Coldness and Cruelty Notes

Sigler
...
In this view, the masochist is desubjectivizedhe or she emerges qua masochist only through a
process of negation and objectification. But the masochist is not objectified merely because s/he
has forfeited subjectivity: Lacan is specifically not proposing that subjectivity and objectivity are
opposite or mutually exclusive positions. Rather, the masochistic arrangement conflates
subjectivity and objectivity by fashioning the subject into the very lost object that founds the
arrival of that subject. Subjectivity and objectivity in the masochistic arrangement are thereby
indistinguishable and indissoluble. Therefore in perversion the subject is always in some way
present and involved in that fantasy and perversion sustains itself on precisely the same level
as neurosis.65
-The perversion of reading: For Freud, masochism does not stem from firsthand experience
(The individuals from whom the data for these analyses were derived were very seldom beaten
in their childhood), nor primarily from having watched children being beatenthe act of
literary reading is a more significant contributing factor, he claims, having replaced and more
than replaced spectacles of actual violence.14 Freud notes that it was almost always the same
books whose contents gave a new stimulus to the beating-fantasies, such that masochism is not
a matter of reading per se, but of reading perverse material.
Is it the image of drugs as unlawful and pleasure-providing that implicates the subject as already
guilty?
Lacan and Deleuze show us how to bypass the tendency to construe perversion in individual
terms ironically, the very thing often seen as the central inadequacy of psychoanalytic and
Deleuzian approaches to perversion.
In Lacans thinking, subjectivity and masochism are intimately aligned with each other and with
fiction, as the Lacanian subject comes into being only because masochism asks a question of
the nascent subject, forcing narcissistic man [to] enter[ ] as a double into the dialectic of a
fiction.28 But although all subjects find their place in relation to language and in relation to the
question of masochism, masochists in particular get off on language, for the mark itself already
conducts pleasure. (29) What masochism and sadism share, says Lacan, is a confidence in the
glory of a mark, both a world completely and possibly enveloped by signifiers and the mark
[of the rod] on the skin. (30)
The structure of perversion, we might say, corresponds to the way that a writer acquires
his or her subjectivity (authorship, authority) only by becoming language, becoming text,
becoming object that will then be consumed and used by the reader. The author, like the
pervert, fantasizes about becoming an object that will be a wellspring of readerly and
interpretive jouissance.
-Severin in Venus of Furs: I studied everything higgledy-piggledy, unsystematically,
promiscuously: chemistry, alchemy, literature, astronomy, philosophy[.] . . . I read Homer, Virgil,
Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molire, the Koran, the Cosmos,
Casanovas memoirs. I grew more and more confused, eccentric, and suprasensual every day.37
- That is, Sacher-Masoch teaches us to read suprasensual erotics as a carefully orchestrated
network of desire, dependent upon narrative fiction, which makes intrinsically plural the subjects
that it fixes in place. Masochism is a network rather than as a crisis of any one subjects desire.
This approach brings Lacan into deeper harmony with Deleuze, for whom the pervert is not
someone who desires, but someone who introduces desire into an entirely different system in
which the structure . . . conditions the entire field and its functioning.43 Occupying the place
of the objet petit athe very excess of enjoyment normally forfeited by the subject in the oedipal
processthe pervert adds precisely nothing to supplement a lack perceived in the Other; the
subject is thus desubjectified or rendered inhuman. Perversion is thus the internal tearing apart
of what normally passes for human nature.44 Under these conditions, as Severin explains, we
stop thinking, feeling, wishing.45
-47 (Ecrits, 656, Sem 6 19.6.59, Sem XIV, 7.6.67)
72!!! (Sem 6, 7.1.59)
(ATP, 155)
(Lacan Desire 17)
(D and supplementarity, Boundas, Deleuze and Philosophy, p. 22)
(Bogue Deleuzes Way, 111) Find perversion in LoS
- Lacan holds that there is no I of masochism, that it cannot be conceptualized in individual
terms: instead, there is only this contract which our friend Deleuze has so happily emphasized
to supply for the trembling imbecility that reigns in the field of psychoanalysis!49
-This narrative freezing exploits what Lacan has called the flaw of desire, a hitch in the
trajectory of the drive that, when made to short circuit, can produce what he considers a true
discourse.108 (We would be wise to recall that Lacanian truth is reliant upon, and exists only
through, fiction, as Miller explains in his introduction to Television. 109) Deleuze makes much
of Sacher-Masochs tendency to figure the aesthetic experience in terms of waiting and
suspense.110 As Ronald Bogue has noted in his reading of Deleuze, if sadism and masochism
each tell a story, for Deleuze, [y]et in neither case is it much of a story . . . [for] [i]n both cases,
the action may be reduced to a single scene.111 The resistance to narrative is a crucial aspect of
masochismit is its intrinsically literary aspect, we might say.
