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Tensions in Deleuzian Desire

Frida Beckmana
a
Department of English, Uppsala University, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

Online publication date: 06 August 2010

To cite this Article Beckman, Frida(2010) 'Tensions in Deleuzian Desire', Angelaki, 15: 1, 93 — 108
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2010.496172
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2010.496172

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 ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 15 number 1 april 2010

introduction: tensions critical

and clinical
wo problems emerge along with Deleuze’s
T delineation of masochism. The first problem
concerns the notion of desire. Studying the figure
of the masochist in Deleuze’s ‘‘Coldness and
Cruelty’’ and this same figure in Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, some tensions
Downloaded By: [Beckman, Frida] At: 10:32 23 August 2010

surface in how we can comprehend desire

through Deleuze. These tensions are qualitative
and structural and relate to central issues of open-
endedness and directionality in both literature
and life or, to be more specific, to the BwO (Body
without Organs) and subjectivity. In fact, the
tensions between Deleuze’s early essay and his
work with Guattari are so considerable that we
may need to recognize two different models of
desire in Deleuze’s philosophy. This article traces
these tensions and the two kinds of desire that
surface with them through the figure of the
masochist as part of Deleuze’s critical and clinical
project and thereby as part of a project that shifts
focus from text as secondary symptom to text as
primary sign. In accordance with Deleuze’s early
essay, the temporality of the masochist is
recognized as indistinguishable from the struc-
tural conditions of narrative.
The second problem with the function of
masochism in Deleuze relates to the question of
gender. Exactly because the figure of the
masochist in Deleuze is closely linked to the
critical and clinical project, it becomes apparent
that his project has exacerbated the separation
between male and female masochism. That
Deleuze’s symptomatology of masochism relies
exclusively on the works of Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch makes sense considering the inevitable
role that Sacher-Masoch has played in theories of
masochism. At the same time, this single focus
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/10/010093^16 ß 2010 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2010.496172
frida beckman
TENSIONS IN
DELEUZIAN DESIRE
critical and clinical
reflections on female
masochism
has entailed that Deleuze’s critical strategy has
been reserved for a critical symptomatology of
male masochism while leaving female masochism
in the hands of clinical, largely psychoanalytic,
readings. This article attempts to amend this
binary tendency in studies of masochism.
Implementing Deleuze’s critical project by
exploring the structure of narrative and desire
in literary works from Sacher-Masoch and the
Marquis de Sade to Pauline Réage and Kathy
Acker, this article demonstrates that addressing
this second problem also becomes a way of
addressing the first problem relating to the
function of the masochist in Deleuze’s thought.
We end up with two problems that can be posed
through one, single question: are there ways in
which a symptomology of female masochism can

93
 tensions in deleuzian desire
help us rethink the problem of time and desire in
Deleuze?
It is in his work on Sacher-Masoch, Daniel W.
Smith notes, that Deleuze first connects the
critical and the clinical.1 Deleuze, Smith points
out, saw his ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ as a first in a
project of studies in the relation between the
critical and the clinical, a project that would
make it possible to extract concepts from literary
works.2 The critical and the clinical, Deleuze
argues, converge at the particular point of
symptomatology. Medicine, he suggests, com-
prises three activities: symptomatology or ‘‘the
study of signs’’; aetiology, that is, ‘‘the search for
causes’’; and therapy, ‘‘the development and
application of a treatment.’’3 The first part, the
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study of signs, Deleuze argues, can just as well be
a subject for art as of medicine. Symptomatology
is about identifying a point of convergence
between different symptoms and naming it. The
signs that give rise to a particular concept, or
‘‘illness,’’ may emerge from a human body but
they may just as well be recognized through a
work of art, or a piece of literature. Already
Sigmund Freud, as Smith notes, used this critical
strategy when he turned to Sophocles in his
creation of the Oedipus complex.4 At the end of
the nineteenth century, Richard von Krafft-Ebing
used the particular agendas and aesthetics of the
literary texts by the Marquis de Sade and Leopold
von Masoch to identify sadism and masochism as
two particular sexual pathologies. As Barbara
Mennel puts it, Krafft-Ebing ‘‘turned aesthetics
[ . . . ] into sexual science.’’5
While Krafft-Ebing’s much-disputed approach
was later largely overridden by the clinical
approaches of Freud, Theodor Reik and Marie
Bonaparte, Deleuze, when introducing his own
symptomatology of masochism, finds reason to
return to the critical approach and thereby to
Sacher-Masoch’s (as well as Sade’s) own work.
Krafft-Ebing’s symptomatology relied largely on
the contents of the literary texts, which led him to
distinguish between sadism and masochism on the
grounds that the sadist evinces the desire to
‘‘cause pain and use force’’ while the masochist
harbours ‘‘the wish to suffer pain and be subjected
to force.’’6 Deleuze’s symptomatology of maso-
chism, on the other hand, becomes not so much a
matter of content as a matter of structure. For
Deleuze, it is the literary strategies of repetition
and postponement that reveal the nature of sadism
and masochism. It is by paying close attention to
these textual strategies that enables Deleuze to
revise both Krafft-Ebing’s dual view and the
psychoanalytic symptomatology that, because it
had neglected the nature of the texts themselves,
had made it possible to conflate sadism and
masochism in the complementary unity of
sadomasochism. In other words, it is the very
structure of Sacher-Masoch’s work that allows
Deleuze to move from more clinical, psycho-
analytical approaches to perversion to an analysis
that relies on the structure of the literary text.
This means that while Deleuze is thus not the
first to recognize the link between sadism and
masochism and literary texts, something new
happens when he reads Sade and Sacher-Masoch
and extracts from their literary texts a sympto-
mology. In complementing and reassessing
clinical approaches to sadism and masochism
with a critical inquiry into the very nature of the
literary works that have named them, literary
language and descriptive functions become not
symbols or representations of sadism and maso-
chism but the very means of determining their
differential structures. Deleuze builds on Krafft-
Ebing’s acknowledgement of the literary in the
shaping of sadism and masochism but by
returning once more, and more critically, to
Sacher-Masoch’s literary works he makes it
possible to posit masochism as an economy that
is different from sadism rather than its comple-
mentary opposite. The demonstrative function of
language in Sade and the dialectical in Sacher-
Masoch produce narratives based on accelerated
repetition and deferral respectively which, in
Deleuze’s view affects, or even effects, the spatio-
temporal coordinates of sadism and masochism.
The return to the work of Sacher-Masoch and
Sade, then, not only enables Deleuze to make a
strong case for his critical symptomatology by
demonstrating how it enables him to launch his
influential differentiation between masochism
and sadism. This literary approach also allows
him to identify what he sees as the crucial
temporal form of masochism. There are ways, he
shows, in which the different functions of
94

