Masochism
and Disembowelment:
Parody,
Shock, and the Drawing of Blood
I. Introduction
The
dialectical transformation of elements into their opposites, the
bursting-forth of identity from within a system of differences, is
always a shock. Perhaps, then, the pure form of such a transformation
is the absolute shock of reversal encountered in masochism, that from
pain to pleasure. Transposed
from the realm of the conceptual, and even of the experiential, we
have in masochism pure shock,
simultaneously immaculate and sordid, lofty
and base, utterly contradictory:
“There is something in pleasure’s satisfaction that is distinctly
unpleasant” (Phillips 36). Such
are the stakes of the masochistic event, though perhaps only at first
pass. In other words, pain
and pleasure may seem to be the primary opposing pair, but in their
very opposition, since so strong, they show themselves to be in fact
the same thing, so that perhaps instead of pain and pleasure the
fundamental (or at least the more interesting) pair might be feeling
and unfeeling.
Indeed,
the shock of feeling, or more particularly of touching, may be all
that there is. In any
case, the relational aspect of masochism must be stressed—it is
always a touching, a sharing, and the shock is not restricted to the
submissive: “To be doted
upon beyond reason tends to produce the reaction of loathing in the
object of devotion… They [masochists or otherwise
unrequited lovers] arouse in us a feeling of contempt, of scorn, as
if slugs were crawling on our flesh” (Phillips 81). The
classic example would be Sacher-Masoch's Venus
in Furs, wherein
Severin's Domme,
Wanda, continually
drives her servant away in disgust towards his groveling
self-debasement until
his final emotional self-destruction.
Masochism
is never a solitary endeavor.
First
then: a disclaimer as well as a brief checklist for a masochistic
encounter. The masochism here analyzed, since it comes from
Sacher-Masoch himself, is primarily that between a male masochist and
a female dominant, or “woman torturer”. While this is not
necessary, I was able to utilize previous scholarship on this setup
due to its literary presence in such writers as Masoch, Swinburne,
and others. In any case,
besides the two participants, a masochistic encounter may involve
humiliation (both verbal and through action), a series of commands,
erotic bondage, punishment of various kinds, and flagellation. For
all this to occur smoothly and with consent, a contract is usually
drawn up, either written or verbal, in which the particularities,
especially the limits, of the encounter are laid out. In more extreme
cases, this contract confers extra-legal (read: illegal) powers upon
the dominant, such as complete control over the masochist for an
unspecified period—Masoch's real-life contract with Wanda was of
this type, a long-term “slave” contract as opposed to an
encounter-only model. Regardless,
the contract and also the
states of mind of the subjects involved
are
what clearly differentiate
masochism from torture as
such.
In the first section, entitled
“Masochism & Agony”, I will take a dialectical approach to
the masochistic subject and his
relation to experience,
the senses, the
woman torturer, and of
course himself.
From the work of Walter Benjamin (and indirectly also from Georg
Simmel), I will draw a theory of the defensive ego in the face of
shocks, as well as the importance of anxiety (which
concept, however, I will discipline with that of “parody”).
To this I will also apply Catherine Malabou's theory of the plastic
self-determination of substance, in order to better understand the
relation between the masochistically-let-in
shock and the subject, how they might interact. In
this regard it would be impossible not to cite Hegel, and therefore I
will take a closer look at
several sections from the Phenomenology
of Spirit,
particularly
“Sense Certainty” and the Master-Slave dialectic. Next,
I will return
to parody in the wake of these discussions and continue to elaborate
the relation of masochism to the dialectic of sense certainty and the
possible undoing thereof. Finally, I will examine the character of
“the Greek” in Sacher-Masoch's work and show that the gaze is
impotent even when a third party is added to the masochistic
encounter.
In
the second section, entitled “Masochism & Skin”, I will turn
primarily to Niklaus Largier's In
Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal and
to Gilles Deleuze's
Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty in Venus in
Furs. Here, I will show that
perhaps the previous
psychoanalytic reading was
followed a bit too hastily. First,
the focus will be on masochistic anticipation as a state rather than
an instance. Second, touching will be examined in its relation to the
masochistic contract. Third, I will discuss Deleuze's concepts of
disavowal and waiting, and show that they are important supplementary
concepts. Finally, I will discuss the liberatory potential of
masochism as an imaginative enterprise, drawing on Deleuze's theory
of masochism
as the rewriting, or rather the re-staging, of the oedipal myth.