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-Deleuze: The sadist needs institutions, and the masochist contractual relations. Possession and
the pact of alliance are the respective forms of madness of the sadist and the masochist.
Masochism seeks historical and cultural confirmation in mystical or idealistic initiation rites.
-In Sade the imperative and descriptive function of language transcends itself toward a pure
demonstrative, instituting function, and in Masoch toward a dialectical, mythical and persuasive
function. These two transcendent functions characterize the two perversion, the twin ways in
which the monstrous exhibits itself in reflection. The sadistic hero sets himself to the task of
thinking out the Death Instinct (pure negation) in a demonstrative form, and is only able to do
this by multiplying and condensing the activities of component negative or destructive instincts.
-Disavowal should be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists
neither in negative nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of
that which 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. The fetish (as image or substitute of
the female phallus, the last object seen before it not being there) is not a symbol at all, but
a frozen, arrested photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous
consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration, it
represents the last point at which it was still possible to believe. Fetishism, defined by the
processes of disavowal and suspension of belief belongs essentially to masochism.
-We cant confuse potential violence toward the fetish itself and a violence which arises
only in connection with the choice and the constitution of the fetish. Fetishism only occurs in
sadism in a secondary and distorted sense. It is divested of its essential relation to disavowal and
suspense and passes into the totally different context of negativity and negation, where it
becomes an agent in the sadistic process of condensation.
-Is addiction simply fetishism? Does it split off into sadism and masochism, defined in
terms of institutions and contracts?
-The aesthetic and dramatic suspense of Masoch contrasts with the mechanical, cumulative
repetition of Sade. The art of suspense always places us on the side of the victim and forces us to
identify with him, whereas the gathering momentum of repetition tends to force us onto the side
of the torturer and make us identify with the sadistic hero. In Sade, repetition is a function of
acceleration and condensation and in Masoch it is characterized by the frozen quality and the
suspense. Fundamental distinction b/w Sadism and Masochism is the contrasting processes of
negative/negation and disavowal/suspense. A speculative, analytical handling of the Death
Instinct (which can never be given) versus a mythical, dialectical, imaginary handling of it.
They are only complimentary in the sense that one can flip at the conclusion of a sadistic or
masochistic sequence. Sades libertine can enjoy being whipped, not to expiate/atone, but to
recognize and rejoice in his achievement of having gone far enough to deserve such treatment.
And the masochist can only convert into a sadist by expiating. Sadism is the humorous outcome
of masochism, and masochism the ironic outcome of sadism.
- Laurent (1998): The first thing that drug addiction teaches psychoanalysis is that the object is a
semblance, not a substance. It is precisely in drug addiction that we can find the most strongly
sustained effort to incarnate the object of jouissance in an object of the world.
-In masochism, the father in the son is guilty, not the father in relation to the son. 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 fathers likeness in him that he experiences as a sin which
must be atoned for.
-The law transcends the contract but leads us straight into ritual and myth. By means of
the contract the paternal function of applying the law was transferred to the mother,
resulting in the most radical transformation of the law. The law now ordains what it was
once intended to forbid; guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment
makes permissible what is was intended to chastise (hazing). This is the disjointed
temporality of cyberspace, whose primary legal argument is about having nothing to hide.
We are not so much guilty until proven innocent, but must disavow guilt, making it
palpable and apparent, thus leading toward absolution that allows one to proceed.
Surveillance as punishment makes permissible what it was meant to chastise.
