Male Subjectivity at the Margins

Kaja Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781135200633
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through the examination of a range of literary and cinematic texts, from William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives to the novels of Henry James, Silverman offers a bold new look at masculinities which deviate from the social norm.

Masochism

5
Masochism and Male Subjectivity

Perversion: Turning aside from truth or right; diversion to an improper use. . .

(OED)

What is the "truth" or "right" from which perversion turns aside, and what does it improperly use? The OED goes some way towards answering these questions when it quotes, by way of illustration, part of a line from Francis Bacon: "Women to govern men . . . slaves freemen. . . being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations." According to this grammatically "deviant" citation, perversion turns aside from both biology and the social order, and it does so through the improper deployment or negation of the binarisms upon which each regime depends—binarisms that reinforce each other in the case of gender, if not that of class. The "truth" or "right" which is thus subverted is the principle of hierarchy.

Freud's account of perversion also stresses its diversionary and decentering character. "Perversions," he writes in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim."¹ Here, in utter disregard for Western metaphysics, the " true" or"right" is heterosexual penetration. All other sexual activities belong either to the category of "fore-play," in which case they are strictly subordinated to "end-pleasure," or perversion.

Coitus is "ideally" a reprise in miniature of the history of infantile sexuality, a history that begins with oral gratification and culminates with genital desire for an object of the opposite gender. Here too the subject is exhorted to keep his or her eyes on the finish line, and to move as expeditiously as possible through the preliminary stages. But in both cases perversion intrudes as the temptation to engage in a different kind of erotic narrative, one whose organization is aleatory and paratactic rather than direct and hypotactic, preferring fore-pleasures to end-pleasures, and browsing to discharge. Since every external and internal organ is capable of becoming an erotogenic zone, sexuality need not even be limited to the three stages Freud decreed for boys, or the four he ordained for girls. Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse, and even in the erotic activities of the most "normal" adult there are "rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as 'perversions.'"²

I do not mean to suggest that polymorphous sexuality is more "natural" than genital sexuality. There is no form of human sexuality which does not marginalize need or substitute a fantasmatic object for the original and nutritive object. As Laplanche explains, "Sexuality is ... a localized, autoerotic pleasure, a pleasure of the organ 'in place,' in opposition to a functional pleasure with all which that term implies of an opening towards the object. . . Thus a natural, functional rhythm (that of rutting) disappears, while elsewhere there emerges a different kind of sequence, which is incomprehensible without calling into play such categories as repression, reminiscence, work of elaboration, 'deferred action.'"³

The notion of a deferred action has a particular relevance within the present discussion, since infantile sexuality assumes the narrative coherence of "stages" only after the fact, from the vantage-point of the Oedipus complex. The concept of perversion is equally unthinkable apart from the Oedipus complex, since it derives all its meaning and force from its relation to that structuring moment and the premium it places upon genital sexuality. It is in fact something of a misnomer to characterize infantile sexuality as "polymorphously perverse" since sexuality only becomes perverse at the point where it constitutes either a retreat from Oedipal structuration, or a transgressive acting out of its dictates. Perversion always contains the trace of Oedipus within it—it is always organized to some degree by what it subverts.

Those writers who have engaged theoretically with the topic or perversion tend to emphasize one of these aspects at the expense of the other. For Foucault, who stands at one extreme, perversion has no subversive edge; it merely serves to extend the surface upon which power is exercised. He insists in The History of Sexuality that "polymorphous conducts [are] actually extracted from people's bodies and from their pleasures" by what might be called "the society of the panopticon"—that perversion is "drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices."⁴ At the other extreme there is a volume like the polysexuality issue of Semiotext(e),⁵ which heaps perversion upon perversion with wild abandon in the vain hope of burying Oedipus altogether. Neither position is adequate to the complexities of the issues involved.

Ironically, it is a rather hateful book by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel—a book which consistently comes down on the side of the father, "mature" sexuality, and a well-fortified ego—that seems best to intuit the challenge that perversion poses to the symbolic order. Its author cautions that "The pervert is trying to free himself from the paternal universe and the constraints of the law. He wants to create a new kind of reality and to dethrone God the Father."⁶ Chasseguet-Smirgel's reading of perversion suggests that its significance extends far beyond the domain of the strictly sexual (if, indeed, such a domain ever existed)—suggests, that is, that it turns aside not only from hierarchy and genital sexuality, but from the paternal signifier, the ultimate "truth" or "right." As I will attempt to demonstrate later in this chapter with respect to masochism, at certain moments perversion may pose such a radical challenge to sexual difference as to enact precisely the scenario condemned by Bacon.

The theoretical interest of perversion extends even beyond the disruptive force it brings to bear upon gender. It strips sexuality of all functionality, whether biological or social; in an even more extreme fashion than "normal" sexuality, it puts the body and the world of objects to uses that have nothing whatever to do with any kind of "immanent" design or purpose. Perversion also subverts many of the binary oppositions upon which the social order rests: it crosses the boundary separating food from excrement (coprophilia); human from animal (bestiality); life from death (necrophilia); adult from child (pederasty); and pleasure from pain (masochism).

