Masochism in America

Michael Uebel

Le vice americain: to judge by the profound intellectual, if not

libidinal, interest in masochism nowadays, it would seem that, despite the claims of classical sexology, this so-called vice is no longer
the supreme cultural property of the British. Iwan Blochs outrageous (or is it?) remark in Sex Life in England (1901) that in no
land has the passion for the rod been as systematically developed
and cultivated as in England (191) has undergone translation into
a contemporary, and distinctly, American academic idiom: in no
land has the passion for the rod been as systematically examined
and theorized as in America. Doubtless the very positing of national forms of masochism tells us little about masochism as an unmistakable set of bodily practices. Instead the utility of imagining
something like an American masochism is tied to the way it signals
the existence of historically conditioned fantasies, all of which in
turn structure the libidinal attraction and psychic reward of a wide
range of corporeal acts, from asceticism to pain to bondage. What
I wish to consider here are the ethical and political fantasies supporting not only the culture of masochism in America but also
the very study of masochism. Two questions then: Why, to ask
along with the authors under review, does masochism appear as a
prevalent cultural fantasy at some times rather than at others?
And, thinking self-reflexively through the authors, what makes
masochism such a compelling object of study now?
Study of the rod and of the passionate uses to which it is put
reveals above all that the genealogy of masochism in America is an
exquisite register of cultural anxieties, particularly sensitive to the
frequently reactionary manner in which sex and politics interanimate. The label masochist is never neutral, politically or
morally, whether applied to women or to men, whether framed
within or outside of clinical discourse. And although no study of
masochism could ever be objective, that is to say descriptively
pure, it is striking just how politically charged most studies are.
The study of masochism functions as the nodal point at which the
political fantasies, intellectual interests, and libidinal investments
of the investigator all coalesce and are given forceful expression.
The fifties and sixties are exemplary decades when theories of sex 2002 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY

Counterpleasures
By Karmen MacKendrick
State University of New
York Press, 1999
Contract with the Skin:
Masochism, Performance
Art, and the 1970s
By Kathy ODell
University of Minnesota
Press, 1998
Taking It Like a Man:
White Masculinity,
Masochism, and
Contemporary American
Culture
By David Savran
Princeton University
Press, 1998
Between the Body and the
Flesh: Performing
Sadomasochism
By Lynda Hart
Columbia University
Press, 1998

The label masochist is

never neutral, politically
or morally. . . . And
although no study of
masochism could ever
be objective, that is to
say descriptively pure, it
is striking just how
politically charged most
studies are.

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Masochism in America

ual and social masochism masked political agendas. Whereas detecting the ideological bent of the massive attention paid to
masochism by psychoanalysis, an interest peaking in immediate
postwar America, is rather complex workinvolving, for instance, assessment of the theoretical and therapeutic advances
in psychiatric war medicine and analysis of their political
agendas1it is relatively easy, say, to identify the slant of massmarket sleaze fiction, in its heyday roughly from the late fifties to
the early seventies, a body of literature more often than not purporting to offer psychosexual case studies of the phenomenon.
Sleaze fiction, at least by comparison, seems ideologically transparent since it is a genre so clearly fixated upon threats to traditional white masculinity.
Studies of masochism in the sixties appear to have responded to a quite specific anxietythe fear of sexually liberated
women. A pseudoacademic interest in forms of male masochism
then prevailed, with dozens of mass-market paperbacks offering
titillating case histories (the genres buzzword) of the dominant
female, a figure, judging by her frequent appearance on the covers of popular mens magazines (see Figs. 1 and 2), otherwise consigned to the fantasmic realms of exoticism and militarism.2
Sleaze with a scientific veneer, these mass-market paperbacks attempted to address men roughly between the ages of 18 and 45 in
order to warn of the consequences of their crumbling masculinity. Ralph St. Clairs hysterical (in both a clinical and colloquial
sense) The Man-Eaters (1967) announces on its cover: A female
wave of bedroom brigadiers is enslaving the American Man,
stripping him of his masculinity, devouring him with insatiable
erotic demands! The back cover offers an antidote to this fantasized threat, a new breed of masculinity ready to turn its
masochism to advantage:
Meet a new kind of American woman who attains sexual exultation from controlling the bodies of her mates. She pushes
the buttons and reaps the rewards, often at the expense of her
unfulfilled partner. Hers is a sensuous skill, fed by a neurotic
need for endless release and a thousand silent screams of
sweet relief . . .
Now meet a new kind of man, one who profits from the sensuous skills of the female sex aggressor. He is concerned
enough to be well-read and well-armed with the information contained in THE MAN-EATERS. That man could be
you . . .
Likewise issuing a neon warning on its cover to the innocent

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391

Fig. 1. Exotic bondage:

Action for Men,
March 1969.

(The Dominant Female may be anywhere, anyone . . . and you

cant tell until its too late!), Hermann K. Wolffs Role of the
Dominant Female in American Society (1966) sees the present social order of female supremacy as symptomatic of a malevolent
social and psychic retribution on the part of a great many modern-day women [who] have pushed far beyond the point of sexual
equality . . . reach[ing] a point where they are wreaking upon the
head of todays Man vengeance for the sins of all his male
supremist antecessors (1415). The typical wife, Paul Thornton
insists in Tyrannical: A Study of Female Domination (1967), has
transformed herself into the mighty woman-master, usurping
the role traditionally held by the father in a normal family relationship (10). Similarly, Lou Condors marginally less sober ac-

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Masochism in America

Fig. 2. Nazi domme:

Rugged Men,
April 1961.