narrative and temporality in literature can be
linked to economies of masochism and sadism
respectively. Their respective and irreducible
economies depend on the function of desire and
how it can be drawn from the structure of the
narrative.
narrative and time in sade and
sacher-masoch
That the symptomatology of Deleuze’s critical
enterprise encourages and even relies on a close
interrogation of the literary text can be clearly
demonstrated by taking a closer look at his
arguments for the separation of masochism and
sadism. In Sade, Deleuze writes, ‘‘the imperative
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and descriptive function of language transcends
itself toward pure demonstrative, instituting
function.’’7 This is a demonstration not of
knowledge but of power. The libertines in
Sade’s work, as Deleuze shows, reason with
their victims, not to persuade or educate, but
simply to demonstrate that ‘‘reasoning itself is a
form of violence.’’8 An awareness of Sade’s
critical strategies also suggests that the recurrent
libertine speeches are not meant to instruct the
fictional listeners so much as the reader. Sade’s
project, as Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer show, was to illustrate and take to
the extreme the implications of Enlightenment,
and in this way it is a very moral project in the
midst of its blatant immorality.9 This way, one
might say that it is the physical violence that
doubles the reasoning rather than the other way
around. It is the speeches that are the main
narrative. In this view, the sexualized torture is
just an illustration of the implications of the
Enlightenment model of subjectivity and ration-
ality. It is here, as many critics have shown, that
we see most clearly Sade’s work as a critique of
the contemporary belief in the nature of man and
its link to practical reason.
What happens in Sade, one may say, is that the
narrative transforms reasoning as a dialectic
process into an atemporal doubling of the
narrative action. Narratively, reasoning aims not
toward an argument and ultimately a synthesis
but rather it aims back only at itself. Rather than
supporting and promoting a narrative from which
95
beckman
we can draw a sense of temporal continuity,
reasoning brings the narrative to a halt only to
point to its own function. When Sade’s libertines
stop the persecution of their victims to deliver
speeches about Enlightenment ideals and ration-
alism, they disrupt the narrative in two ways. To
begin with, there is the obvious way in which the
action is deferred by them. Also, and more
intricately, the speeches double the violation of
the victims; they are not only exposed to physical
violence but also to the violence of reason.
Deleuze shows how the reasoning, by not being
shared but rather demonstrated to the listener/
victim, reflects the fact that pleasure does not
have to be shared by the person from whom it is
derived.10 Like the sexual violence it doubles it is
in fact desirable that the victim/listener does not
derive pleasure from the speeches. Accordingly,
the demonstrative reason of Sade’s stories func-
tions to double the narrative of physical violence.
From a narrative point of view, the doubling
reinforces the endless descriptions of transgres-
sive and violent acts and endows Sade’s narratives
with a rhythm of repetition rather than a
dialectical development.
In Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze shows, the ‘‘pure
demonstrative, instituting function’’ of Sade is
exchanged for a ‘‘dialectical, mythical and
persuasive function.’’11 Masochism is ‘‘neither
material nor moral, but essentially formal.’’12
The hesitant woman has to be coerced into her
dominating function and made to perform
according to the erotic fantasy of the masochist
subject. She has to be transformed to correspond
with the chilly beauty of a Venus statue. This
takes time. ‘‘But Severin,’’ Wanda exclaims in
Venus in Furs, ‘‘do you believe me capable of
maltreating a man who loves me as you do, and
whom I love?’’13 The increasing violence of the
narrative is possible on the conditions of a causal
narrative through which reality is made to
correspond to the masochist fantasy and the
woman to the dominatrix ideal. One might say,
then, that while the Sadean narrative depends on
repetition and doubling, the classic masochist
narrative relies on temporal causality and
linearity.
If Sade’s narratives function according to an
economy of repetition and demonstrative reason,
 tensions in deleuzian desire
Sacher-Masoch’s novels centre on deferral and
agreement. But unlike the endless repetition of
the body in Sade, there is something inescapably
temporal and linear about the desire of the
masochistic body. The masochistic body is
suspended in time because the pain it experiences
does not in itself constitute an immediate
gratification but is rather a promise of what is
yet to come. It is because pleasure is deferred that
it becomes possible for Deleuze and Guattari to
argue that the masochist remains within the realm
of desire.14 The acts of waiting and suspension, as
Sacher-Masoch’s work shows, are expressed
through a coherent narrative that can incorporate
the temporal form of indefinite delay. Even if the
goal is suspended there is nevertheless a goal; it
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is, to speak in terms of the literary that Deleuze
himself finds so central to masochism, a state of
suspension that relies on a narrative
development.
masochism and desire
Assuming that Deleuze is right about the
centrality of the formal in masochism, and
assuming that his critical approach is valid,
then the structure of the narrative is central to
how we may understand masochism and the
desire it transfigures. To be able to appreciate the
philosophical problems that arise with Deleuze’s
critical reliance on the narrative and hence the
formal construction of masochistic desire in
‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ we need to understand
how the narrative economy outlined in this text
chafes against the economy as well as the
implications of desire in Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari free desire
from its psychoanalytical links with goals and
lack and instead position desire as open ended
and productive. Reconsidering the focus on the
goal, and thereby on a specific directionality of
desire, makes it possible for them to rethink the
notion that desire is based on lack. It also enables
them to free desire from a particular subject
position for whom this lack would be perceived as
reality. Rethinking desire thus becomes a way of
rethinking the notions of subjectivity as well as
the body. Rather than presenting a desire based
on lack, they offer desire as a productive coupling
of energies, a connectivity that does not try to
cover up what is missing but is always in the
process of creation. It is this conception of desire
that makes it possible for them to question
predetermined borders of the body, the subject,
and, indeed, being itself, without ending up with
dissolution or absence. Instead of drawing the
contours of the individual body and explaining its
desire to connect with other bodies in terms of a
compensation for an inner lack, they point to
desiring machines; assemblages created by a
creative capacity to connect.
In A Thousand Plateaus, the masochist is
used as a way of explaining this open-endedness
of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari, the maso-
chist enables new openings for thought that are
central not only to how we think about a
particular perversion but also to how we approach
ontological questions of becoming, bodies, and
desire. Desire based on lack and the subject
predetermines being according to social, familial,
and political categories and thereby closes down
the creative potential inherent in all life.
Psychoanalysis, it is argued, ‘‘confines every
desire and statement to a genetic axis or
overcoding structure, and makes infinite, mono-
tonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the
constituents of that structure.’’15 The masochist
body, on the other hand, opens up the possibility
of replacing psychoanalytic desire with open-
ended and productive desire based on connectiv-
ity and suspension. As such, the masochist
becomes a way of rethinking the delimiting
notion of a unified body determined by a
unidirectional desire with a body and desire in
a continual and non-limitative process of creation.
One of the central characteristics of masochism
according to Reik, one of its earliest theorists, is
the ‘‘suspense factor,’’ that is, a postponement of
release that is intimately linked with the anxiety
raised by the ‘‘end-pleasure.’’16 Making use of
this theory to suggest that masochism formally is
a state of waiting, Deleuze finds in the masochist
a desire that has no limit in that it is located in
time itself rather than in the particular moment
of fulfilment.17 Desire is not limited to personal
desire but is a positive force of all creation.18
Pleasure, on the other hand, is ‘‘an affection of a
person or a subject.’’ Pleasure, in fact, ‘‘is the
96

