Shadows of cruelty

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Notes

notes

1 BDSM is a conflation of various adjacent and often overlapping practices, tastes and inclinations in the new communities of perversion which have emerged as a consequence of the expansion of the Internet and network cultures since the 1990s. It is generally understood as a compressed acronym, combining bondage and discipline (hence BD), dominance and submission (hence DS), and both sadism and masochism and slave and master (rendered variously as SM, S/M and S&M).

2 Gourevitch and Morris.

3 Noyes 36.

4 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 87.

5 Deleuze, “Mysticism and Masochism” 132.

6 The historical specificity of masochism, but also sadism, as a cultural invention, a technology of perversion, is stated eloquently by John Noyes in The Mastery of Submission.

7 Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism 276.

8 Ibid. 277.

9 Silverman 189.

10 Deutsch 412.

11 See, for example, Caplan 130–39.

12 Mansfield xii.

13 Noyes 9.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid. 223 n. 17.

16 Felski 127–41.

17 In this formulation, the “wound” of philosophy may be understood in the sense that Deleuze accords it in distinction from the “scar” of philosophy in Logic of Sense and elsewhere. For a discussion of this distinction and its significance for the temporality and the event, see Reynolds 144–66.

18 Deleuze, “Mysticism and Masochism” 133.

19 Idem, Difference and Repetition 28.

20 Ibid.

21 See his Deadly Dialectics.