal law upside down, emerges as a distinct literary genre in Deleuzian aesthetics. (shrink)

Recent work on pain focuses on the question ‘what makes pains unpleasant’. Second-order desire views claim that the unpleasantness of pain consists in a second-order intrinsic desire that the pain experience itself cease or stop. This paper considers a significant objection to second-order desire views by considering the case of the masochist. It is argued that various ways in which the second-order desire view might try to account for the case of the masochist encounter problems. The conclusion is that until (...) there is a convincing explanation of how second-order desire views can handle masochistic psychology, theorists should look elsewhere for an account of pains unpleasantness. (shrink)

In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze remarks that masochism may be reflected on from three perspectives: as a pleasure–pain alliance, as an enactment of humiliation and slavery, and as a consideration of the enslavement of contractual relations. Later Deleuze and Guattari consider masochism in terms of an ontology of desire – in terms of virtuality rather than extensity. I argue that while the actualisation of pain might be considered secondary, and is oftentimes portrayed as incidental in popular depictions, it (...) also constitutes the exhaustive/exhausted and refrain functions of masochism so that the masochist might be thought of as the figure of exhaustion. (shrink)

(2009). Recovering Difference in the Deleuzian Dichotomy of Masochism-Without-Sadism. Angelaki: Vol. 14, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part one, pp. 27-43.

Hegel’s famous analyses of the ‘master-slave dialectic’, and the more general struggle for recognition which it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bound up with the dominance of this idea, however, has been a corresponding treatment of sadism and masochism as complicit projects that are mutually necessary for one another in a manner that is structurally isomorphic with the way in which master and slave depend on one another. In clinical diagnoses (...) it is almost invariably asserted that sadism and masochism are causally connected, with one of these ‘pathologies’ being seen to derive from an inversion or displacement of the other. Deleuze, however, in Difference and Repetition, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, and elsewhere, rejects the primacy of the master-slave dialectic for understanding social relations, at least insofar as it relies upon the themes of negativity, contradiction, opposition, and he also rejects the resultant treatment of sadism and masochism. Moreover, if his symptomatology of the latter (especially masochism) convinces us that the master-slave dialectic not only does not understand these ways of existing, but necessarily could not, then we are faced with an important challenge to any conception of social relations that is too closely tied to the dialectic of lordship and bondage as it is sometimes known. This paper, then, is composed of four sections: 1. an exposition of Hegel’s treatment of the master-slave dialectic; 2. a selective account of later understandings of social relations that are indebted to it; 3. a recital of Deleuze’s objections to the master-slave dialectic and its reliance upon three key components: contradiction, opposition, and negativity; and 4. an argument, extending Deleuze’s work, for the manner in which the master-slave dialectic has also been bound up with, and made possible, the belief in a ‘sado-masochistic’ unity (i.e. the way in which they are envisaged as complementary opposites, or as causally connected symptoms). (shrink)

(2009). “Twenty Paragraphs of Written Instructions”. Angelaki: Vol. 14, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part one, pp. 59-68.

(2009). Text and deployment of the masochist. Angelaki: Vol. 14, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part one, pp. 45-57.

This article introduces and explores the concept of emotional consumption through an analysis of an exotic dance club in the New England area. Through understanding how regular customers consume the services offered in an exotic dance club, I show how consuming service labor differs dramatically from consuming objects of exchange. Emotional consumption involves psychosocial dynamics, which emerge from the intersubjective relationships between the consumer and the dancer who is providing a service. In this exchange, the consumer engages in an interaction (...) where the boundary between pure economic exchange begins to merge with a sense of relationality. (shrink)

The late Richard Rorty has sometimes been described as a controversial, or even outrageous, thinker. Yet the reasons that stand behind such a reputation are obviously quite different from in the ca...