Thought I figured out the world in its circular way, and then I saw the sun fall out of the sky the
other day. There was nothing in it but pain for me. John Darnielle
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The changes called real subsumption are changes in the function of law, and are manifested
in the truth of masochism. What happens when the Father is brought down to the level of
the subject and lends itself to horizontal identification described by McGowan in terms of
the anal, everywhere father, is really the recognition of the father in the son, the law
ordaining what it once forbade, and punishment as permission.
-Your money or your life of alienation founds the CONTRACT!
Alienation = enslavement (the being born into) ... subjection = separation (the
diverse forms of handling) why does this matter????
Tell Kareen: What I want permission for is to make the leap from the
subjectification of the non-subject in the drive, the headless subjectification to the
FACT THAT THE OBJECT OF THE DRIVE IS NOT INDIFFERENT BUT HAS
ORGANIZING EFFECTS, which scaffold the subject created from the drive as a
masochistic subject. This is only the case when the objects of fetish/addiction/object
as incarnation in reality already does the work of self-creation that is then doubled in
the landing of the drive.
Chapter Seven, Humor, Irony, and the Law
Irony is the process of thought whereby the law is made to depend on an infinitely superior
Good, just as humor is the attempt to sanction the law by recourse to an infinitely more righteous
Best.
-In Kants Critique of Practical Reason, we see the conceptual move from a classical to a
modern conception of law. The moral law signifies the pure form of law, apart from specific
objects or positive content of any kind (circumstances, domains, etc.). The moral law, in taking
up the mantle of the pure form of the law, is immanent, that is, not grounded in any transcendent
principles from on high. The Good revolves around the Law rather than the Law receiving its
support from the Good. In it, we can also glean that the object of law is unknowable and elusive.
This is a structural consequence. The law is, therefore, not in the least transparent, reflecting no
determinations of its substance or object. It operates, as Deleuze says, without making itself
known, defining a realm of transgression where one is always already guilty, and where one, like
Kafkas characters, or Oedipus, oversteps the bounds without knowing what they were. The
indeterminacy of the law is correlative to the extreme specificity of punishment that makes no
more available anything that would be the specifications and indices of law.
-Sade and Masoch represent two main attempts at subversion of the law, of turning it upside
down. Such is the destiny of irony and humor in modern thoughtsubversion. Since irony still
maintains its fundamental structural quality, effecting a bypassing of law that transcends it
toward a still higher principle, Sades irony involves the fact that in all its forms, law represents
the rule of secondary nature which is always geared toward the demands of conservation: it is a
usurpation of true sovereignty. Everyone is equal as a product of secondary nature. The law is a
mystification that depends on the tyrannized and the tyrant. The tyrant, produced as he is by the
law, in its guts, draws his authority from it. This marks in Sade an attempt to transcend law in the
opposite direction from the Good: the idea of Evil.
-Sade often stresses the fact that the law can only be transcended toward an institutional model
of anarchy. Is this accelerationism? What about the subordination of Law to the changes in
technology, Law at the hands of, or taking its positive content in the shifting movements of
technology, that is, industry?
-While the Sadist subverts the law, preferring the anarchy of permanent revolution to the
perniciousness of law, the element of contempt in the submission of the masochist to Law may
also contain some coordinates for a politics of resistance. The apparent acquiescence of the
masochist barely veils the provocative critique inherent to it.
-If irony is the upward movement that transcends the law toward a higher principle, humor is the
downward movement from law to its consequences. Meticulous application of the law (okay, Ill
do it in spades, says the addict) provides a demonstration of its absurdity and provokes the chaos
that it is intended to prevent or to conjure. Taking the law of pleasure to its furthest consequences
is the philosophical, performative demonstration that the addict bestows upon the world. This is
what it means to learn from the addict. In masochistic fantasy, whipping does not punish or
prevent an erection, but provokes and ensures it. In exercising the fundamentally punitive
process of the law, the masochist inflicts punishment on himself, which becomes for him the
authorization to experience the pleasure that the law was supposed to forbid. The law demands
the punishment first and then orders the satisfaction of the desire to follow the punishment.
-Temporal succession of being punished and then experiencing pleasure should not be confused
for causality. It is not the punishment, the pain, that causes the pleasure, but rather it precedes it
in an overarching logic of reversal based in a ritual affordance by punishment. This temporal
reversal that also reverses its contents, from you must not to you have to, is a process that is also
reflected in the other features of masochismdisavowal, fantasy, and suspense.