Strictly speaking, this is also a “psychoanalytic” reading, but
it is one that is instated by the masochistic participants in a
radical act of self-creation, and therefore
its implications are vastly
different.
In
the third section, entitled “Masochism & Entrails”, I will
attempt to lay out a theory of the masochistic event itself,
specifically in its effects on the subject. To this end I am struck
by Niklaus Largier's statement: “Flagellation is also a radical
affirmation and negation of all images of finitude, all forms of
radical spiritualism and radical materialism” (Largier 31). I will
thus describe the death and rebirth of the subject with reference to
the Crucifixion and to Aztec human sacrifice, with a special emphasis
on the immanent spreading-out of one's entrails. This
is masochism at its most orgiastic, its most anarchic,
but also therefore at its most terrifying and deadly. Therefore,
I will attempt to convey something of that experience and present a
conclusion bringing together the insights of the preceding sections.
II. Masochism & Agony
Pain, both physical and mental, is an absolutely essential part of
masochism. The polarization of pleasure and pain is what allows for
the complexity of the masochistic experience, for the subtle and
delicate preparation of the erotic contract. This setup, this
difference of the two concepts held apart, however, is deconstructed
in the course of the encounter, and the manner in which that
deconstruction occurs is of prime importance.
In other words, it is indispensable that the masochist in some sense
regulate the flow of experience, that incoming stimuli are subjected
to a filtering process. It is perhaps counter-intuitive, then, that
the masochistic ego is to be conceived as an opening.
Masochism is a letting-in of
experience before it is a regulation thereof. Fundamentally,
masochism is the opening-up of the ego in the face of the world
brought to a particular level of intensity.
It
is in this manner that masochism works against
the senses. The senses
are—and this is of course strange to think about—primarily tools
of regulation and rejection, keeping out vast amounts of information
the processing of which would surely
drive us mad: “In
Freud's view, consciousness... has another important function:
protection against stimuli” (Benjamin 161).
. Though it may sound absurd,
the senses work
against sense.
They are gateways, wardens
whose sole effort is concentrated on the insurmountable
task of shutting us off from the outside
world.
Thankfully,
the senses are helped in their task by another, impossibly strong
force: anxiety. Anxiety is
the ever-vigilant state of preparation for shock, the premeditation
of possibilities that allows for their handling by the ego: “The
more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely
are they to have a traumatic effect” (Benjamin 161).
One cannot truly be shocked when one has been sufficiently anxious,
and indeed the ego-shattering shock might just as well be called a
surprise. Always worrying
about the future, the anxious
ego is able to stave off the
vast majority of possible injuries by disconnectedly prejudging them.
The problem—and what a
problem it is!—is that too much anxiety is poor medicine, and by
its self-reinforcing nature it is most assuredly always too much.
Indeed, the affliction of our
age might be said to be anxiety or otherwise anxious disorders.
Indeed, the struggle against
this unholy extension of the senses is the very definition of the
artistic endeavor: “...the
mystery of art begins right there, where the senses cease to be of
any use” (Huysmans
17).
It is for
this reason that
Sacher-Masoch's “supersensualism” should be interpreted as
“beyond” or even “without” the senses rather than indicating
an abundance of sense experience.
But certainly anxiety and anxious
sensualism are not the only forces at work here. This
brings us back to masochism, the controlled opening of the floodgates
of sense. According to Anita Phillips:
"Sexual arousal happens when a stimulus is so perturbing, so
intolerable, that one's sense of a controlling self breaks down.
Masochism is the ground of sexuality, not an individual aberration:
what we seek in it is a kind of ecstatic pain, a bodice-ripping, an
overwhelming physical sensation" (43).
Or, according to Leo Bersani,
“Sexuality would be that
which is intolerable to the structured self” (38). In
this sense, masochism (which is, according to the line we are
developing here, synonymous with sexuality itself) is transgressive.