count of feminine power, entitled The Female Aggressor: A Study

of the Domination Complex (1967), alarmingly declares that the
ranks of the male masochists are swelling in this age of strong
women and receding manhood and fast disappearing strong
males (79). For Condor, as for other writers,3 this problem is a
distinctly modern one: men have become entirely too cerebral,
choosing to live in a world of fantasy rather than in a world of
activity. The male masochist, he asserts, is usually a passive
dreamer, and not an aggressive doer type (90). Condors implicit
equation of the masochist with the intellectual is, we will see, not
so farfetched; indeed, it may lie at the heart of the current fascination with masochism.
Into the next decade, protest against the Vietnam War in the

American Literary History

early seventies did appear to divide men into passive dreamers and aggressive doers, only by this time the former were ready
and able to place themselves in positions to embrace their
masochism, turning it into a stinging weapon for political
change, as Kathy ODells study of seventies performance artists
suggests. Ignoring altogether any positive political force masochism might have, earlier cultural commentaries such as Michael
Leighs The Velvet Underground (1963) and Dale Gordons Hippie
Sex (1968) instead blamed the countercultural milieu, with all its
supposed forms of sexual anarchy, for nothing less than the decay of modern civilization. Dismissed as elements of gross cultural corruption, hippies, like their forerunners, the Beats, were
easy targets of conservative social critique. A number of sleaze
case studies bearing titles like Sodom USA (1965), whose cover
asks Is the Space Age Whirling Us into All-Out Perversion?
Sick Sex! (1966), The Sex Epidemic (1968), and the two-volume
The Perverted Generation (1969) addressed an audience that enjoyed, rather masochistically one must imagine, the tension between titillation and approbation held out by these studies. To be
warned of societys disintegration without at least the perversely
pleasurable supplement of self-punishment would seem useless,
if not unpalatable. This is finally what is so fascinating about
these fictional case studies: the ways they work to stimulate the
fantasies they exclude (usually by channeling them through the
affect of shame) or even to incite the very perversities they
malign.
Indeed, as David Savran argues in Taking It Like a Man,
contradictory forms of masochism are regularly on display,
where, remarkably, calling attention to ones victimization and
pain is not at all inconsistent with the satisfaction of oppressing
others. Here the male masochist assumes the position of the victim, in the process fantasmically feminizing and even blackening
himself, all the while asserting his (white) virility. This insight into
the structure of masochistic fantasy had been emphasized as
early as 1941 in Theodor Reiks monumental study, Masochism in
Modern Man (1941), where, in an important chapter (The Relation to Femininity), surprisingly undervalued by Savran,
masochism is revealed to aim at producing a distorted or disfigured femininity, over which the male asserts his control in a
twisted way: The masochist indicates to the woman by his feminine behavior in what position he wants to see her (199). During
the eighties and nineties, Savran reminds us, the image of the feminized male was transformed by Hollywood into the troubled survivor, indeed subjugator, of femininity. Witness the multiple heroas-victim roles of Michael Douglas, from Fatal Attraction (1987)

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Masochism in America

to Falling Down and Basic Instinct (both 1992) to Disclosure

(1995), along with the typical hero of Sam Shepard plays and of
Sylvester Stallone movies, not to mention Robert Blys Wild
Man, as contemporary signs of just how deeply the libidinal
logic of masochism informs white masculinity and its more ugly
prerogatives.
The prominence of masochism in contemporary American
cultural criticism undoubtedly owes much to its auspicious origins in psychoanalytic film theory, some of the most important
contributions to which aim directly at countering the predominant fiction of the masculine sadistic and fetishistic gaze.4 Most
substantively, Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, Steven Shaviro,
Kaja Silverman, Gaylyn Studlar, and Linda Williams have in
different, and even at times antagonistic, ways emphasized the
extent to which the fascinations and identifications that film sets
in motion necessarily involve radical sacrifices on the part of the
spectator. It is claimed that film, especially the genres of horror
and pornography, compels the viewer to temporarily relinquish
his mastery, self-possession, and enjoyment (end-pleasure).
Through its powerful analysis of masculine spectatorship and its
focus on masochism, film studies encourages us to recognize just
how deeply fantasies of power and powerlessness are built into
the very structure of subjectivity. The inspiration here is thoroughly Lacanian, for, as Jacques-Alain Miller has underscored,
the predominant topic in Jacques Lacans theory is not language
but the divided self, a fundamentally masochistic subject
whose discovery of satisfaction in displeasure provides, according to Miller, the most significant clue as to why Lacan remained
so interested in the mirror stage.5 The psychoanalytic concept of
the mirror stage describes the anxious relation between the subjects own body and its image, though it tends not to see this relation as historically or culturally conditioned. If Lacans insight
into the division of the subject tells us something about how
masochism emerges psychically or even phenomenologically, it
may very well offer a critical framework for determining why, under what conditions and for whom, masochism itself becomes an
especially interesting or compelling object of analysis. It appears that the recent explosion of interest in the ethical and cultural meanings of masochism has its own defining anxiety:6 it
attests to rather profound anxieties on the part of leftist intellectuals who are increasingly aware of their ineffectiveness to oppose, and otherwise dismantle, the conservative hegemony since
the mid-seventies. In order to align masochism, as well as its
study, with an essentially progressive politics, we will have to
consider how masochism can be said to be simultaneously a

American Literary History

mode of existencea perverse one, at least according to psychoanalysisand a political strategy of resistance.