only way for persons to ‘find themselves’ in the
process of desire that exceeds them.’’19 Thereby,
pleasure becomes the termination of desire; it
effects what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘‘reterri-
torialization,’’ a closing down of desire by
subjectification. As Deleuze writes in Two
Regimes of Madness:
I cannot give any positive value to pleasure
because it seems to interrupt the immanent
process of desire. Pleasure seems to me to be
on the side of strata and organization . . . I tell
myself that it is no coincidence if Michel
[Foucault] emphasizes Sade, and I, on the
contrary, Masoch.20
If pleasure puts an end to desire, then the
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postponement of pleasure in the singular waiting
of the masochist is thus an ideal instantiation of
desire as untied from pleasure. As Deleuze and
Guattari put it, ‘‘the masochist’s suffering is the
price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to
untie the pseudobond between desire and
pleasure as an extrinsic measure.’’21 In A
Thousand Plateaus, one of the most essential
characteristics of desire is not only that it is open-
ended but also that it is all over. As such, the
masochistic body is used to discuss the Body
without Organs (BwO). The BwO is the
Artaudian concept that Deleuze and Guattari
evoke to question the notion of the body as
determined according to its internal and pre-
determined organization in terms of organs rather
than in its connective potential. The BwO does
not pre-exist experience but is made up only of
the intensities that pass through it.22 In Deleuze
and Guattari’s writing, the body of the masochist
is activated to think the BwO because the pain of
the masochist, they argue, creates a body of pure
intensities. Negotiated into a flow of pure pain,
the masochist body becomes a desiring machine.
The idea of lack is suspended along with the
body – through this desire, the body escapes
subjectification (or facialization as they call it)
and becomes pure event. The role of the
masochist in A Thousand Plateaus thus clearly
functions to effect the notion of a multidirectional
desire. Arguably, then, the masochist serves not
only as a means to illustrate a philosophical
argument but the economy of this perversion
97
beckman
helps to free thought from the subject and desire
from its teleological endpoint.
The possibility of thinking open-ended pro-
ductive desire through the figure of the masochist
is complicated, however, by the temporal form of
masochism that Deleuze identifies in ‘‘Coldness
and Cruelty.’’ In fact, between ‘‘Coldness and
Cruelty’’ and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze’s
use of masochism seems to point to two different
kinds of temporalities with two different sets of
implications for the concept of desire. In
‘‘Coldness and Cruelty,’’ he argues that the pain
and humiliation of the masochist is incompre-
hensible if we do not relate it to ‘‘the temporal
form that makes it possible.’’23 This temporal
form is about the immediate experience of pain,
not as pleasure in itself, but pain as a sign of the
indefinite arrival of pleasure. Even if the waiting
of the masochist thus by definition postpones the
pleasure that would put an end to desire, does not
this ‘‘temporal form’’ nonetheless suggest a
teleology of desire?
If we take a closer look at the temporal form of
the masochist in ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ it
suggests a desire that, although it may not have
a definitive end, is nonetheless unidirectional.
This proposition is underscored by the recurrent
argument that the male masochist does not, in
fact, relent his organizing power but evinces,
rather, a very strong sense of subjectivity. The
link between masochism and subjectivity has
been explored by a number of modern critics. As
Marianne Noble notes, theorists such as George
Bataille, Roy Baumeister, Leo Bersani, Nick
Mansfield, and Julia Kristeva have in different
ways pointed to a masochist shattering of the self
as a striving toward ecstatic merging with the
other, with totality, or death.24 A perceived
imprisonment in structures of the modern self
causes a violent attack on this self in order to
expand beyond it, a longing, in the case of
Kristeva, ‘‘to shatter the boundaries of the self in
order to remerge with totality in a state of ecstatic
non-identity.’’25 Mansfield suggests that this
transgression of borders between self and other
makes the masochist strive to incorporate self and
other ‘‘as the structural logic of a sort of total
subject.’’26 Mansfield builds on the notion that
the masochist is in one sense annexing the
 tensions in deleuzian desire
subjectivity of his torturer. In this understanding,
the (male) masochist in no way surrenders his
power to the person who dominates, tortures, and
humiliates him but, quite the contrary, he
manifests the power of his subjectivity by
teaching, and sometimes coercing, the dominant
how to treat him. Power is thus only seemingly
placed with the figure of dominance while all the
while remaining with the masochist. As Mansfield
puts it, the masochist ‘‘cajoles and manipulates
his partner into expressing a desire he himself has
constructed for her.’’27 Similarly, Deleuze notes
how the masochist contract points not only to the
consent of the masochist but ‘‘his pedagogical
and judicial efforts to train his torturer.’’28 This is
most famously exemplified in Venus in Furs
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where Severin instructs the initially confounded
Wanda according to his demands for her
dominance and makes her into the cold Venus
of his dreams and desire. ‘‘I shall try,’’ she
surrenders, ‘‘to be Venus in Furs.’’29 In this
shape, then, the masochist asserts rather than
abandons his subject position. Mansfield notes
how this masochist does not simply dominate and
control the desire of the other. Even on its own,
the power of the masochist over his torturer, his
training and even annexation of the torturer’s
desire suggests an extraordinarily powerful sub-
jectivity. Moulding this forceful subjectivity in
the temporal form of masochism suggested by
Deleuze, a strong, and unidirectional subject
position appears. The subjective determination
and strictly structured temporality of the male
masochist reveals masochism as ‘‘an art of
power,’’ as Mansfield puts it. Even if the desire
of the masochist, most famously positioned under
the boot of the woman in furs and under the
shadow of the whip, is postponed, it is not, in
fact, liberated through this act since it still finds
its answer in the whip or the heel of the boot; the
trajectory of the whip is already decided just as
the masochist himself has selected the sharpness
of the heel.
We can now begin to see the tensions that arise
when we try to make use of the masochist to
rethink desire and its intimate association with
temporality through Deleuze’s critical project. Is
the open-ended but ‘‘temporal form’’ of the
masochist in ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ comparable
to the open-ended multidirectional desire in the
masochist of A Thousand Plateaus? There are
ways, it seems, in which the masochism outlined
in Deleuze’s essay on Sacher-Masoch is not the
dissolution of the body into the BwO as much as
it is the complete failure of escaping the subject
position. The notion of masochism as developed
by Deleuze thus creates problems for his notion
of desire and the rethinking of the body and
subjectivity. This is clearly linked to the tensions
between unidirectional and multidirectional
desire and how they are structured through the
temporal structure suggested in the literary
narrative. But what happens to our understanding
of masochism if we accept Deleuze’s premises of
the symptomology of masochism as a critical
practice but look rather at literary works about
female masochism?
a critical approach to female
masochism
While male masochism has been addressed as a
theoretical challenge to temporality and being,
female masochism has travelled less far from the
clinical, and primarily Freudian, link between
masochism and female passivity and sexual
submissiveness. Between them, the writings of
Krafft-Ebing, Reik, Freud, and Deleuze have
caused a different symptomatology between male
and female masochism. Kaja Silverman notes the
curious fact that Freud follows up his famous
comment on the accessibility of female maso-
chism with a discussion limited to male patients.
Krafft-Ebing’s, Reik’s, and Deleuze’s later stu-
dies of masochism have all focused on male
masochism. Silverman suggests that this privile-
ging of male masochism is indicative of how only
masochism has been seen as pathological while it
has been taken as a ‘‘normal’’ element of female
subjectivity.30 For Reik, for example, a maso-
chistic woman does not really surpass her regular
subjective limits while a male masochist moves
into the ‘‘‘enemy terrain’ of femininity.’’31 Most
subsequent critical interrogations of masochism
have also been gendered and separated. In an
article that was to greatly influence Freud, Helene
Deutsch discusses femininity as ‘‘the feminine,
passive-masochistic disposition in the mental life
98