Instead of transgressing a
pre-given (or rather
pre-implied) limit, as occurs
in the writings of the
Marquis de Sade, masochism plays with the very notion of the limit
and lowers it through parody to the point where the superego itself
is an impossibility. In
this sense, masochism's operation is quite different from that of
transgression—and this mirrors the literary techniques of
Sacher-Masoch, who never describes obscenities and whose characters
are always clothed. As Deleuze notes, “The body of the victim
remains in a strange state of indeterminacy except where it receives
the blows” (24). Compare this with Sade, whom Bataille takes as the
paragon of transgression.1
In any case, the complexity
and seeming absurdity of the stipulations of the masochistic contract
serve this very function, that of destroying and reconstituting the
limit so that failure and hence punishment are utterly assured.
But
what allows masochism this strange
power to trump anxiety? In a
word: parody. It is only
mockery, twisted self-debasement, humiliation and self-parody that
can weaken the ego to the extent necessary to experience a shock. In
this way, conscious manipulation can be utilized, awareness can be
turned against itself, for awareness is nothing but a compressed
point of anxiety: “Masochism protects you from your engulfing fear
of the entire universe by encouraging one part of it to invade you
and ravish you” (Phillips 63). The
ego may be too strong initially, a reified extra-subjective thing,
but through parody it can be loosened
and made plastic, pliant to the whip.
Parody, specifically masochistic self-parody, is the absurd
over-extension of
disciplinary structure.
In
the face of such power, the submissive trembles. This
utter power can be taken to stand in for death itself, as evidenced
from Sacher-Masoch's real-life contract with Wanda: “...I [Wanda]
have the power and the right to torture you [Masoch] to death by the
most horrible methods imaginable” (qtd. in Deleuze 235).
But this is not the case of the sadist bearing down on a
victim—rather, the staged, theatrical nature of the parody is
essential.
The
aforementioned contract also reminds us that it is not just
torture: “You have nothing save me; for you I am everything, your
life, your future, your happiness, your unhappiness, your torment and
your joy” (qtd. in Deleuze 235-236).
It is thus as
an imitation, particularly
of courtly love, that
masochism debases the
masochist through his self-othering, through the over-extension of
his own feelings, his far-too-passionate love. It is not a simple
humiliation as one might encounter in a schoolroom, but is a
movement-from, a flowing-forth, a radically self-originated and
even self-originating act,
where “self” is quite
distinct from the anxious ego.
Most importantly, it induces a state of nearly absolute vulnerability
which alone could lead to masochist's goal: “One
could deduce that the diminishing of the ego in masochism is a
prelude to its annihilation during the sexual act” (Phillips 105).
This is only our first
encounter with parody, the
full and relevant meaning of which will be successively elaborated.
In
a more general sense, we might say that masochistic parody is a
making-plastic, the process of plasticity, to use Catherine Malabou's
terminology. It is activity done in preparation, an attempt to see
what is coming, an anticipation, while at the same time what occurs
during climax (not necessarily, and indeed not even usually the
genital sexual kind) is utterly unpredictable. Here
we must draw attention to two apparently competing images of
plastic—that of the plastic arts and that of plastic explosives.
Even the latter must be carefully and conceptually manufactured. In
the context of masochism, perhaps we would do well to focus on this
latter determination, without on that account discounting the former.
Under this conception, climax
is the Event, the zero-point of madness, the eternally-proclaimed
apocalypse, and parody is the millenarian devotion thereto, all the
more disturbing for its seeming
lack of sincerity. This
metaphor of apocalypse and preparation captures the liberatory
potential of masochism quite nicely: it is not merely a matter of the
deferral of Absolute Knowledge or the end of history, but rather it
structures all activity and exists in the present not as a conceptual
possibility but as anticipation, as a tense state of being. In
parody, everything is at stake for the masochist, and hence his every
muscle is taught. Contrary to anxiety, however, this preparation is
effected not through contraction but through over-extension, not
through a mental rehearsal of possibilities but through stretching
the very concept of possibility.
Such an activity could not
fail to leave its mark on the body.