1
It is Gilles Deleuze who most sharply insists on the linkage
between masochism as a practice of living and as a technique of
political resistance. In his study of the quintessential novel of
masochism, Venus in Furs (1869), Deleuze argues that Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch, the author, became identified with the perversion not because he suffered from it, but rather because he
created a new picture of it by linking masochistic practices to
the place of ethnic minorities in society and the role of women in
those minorities: masochism becomes an act of resistance, inseparable from a minority sense of humor (On Philosophy
142). Masochism, in important respects, is thus not a forfeiture
of power, but an attempt to recuperate it within different social
and libidinal economies, especially within those colored by a
humor that is in fact not at all ludic, but expressive of what
Tania Modleski calls a militantly explosive derision (155)
aimed at symbolic sources of authority and discipline (e.g., the
father, the political leader). If masochism, a medically classifiable phenomenon since the late nineteenth century, coincides
with, as recent commentators assert, the contemporary everyday,7 it has only rather recently become broadly visible as a (predominantly masculine) tactic of power predicated upon powers
disavowal.8 The meaning of contemporary power appears
twisted according to a masochistic logic: if you cannot cast yourself into the role of the victim, then you are unworthy of being
considered powerful in the first place. The inverse relation between powers renunciation and its symbolic possession explains
the fantasy structure of certain forms of masculinist media, such
as pornography or femme fatale films, to take two popular forms
of male masochistic gratification. It seems that these spectacles
of masculine abasement or depletion furnish fantasies needed to
compensate for the absence of mastery most men experience
within their social and economic roles under the depressive realities of technocapitalism. I argue elsewhere that there is a distinctly postmodern inflection to these compensatory fantasies,
given the way masochistic mentalities are accommodated on a
mass-cultural scale in heterosexual cyberporn.9 Radically altering the ways men actually consume visual pornography, cyberporn remodels the fantasmatic economy of pornographic desire,
installing a masochistic relation to power, through which the

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conflict between misogynist and feminist impulses can be momentarily reconciled.

For straight men, at least, masochism in America is compensatory. Having internalized, however imperfectly, 30 or so
years of the discourse and political effects of feminism, men know
it is now unacceptable to evince outright patriarchalism. Yet the
enlightened or liberal consciousness of the American male at
the beginning of the twenty-first century finds itself in a remarkable relation to a patriarchal deposit so culturally calcified it is indissoluble, a relation that seems, on the face of it, to demand an
end to dominance, but in fact is nothing other than a compensatory mechanism, allowing, at the level of fantasy, for the continuing reclamation and consolidation of masculine hegemony. There
is a strong sense in which the postmodern male is either unwilling
or unable to assume the sadistic role that Catharine MacKinnon
and others have assigned to the masculine subject generally in a
patriarchal society. This, however, is only to affirm that this same
postmodern male can, through masochism, achieve the affectivity
of dominance without having it linked to violence. According to
the liberal calculus of the masculinist conscience, women are marginally better off in a world populated with passive masochists
rather than active misogynists, pointing to just how increasingly
mystifying and perverse the exercise of domination is becoming.
Masochism, despite its elaborate and circuitous route to
power, is an amazingly efficient mode of self-regulation, practiced
privately in the name of an ascetic imperative, acts of self-denial
or self-restraint undertaken as a technique of empowerment,10
and practiced intersubjectively in the recognizable form of passive aggression, acts of blackmail actually, according to Roland
Barthes: I raise before the other the figure of my own disappearance, as it will surely occur, if the other does not yield (33). Yet
and this lies at the heart of masochisms twisted logicthis turning of oneself into a spectacle of abjection always conceals a desire
for exactly the opposite, the wish to not be looked at too closely,
so that when ones degradation is overcome later, one appears all
the more brilliant or powerful. This exhibitionism with reversed
sign (76), as Reik calls it, is a way of directing attention away
from oneself, to appear triumphantly before others even while
parading, like the self-deprecating comedian, ones own vices or
weaknesses. Indeed, the demonstrative, or performative, function
of masochism has long been noted as one of its most salient features, a key element of the provocative force that masochism is
claimed to have. Postmodern theorists of masochism, however,
tend to neutralize this demonstrative function, making of it (along
with other elements of masochism such as sheer pleasure in abjec-

American Literary History

tion, upon which the demonstrative function is based) a politically

correct form of self-improvement. Karmen MacKendrick, always insisting on the politically and libidinally subversive force
of masochistic pleasures, maintains at the same time that
[m]asochism does not give power over anyone . . . it is instead a
sense of power as strength, an extraordinary relation to ones own
self, flesh, and subjectivity, to the world as a space of possibility,
an openness to the outside (103). Masochism, MacKendrick
seems to imply, is good because it does not involve intersubjective
coercion, but rather a kind of benign individualism, dependent
upon a profoundly responsive strength. However, I assume
MacKendrick sees part of the political value of masochistic practice residing precisely in this idea of the world as a space of possibility, a site, like the self, radically open to remaking. Yet, abandoning, as MacKendrick does generally in her analysis, the
psychoanalytic sense of masochism as an archly provocative reconsolidation of the self deprives the subject of an important dimension of its political potencynamely, its power to assert its
will over that of others in the name of change.
The masochist changes the world, as Deleuze puts it, to the
extent that she questions the validity of existing reality in order
to create a pure ideal reality, an operation which is perfectly in line
with the judicial spirit of masochism (Coldness 33). This judicial spirit is, in practice, intersubjective (based on contractual
relations), judgmental, and assertive. Its power is directed over,
even against, othersto educate, to persuade, to bring into agreement. Masochisms judicial spirit becomes most recognizably political when it sweeps the social field in the form of mass fantasy,
so that in the case of oppressed groups it often takes the form of a
kind of politically idealized suffering in the name of future rewards.11 Social suffering serves as a prelude to, and in reality a
warranty for, the achievement of future satisfaction. It is perhaps
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel who most boldly underscores the politicalwhat she sees as the utopicforce of the so-called counterpleasures, when she associates historical ruptures which give
an inkling of a new world (293) with the dynamics of perversion.
A crucial point to bear in mind here, however, is that, like any tool
for change, masochism can be put to both progressive and regressive uses, deployed as a political tactic for utopian change and,
conversely, for cultural entrenchment and even gender violence.
Deployed in the name of either revolutionary or retrograde
causes, masochism works by calling into being the very Lawthe
limit or penancethat ostensibly blocks access to the ideal by
thwarting what Lacan once called the will to jouissance. So
from outside the politico-libidinal matrix of master/slave, it looks