of women.’’32 Making the important distinction
between the feminine and the female, Freud’s
argument that the masochistic phantasy puts the
subject ‘‘in a characteristically female situation’’
and that this female situation is passive and based
on lack, it is about castration and ‘‘being
copulated with’’ has arguably engendered an
association between female passivity and the
passivity commonly ascribed the masochist that
later studies have had problems shaking.33
Although Deutsch’s as well as Freud’s associa-
tions between femininity and masochism have
been questioned, there seems to linger a tension
in how we think about female masochism. On the
one hand, arguments that women are somehow
masochistic as part of their sexuality or even
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psyche are no longer very persuasive. In fact,
already in 1957, Rudolph M. Loewenstein argued
that, although masochism is much more common
in women than in men, the equation between
female sexuality and masochism is problematic
and does not solve any problems in how we think
about masochism.34
On the other hand, the act of passivity and
surrender of subjectivity has continued to be
perceived as highly problematical in the case of
female masochism. The considerable variation in
critical approaches is suggestive of the difficulties
of coming to terms with the idea of female
submissiveness in modernity. As Rita Felski
points out, the critical response to female
masochism includes propositions such as ‘‘maso-
chism is a natural urge in women: epitomizes
women’s oppression under patriarchy; is an
empowering form of sexual experimentation;
does not exist.’’35 The uncomfortable association
of the traits of the masochist and traditional
definitions of the feminine has strongly influ-
enced the fact that approaches to female maso-
chism have tended toward the psychoanalytical
and clinical. Feminist scholars, Felski notes, have
largely relied on psychoanalytical theory. The
gendered symptomatology of masochism finds its
most famous and arguably most influential source
in Freud’s famous declaration in ‘‘The Economic
Problem of Masochism’’ that feminine maso-
chism is both the most accessible as well as the
least problematical; ‘‘it can be surveyed in all its
relations.’’36
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Paula Caplan suggests that the idea of
masochism as a natural part of the female
psyche and sexuality is based on two misunder-
standings. The first is the biological and later
psychoanalytical view that stems from Krafft-
Ebing’s idea of an ‘‘instinctive inclination’’ and
voluntary subjection of the female physiological
and sexual set-up. The second is the misreading
whereby women’s adaptation to unequal social
conditions is taken as natural behaviour.37
Belonging to a second-wave feminism that
strongly questioned the idea of masochism as a
natural female condition, Caplan points to
numerous readings that consider female maso-
chism as an extension of normative female
behaviour. Judith Bardwick and Clara
Thompson in different ways consider masochism
as a way for women to adapt to pain and the
restriction of their aggression and sexuality, and
Jessie Bernard and Nancy Chodorow theorize
how society shapes women’s acceptance of self-
negation and sacrifice. A ‘‘learned behaviour,’’
Caplan writes, is thereby taken as proof of
‘‘‘natural masochism’’’ in women.38 The notion
of female masochism, Caplan concludes, does
women an immense disservice as it constitutes a
misreading of the female condition and a
misplacement of political agency. Similarly,
Frigga Haug suggests that women’s masochism
‘‘simply describes their efforts to accept [their]
situation, and the fairytale which transforms such
efforts into an essential quality of women is
intended to have the function of reassuring us
that defects in society can be resolved in women’s
characters.’’39 Jessica Benjamin agrees with
Caplan in the cultural determination of the
association of femininity and masochism but
points out that she completely fails to take
account of the pleasurable and erotic dimensions
of masochism. Arguing from her psychoanalytical
perspective, Benjamin notes that ‘‘Cultural myths
and labels still do not explain how the ‘essence of
trained femininity’ gets into women’s heads and
is there converted into pleasurable fantasies of
erotic submission.’’40
These critical responses to masochism consti-
tute a prime example of how the thematic and the
clinical have been linked in responses to female
masochism and how both the social and
 tensions in deleuzian desire
psychoanalytical understandings have remained
within a discourse of the clinical. What happens if
we move away from psychoanalytical approaches
to masochism and accept Deleuze’s premises of
the symptomology of masochism as a critical
practice but direct our attention to literary works
about female masochism? Are there ways in
which a symptomology of female masochism can
be not only a way of readdressing the forms of
female masochism but also a way of rethinking
the problem of time and desire in Deleuze?
Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly notes that the
‘‘possibility of a feminine masochism, with
gender specificity for women, has not quite
been laid to rest.’’41 She also points out that
there is a persuasive fascination with sexual
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submission and humiliation in women’s fiction
from Charlotte Brontë to Alice Munro. Arguably,
Réage’s Story of O is the most famous literary
text about female masochism. In her review of the
novel, which took the shape of an enraged attack
on its gendered implications, Andrea Dworkin
writes that ‘‘the sado-masochistic complexion of
O is not trivial – it is formulated as a cosmic
principle which articulates, absolutely, the fem-
inine.’’42 O, she argues, is ‘‘a clear mythological
figure: she is a woman, and to name her O, zero,
emptiness, says it all.’’43 Story of O is more than
simply pornography, Dworkin insists, because it
‘‘claims to define epistemologically what a woman
is.’’44 The passivity linked with masochism has
been seen to correspond more to a ‘‘classic’’
female problem of giving up subjectivity to rest
in the stronger one of the dominant gender. This
way, the masochism of O would appear as a
symptomatology of the female inaccessibility to
the subject position in the first place. Benjamin,
for example, suggests that O gives her self up in
order to gain access to the more powerful
subjectivity of the man. Her sacrifice, Benjamin
argues, ‘‘creates the master’s power, produces his
coherent self, in which she can take refuge.’’45 At
the same time, Benjamin has been criticized for
reconfirming the Freudian link between maso-
chism and women. Noble argues that Benjamin’s
psychoanalytic reading of masochism ‘‘virtually
fuses masochistic desire with the female subject
position in modern Western society.’’46 The
intellectual debate over the question of female
agency in Story of O, Michell Ward notes, is
indicative of the question of whether the
(particularly female in this case) masochist
should be seen as an agent or as a victim.47
While Dworkin’s argument points to O as the
incarnation of women’s victimization, Susan
Sontag suggests that O is ‘‘profoundly active in
her own passivity.’’48 But what happens if we let
go, for a moment, of both the clinical and social
approaches to female masochism in general and
Story of O in particular and ‘‘borrow,’’ instead,
Deleuze’s critical approach?
Story of O threatens to undermine Deleuze’s
distinction between sadism and masochism. It has
even been used as a prime example of sadomaso-
chism by Benjamin who sees Réage’s text as ‘‘a
web in which the issues of dependency and
domination are inextricably intertwined.’’49 The
masochistic temporality of deferment that is so
important to Deleuze has different implications if
we accept the sadomasochistic argument. Here
Benjamin offers a Hegelian understanding of the
temporal development in Story of O. Hegel’s
famous master–slave dialectic shows how the
hierarchal roles of dominance and submission are
under constant threat of reversal. The slave’s
surrender to the master in the struggle for
domination is ultimately making him the stronger
one; not only has he stared death in the face, his
service to the master gradually makes the master
depend on him. The master, furthermore, is
weakened by his awareness of the fact that the
recognition he demands from the slave is based
on power rather than genuine recognition.
Benjamin shows how the narrative of Story of O
is developed in line with this logic. The dialectic
shows how a slave who is completely vanquished
is no longer able to give the master the
recognition he craves. According to this logic,
the possession of O must be, and is, prolonged.
The story, Benjamin writes, ‘‘is driven forward by
the dialectic of control.’’50 The importance of the
masochistic prolongation and deferment acquires
a slightly different meaning if we discuss it in
terms of such dialectic. The temporal deferral
that enables the open-ended desire that in turn
harbours the potential of escaping the subject
position in Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the
masochist becomes, in its dialectical
100