It
is here that the opening section of Hegel's Phenomenology,
that on sense-certainty, might be of use. There,
it was shown that even the concepts of “here” and “now”,
seemingly immediate, contain within them in implicit form the
greatest heights of abstraction and even the greatest denial of
immanent being. Once the dialectic is started, it is hard to go back
because, as Malabou notes, cultural assimilation is a sped-up
traversing of these very dialectical ruts (146-152).
That is to say, discourse itself creates
and accelerates dialectical
simplification. This
simplification, however, while unavoidable, need not be a
strait-jacket, as so many have supposed. Rather, masochism
is that process which “reverses” the dialectic and makes it
plastic once more.
Masochism's aforementioned play
with limits, its infliction
of true bodily pain on the masochist, and its overextension of both
tender love and cruelest discipline, push back dialectical
development to a ground-state or zero-point, though
distinct from sexual climax. This
shock creates fertile ground for an alternate development where
before there was a stagnant identity. Thus at this level masochism
works against the dialectic. However, this is not the whole of its
action, for it is not only a shock that interrupts the structured
self. It is also a creative
restructuring of that self. In other words, masochism is not just a
pain that destroys structure, for this would only open it up to be
re-assimilated. Rather, and this cannot be stressed enough, the
contract confers what may be considered a premeditated structure on
the post-masochistic self—it
is the herald not of anarchy but of self-creation; the fact that the
resulting self, due to the properly traumatic nature of the event, is
unpredictable is of no consequence, and should not surprise us. This
aspect is simply another modality of Malabou's “to see (what is)
coming”.
Of perhaps even more obvious application is the Phenomenology
chapter on master and slave, but this obviousness may turn out to be
seriously misleading. There,
Hegel lays out a dialectic of recognition, often represented as that
of the gaze. Perfect mutual
recognition thus becomes the basis of absolute self-consciousness.
While it might be tempting to
equate the master with the Domme, and the masochist with the slave,
this is unfruitful to say the least. First, it
is the masochist who is in control, not in the sense that he has a
superior potential for self-consciousness, but in that he controls
and structures the masochistic encounter
as far as possible, which
only then becomes the
basis for changes in consciousness; the order is the
reverse of that found in Hegel.
Second, the
gaze plays almost no part in masochism per se,
the focus being rather on touching,
a mutual interaction of quite a different order (we
will return to this later).
Third, while both masochist
and slave experience abstract negativity, which makes the both of
them tremble, its effects in each case remain to the other relatively
incommensurable. For the slave, there exists a world of positivities
that are cleaved by the negative power of thought which first gained
potency through the abstract negativity of death. The standing or
perpetual negation of the slave's subject is a testament to such an
experience. For the masochist, on the other hand, the
de-structuring of the self (a type of abstract negativity) confronts
something already negative.
In other words, for the masochist there already exists his negative
self, which has however hardened into dialectical modes of discourse.
The masochistic event serves to de-structure that self, through
trembling (a type of
negativity), which however
utilizes and makes reference to a positive basis, that of rebirth.
For the masochist, and we
will return to this in the final section, the problem is not to enact
a dialectic onto a positive plane, but rather first to undo
that dialectic, the only safe passage between the twin rocks of life
and death (as opposed to living and
dying).
Thus
the function of parody is of utmost importance, as it is the
precondition for this safe passage. Again,
this is not an activity of the gaze. Parody
is theatrical insofar as it is role-play, and not insofar
as
it relies on an audience or
spectator. Even the staging
between the dominant and the masochist is not predicated on seeing or
even on recognition: “Masochistic love is very much interested in
the person of the other, but not all that much in the other as a
person” (Phillips 58). There
are, however, certain types of sexual exhibitionism or polyamory
employed in masochistic fantasy, the most important of which is
undoubtedly the appearance of “the Greek” in Sacher-Masoch's
fiction.
This
character functions as a third party privy to the interactions of the
masochist and the Domme, and is
in this regard even in league with the Domme against the masochist.
Importantly,
the Greek as archetype, while apparently sought out by Sacher-Masoch
in his actual life (see Appendix III in Deleuze), causes Masoch's
characters excruciating pain, and is even the reason for Severin's
implosion at the end of Venus
in Furs.