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as if masochism involves only the sacrifice of ones own enjoyment. However, from within, the masochist reveals the truth of
symbolic power: subordination to the exact letter of the Law,
thereby exaggerating its obscene dimension, subverts the very
meaning of regulation. The potential political value of this is significant, as Reiks example of the masochistic art of resistance reveals: Austrian railroad workers, protesting low wages and long
working hours, go on strike, but rather than walk off the job, they
carry it out with increased conscientiousness and punctuality, following the railway boards myriad bureaucratic regulations to the
letter. The result is a total paralysis of train traffic, and with trains
neither arriving nor departing, the company elites are forced to
capitulate (108; cf. 15459). The workers, through radical obedience to the law, are able to turn the misery of their working conditions into a politically satisfying conclusion. Closing the gap
between the law and its realization, extreme submission has the
precise effect of revealing the fantasmic support of the law in its
full inconsistency.12 As a mode of dissidence, masochism depends
on a strategy of passive resistance, evoking a constellation of
other strategies for social change such as the hunger strike, sit-ins,
and related forms of nonviolent passive protest. When deployed in
these ways to expose the inconsistency of cultural protocols,
masochism becomes fully political, a strategy of resistance,
wherein the masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender (Reik
156). Given masochisms primary function as defiant submissiveness (victory through defeat is Reiks famous formula), there
are expedient reasons to conceptualize it across the limits of the
sexual or the erotic, into the social.
Masochism, despite remaining a slippery (and at times hotly
contested) term in psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses,13
has emerged in recent critical treatments as a particularly flexible,
even necessary, form of cultural critique. It is within this context
that one of Deleuzes most valuable insights is intelligible as a fully
political revelation: [The masochists] apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation (Coldness 88). Remarkably, the fundamentally utopian energy of masochism increases
with cultural advancement. If masochism is indeed unmistakably the most important culturally among the usual perversions,
it is so, to follow Reik, precisely because it is the chief register of
culture, developing coterminously with it: as culture progresses,
masochism increasingly becomes a psychic necessity (264; cf.
383).14 But, as Reik himself rather presciently points out, masochism is fast evolving beyond its status as a psychic necessity to
become something of a mental luxury, a political option (though
admittedly never available to all) replacing what had once

American Literary History

been diagnosed strictly as a psychic condition simply suffered by

desiring subjects beyond their own will. Despite its status as luxury, masochism appears no less urgent a tool for reimagining or
remaking the self and the social. Leaving behind the limited notion of the masochist as a self-destructive subject, one to whom
something is done, or on whom something is perpetrated, we are
able to see the masochist as an idealizer par excellence, a revolutionary who seeks after a utopic condition that is never merely or
only libidinal.

2
The study of masochism is particularly compelling as an
analysis of power and its effects, and although it may even sensitize us to the brutalities of social and political inequality, the question is as yet open regarding whether in the end this ongoing interrogation can purchase, as three out of the four authors under
review believe it can, any kind of political satisfaction or ethical
joy. Some form of pleasurethrough painis always at stake in
the affectivities of humiliation and subjection that we continue to
associate with Alfred Kinseys neologism, S/M. These affectivities
are intensely paradoxical, as the late Lynda Hart underscores, in
part because they alternately affirm and deny the truth, or the
Real, of pleasure. Furthermore, as MacKendrick emphasizes, the
exquisite pleasures of S/M continuously transcend the level of
the merely physical, channeling libidinal energy, along with orgasmic end-release, into an ongoing affective state of pure will
(Lust), an experience she discusses, through a mlange of Georges
Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche, in terms of responsive or active receptivity, a libidinal economy by which all roles in the s/m
scene have [a] subversive potential for undermining our cultures
disciplinary demand for productive pleasure (127). Much of the
subversive energy of masochism in this view is antiteleological
and, by extension, anticapitalist, since it refuses to produce on
time. In this section, I am interested in identifying, along with the
authors under review, some of the pleasures, private and public,
that are imagined to be up for grabs in masochism, as well as evaluating the possibilities for social and ethical change that masochism offers.
Almost from its inception, psychoanalysis has posited not
only that masochism is the most common and most significant of
all the perversions (Freud, Three Essays 157), but also that it is
the most successful one on account of its elaborate fantasy structure. Masochism, through sophisticated disavowals, brilliantly