interpretation, a reinforcement in the Hegelian
power struggle over subjectivity itself.
From this Hegelian perspective, both the
thematics and the temporal structure of Story of
O threaten to collapse Deleuze’s distinction
between sadism and masochism. I would argue,
however, that Réage’s story could equally be
understood as following the temporal structure of
masochistic waiting that Deleuze ascribes to
Sacher-Masoch’s writing, and thus masochism,
specifically. Like Severin in Venus in Furs,
Réage’s protagonist is left chained up, she is
left in darkness, in various humiliating positions,
waiting indefinitely. Story of O begins when the
independent fashion photographer O is taken in a
taxi by her lover toward an unknown destination.
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She is taken to a chateau at Roissy to become a
sexual slave. O is told to wait naked for her lover,
she is kept locked up in dark cellars, she is kept
chained in her room and told always to expect
pain. The awaited pleasure for O – the gratifica-
tion which makes her pain meaningful – is the
returned love, first of René and later of Sir
Stephen. Even if O’s pleasure is deferred – and
indeed, it is postponed indefinitely when the
novel ends with O being left at Roissy in the
uncertainty of Sir Stephen ever returning –
pleasure is there to structure her desire. This
means that even if desire is maintained, it is
channelled in a specific direction and kept within
the realm of the subject. Even if it is open ended,
the pain, the waiting and the pleasure to come
produce a unidirectional temporal arch in which a
coherent subject and body can be maintained.
The masochist narrative that confirms the
temporality of deferment as explicated by Reik
and Deleuze is thus present in Story of O.
The masochistic body of O in Réage’s novel
experiences pain as pleasure because it constitutes
a deceptive and temporary relief of desire. In line
with Reik’s earlier note that it is not the pain that
is pleasurable to the masochist but the anxiety of
its possible execution,51 Deleuze and Guattari
argue that the notion that the masochist
experiences pain as pleasure is inaccurate. The
point for the masochist, they maintain, is to
consistently defer pleasure.52 The pleasure that O
seems to find in her pain is a proof that her lover
René, and later Sir Stephen, still wants her. It is
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only under the lash or beneath the heavy body of
an unknown man that she finds herself, that she
becomes someone who can be loved. This love
that she craves is not the love of any man – her
love is exclusively bestowed first on René and
then Sir Stephen. Accordingly, she is not simply
a masochistic, objectified body but a subject who
chooses abuse and objectification as part of a
game of love. This becomes obvious when she is
shocked to discover that her lover fulfils his
objectification of her and actually treats her ‘‘like
a piece of furniture.’’53 She realizes that she had
not quite believed him, that she had placed his
acts of degradation within the realm of mutual
love. This means that even if it ultimately fails,
O’s masochism has an agenda. She works to
maintain the love of the men she herself desires.
The crucial point here is that there is a narrative
and a subject according to which pain and
pleasure make sense, albeit in a perverted way.
Even if O’s desire cannot be assuaged even with
the increasing intensity of her torture and
degradation, the pain constitutes for her proof
of her own, admittedly problematic, agency.
I would like to suggest that because O is part of
a narrative, a narrative that places her in a position
where her masochism does have a purpose
(to please René and Sir Stephen), it is possible
to see O as a subject and her pain as pleasure. In
other words, O can be seen as a subject because
the narrative identifies and describes a pleasure in
her pain. On her first night at Roissy, and after her
first whipping, she ponders ‘‘why there was so
much sweetness mingled with the terror in her or
why her terror seemed itself so sweet.’’54 What
troubles her more than the whipping is that she
has not been able to identify her lover among the
many men that had taken her earlier in the
evening.55 Her feelings centre completely on René
and she wants her pain to be part of her expression
of love for him. Accordingly, the narrative
conducts a twofold identification of O. Not only
does it construct her as a subject through the
unfolding of her character through her thoughts
and actions but also it constructs her as an
embodied subject by accounting for her pain
within a narrative framework.
It seems, then, that three possible models of
female masochism emerge with Réage’s novel.
 tensions in deleuzian desire
The first one reads O as a sign of womanhood, be
it based on a ‘‘natural inclination’’ or societal
pressures. This model relates O to historical
behavioural patterns of female sexuality and
subjectivity. According to this model, Story of
O can be read either as proof or as a critique of
the subordination of female sexuality and
subjectivity. Dworkin’s indignation, as we have
seen, was based on her experiencing Réage’s
novel as laying claim to a universal principle of
what constitutes a woman. Sontag, on the other
hand, finds in Story of O an element of parody;
Story of O fits almost too well with the
symptomatology that equates female sexuality
and subjectivity with masochism. Like Dworkin,
she reads Story of O as portraying the gradual
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process of making O as empty as her name. O
increasingly ‘‘becomes more what she is, a
process identical with the emptying out of
herself.’’56 While Sontag does not position her
reading of masochism in relation to the early
Freudian discourse and while her article pre-dates
Dworkin’s attack on Réage’s novel, her approach
points directly to a recurrent symptomatology of
female masochism. O, she suggests, can be read
as ‘‘a cartoon of her sex, not her individual sex
but simply woman; it also stands for nothing.’’57
The second model of masochism appearing
through Story of O is the influential Hegelian
reading offered by Benjamin. Here, a theorization
of the temporality as a crucial component of the
symptomatology of female masochism begins to
emerge. Benjamin shows how O’s suffering needs
to be prolonged and the complete erasure of her
subjectivity deferred in order for the dialectics of
recognition and enslavement to function. Read
dialectically, the temporal deferral of the maso-
chist’s complete surrender is related to the
master’s continued need to be recognized as
such. This way, one might say, the temporality of
masochism depends on the needs of the master
rather than the ‘‘slave.’’
The third model is the Deleuzian one based on
a deferral and postponement that keeps desire
open-ended. Deferring pleasure endlessly means
deferring endlessly the endpoint of desire. While
complicating Deleuze’s distinction between
sadism and masochism, Story of O follows this
temporal pattern and, indeed, ‘‘improves’’ on the
theory. In Venus in Furs, Sacher-Masoch’s
Severin is ultimately ‘‘cured’’ of his masochistic
inclinations.58 Furthermore, the final paragraphs
are suggestive of the reversal of sadism and
masochism that Deleuze so vehemently denies in
his theory of masochism. ‘‘I was a fool,’’ Severin
states, ‘‘If only I had whipped her instead.’’59
Réage’s novel, however, suggests neither cure nor
reversal. Furthermore, with an ending that leaves
both O and the reader in a state of suspension –
does O stay at Roissy? Does she die? Does she go
home? Does Sir Stephen ever return? – Réage’s
novel more appropriately stages the infinite
deferral of an endpoint or pleasure.
In response to these three models, I would like
to suggest that whether we understand Story of O
as a comment on female subordination, in terms
of dialectics, or postponement, we still end up
with a unified direction of desire, a direction that
is firmly connected with a desiring subject and
that is therefore at odds with the deterritorializing
function of desire in A Thousand Plateaus.
Whether we focus on the male masochism of
Sacher-Masoch or the female masochism of
Réage, on Hegel or Deleuze, the temporality of
masochism seems to rely on an admittedly
different but yet equally determined teleology
of desire. The temporal form is fixed and easily
identifiable, and from a formal point of view this
similarity is more important than both the
differentiation between sadism and masochism
and between male and female masochism.
Réage’s novel provides a fruitful point of
comparison in relation to Deleuze, but it does
not provide a way of readdressing the tensions in
Deleuzian desire. The male and the female
masochist are both stuck in an economy of a
unified subjectivity because desire is fixed in a
unidirectional temporality. Whatever happened
to difference? If all the prior models of
masochism are insufficient to do justice to
Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the figure of the
masochist as a means of liberating desire and
constructing a BwO, this means that we need
either to discard the literary approach or find a
more constructive literary model.
In the beginning of this article I suggested that
the tensions that emerge from Deleuze’s concep-
tion and elaboration of masochism and
102