The
Greek, however, is not a spectator and indeed cannot be, for in
Masoch the gaze (and
following Hegel, this means language as well)
has no power, its detached Logos utterly incompatible with the
tirelessly
sought shock: “Of
course, language never succeeds in the incarnation of experience, but
perhaps it is at its worst when attempting to describe pain”
(Phillips 31).
Deprived of the power of touch, especially that sanctioned
by the masochistic contract,
the Greek would be both powerless and useless, rather a pathetic
voyeur than a (too)
cruel
instrument of humiliation.
III. Masochism & Skin
It seems that the conclusion to the previous section took us far and
away from the activity of the ego that was our first axiom. There, we
concluded that masochism could be conceived as a ritualized imitation
or structuring, a mimetic rather than symbolic act which deals
directly in the extremes of sense. Indeed, we must depart from Hegel
for a while and continue our analysis on the level of the skin, where
the playing-out of the drama of masochism takes place, namely,
ritualized bodily space. It is here that we will come from a somewhat
different (though of course related!) angle and perhaps refine
several prior assumptions about the proper import of the masochistic
experience. First, the tense
state of being that is masochistic experience will be contrasted with
a view of the event which is primarily focused on an instantaneous or
sexually “normal” climax.
Second, it
will be seen that this
state of being is incompatible with a representational or
gaze-based account of
masochism, and that the
more democratic modality of touching is thus of prime importance.
Third,
the concept of parody
will be supplemented with
disavowal and waiting, two concepts suggested as relevant by Gilles
Deleuze in his Masochism.
Following
in the same vein, I will discuss some
implications of Deleuze's theory of masochism as the creative
re-making of the oedipal myth.
Focusing
on the ego, “One could
deduce that the diminishing of the ego in masochism is a prelude to
its annihilation during the sexual act” (Phillips 105). Replacing
the “diminishing of the ego” with our tense state of being, we
are left with masochism as a state of anticipation for a future
conclusion, the sexual act, the orgasm-as-Event. Taken
at face value, however, this completely misses the point of
masochism: as both Largier and Phillips note, it often happens that
in masochistic encounters there is no sexual
climax, no orgasm, often no
genital contact whatsoever (the English whipping-houses are a good
example of this). Thus, the importance of the state
of being, wherein the future is here and now, yet
remaining distinct. The
tenseness of this state
applies to
temporality itself—it
takes the diffuseness of time and forcibly folds it into the body,
creating disorder within the muscles and sinews of the masochist. In
other words, the tense state of being is an anticipation of the here
which therefore becomes the now.
That anticipation is not achieved by a temporal differentiation
wherein the present separates
the future from itself (and
thereby creates the
conditions of anticipation),
but by the exact reverse
process: the projected future
is merged with the here-and-now to create the conditions of being and
therefore of experience. If
one were to look for masochistic “climax” as for a point in time,
the state thereof
would be missed. This climax
does not occur within a moment, but is instead a point of maximal
contraction that thereby destroys the temporality that would label it
as such.
It
is in this sense a mimetic
and not a representational-projectional state—there
is no correspondence-between and therefore no discursive truth.
Perhaps agreeing with this,
Largier writes, in the
context of self-flagellation in religious asceticism, “Against
all expectations, there is no concealed truth at work here—no
spiritual, animal, or legal depth of the body. Instead, there is an
extroversion that stages the ungraspability of anything inward while
also awakening anxiety, desire, or horror” (15).
It is in this play, between
the self
who happens to suffer
and the suffering-self,
in other words between the
accidental and the essential,
that the masochistic event takes place. But
this, while necessary, is not yet a sufficient condition for the
event—above all, it requires not only
the “none” of the masochist's self but the “two”, masochist
and dominant.
In
masochism, it is not the gaze that makes actual the sharing of sense,
but touch, the contact of skin. In “normal” sexuality, this
contact is that of skin on skin, a single plane of interaction. We
can thus point to masochism as a reinterpretation of this touching, a
pushing of that seemingly
democratic action to its
breaking point, its most sordid and vilified extreme. Here,
there is enacted a hierarchical structure, a power relation
controlling who gets to touch who, where, and how, in a parodically
over-ritualized manner. Masochistic
touching is of course not driven by actual force, but by the
democratic contract—perhaps it is this aspect that makes it so
shocking. As when a dictator
is voted into power, we are in masochism confronted with something
that draws its greatest effect
from the
utter reversal of the supposed spirit of its own preconditions, but
which nevertheless fulfills them and even brings them to a
sort of perfection. The
gaze, by contrast, is already too hierarchical to account for
masochistic nuance.