-Sade is a logician of principles, while Masoch is a logician of consequences.
-The upending of the modern conception of law, that it is not to be based on the principle of the
Good, but on its form alone, relates to sadistic and masochistic forms of subversion, either
through the logic of consequences (masochism) or the logic of principles (sadism). The sadist
aims at a demonstration of formlessness, supported by an informal, primary nature, while the
masochist aims to profit from law by carrying it to its extreme which causes an inversion. We can
construe these in terms of past and future orientations that could potentially support a political
vision for the present.
-If the discovery of the modern conception of the law is that the one who submits to the law is in
fact the one who is most guilty, then the addict, in his obstinacy with regards to a strict, rigid
regimen of pleasure inadvertently demonstrates the opposite. It is in this way that the addict is
not duped, he proves the contrary to the modern form of law and pays dearly for it. The
masochist stands guilt on his head, making punishment into a condition that can provide for
illicit pleasure. The addict does exactly the opposite, inverts the formula of masochism, by
making pleasure into a condition for a self-punishing that confronts the real of life directly, with
its life cycles, its dynamic fluxes of time, and the attempt to install a rhythm or a refrain.
-In the case of sadism, the father is placed above the law; he becomes the higher principle with
the mother as his essential victim. In the case of masochism, the totality of the law is invested in
the mother who expels the father from the symbolic realm.
Chapter Eight, From Contract to Ritual

In psychoanalytic thought more broadly, this renunciation

is coupled with the prohibition of incest that, in Claude Lvi-
Strauss words, means that where the relationships between the
sexes are concerned, a person cannot do just what he pleases
(1969, p. 43). This double attempt to settle the question of the
relation between the sexes evidences the mutually-establishing
inextricability of enjoyment and law. Even in its crudest
rendering, law is already an economic question, in that it is
concerned with the distribution of enjoyment rather than simply
its prohibition. The law that designates things according to the
pragmatic distribution of their use and the agreements to which
they give rise corresponds to Lvys (1998) notion of the
contract as a virtualization of violence: it virtualizes the relations
of force, given in brute reality. Just as this mythical social
contract virtualized violence,
This same notion arises in Freuds paradox of the conscience. It is not, by any stretch of the
imagination, the case that obedience to law secures a feeling of righteousness. Quite the contrary,
in fact. He notices that the most law-abiding people often experience the most guilt. Freud
reconciles this paradox by showing that the renunciation of instinctual gratification does not
follow some enigmatic entity, conscience, but inversely that conscience springs from that very
renunciation. Conscience comes from renunciation. Think about this fact in relation to a feminist
politics that supports refusal as a potent form of resistance. The repressed instinctual drives gives
rise to conscience. These drives are displaced onto the plane of the superego, where another
register of reality comes to bear its weight on the shoulders of the ego which it treats with
insoluble cruelty.
Deleuze, restating Lacan, claims that the law is identical to repressed desire. The law is doubly
defunct in that it cannot determine an object without contradicting itself and that it cannot define
itself with reference to a content without removing the repression on which it rests. Put more
briefly, the exercise of its power rests entirely in its elusive, nebulous character. When it tries to
name an object, it eats its own tail, destroys itself as a mechanism, thereby exposing its positive
quality as abstraction itself. The object of the law and the object of desire are one and the
same, and remain equally concealed. That the nature of the object relates to the mother and
desire and the law relates to the father makes visible that the law, by virtue of its Oedipal origins,
must conceal its content in order to operate as a pure form, renouncing both object and subject.
-In relation to the formation of culture from Freuds myth:
Law and something like a social contract are fundamentally at odds. This is because the
principles that comprise a contractthe retention of certain rights, the application of its statutes
exclusively to signees (and in no way automatically apply to third parties), and limitation to a
specified duration, are violated by the law itself. Each facet, those that bespeak some semblance
of mutuality is torn apart. A subject of law is presupposed by accession to the pact that grounds
the law in the first place. To imagine that a contract is at the origin of society is to invoke
conditions which are necessarily invalidated as soon as the law comes into being. For the law,
once established, violates the contract in that it can apply to a third party, is valid for an
indeterminate period and recognizes no inalienable rights.
