Again obliquely - this came to me this morning - I wonder whether the
solipsism (a "problem of consciousness") of Sade and Masoch may be related
to their enthusiasm for violence (understood as violation, as the exercise
of overwhelming force). For them, as for many others before and since, it is
only violent infliction that can break down the walls of the self (ask any
teenage self-mutilator, and she - usually a she - will say the same thing).
For them, the only kind of intimacy possible - that is, the only kind of
intimacy that is not false or perjured, that does not ultimately feed into a
more primary narcissism - is that of molestation.
Libertinage and masochism are both presented as ways of arranging for the
violent transgression of a selfhood imagined as *armoured* (in a sense
similar to that elaborated by Reich), a transgression which makes possible a
"self-shattering" which is accompanied by a release of pleasure (and also,
possibly, creative energy of some kind). Neither Sade nor Masoch can imagine
a way of obtaining pleasure, of exercising creativity, that does not involve
the commission of some violent act: the self, for them, is an obstacle,
something to be punished and degraded in order that something pure and
selfless (Foucault's "anonymous" pleasures, for instance) may be permitted
to express itself.
Perhaps I am after all something of a Romantic, since I at least sympathise
with Reich's suggestion that the "armoured" self, the self that must be
injured in order to attain to enjoyment, is a self whose primary energies
have been turned out of their natural courses - which is to say, perverted.
IIRC, Reich argues that sadomasochism is an attempt to overcome a
militarised, totalitarian selfhood in order to release the energies that
this selfhood represses; but for him the original problem is that such
repression takes place to begin with.
A comment of Laing's to the effect that some perversion or other was "like
attempting to make ice cubes by boiling water" seems apposite here. I mean
to say that I think that sadomasochism compounds the original error of
turning the self into a militarised zone, and its irruptions and
transgressions merely affirm that this, and nothing else, is what a self
must be.
To speak of "self-shattering" is to imply that the self is brittle,
calcified, incapable of any dynamism on its own behalf. One must already
have despaired of the self's potential for creativity if the only way one
can imagine attaining to any kind of freedom is through the exercise of
ritualised self-annihilation. This despair is a recurring philosophical
bogey, as Stanley Cavell observes; but there may be other ways of answering
it (without ever hoping to have the last word...). One of these is to ask
what it is that holds one's self in stasis, what forces there are at large
that have parked their tanks on one's inner lawn. Was not Masoch an
extremely *limited* individual? For all that his followers protest their
inner "complexity", they show a marked tendency towards conservatism and
outwards respectability - all those besuited businessmen rushing off at the
end of a hard day's strenuous conformity for a quick session with some
whip-wielding madam - and this is not so much the pathos of having to keep
one's inner desires "in the closet" as the predictable conjunction of a
prediliction for hide-tanning with a fundamentally hide-bound personality.
The "wildness" in de Sade similarly makes more sense if one considers that
he was essentially a bit of a prig. The Divine J. Edgar Hoover comes to
mind...
- Dom
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