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carries out the work of defending the self from an engulfing fear
of the entire universe by inviting one part of it to invade and ravish the subject. Reik, for instance, offers the case of a patient who,
as a little girl, repeatedly fantasizes about death, whom she imagines as a skeleton, in order to combat her sexual excitement, her
global feeling that the world is everywhere and unpredictably
stimulating. Eventually, the skeleton symbolizing death becomes
itself a fixed source of excitation for the girl and remains so well
into her adult life (11920). Here the image of the skeleton, embodying death and therefore a primal object of fear, is permitted
to flourish as an object of stimulation, impeding further both fear
and excitement. Masochismwith fetishism here subordinated
to itappears structured by this contradiction: at the same time
that it protects, it drastically opens up the self to the world. Like
the aesthetic experience of the sublime, this state of radical receptivity carries with it both the promise of poetic ecstasyMichel
Leiris is here exemplary, noting that [p]erhaps the only beautiful
thing in life is to have been infinitely ravished (LAge dhomme)
and the peril of psychic narcosis. This rhetoric of openness is consistent with the postmodernist view of masochism as a shattering event, dissolving subjective coherence by either exploding
identity with extravagant pleasure or putting it under suspension,
freezing it in a state of intense anticipation. MacKendrick follows
Leo Bersani and Bataille in critically celebrating an erotic economy of the body that locates pleasure precisely in self-erasure,15
except her theory avoids the careful distinction required here
between a psychoanalytically inflected model of power such as
Bersanis, which decouples itself from the Freudian death drive,
and a biologically driven concept of transgression such as
Batailles, which installs the impulse toward death and violence at
the center of subjectivity. Of the two, Bersanis model is the more
politically satisfying, since the dissociation from the death drive in
a theory of masochistic jouissance means that subjects, as he puts
it, are unfindable as object[s] of discipline (99), whereas the kind
of erotic transgression of taboos that Bataille envisages places
subjects outside/against culture (and, for that matter, history), in
a presocial state of animal freedom that has the effect of reinstitutingthat is, reinscribing through validationthe predominant order.
Theories of the utopian and subversive value of perversion,
particularly as advanced by the Freudian Left, have been critiqued
along similar lines.16 Although masochism is clearly transgressive,
its subversive potential is less certain, and for this reason we
should distinguish, as MacKendrick does not consistently, between transgression and subversion. If the masochist, as Zi z ek

American Literary History

says, is the inherent transgressor par excellence (Ticklish 248),

he is so, as Reiks example of the railroad workers illustrates, to the
extent that he stages and puts into practice the fantasies supporting the hegemonic order. By sustaining a discourse of public
power, masochistic fantasy announces that it knows (too well) the
truth of the big Others desire, knows what pleasure is for the
dominant order. To put it rather abstractly, masochism is fundamentally a coming to and possession of knowledge. Knowing is
crucial to masochism, for it is always a matter of apprehending
what is available, or how far one might goa matter, to be more
precise, of knowing possibilities before closing them off. Risk taking, intellectual and otherwise, is thus the hallmark of masochism,
and so whatever subversive potentiality lies beyond the immediate
transgressive force of masochism amounts to an idealism, a belief
that ones risk taking will be somehow rewarded. The subversion
nascent in this idealism is, especially for the intellectual Left, compelling evidence of masochisms political dimension.
Reading the accounts of Hart, Savran, ODell, and MacKendrick together, one is struck by the exigency with which writers,
artists, philosophers, and activists are shown to have rearticulated intellectual and political identity in masochistic terms. Indeed, if by redefining intellectual and aesthetic practice in terms
of (or as a tautology for) masochism, we arrive at something like
the deep grammar of modern political subjectivity, we are in a position to postulate, given the premium placed on fantasy in
masochism, that the intellectual comprises the (impossible) political being par excellence. Impossible, because the intellectual
work of healing, educating, and governing (Freuds three impossible professions)17 coalesces as the perverse labor of progressive political action, which typically exemplifies the motto
victory through defeat. All four theorists of masochistic culture
make implicit, and in the case of MacKendrick explicit, linkages
between intellectualism and masochism, linkages that can be
traced back to Freuds assertion in Three Essays on Sexuality that
it is in the world of ideas . . . that the choice of a [sexual] object
is accomplished at first (225), through clinical statements on
perversion by analysts such as Phyllis Greenacre, who demonstrated that a perversion in well-defended isolation not infrequently is seen in clergymen and teachers (1: 311), and forward
to the recent identification by Paul Mann of the critical enterprise
itself as intensely masochistic: Nothing is more humiliating than
a brilliant critical career (38).
That the intellectual is a key figure for intellectuals signals
the power of masochistic identification especially when the theorizing of oppositional political practice is at stake. There is a

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strong, if tacit, recognition that the intellectual becomes political

through masochism. MacKendrick, in a footnote to her claim that
ascetics and sadomasochists tend to be rather intellectual (153),
provides, without elaborating, what is arguably an originary moment of masochistic intellectualism. Her example is St. Catherine
of Alexandria, whom she succinctly notes is the patron saint of
philosophers . . . whose life was ended by tortuous stretching on
the Catherine wheel, now adapted as an s/m toy (193 n.5). The
fact that St. Catherines life is said to have ended by beheading rather than by torture on the wheel does not vitiate the more
interesting observation here concerning the relation between
masochism and Catherines revolutionary career as an intellectual.18 A short hagiography then: Venerated as the patroness of
scholars and preachers,19 Catherine, according to medieval legend, publicly protested against the practice of idol worship and its
promotion by the Emperor Maxentius, who, astounded at her rebellious spirit but too intellectually feeble to vie with her in point
of learning, ordered that she dispute with 50 philosophers summoned to dissuade her from the faith. In the course of dismantling
their arguments, her eloquence and learning converted the philosophers, who were then burned for their apostasy. Refusing to
deny her faith, Catherine was beaten and put in prison, where she
was able to continue converting those who came in contact with
her, including the empress and 200 soldiers, who were also immediately martyred. A last attempt was made to break Catherines
will by torturing her on a spiked wheel, but when the device miraculously disintegrated at her touch, the enraged emperor had her
beheaded. In a condensed way, St. Catherines martyrdom dramatizes how masochistic forms of intellectual dissidence redefine
politics as an art of the impossible by altering the parameters of
what is considered possible within the status quo.20 Her political intervention did not work well within the order of existing relations, but nonetheless had the effect of changing the very terms
that determine how things do work. Masochism has precisely this
effect: it opens up the gap between what is and what is possible,
clearing the space necessary for genuine critique.
In her suggestive study of masochistic performance art of
the seventies, ODell focuses on the intensely reflective creativity
of a group of artist-intellectuals committed, she argues, to changing the parameters within which audiences relate to the artist,
and ultimately how they relate to their own social and political
situation. The highly complex dynamics of an audiences relation
to the self-mutilating artist inhere, ODell argues, in the form of
the contract, a quasi-legal bond that, as Deleuze theorized, is the
intrinsic formal logic of masochism. By putting their pain on dis-