temporality are brought out by the directionality
and open-endedness of masochistic desire respec-
tively. As I have tried to show so far, the
postponement of desire that is integral to
Deleuze’s understanding of masochism in
‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ is suggestive of a
directionality of desire and a strong subjectivity.
This model is thus at odds with the open-ended
desire of the masochist as a BwO in Deleuze and
Guattari. The BwO is a productive desiring
machine that multiplies connections and that,
while not in opposition to subjectivity, functions
by means of experimentation, it is a practice of
removing ‘‘the phantasy, significances and sub-
jectifications’’ that keeps the subject in place and
desire in check.60
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According to Deleuze and Guattari, the virtue
of the masochist lies in a deferral of pleasure and
thereby a retention of desire. Pleasure is a
termination of desire that effects a reterritoriali-
zation, a closing down of desire by subjectifica-
tion, but the masochist’s deferral of pleasure
through suspension and indefinite waiting, in
their view, effects a deterritorialization of the
subject. As I suggested above, the deferral of
desire as part of a temporal narrative retains the
idea of pleasure, or the ‘‘end-pleasure’’ as Reik
puts it, as an ultimate goal. It would seem, then,
that in order for masochism to really become the
figure that liberates the subject and the body, one
needs not just to defer pleasure but to remove it
as a possibility. One needs to remove the ‘‘goal’’
which would make desire temporal.
Using her famous strategy of what has been
called everything from intertextuality to pirating
to plagiarism, Kathy Acker includes parts of
Réage’s text in her novel Great Expectations. In
this novel, Acker moves through Story of O and
its sequel Return to the Château over the course
of sixteen pages.61 Repeating the taxi ride that
takes O to Roissy in the opening of Réage’s novel,
the section ends with the very last words of
Réage’s second book. Acker lifts single sentences
and paragraphs from Réage’s story and rejects
but leaves out the coherence of the original
narrative. Almost exclusively, it is the fragments
of the text that describe perverse and impersona-
lized sexual activities that are repeated. Acker
thereby takes on the masochistic body of Réage’s
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story while robbing it of the teleology of pleasure.
Acker’s novel thereby offers a way of exploding
the limitations of a unidirectional temporality.
Great Expectations is hardly ever mentioned in
relation to its masochist theme, and yet this is the
novel in which Acker’s portrayal of masochism
has its greatest revolutionary potential.
As if to prove the strong link between
masochism and temporally coherent narrative,
the pervasive theme of masochism in Acker’s
work is noted mainly in relation to her more
coherent narratives (see, for example, Redding
and Ward). Critics have recognized that maso-
chism recurs in nearly all Acker’s protagonists
and ‘‘courses through her prose like a virus’’62 and
even that ‘‘Acker’s fictions are always about
masochism.’’63 Most interpretations of the theme
of masochism in Acker focus on novels such as
Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless, and Blood
and Guts in High School, that is, on texts that,
although they are frequently fragmented, none-
theless offer the presence of a narrative framework
that makes it possible to interpret bodies and their
desires in time. There is, in other words, some
kind of temporal development of masochistic
desire. In both Blood and Guts in High School
and Empire of the Senseless the masochism of the
female protagonists is linked back to their
incestuous and violent childhoods and masochism
becomes a way for them to control their pain.
Arthur Redding argues that masochism in Acker
is familial and is caused by the internalization of
an abject image of the self.64 His concise summary
of Acker’s masochistic thematic evinces this quite
clearly: ‘‘Rape by the father, the mother’s suicide,
the structural limits of the oedipal triangle
overdetermine the masochistic nature of Acker’s
protagonists.’’65 While obviously critical in the
sense of its literary symptomatology, Redding’s
analysis is suggestive of how female masochism
tends to be framed by clinical interpretation in the
sense that masochism is explored as a thematic,
psychoanalytic narrative.
These previous psychoanalytic readings of
Acker’s works have put too narrow a focus on
the clinical much in the same way as such
readings of Sacher-Masoch’s and Sade’s work
have done, according to Deleuze. Deleuze argues
that it is exactly the disregard of the literary, that
 tensions in deleuzian desire
is, the narrative techniques and the role of
descriptive functions, that makes it possible for
psychoanalytic theory to invent the faulty notion
of sadomasochism. In demonstrating how this
entity can be questioned by a literary approach,
Deleuze not only points to the irreducible natures
of sadism and masochism but also makes a strong
case for his critical and clinical project: ‘‘The
critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in
the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a
new relationship of mutual learning.’’66 But while
Deleuze’s reading enforces an important revision
of the sadomasochistic entity, and introduces a
critical revision of symptomatology, his reading
of Sacher-Masoch’s narratives in terms of tempor-
ality and desire, as I have already noted, leaves
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the concept of the masochist itself in trouble. A
critical symptomatology of Acker’s text, on the
other hand, opens the possibility of addressing
the tension between the masochist temporality of
postponement in ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ and the
masochist as a liberation of desire in A Thousand
Plateaus. Great Expectations is Acker’s most
fragmented work and it lacks the narrative
development of masochistic protagonists present
in her other texts. The disjunctive spaces of Great
Expectations do not easily organize themselves
into a representation of the masochistic process
suggested in Acker’s other novels, as well as in
Sacher-Masoch’s texts and Story of O. When
Acker’s novel presents masochist bodies but does
not offer a temporal framework, or as Deleuze
puts it ‘‘a temporal form’’ for a masochistic
subject to crystallize, it opens a way of re-
addressing the problem of time and desire that
arises with the concept of the masochist in
Deleuze’s philosophy.
Often, Acker’s strategy entails exchanging the
narrative framework for sets of piled-up sentences
with spaces in between.
His knees stick into her face.
He explains to her she’s not going to know.
His strong arm pulling on her arms is lifting
her to her feet.
He shows her his whip.67
The fragmented narrative also puts out of play a
sense of continuous temporality. The idea of a
desire that exists outside linear temporality opens
for the movement beyond the limitations of the
body and beyond the ‘‘I,’’ which posits the
masochist as a more radical liberation offered
through Acker’s text. When Acker takes sections
from Story of O but leaves out the description of
thoughts and feelings that make Réage’s O into a
clearly defined – if deteriorating – subject,
Acker’s characters remain largely unidentifiable
and destabilized in terms of identity as well as
gender. In Story of O, one of the rules meant to
de-subjectify the women at Roissy is a prohibition
to look the men in the eye. In Acker, this is
expressed differently:
He is saying that it no longer matters what she
thinks and what her choices are.
He is saying that he is the perfect mirror of her
real desire and she is making him that way.
His eyes are not daring to meet her eyes.
He is walking back and down and in front
of her.68
As we can see, the fragments that Acker has taken
from Réage’s text dislocate the identification of
the body of desire and the desired body and
thereby deny the pleasure that would make
characters ‘‘find themselves.’’ Deleuze’s sympto-
matology of masochism, as we recall, is largely a
matter of structure. It is the element of
postponement in Sacher-Masoch’s literary texts
that enables his theory of masochism; the
deferment of the end-pleasure makes masochist
desire indefinite. Combined with her disenabling
of a ‘‘temporal form’’ of masochistic desire Acker
not only postpones but also remove the prospects
of an ‘‘end-pleasure’’ altogether. This means that
desire in Great Expectations cannot be translated
into subjectified pleasure. Instead, characters –
and readers – are left at the mercy of imperso-
nalized desire. Robert Glück suggests that in the
sexuality of Acker’s heroines ‘‘[i]t is pleasure
happening, not the self.’’69 In the light of our
earlier discussion of the difference between
pleasure and desire, I would like to adjust this
wording slightly and suggest that in Great
Expectations it is desire happening, not sub-
jectivity. More specifically, it is masochistic
desire happening, not a masochist subject.
Desire in Acker’s text is constructed through
the disjunctive repetition and perversion of
104