-In the masochists use of contracts in love relationships, the ultimate irony is that a contract,
which, in so many different ways, delivers a patent slave-master relationship, is entered into
willingly (with will) by the victim himself. The position of agency here, between a frantic,
unclenching form of dependence, on the one hand, and a stultifying oblivion, on the other, is the
quintessential feature, that is, in relation to the tie, law and desire, and the social function of the
demonstration of the ironies of modern life. It is the contract that transfers the traditionally
paternal function of applying the law to the mother. From this effect the law mandates what it
had intended to forestall. The changes in the law stemming from the masochists willingness to
submit to the contract draws him in to the impersonal realm of fate, which finds expression in the
myth and rites of the hunt, the squeezing of the land, and of course the birth of the new.
-The threat of castration, of punishment upon incest, has the effect of preventing it when linked
with the fathers image. But, when linked to the mothers, it makes incest possible and actually
ensures its success. Castration is the precondition for the rebirth which obliterates in the son any
likeness to the father, making of him a new man, devoted entirely to the all-powerful oral mother.
-Interrupted love in the acts of Masoch functions to bind sexual activity to the notion of incest
and to second birth.
-Ritualistic activity is essential to masochism, as it foments the world of fantasy. In the novels
these take the form of hunting rites, agricultural rites, and rites of regeneration and rebirththe
final one being the culminating point of the labors of the others and their apex. The uterine and
Oedipal mothers are absorbed by the oral mother. Parthenogenesis. Apostasy. Foresworn.
Forsaken. Expiated.
-Three forms of disavowal pervade masochism: magnification of the mother by attributing to her
the power of rebirth and regeneration, the exclusion of the father since he has no role to play, and
the interruption of sexual pleasure that transforms it from genital pleasure into the pleasure of
rebirth.
-A material definition cannot be given for masochism because the sensual experience which
houses its intricate combination of pleasure and pain imply formal conditions, which cannot be
ignored. Guilt is not experienced because the masochist has sinned against the father. Again, it is
the fathers likeness that is experienced as a sin.
-Masochism is a phenomenon of the senses, a function of feeling or sentiment, but also contains
a suprapersonal element: the demonstrative relating of the regime change, so to speak, from the
reign of the father to the rule of the mother. He uses all of his psychic energies, dedicates the
entirety of his being to relating this story of the triumph of the mother. Drama takes on an import
that far exceeds that of moralism or guilt in masochism. The three women in Masoch constitute a
symbolic order that is not the name of the Father. The Mother represents the law (rather than
nature) under prescribed conditions: she generates the symbolism through which the masochist
expresses himself. It is not a case of identification with the mother, but a threefold division of her
that expels the father from the universe. The mother is disavowed through magnification, and the
father through degradation. The father reemerges in the real, having been expelled from the
symbolic (see the final episode of Venus for his aggressive and hallucinatory return). This return,
and fleeting reminiscences of the father, mark the culmination of the masochistic fantasy, which
must always stave off the reality that threatens its cohesion. Because there always remains this
risk of realitys intrusion, the masochist develops the strategy of the contract as a bulwark against
it. The contract stabilizes the role of the mother (do what you like with me, woman!) so that his
symbolic universe of fantasy can open onto a timeless realm where the three mother-images
dwell.
-The structure of fantasy is such that it plays on two series, two opposite margins, and
the resonance thus set up gives life to and creates the heart of the fantasy. In masochism
the two symbolic margins are the uterine mother and the Oedipal mother; between them
and moving from one to the other is the oral mother, the core of the fantasy.
Chapter Nine, Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Masochism
-Masochism is not the aggressive drive, presumed to take effect in sadism, turned around on the
subject. Neither for pregenital reasons (a loss of love) nor for Oedipal reasons (feelings of guilt
related to the birth of the superego), masochism pertains to a formally different structure. We
could conceive of sadisms turning around with the superego, as the desexualized libido, acting
cruelly upon the ego. But this does not a masochistic ego make. There is no masochism proper
without a reactivation of the Oedipus complex, hence without a resexualization of the
conscience. It should not be defined by the turning around process, but by the resexualization,
the coming back out, of the aggression that had turned upon the self in this process. Freud
suggested the hypothesis of libidinal sympathetic coexcitation to account for the link between
pain and sexual pleasure, thus positing the superior position of intensity of experience over its
nature as a sort of fundamental masochistic base. Another reason is that the process of turning
around upon the self could be construed as reflexive, as in the obsessionals self-punishment, but
masochism implies being beaten, a passive stance, which suggests the likelihood of conferral of
agency outward to something external to the subject that then assumes its role.