Rather than parody, Deleuze suggests the concepts of waiting and
disavowal to describe the masochistic event. In contrast to the
negation of discursive reason (as found in the work of the Marquis de
Sade), masochism utilizes a suspenseful disavowal in the imaginary
order (see Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). Deleuze's explication of
disavowal is worth quoting at length:
It might seem that a disavowal is, generally speaking, much more
superficial than a negation or even a partial destruction. But this
is not so, for it represents and entirely different operation.
Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of
an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying,
but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it
suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a
new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it. (28)
It is in this sense that masochism is connected to creation and
creativity for Deleuze. The masochistic encounter does not destroy or
negate the conditions in which it was framed (the contract), but
rather allows for the playing-out of possibilities, up to and perhaps
beyond the radical dissolution of even the appearance of the
subject, that
which could enter into the contract in the first place. Masochistic
disavowal, and in particular the coldness of the interactions between
dominant and masochist, “is
not the negation of feeling but rather the disavowal of sensuality”
(Deleuze 46).
Such
disavowal must be combined with waiting (for
this is the dramatic suspension),
which we have previously indicated
with the designation “tense state of being”. However, Deleuze
here points to two types of waiting, or rather two moments contained
in masochistic pure waiting: the first is “essentially tardy,
always late and always postponed”, and the second is that “on
which depends the speeding up of the awaited object” (63). The
first is thus, more
concretely, the lack of genital climax; the second is the compression
of future into the now which manifests itself to the masochist as an
acceleration—this is thus revealed as a justification of our
previous use of “anticipation”.
Disavowal
and parody thus come together: “Disavowal
is a reaction of the imagination, as negation is an operation of the
intellect or of thought” (Deleuze 110).
Imagination
is the tie that binds together the “theatrics” and the
“experience” of masochism, that reveals play as theater and vice
versa. There
is no need of a spectator, but rather the two actors, performing for
themselves and each for the other. The
performance is not necessarily one for the gaze, but for the
imagination, for imaginative creativity. While appearing to
approximate its ideal, it might be better said that masochism is
its own ideal, in that the masochistic encounter is not a
representation or even an instantiation of the abstract form of
overextended courtly love. Rather, the event must
be held in tension by both parody and disavowal: parody, because it
is in the enactment of an exaltation taken too far that allows the
mind as much as the body to be cut; disavowal, because it
is only in the dramatic suspension of the given that this exaltation
can take place on the plane of the imagination. And
how else could a real parody function but by disavowal? Through
disavowal, the primary function of parody changes from (irreverent)
approximation of an ideal type to a creative actualization.
We
now turn to Deleuze's theory of masochism as a creative remaking,
through disavowal, of the Oedipus myth. Here
we will focus on the literary case of male masochism as narrated in
Sacher-Masoch's Venus
in Furs,
though
the implications could easily be applied elsewhere. There,
masochism is an incestuous fantasy wherein the father has no place.
First, the
woman torturer is imbued with the symbolic power of the father or of
the superego, and thereby does she punish the masochist—it is not,
however, the ego of the masochist that takes the beating but the
likeness of the father (Deleuze 58). Thus, the
masochist imagines (and
experiences!)
a world without the father, through whose symbolic death (in
the
act of punishment) the masochist is reborn: “The
masochist practices three forms of disavowal at once:
the first magnifies the mother by attributing to her the phallus
instrumental to rebirth; the second excludes the father, since he has
no part in this rebirth; and the third relates to sexual pleasure,
which is interrupted, deprived of its genitality and transformed into
the pleasure of being reborn” (Deleuze 87). The
first is the giving of absolute power to the woman torturer (the
mother), the second is the punishing of the father in the masochist,
and the third explains the lack of genital sexuality in masochistic
encounters.