American Literary History

play, artists such as Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci
eschew the sympathy that suffering calls for, in favor of laying
bare the distance or alienation such displays create at the same
time. Masochistic performance aims at decoupling meaning from
its representation, so that the alienating distance opened up by
S/M art becomes politically useful as a space for critique and the
interpretation of complex social signifiers such as those surrounding war and disease. Pain is thus fully political in the hands
of performance artists whose masochistic practices symbolize the
pain of the observers own submission. Viewers, ODell writes,
are asked to take responsibility for masochisms institutional
causes (8384). Pain then becomesand this is where ODells
analysis has been headinga mode of political thinking, one that
rejects binaristic reasoning in favor of reciprocity: Masochistic
artists . . . deliver the important message that nonnegotiable,
black-and-white thinking is not effective in the long run. This
message becomes clearerand more crucialin times of strife,
when people tend to fall back on dualisms to simplify and to
make things more manageable, even if those solutions are temporary or illusory (84).
That this ideal of negotiation is finally too rudimentary to
support a political philosophy of power seems somewhat beside
the point given the contexts of social urgency within, and against,
which masochistic artists continue to perform their critical opposition. ODell identifies the Vietnam War and the failure of American imperialism it symbolized as the primary context within
which seventies artists of pain worked, while alluding also to those
critical factors Savran names responsible for the general ascendancy of masochism in Americareactions to feminism, gay and
lesbian rights, and the civil rights movement. For masochistic
artists a decade or so later, the AIDS crisis, domestic violence, and
child abuse constitute some of the politically and socially urgent
contexts within which they create. Masochistic art, ODell claims,
dramatizes the uncertain position of the body in society, by drawing attention to the political conditions in which the authenticity
of ones own bodily experience is threatened by the normality of
ideologies promoting the synonymy of the body with exchangeable goods. Such an ideology begins to appear less normal, indeed abnormal, ODell suggests, once the masochistic contract is
foregrounded as structural device. In the contractual dimension
of masochism, ODell discovers the possibility for stabilizing,
through negotiation, crisis-induced instabilities, even those as violent as war. As a structured response to cultural emergencies, the
contract contains, but never extinguishes, the hierarchical violence of binarisms. Masochistic art thereby reminds us just how

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intricately the logics of us/them and S/M are intertwined in our

everyday lives.
ODells optimism regarding the political potential of
masochistic art to oppose social violence and the destitution of
the modern subject is not shared by Savran, who is clear about
where the ascendancy of masochistic practice leads: these
private theaters in which ones pain and victimization are celebrated stifle collective political action. The history of
masochism in postwar America is, for Savran, the history of
how new prominent styles of white masculinity, from Beats to
New Age men, have worked to solidify social fantasies of dominationhomophobia, racism, misogyny. Savrans critical leftism finds reactionary elements precisely among those whose
claims to progressivism are discredited by confessional displays
of the humiliating and scandalous (the Beats) or by a kind of
drug-induced Christian masochism, the belief that transcendence can be achieved through abjection (the hippies). The fading countercultural energies of the seventies and the fallout of
the Vietnam debacle make this decade the crucial one, whose
dominant masculine figure is the reflexive sadomasochist, a
man playing the role of the victim and the aggressor simultaneously in such a way that, through eroticization, he can ultimately disavow both domination and submission. (I am convinced that this same masculine modality is at work in the
sixties.) Throughout his analysis of this new S/M masculinity,
what is most crucial for Savran is the way masochism structures,
even as it attempts to heal, this split identity, producing a male
subject at war with himself (176). This conflicted masochistic
subject, inhabiting the cultural mainstream as the kinder, gentler new spiritual man ( la Forrest Gump or the Promise
Keepers), offers, according to Savran, absolutely no politically
transformative potential. The culture of masochism, despite its
momentary reanimation of the promises of sixties countercultural theory, collapses back into itself, withdrawing its agents
from the political field, privileging the private over the public
and the genuinely associational.
There is a marked nostalgia in Savrans book for a Marxist
humanism capable of educating society to the dangers of liberal
humanism once corrupted by global capitalism. When freedom
is understood as something tied only to the marketplace, and not,
as for Herbert Marcuse, a human condition in which there is genuine freedom from want and necessity, fantasies of masochistic
masculinity are not, as Silverman theorizes, inimical to the extant social order because they threaten the idea of reality as
founded upon sexual difference, but rather because they produce

American Literary History

little more than politically impotent spectacles of private rage.