Chapter Ten, The Death Instinct
-There are no exceptions to the pleasure principle, but there is a residue irreducible to it and
heterogeneous from it. The pleasure principle, as a principle, governs life universally and without
exception. Repetition comes before the pleasure principle as the unconditioned condition of the
principle. But, in experience, the order is reversed, putting repetition in service of pleasure (as
we repeat that which is found or anticipated to be pleasurable).
-Problems that lend themselves to speculation seek the discovery of a transcendental principle of
binding of the first order principle to the field that it governs.
-Freud says that the binding of excitation alone makes its discharge, its transformation into
pleasure, possible. The binding action of Eros that makes up the pleasure principle must be
characterized as repetition in respect of excitation, and repetition of the moment of life, and the
necessary union. Excitation is bound and discharged by a double act of repetition that binds the
excitation and then tends to eliminate it.
-Repetition as conceived by Freud is in and of itself a synthesis of timea transcendental
synthesis. It is at once repetition of before, during, and after. It is a full-fledged constitution in
time of the past, the present, and even the future. It is for this reason that we see him waffling
between a monistic unity between Eros and Thanatos, an insistence on their duality from a
qualitative point of view, and then a simple difference in rhythm.
-Repetition that binds constitutes the present, that which erases constitutes the past, and there is a
third, the repetition that saves or fails to save, depending on the modes of combination of the
other two.
-Theory, in the sadist, and fantasy, for the masochist, is defined by the essential feature of the
structure of perversion--coldness. The process of desexualization is even more pronounced than
in neurosis and sublimation and is accompanied by a resexualization that does not cancel out the
desexualization. The original desexualization is retained in its new function as the object of
sexualization. This resexualization is instantaneousa fantastic leap.
-Reiteration in sadism takes the form of quantitative accumulation and precipitation and
qualitative suspense and freezing in masochism. This reiteration is even more important to take
into account than the two perversions link with pain, that seemingly most prominent content.
The essential point is that pain only acquires significance in relation to the forms of repetition
that condition its use. [see p. 119]
-The normal function of repetition in relation to the pleasure principle is altered. Repetition is not
an experience related to pleasure obtained or anticipated, but now runs wild and becomes
independent of all previous pleasure, becoming itself an idea(l). Pleasure is now subordinate to
repetition, accompanying it and following it, resulting in a swapping of primacy. This is a
consequence of the twofold process of de- and re-sexualization.
-The mystery of sadism and masochism are not of a piece with the question of the pain-pleasure
link, but in the desexualization process that consolidates repetition at the opposite pole to
pleasure, and in the subsequent resexualization which makes the pleasure of repetition seemingly
proceed from pain. Pain is only an effect. It doesnt bear a direct relation to the process of
desexualization featured in perversion.
Chapter Eleven, Sadistic Superego and Masochistic Ego
-The weakness of the ego which one might assume is taken over by the strong, overbearing
superego in masochism is only a strategy employed by the masochist to manipulate his others
into the ideal state to play the role he has in mind for them. This might cause us to assert, to the
contrary, that the masochist is not at all lacking in ego but in superego. By externalizing the
superego into the figure of the punisher, the masochists displays the derisory and cruel nature of
the superego, outing it in an epic triumph of the perspective of the ego.
-Irony is the operation of an overbearing superego, the art of expelling or negating the ego, with
all its sadistic consequences...Humor is the triumph of the ego over the superego which seems to
say to it you see, whatever you do, you are already dead; you only exist as a caricature; the
woman we 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. The pain inflicted is felt to be inflicted
upon the superego itself, drawing a wider distance between ego and superego that makes
disavowal possible.
-Disavowal is linked originally to castration, and the fetishistic disavowal that would insolently
hold that the mother does not lack a phallus is the basis of other forms of disavowal, like the
disavowal of sexuality and of the father. Disavowal is the foundation of imagination and the
suspension of reality to establish an ideal world, as negation is the foundation of thought.