From
another angle, we see
the woman torturer invested with the myriad powers of the three
Freudian mothers: oral, anal, and genital. If
the woman torturer strays too far into any one of these territories,
then she cannot be capable of fulfilling the masochistic contract.
For example, at the beginning of Venus
in Furs,
Wanda is a purely hetaeric, pagan woman. In her own words:
I admire the serene sensuality
of the Greeks—pleasure without pain... Nature admits of no
stability in the relations between man and woman... Despite holy
ceremonies, oaths and contracts, no permanence can ever be imposed
on love; it is the most changeable element in our transient lives.
(Sacher-Masoch, qtd. in Deleuze 131-134)
But
on the other side, the sadistic anal mother is also dangerous and
unfit for masochism. At the end of the story, Wanda has gone too far
in this direction in her humiliation of Severin at the hands of the
Greek. Thus, a stable medium must be found, so that the woman
torturer is both the strict and punishing anal mother and the wild
and sensual pagan—this is the function of the imaginatively-created
all-encompassing oral mother, in whom are subsumed the other two.
Such an integration is obviously very difficult, and it is this
difficulty that thwarts Severin's wishes time and time again.
In
any case, “The
threefold division of the mother [anal, oral, genital] literally
expels the father from the masochistic universe” (Deleuze 56). The
mother is everything, and the father nothing. This imaginative vision
is nothing short of the vision or rather the symbolic enactment of a
new society. As
Deleuze rather beautifully puts it:
"Masochistic
coldness represents the freezing point, the point of dialectical
transmutation, a divine latency corresponding to the catastrophe of
the Ice Age. But under the cold remains a supersensual
sentimentality buried under the ice and protected by fur; this
sentimentality radiates in turn through the ice as the generative
principle of a new order, a specific wrath and a specific cruelty"
(46).
What
these psychoanalytic considerations teach us is not that the
masochistic event must
follow this structure,
but rather that the
specific techniques of masochism allow for such creative remaking of
what were previously supposed to be solid and unchangeable psychical
facts, namely
the Oedipal fantasy.
Indeed, “There
is no specifically masochistic phantasy, but rather a masochistic art
of phantasy” (Deleuze 64). This
imaginative capacity is, in the last analysis, the most important and
defining aspect of masochism, what separates it from all other forms
of truly erotic sexuality: “Masochism
is both relieved and fulfilled by death, and to stop the play of
representations perhaps condemns fantasy to the climatic and suicidal
pleasure of mere self-annulment” (Bersani 46).
IV. Masochism & Entrails
We now have a relatively developed constellation of concepts at our
disposal, some newly tempered and some borrowed: parody, disavowal,
waiting/anticipation, touching, contract, imagination, climax. We are
now in a position to describe, as thoroughly as possible, the
masochistic event itself, the radical implications of an existence
framed by masochism. In order to do this, we must reference the
subject (and its dissolution), if only because it is a peculiar state
of the subject that distinguishes masochism from torture or sadism.
Furthermore, it is in the play between sense and structure that the
activity of masochism takes place. This relation between sense and
structure, self and other, the experience of the masochist when
confronted with a cruel and excruciating punishment, can be conceived
as a disembowelment of the
self in all its modalities.
Disembowelment
is the violent making-outer of the inner, of what is vital inside the
mental or bodily organism. In masochism, the subject is disemboweled,
his inner experience cut out of him and spread out over the plane of
immanent sense. In this
offering of the self, there is a marked similarity to both the Aztecs
and to Christ on the cross on which it is worth quoting at length:
"They
[the Aztecs and others]
believe that their gods will not be happy with the blood alone, but
that it has to come from the heart, and that the heart itself has to
be sacrificed. This, as well, has been shown by Christ. He was not
content with the fact alone that he sacrificed his most holy blood
for the sins of the world... but he wanted that they opened his
breast and side after his death. There, in his side, lay hidden the
most valuable part, that is, his most beloved, most tender, and most
holy heart, which burned beyond measure in his love of mankind. He
wished that even the last drop of blood in his heart should be
spent. Thus he wished to show that he gave not only the blood in his
body, the blood in his limbs and vessels, but the very blood of his
own heart" (Diez and Vetter, qtd. in
Largier 189-90).