Only collective or mass-movement oppositional politics has, for
Savran, the power to overcome binaristic masculinity, transforming it from a dissident sexuality (as celebrated by postmodern theory) into a coordinated political practice. One gets the sense from
Savran that masochism, given the historical forms of masculinism
it has taken, simply cannot deliver what it promises formally, that
is, a provocation or critique of the status quo, the product of an alliance of coordinated submission in the name of an ideal such as
social justice.
The masculinism of masochism, as Savran acknowledges in
his brief reading of lesbian S/M (23033), can be phantasmically
appropriated to mime a masculinity that is already understood
to be an imitation (230). This mimicry, Hart insists, should not
be simply construed as mimesis, based on the logic of model/
copy, but as a mode of ambivalent simulation, what she calls the
dis-semblances of s/m (86). Masochisms performative emphasis conjures up, as Hart puts it, the contradictory nature of
all performance, which strives both to create the truth of
illusion and unmask the illusion of truth (68). Hart goes well beyond Savran theoretically, in the effort to transcend the phallocentric model of S/M, arguing that the lesbian S/M dynamic resignifies power and gender relations in ways that are doubtless
enabled by heterosex models, but at the same time are dissonant
displacements of them (86). Like ODell and MacKendrick,
Hart finds in the formal elements of masochismthe contract
and suspense, for examplea utopic impulse, a yearning for a
new economy of passionate relations. The relations Hart has in
mind are based upon a new kind of bondage, where the word, the
contract, is the bond, and the bodily practices of S/M represent
an acting out of commitment, a willingness to be transformed
through the recognition of the other (80). The body becomes the
site for transacting a perverse form of fidelity (104), where the
elements of suspense (the refusal to consummate) and the contract work to extend indefinitely the seductions and satisfactions
of S/M, establishing in the process a sense of continuity that
works without ever extracting promises that cannot be kept. In
this way, S/M signals a commitment that is beyond the inevitability of the broken promise (155). I spotlight the ethical dimension of Harts argument not only because I find it to be one
of the truly paradigm-shifting facets of her argument, but because I surmise that the ethics of S/M is intimately linked, for
Hart, to its politics, and therefore to its cultural urgency. S/M becomes especially attractive to certain classes for whom such practices, as Juliet Flower MacCannell speculates, stand as codified

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models for a trust that long ago fled a society awash in tales of
out-of-control crimes and punishments. Sadomasochism offers a
welcome reliefguarantees, signed contractsto young moderns bereft of the once taken-for-granted coordinates of civil society (49).

3
This much seems clear: masochism is oddly at home within
leftist politics, whether it offers an opportunity for a paleo-Marxist like Savran to deny the dissident possibilities that postmodernist theorists (e.g., Bersani, Silverman, Deleuze) assert are inherent in the masochistic strategy, or whether, as for Hart and
ODell especially, it promises to dismantle, or at least radically to
refigure, real conditions of repression and oppression owing to
masculinist monopolies on sexuality and the body. That submission to these monopolies is an inescapable feature of everyday life
under late capitalism is a sign perhaps of masochisms utter intractability, at least in Savrans reading. Yet to critique this monopolization of eros from the vantage point of masochism theory
is not merely a step toward seeing how bodies come to be indelibly
marked by social forces of subjection, but, more crucially, it is also
a step toward appreciating how the very pleasures of subjection
militate against forces of discipline and punishment. It seems
masochism accomplishes this in two ways: one, it affirms that contemporary authority, internalized as so many affects of self-denial
or abjection, is rarely sovereign and therefore cannot be directly
disrupted or dislodged once and for all; and, two, it stages a neverending repetition of abjection where authority is or is made to appear momentarily locatable, having now an unmistakable relation
to the subject. The compulsion to repeat ones subjection is now
charged by the desire that a different structure of value could
emergean elsewherebeyond the dialectic [of power and powerlessness], a different kind of knowledge/experience (Hart 151)
that eludes the crushing finality of surrender. In an important way,
we are returned to one of the strongest themes in MacKendricks
philosophy of counterpleasure: that masochism is never to be misrecognized as passivity or withdrawal, but should be taken as a
form of intense engagement, arguably the very basis for critique.
Considered together, I think, these four books offer a cautious tale regarding the future of liberal humanism and leftist politics generally. The case could be made that this explains in large
part their raisons dtre. On his last page, Savran somberly points
out that, with the demise of Communism, the near-identity of the

American Literary History

Democratic and Republican parties, and the unceasing penetration of capitalism, you are left with almost no real opposition
(320). It then becomes an urgent question how progressive opposition can be and actually is structured, both as fantasy and political reality. In his recent assessment of the crisis of the Left,
Ernesto Laclau states bluntly that there will be no renaissance of
the Left without the construction of a new social imaginary
(211). Contra Savran, producing this new social imaginary must
involve recognition of the diagnostic and liberatory potentials of
masochism, as a practice and critical paradigm. As we witness
masochism fast becoming a predominant mode of cultural commodification, reflected, for example, in S/M-theme marketing
strategies (from Bass Ale to Gucci shoes to Winston cigarettes), in
the popularity of reality TV (CBSs Survivor and MTVs Jackass
are exemplary) and prime-time game shows (with BBC/NBCs
The Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinsonwhose affect conflates Rudolf Hess, Margaret Thatcher, and Sally Jessy Raphael
as everybodys favorite domme), and in gross-out movie comedies
(Ben Stillers self-zippered agony in Theres Something about Mary
[1998]), analysis of what is truly productive in masochisms social
function becomes all the more necessary. Here, remarkably, a notion to which Savran passingly refers makes its presence deeply
felt (254): Walter Benjamins Jetztzeit (now-time), a utopianism of
the present that masochism, I think, so brilliantly stages through
converting binary oppositespleasure and pain, power and powerlessness, public and private, and so oninto charged constellations whose potentially world-shattering force derives from the
holding open of those binaries, the refusal to resolve them in the
present moment. Masochisms now-time becomes thus an incitement to think the unthinkable, beyond the reach of the commodity, into the realm of the revolutionary.
Is leftism strategically masochistic, masochism tactically
progressive? There are certainly sound reasons within psychoanalytic theory to affirm the latter assertionthe idea that
masochisms momentary disavowal of reality amounts to a kind
of utopic wishand there are perhaps more compelling reasons
to affirm the former, given the apparent obligation on the part of
left-oriented theory to think through masochism and its cultural
forms, not to mention the perceived hopelessness of prevailing
against capital and the forces of conservatism. What contemporary writing on masochism reveals are the dissident, oppositional,
and utopian values of masochism, values that turn the critical enterprise itself into something humiliating. This, arguably, is the lesson of David Finchers Fight Club (1999), a film that ends on a
note of political sterility, its challenges to consumerist culture,

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founded in an antimasculinist and masochist form of one of the

most masculinist and sadistic activitiesfistfightingfinally collapsing into a fascistic fantasy of armored conformity, a failed defense against identity disintegration (Jack/Tyler Durdens schizophrenic breakdown).