Réage’s novel. Pain is not made to make sense
through narrative justifications. Pain is left
insensible, outside subjectivity. This, I would
suggest, is also what the text conveys when it asks
‘‘[i]f there are an infinite number of non-relating
events, where’s the relation that enables pain?’’70
‘‘As opposed to subjectivity,’’ Deleuze writes,
desire is ‘‘an event, not a thing or a person.’’71 In
Acker’s text, events are ‘‘non-relating’’ because
there is no narrative to tie them together.
Without narrative, there can be no pleasure and
no definitive subject. The masochistic pain
emerges from the very exposure to the event
that has no narrative justification. The ‘‘phantasy,
significances and subjectifications’’ that keep
desire imprisoned are thereby exchanged for
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multiple connections and a masochistic subject is
exchanged for a productive and multidirectional
desiring machine; a BwO.
The masochist, Deleuze argues, ‘‘does not
believe in negating or destroying the world: what
he does is to disavow and thus to suspend it, in
order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended
in fantasy.’’72 In Great Expectations, two
detached sentences follow one another – ‘‘I’m a
masochist’’ and ‘‘This is a real revolution.’’73 The
‘‘real’’ revolution of masochism in Acker’s text is
the notion of a masochism that it not working to
negate or destroy the world, but is neither the
creation of a fantasy that ‘‘suspends’’ reality. It is
the abandonment of coherent narrative that
makes either of these possible. Acker is not
creating a fantasy either for her characters or for
her readers to indulge in. She is separating
masochism from fantasy, from subjectivity and
she is informing it with the eroticism of a body
that is not objectified so much as it is freed from
subjectification. Her fragmented sections do not
provide any narrative justification of the maso-
chistic relations they describe. There is no
‘‘agenda,’’ so to speak, according to which the
pain attains a purpose. Who is waiting for
pleasure and what would that pleasure be?
Without a clear subject and the idea of a future
pleasure, the linear temporality in which waiting
would make sense is annulled. Because maso-
chism is portrayed through repetition and
disjunction, both subject and body are opened
toward difference and indetermination. Great
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Expectations thus offers a masochist thematic
but withholds the narrative framework that would
disenable the possibility of pleasure even as an
indefinite element of the masochistic striving. In
this way, desire is not only kept indefinite but is
kept open as a possibility beyond the temporal
subject.
I have suggested in this article that the figure
of the masochist reveals some tensions in the
Deleuzian conception of desire. Although Deleuze
and Guattari’s project is very much a move away
from the conventional notion of subjectivity, it
seems that Deleuze’s earlier reading of maso-
chism in ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ relies quite
heavily on the idea of a conventional subject.
Even if the masochistic body is a rejection of the
permanent identification and signification of the
body – the standstill that pleasure would entail –
the temporality which according to Deleuze is a
requirement for the retention of masochistic
desire suggests a masochistic subject. There
must be a subject, and I would even venture to
say a fairly coherent, temporal subject, to
perceive and also determinedly organize the
waiting and the suspension of pleasure. This is
confirmed in Sacher-Masoch’s work as well as in
Story of O. Because the masochist is part of a
coherent narrative of gradual development,
masochism is placed within the temporality of
the suspension of pleasure and thus, I have
suggested, in a trajectory that originates in a
subject. Both Severin and O can be seen as
temporal subjects because they choose pain as a
means, a prerequisite to attain pleasure. This
means that not only do these narratives construct
masochist subjects but they also construct them
as embodied and unified subjects by accounting
for their pain and suspension within a ‘‘temporal
form.’’ There is a sense, then, in which the
masochist economy of waiting seems to anticipate
or even depend upon a narrative of temporal
continuity.
In Great Expectations, on the other hand,
there is no narrative according to which the pain
could be seen as part of the pleasure of the
masochistic body. This impersonalized desire
does not relate back to the subject or pleasure.
Great Expectations thus offers an impersonal
desire that does not relate back to a specific body
 tensions in deleuzian desire
and its (anticipated) pleasure. It seems, therefore,
as if a critical symptomatology of Acker’s female
masochism allows for the liberating of desire that
Deleuze and Guattari seek in A Thousand
Plateaus. Although their explication of the
masochist body as a deterritorialization of the
body makes sense, the connective desire that
explodes the limits of the stratified body and
subject risks being deterritorialized by the
temporal form which Deleuze ascribes to it. It
is, as we have seen, the goal that has to be
deferred, both in Reik’s and Deleuze’s under-
standing of masochism. Acker’s text opens for a
BwO by constructing a masochism for which
desire truly moves without goal. At the same
time, it also opens for new readings of female
Downloaded By: [Beckman, Frida] At: 10:32 23 August 2010
masochism, neither in terms of
gender oppression nor in terms
of psychoanalytic theory, but in
terms of a truly revolutionary
critical practice.
notes
1 Daniel W. Smith, ‘‘Introduction. ‘A Life of Pure
Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’
Project’’ in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and
Clinical (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997) xi.
2 Ibid. xix.
3 I owe much of this explication of Deleuze’s strat-
egy of symptomatology to Smith’s excellent
introduction.
4 Freud also makes a tentative link between
masochism and literature when he points to how
literary texts stimulate beating-phantasies in chil-
dren. Sigmund Freud,‘‘‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A
Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual
Perversions’’ in Essential Papers on Masochism, ed.
Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York and
London: New York UP,1995) 160.
5 Barbara Mennel,‘‘The Literary Perversion: The
Invention of Masochism at the Fin-de-Sie'cle’’ in
The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in
Film and Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
11^36 (11).
6 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis.
With Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A
Clinical-Forensic Study [1886], trans. Franklin S. Klaf
(Burbank: Bloat,1999) 86.
7 Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ in
Masochism, trans. J. McNeil (New York: Zone,
1991) 23.
8 Ibid.18.
9 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) xvi.
10 Ibid.19.
11 Deleuze 23.
12 Ibid. 74.
13 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in
Masochism, trans. J. McNeil (New York: Zone,
1991) 172.
14 Gilles Deleuze and Fe¤lix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (London and New York: Continuum,
2004) 172.
15 Ibid.14.
16 Theodor Reik, ‘‘The Characteristics of
Masochism (An Excerpt)’’ in Essential Papers on
Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly
(New York and London: New York UP,1995) 335.
17 Deleuze 71.
18 Ibid.183.
19 Deleuze and Guattari 173.
20 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts
and Interviews 1975^1995, ed. David Lapoujade;
trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina
(New York: Semiotext(e), 2006) 130 ^31.
21 Gilles Deleuze and Fe¤lix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh
Tomlinson (London and NewYork:Verso,1994) 171.
22 Ibid.169.
23 Deleuze, ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ in
Masochism 71.
24 Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of
Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP,
2000) 72^73.
25 Ibid. 73.
26 Nick Mansfield, Masochism: The Art of Power
(Westport: Praeger,1997) 8.
27 Ibid. ix.
106
 beckman
28 Ibid. 75. 45 Benjamin 61.
29 Sacher-Masoch 195. 46 Noble 16.
30 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the 47 Michell Ward, ‘‘Empowerment in Chains:
Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Masochism,’’
189. eSharp 6.1 (2005): 3.
31 Ibid.190. 48 Quoted in ibid. 2.
32 Helene Deutsch, ‘‘The Significance of 49 Benjamin 55.
Masochism in the Mental Life of Women’’ in
50 Ibid. 58.
Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann
Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York and London: 51 Reik 326.
New York UP,1995) 412.
52 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
33 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Economic Problem of 171^72.
Masochism,’’ trans. James Strachey, in Essential
53 Pauline Re¤age, Story of O, trans. Sabine d’Estree
Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann
(New York: Ballantine,1965) 81.
Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York and London:
Downloaded By: [Beckman, Frida] At: 10:32 23 August 2010