In
these symbolic acts, God or gods of some kind become corporeal: God
becomes man through Christ as the
Aztec
gods become incarnated in ixiptlas.
Subsequently, the incarnation
is not just killed but radically opened up,
so that its insides are exposed, or even, in the case of Aztec human
sacrifice, torn out. Thus we
have a perfect symbolic representation of the masochistic event: the
masochistic subject is made vulnerable and then, neither destroyed
nor negated, it is opened up and spread out. There
is no sublation here, as if the progression were a dialectical
synthesis. Rather, when the subject is spread out, the dialectic is
undone (at least for a time). Again,
this undoing does not result in infinite chaos, though it may partake
of such a thing. Instead, the
dead subject is reborn, just as Christ was resurrected. This rebirth
is into a new order, though perhaps the pure pleasure in being thus
reborn trumps any particularity thereof.
After
Christ's death there occurred
a series of shocking events, including earthquakes and the opening of
tombs. At this Saint Longinus
declared, “Truly this man
was God's Son!” (Matthew 27:54). Experiencing the death of one's
subject is an absurdity (like
Christ's death, the fact that he “was” the son of God, has ceased
to be so!) after which one
might say, “Truly this my
subject had to die, though I
thought it impossible!”
Without its entrails coloring
all concepts and actions red with blood, the subject would be reduced
to the gaze, the solipsistic
God of pure transcendence. If
one must truly touch everything, share sense with everything, even
one's deepest
insides must be unraveled from the
body cavity and flattened
into a massive gory antenna.
Materially
speaking, it is the contract that structures this spreading-out and
prevents the simple dispersion of the subject into momentary death,
only to be reconstituted in just as joyless and powerless a self as
before. The
contract creates the conditions for parody, which thereby creates the
conditions for death. The relation of this so-called death to
discourse and structure is complex: “...Flagellation
cannot and should not be narrated, but rather...
the event itself and its power of arousal demand to be awakened by
narrating them” (Largier 28). Though
Largier speaks again with reference to ascetic flagellation, the same
insight applies to masochistic flagellation, and masochism in
general. In
particular, the masochistic event is contained within
the narrative structure of the parodic contract. Even though such an
event at its most extreme is impossible to narrate or even to
describe in language, the context of masochism does it
anyway.
The
liberatory potential lies in this, that the
dead subject is (ideally) reborn in an order of his own choosing, if
only symbolically and for a time: “One
can certainly speak here [again,
ascetic imitation of Christ]
of a radical individualization” (Largier 57). It
is not transcendent
indeterminacy that marks the masochistic subject, but neither is it
immanent determinacy. Rather, it
is the art of self-creation, of fantasy, and, most importantly, the
twin
virtues of
joy and
knowledge
found
simultaneously
in one's own death and
rebirth:
“For man to finally be revealed to himself he would have to die,
but he would have to do so while living—while watching himself
cease to be” (Bataille, qtd. in Derrida 257).
The
deepest and most vital aspects of the masochist are thus forcibly
expurgated by the violence of a world without dialectics. The
brutal
flagellation, the cruel humiliation, the ropes tied just barely too
tight—all
these together constitute a
kind of symbolic death. For a time, only pain is real, and then after
that only feeling. Then one opens one's eyes and sees one's shattered
thought-forms beneath the boot of the Domme, and one trembles with
the realization of Saint Longinus. It is only then that masochistic
parody is completed, with the
birth of a
new self.
Works
Cited
Benjamin,
Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.
Deleuze,
Gilles.
Masochism:
An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, together with the entire
text of Venus
in Furs by
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. G.
Braziller, 1971. Print.
Derrida,
Jacques. Writing
and Difference.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Print.
Hegel,
GWF. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans.
J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967. Print.
Huysmans,
J.
K.
La-Bas: A
Journey Into the Self.
Sawtry: Dedalus, 2001.
Print.
Largier,
Niklaus.
In Praise of the Whip:
A Cultural History of Arousal. New
York: MIT Press, 2007. Print.
Malabou,
Catherine.
The Future of Hegel:
Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic.
New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Phillips,
Anita.
A Defense of
Masochism. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Print.
1See
Bataille's Erotism