-The maternal phallus in the imagination of the masochist is the ideal organ of neutral
energy. It is the foundation of the dream of neutrality, of tolerance, so common in the
discourse of liberalism. The ideal ego of pure rebirth, generated by the imagination of
neutral energy, splits the ego of the masochist in view of the superpersonal element which
produces it. This is why in masochism the ego is dominant but nonetheless carries the
tone of impersonality.
 -Fantasy is the primary theater of masochism, where the twofold process of de- and
resexualization manifests itself in the imagination and finds expression in the dialectical
movement between the narcissistic ego and the Ideal ego, conditioned by the mythical
image of the mother.
-In sadism there is a progression from the negative as a partial and repetitive process of
destruction to negation as an absolute idea of reason. This progression can be accounted for by
the vicissitudes of the superego. The sadistic superego expels the ego and projects it into its
victims. Thus it is saddled with the work of destroying something outside itself. And, since the
sadist identifies with his victims, there is the added necessity, in this progression, of adding up all
the partial destructions toward an idea of pure negation which constitutes the cold purity of
thought in the superego. The operation of totalizing extracts a neutral, free-floating energy from
these destructive instances, making the superego the paramount of the desexualization specific to
sadism. At the culmination of desexualization, a total resexualization takes place, one which now
bears upon the neutral energy (pure thought).
-Sexualization of thought and speculation, the products of the superego, is the essential
operation of sadism.
-The masochistic use of derision is brought about by exaggeration. The masochist induces apathy
in his audience by caricaturing the monstrous severity of the superego, making it so grand that it
cannot be taken seriously. This is the mechanism of disavowal in its most exemplary iteration.
Through his compliance with his own fantasy of the extreme cruelty of the superego, he
overcomes it by dint of dramatic reenactment that conveniently holds intact a fundamental
agency of the masochistic ego as it relates to punishment. The masochist brings about the
conditions of his punishment, and in this way has a supreme egoic agency that makes of the
embodiment of the superego a derisory character.
-The Death Instinct never shows itself, but becomes an object of thought in sadism and an object
of the imagination in masochism, respectively. Freud said that it is only possible to speak of the
Death Instinct in speculative or mythical terms.
-The true differentiation between sadism and masochism are revealed in the ego-superego split
which occurs differently in each of them.
-The ego can, as in masochism, undertake a mythical operation of idealization where the
mother-image serves as a mirror to reflect (or simply produce) the ideal-ego as a
narcissistic ideal of omnipotence. It can also, as in sadism, turn to speculative
identification and use the father-image to produce a superego that appoints an ego-ideal
as an ideal of authority which harnesses forces from outside the subjects narcissistic ego.
-Mania...the functional dominance of the superego-ego ideal a la Lagache?
-Ego-ideal = being someone else (who doesnt have these thoughts, impulses,
commitments, conditions, etc.), ideal-Ego = best version of myself (enacting to the
greatest degree what is known to be true)
-The masochist story tells of the opposition to the institutional superego and its replacement by
the contractual partnership between the ego and the oral mother. The latter functions as an image
of death, holding up the cold mirror of its twofold rejection to the ego. The reflection of the
(narcissistic) ego in and through death produces (contemplation of) the ideal ego in the
conditions of independence and autonomy which obtain in masochism. The narcissistic ego
benefits (is resexualized) in proportion as the ideal ego becomes desexualized (from all the
thinking about it). This is why punishment and pain represent, from the side of the ideal ego, the
desexualization process that liberates it from superego and the fathers likeness, and from the
side of the narcissistic ego, the resexualization that allows it to enjoy the pleasures that the
superego forbid (if the superego says you must enjoy or love yourself or life matters).
-Sade expresses himself by combining obscene description with rigor and apathy in
demonstration, and Masochs art involves multiplying the disavowals in order to create the
coldness of aesthetic suspense.
RESULTS: 1. Sadism is speculative-demonstrative masochism is dialectical-imaginative
2. Sadism operates with the negative and negation masochism with disavowal
and suspension
3. Sadism operates by means of quantitative reiteration masochism by
qualitative suspense
4. there is a masochism specific to the sadist and 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 is 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 de- and re-
sexualization
11. there is a most radical difference between sadistic apathy and masochistic
coldness