New York UP,1995) 277. 54 Ibid. 22.

34 Rudolph M. Loewenstein, ‘‘A Contribution to 55 Ibid. 23.
the Psychoanalytic Theory of Masochism’’ in
56 Susan Sontag,‘‘The Pornographic Imagination’’
Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann
in A Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar,1982) 220.
Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York and London:
New York UP,1995) 44. 57 Ibid.
35 Rita Felski, ‘‘Redescriptions of Female 58 Sacher-Masoch 271.
Masochism,’’ Minnesota Review 63^ 64 (spring
59 Ibid.
2005): 127^ 41.
60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
36 Freud,‘‘The Economic Problem’’ 276.
Plateaus 168.
37 Paula J. Caplan, ‘‘The Myth of Women’s
61 This section in Acker runs from pages 38 to 54.
Masochism,’’ American Psychologist 39.2 (1984):
130 ^39 (135). 62 Arthur Redding, ‘‘Bruises, Roses: Masochism
and the Writing of Kathy Acker,’’ Contemporary
38 Ibid.134.
Literature 35.2 (1994) 285.
39 Frigga Haug, Beyond Female Masochism:
63 Martina Sciolino, ‘‘Confessions of a
Memory-Work and Politics, trans. Rodney
Kleptoparasite,’’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3
Livingstone (London and New York: Verso,
(1989) 63.
1992) 85.
64 Redding 285.
40 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love:
Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of 65 Ibid. 286.
Domination (New York: Pantheon,1988) 81.
66 Deleuze, ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ in
41 Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly,‘‘Introduction’’ Masochism 14.
in Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann
Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York and London: 67 Acker 39.
New York UP,1995) 406. 68 Ibid. 40.
42 Andrea Dworkin,‘‘Woman as Victim: Story of 69 Robert Glu«ck, ‘‘The Greatness of Kathy
O,’’ Feminist Studies 2.1 (1974) 107. Acker’’ in Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy
43 Ibid.108. Acker, eds. Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman and
Avital Ronell (London and New York: Verso,
44 Ibid.107. 2006) 147.

107
 tensions in deleuzian desire
70 Acker 67.
71 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness 130 ^31.
72 Deleuze,‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ in Masochism
32^33.
73 Acker 52.
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Frida Beckman
Department of English
Uppsala University
Box 527
SE-751 20 Uppsala
Sweden
E-mail: frida.beckman@engelska.uu.se