Notes
1. The fact that during World War II and into the fifties a sustained and vital discourse on masochism developed in place of theories of sadism might seem surprising, yet given the psychiatric focus on the traumatized soldier since World
War I, combat neurosis was predominantly explained in terms of the selfdestructive behavior engendered by the guilty fear of punishment for ones own
unleashed aggression. Theories of interiorized cruelty in the form of guilt led to
the idea of masochism concealing hostility toward the source from which injury
is expected. Wartime theories of masochism such as Theodor Reiks demonstrate
that the real pleasure in masochism turns out to be a sadistic one. I would tentatively suggest that this notion that cruelty can be exercised by proxy explains the
logic of warfare and dictatorship whereby a brutal mass is responsible for the
leaders violence, a cruelty that is less his own than what Reik would call an impersonation of the cruelty of the mass. A theory of dictatorship is found here:
as the ideal emblem of the mass that will sacrifice itself for the will of the one, the
dictator is an emblem of cruelty only insofar as a kind of mass masochism props
it up (see Reik 18384).
2. A sampling of more titles from mens monthlies in the sixties spells out quite
clearly the felt need to prop up masculinity, often in terms of working through
war traumata: e.g., Adventure, World of Men, Champion, Rugged Men, Outdoor
Adventure, Mans Illustrated, Men in Conflict, Mans Life, True Men, Mans Action,
Peril, Mans Courage, Untamed, Mans True Danger, Mans Story, World of Men,
Men in Adventure, For Men Only, New Man, Man to Man, Mans Best, Men Today, Mans Conquest, All Man, Battle Cry, Escape to Adventure, Expos, Mans
Adventure, Mans Daring, Rage, Mans Magazine, Action for Men, Complete Man,
Fury, Mans Prime, Mans Epic, Bluebook for Men.
3. See, e.g., Jerry Lunds concluding chapter, where a sobering portrait of the
American political field under the sway of the triumphant woman is offered.
4. A genealogy should begin with Gaylyn Studlar, Masochism, elaborated
fully in her In the Realm of the Senses: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (1988). Key elaborations follow: D. N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of
Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (1991); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); Carol J. Clover, Men, Women,
and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Steven Shaviro, The
Cinematic Body (1993); and, in relation to porn specifically, Linda Williams,
Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989), esp. 184228.
For a recent assessment of the place of the masochistic trope in film studies, see
Paul Smith.
5. See Miller, An Introduction.

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6. Add to the books reviewed here: Bill Burns, Cathy Busby, and Kim Sawchuk,
eds., When Pain Strikes (1999); Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy:
Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (1999); Paul Mann,
Masocriticism (1999); Nick Mansfield, Masochism: The Art of Power (1997);
Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000);
John Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (1997); Anita
Phillips, A Defence of Masochism (1998); John Munder Ross, The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life (1997); and Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender:
Male Masochism at the Fin-de-sicle (1998).
7. See Lynn S. Chancer, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of
Power and Powerlessness (1992) and John Munder Ross, The Sadomasochism of
Everyday Life (1997).
8. Christopher Newfields reading of The Scarlet Letter does a superb job of contextualizing this tactic of power within the logic of antebellum masculinity; see
his The Politics of Male Suffering. A virtuoso reading of the logic by which
power is perpetuated by self-mutilation appears in Mansfield, esp. 2125,
98102.
9. See my Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn.
10. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism
(1987).
11. See Reik 32122.
12. This both subverts and supplements (in the Derridean sense) the law, according to Zi z ek (Plague 7275).
13. In psychoanalysis, masochism has evolved generally from a sexual perversion to the kernel of generalized (and social) neurosis, as in, e.g., the theory of
Karen Horney. On the difficulty of defining masochism and on the various uses
of the concept within psychoanalysis and psychiatry, see Sack and Miller; and
Grossman.
14. Masochism, Reik explains, bends in the same direction as the cultural development, and is always conditioned by psychic forces representing cultural
interests (385).
15. What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of
its practitioners?a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?
(Bataille 17).
16. See, e.g., Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis
and Critical Theory (1995); and Zi z ek, Ticklish Subject, 247312.
17. See Freud, Analysis 248.
18. The Acts of St. Catherine are recorded in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca (Paris: J. P. Migne, 185766) 116: 276301. See also Hermann
Varnhagen, Zur Geschichte der Legende der Katherina von Alexandrien (1891).

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19. Her patronage also extends to apologists, craftsmen who work with a wheel
(potters, spinners, etc.), archivists, attorneys, barristers, dying people, educators,
girls, jurists, knife grinders, knife sharpeners, lawyers, librarians, libraries, maidens, mechanics, millers, nurses, old maids, philosophers, schoolchildren, scribes,
secretaries, spinsters, stenographers, students, tanners, teachers, theologians,
turners, and wheelwrights. Oxford University awards the St. Catherine of
Alexandria Prize for the best performance in the Honour School of Theology
by a candidate who is also engaged in training for ordination in the Church of
England.
20. I am indebted here to Zi z eks comments on post-politics in Ticklish Subject; see 198205.

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