Of course not all perversions are equally subversive, or even equally interesting. It is unfortunate but not surprising that the perversion which has commandeered most of the literary and theoretical attention—sadism—is also the one which is most compatible with conventional heterosexuality. (The first thing that Freud says about sadism in Three Essays is that "the sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate." He adds that the "biological significance" of this combination

seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position. [157—58]

The Ego and the Id describes sadism's combination of cruelty and eroticism as a "serviceable instinctual fusion.")⁷ The work of Sade commands enormous intellectual prestige—something inconceivable with the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, rescued from oblivion by Deleuze.⁸ One thinks in this respect not only of Bataille,⁹ Barthes,¹⁰ and Gallop,¹¹ but of the massive double issue of Obliques dedicated to Sade, which includes materials from Benoît, Klossowski, Blanchot, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Paulhan, Breton, Mandiargues, Masson, and Labisse, to name only a few of its contributors.¹²

The focus of this essay is the perversion which is most commonly linked with sadism, sometimes as its complement and at other times as its instinctual opposite. I refer of course to masochism,¹³ variously described by Freud as an unusually dangerous libidinal infraction,¹⁴ and as one of the "kindliest."¹⁵

1. Three Kinds of Masochism

In his last work to deal extensively with masochism, Freud distinguishes between three forms of that perversion: "erotogenic," "feminine," and "moral."¹⁶ However, no sooner are these distinctions enumerated than they begin to erode. Erotogenic masochism, which Freud defines as "pleasure in pain," provides the corporeal basis both for feminine and moral masochism. The tripartite division thus gives way rather quickly to one of those dualisms of which Freud is so fond, with both feminine and moral masochism "bleeding" into each other at the point where each abuts into erotogenic masochism.

The adjective "erotogenic" is one which Freud habitually links with "zone," and with which he designates a part of the body at which sexual excitation concentrates. Implicit, then, in the notion of masochism, whether feminine or moral, would seem to be the experience of corporeal pleasure, or—to be more precise—corporeal pleasure-inpain. This stipulation poses no real conceptual difficulties with respect to the first of those categories; erotogenic masochism would seem to be literally "at the bottom" of feminine masochism, which Freud associates with fantasies of being bound and beaten, and with the desire to be "treated like ... a naughty child."¹⁷ It is far less clear how moral masochism could be said to have a necessary corporeal substratum, until we recall that the ego is for Freud "first and foremost a bodily ego"¹⁸—or, as Strachey explains in an authorized gloss, "derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body."¹⁹ If, as "The Economic Problem of Masochism" suggests, the "true" masochist "always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow" (165), the moral masochist's cheek is the ego. That is the erotogenic zone of choice, the site where he or she seeks to be beaten.

Curiously, after characterizing feminine masochism as the one that is the most accessible to our observation," Freud announces that owing to the "material at [his] command," he will limit his discussion of that libidinal economy entirely to male patients.²⁰ The inference is obvious: feminine masochism is a specifically male pathology, so named because it positions its sufferer as a woman. Freud in fact says as much:

... if one has an opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically feminine situation; they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby. For this reason I have called this form of masochism, a potiori, as it were . . . the feminine form, although so many of its features point to infantile life.²¹

The reader is likely to object at this point that only five years earlier Freud had clearly identified the beating fantasy primarily with women. (Of the six patients upon whom he bases " 'A Child Is Being Beaten,'" four are female, and only two male.)²² And from Three Essays until New Introductory Lectures, Freud was to maintain, albeit with certain crucial qualifications, the connection between femininity and masochism.²³ Yet "The Economic Problem of Masochism" is not the only major work on masochism to focus primarily upon male patients. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who gave masochism its name and its first definition, cites thirty-three cases of male masochism, and only four of female.²⁴ (He also names masochism after a male masochist, Sacher-Masoch.) Theodor Reik's research had similar results, leading him to conclude that "the male sex is more masochistic than the female."²⁵ In his study of cruelty, Deleuze not only focuses exclusively on the novels of Sacher-Masoch, but elaborates a theoretical model of masochism in which the suffering position is almost necessarily male. What is to be made of this anomaly, whereby Freud designates as "feminine" a psychic disorder whose victims are primarily men? While I would certainly dispute Reik's notion that men are more masochistic than women, it does seem to me that it is only in the case of men that feminine masochism can be seen to assume pathological proportions. Although that psychic phenomenon often provides a centrally structuring element of both male and female subjectivity, it is only in the latter that it can be safely acknowledged. It is an accepted— indeed a requisite—element of "normal" female subjectivity, providing a crucial mechanism for eroticizing lack and subordination. The male subject, on the contrary, cannot avow feminine masochism without calling into question his identification with the masculine position. All of this is another way of suggesting that what is acceptable for the female subject is pathological for the male. Freud indicates as much when he tells us that whereas the beating fantasy can be effortlessly accommodated within the little girl's positive Oedipus complex, it can only be contained within the little boy's negative Oedipus complex.²⁶ Feminine masochis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Ideology and Masculinity
• The Gaze and the Look
• Masochism
• Libidinal Politics
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index