The problem at stake in the Play!Fight! project seems to be: if perverse sexual practices and political activism are normally understood as separate sets of activities, restricted to their own non-communicating spheres, then where might we find them unified? Or if we desire such a connection, must we construct it ourselves?
Some of the most stimulating insights into this problem can be found in the writings of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, both on his own, and in collaboration with Felix Guattari. Deleuze discussed the subjects of masochism and politics at various points in his writing career. Two specific texts will be considered here, to indicate the evolution of his approach as his philosophy developed, and as he returned repeatedly to the topic: first, the essay Coldness and Cruelty (1967), and secondly, ‘November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?’, a section from A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written with Guattari. The differences between these two books are striking, and they represent perhaps incompatible perspectives on our opening questions.
In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze chooses to discuss Masochism by returning to a foundational text on the subject: the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, particularly Venus in Furs. At the time that Deleuze wrote this essay, Sade had been widely discussed in French intellectual circles, and one of the main achievements of the essay was to re-establish Masoch’s reputation as an artist in his own right, as opposed to simply a complementary shadow of Sade. By extension, Deleuze sought to show that ‘sadomasochism’ is a spuriously constructed entity, which ignores the incompatibility between two distinct worlds. Deleuze argues that the sadist and the masochist do not form a couple, but rather sadism and masochism are completely different artistic and sexual systems.
Deleuze constantly emphasises the significance of the revolutionary historical moments to which these authors were responding: in Sade’s case, the event was 1789 (the French Revolution), and in Masoch’s case it was 1848. This was a year of revolution throughout Europe; Masoch, born in Galicia, was involved with the Pan-Slavic movement, and interested in agrarian communism.
On one level, the fictions and sexual practices of both authors can be understood as parodying the philosophies of history which were used to justify the ruling order. They humorously or ironically replay these discourses, in sexualised form, in order to subvert them. Sade and Masoch thus share a common enemy, but they attack it in distinct ways (here we are focussing on the masochistic strategy). The enemy in question is the law, both as a social reality and as an internalised form of order by which human subjects repress their own desires.
In order to understand Deleuze’s sense of ‘the law’, it is necessary to grasp the centrality of the Oedipus complex to his contemporaries’ understanding of Freud: Coldness and Cruelty is written within a psychoanalytic framework, informed by the structuralist emphasis of Jacques Lacan.
Briefly, the Oedipus complex can be summarised by the idea that every boy sexually desires his mother, but fears punishment from his father, who he thus wishes to kill, because the father represents the law against incest. This causes the child anxiety and guilt. In order to resolve his complex, the child has to learn to repress his desire, and eventually transfer it onto another woman. If the child’s progress through the Oedipus complex is unsuccessful, then this arrested development will lead to neuroses, complexes and perversions. Freud, as he sought to institutionalise psychoanalysis, saw the role of the psychoanalyst as being to facilitate the patient’s passage through the Oedipus complex, and thereby to allow each adult to be integrated into his or her proper place in the family.
The argument goes that our attitude to the wider social world outside the family is determined by the fact that we recognise various authority figures (e.g. teachers, police, bosses, judges, political leaders) in the symbolic terms of paternal authority that we learn within the family. If the child successfully resolves his Oedipus complex, that is, if he marries and has children, this will inevitably reproduce the complex for another generation of the family, and perpetuate the cycle. The implicit thrust of Deleuze’s argument in Coldness and Cruelty is that, since the social order is corrupt, perversions such as sadism and masochism are in fact valuable practices of resistance to the normalising tendencies of society. Freud’s unwillingness to face up to this explains the imprecise and contradictory way in which he discussed these perversions.
But Deleuze clearly believed at this point that the discipline of psychoanalysis could still be retained as a liberatory tool, if it could be adapted to accommodate the perversions in all their singularity, and in a non-judgemental fashion. The role of masochism, in Deleuze’s new framework, is to expel the father figure from the fantasy scene of desire, by bestowing the task of punishment on the mother, who then beats out the figure of paternal authority which the son has internalised. This allows him to be ‘reborn’ as a new man, free from the Oedipus complex.
In much the same way that Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex addresses itself primarily to sexual dilemmas faced by men, Deleuze tends to marginalise the question of whether there could be a feminine type of masochism… the relationship of feminism to Deleuze’s philosophy is ambivalent, but in recent years, some writers have begun to argue for his usefulness to feminist theory.
Deleuze published Coldness and Cruelty in 1967, not long before the momentous events of May 1968, including the French general strike and the student protests in Paris. He would meet the revolutionary psychiatrist Felix Guattari soon after. Guattari worked with schizophrenics at the La Borde clinic. Up to this point, for Deleuze, perversion represented the most productive challenge to the Freudian (and familial) framework, but Guattari had discovered that psychosis was unassimilable in an even more radical way. Thus, in their various collaborations, of which the two books called Capitalism and Schizophrenia are the most widely known, it is the ‘schizo’ rather than the pervert who becomes the central protagonist.
In A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of this project, masochism returns in the section entitled ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?’. The difference from the treatment of the topic in Coldness and Cruelty is very striking. Whereas Deleuze had previously focussed on Masoch himself as the archetypal masochist, here anonymous masochists are discussed. And whereas Deleuze had begun from novels, analysing their formal construction in terms of myth and symbol, with Guattari he looks at a different kind of text: not a fantasy to be interpreted, but a program – a set of instructions by way of which the masochist desires his body to be transformed and liberated from restrictive forms of sexual organisation. Masochism is now considered alongside a spectrum of practices, from courtly love to yoga, from experimentation with drugs to the avant-garde writing of Antonin Artaud. The question for Deleuze and Guattari is how to unify these various practices, to find their totality, or plane of consistency. The politics behind this project can be understood as one of solidarity between creative minorities. There is a parallel here with broader revolutionary programs for the reconstruction and renovation of society, and indeed, of the earth itself. This is characteristic of the more materialist basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizoanalysis’ as opposed to psychoanalysis.
Despite their divergence, both texts that have been discussed here are united by the idea that human groups and subjects are constituted by unconscious processes. Whether we acknowledge it or not, desire is productive of both political and personal formations. By a more expansive analysis of sexuality, in its multiple forms, we will comprehend politics more fully – and vice versa: neither field can be understood in isolation. Both the sexual and political spheres are aspects of the same process; it is their separation that is the historical anomaly, and not their connection. By discerning the influences that condition and limit the ways we behave, we can increase our capacity to act affirmatively, across all parts of our lives. Philosophy is one way of developing concepts that will enable us to articulate and discuss the revolutionary task at hand, and Deleuze and Guattari have gone further in this direction than many. It is hoped that their inventive vocabulary will enrich the dialogue that Play!Fight! aims to facilitate.
This article has given a very general indication of the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, both for perverts and activists. There was not space here to provide a sense of the intricate, rigorous and defamiliarizing style of the writing itself, but readers interested in politics, perversion, or both, should feel encouraged to encounter the texts directly…
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