The master–slave dialectic and the “sado-masochistic entity”

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Notes

notes

The author would like to thank Philipa Rothfield for her comments on this paper, Jon Roffe for discussions about Deleuze and masochism, and the Australian Research Council for financially supporting this research.

1 For an account that makes this plausible, see the final chapters of Robert Sinnerbrink's Understanding Hegelianism.

2 In The Idea of Continental Philosophy, Simon Glendinning has claimed that no such philosophical unity can be found. I argue against this in “Continental Philosophy and Chickening Out” 255–72.

3 Williams 67.

4 Of course, Marx's critique is that this notion of personality development through labour is applicable only when the worker produces a whole chair and has some involvement in design. In the factory life that is typical of early capitalism, workers produce merely one tiny part and become an alienated appendage of the factory machine. Although factories may not be the main structural apparatus for production in late capitalism, such analyses still seem salient.

5 Williams 74.

6 Ibid. 68.

7 Marx 28.

8 Ibid.

9 This is perhaps especially evident in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. While the Deleuzian interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of active and reactive forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy downplays this element, it is difficult to dispute the influence of Hegel's ontological account of mastery and slavery on Nietzsche's own revaluation of values.

10 Bauer. See esp. chapter 5. Much of the following summarizes her analysis, and some of the translations of The Second Sex that I cite below are also Bauer's own translation rather than Parshley's.

11 De Beauvoir 16–18.

12 Ibid. 17.

13 Ibid. 171–72.

14 Ibid. 172–73.

15 See, for example, Butler's Subjects of Desire, and Benjamin's The Bonds of Love and Like Subjects, Love Objects.

16 Comments like these were made to me by Philipa Rothfield.

17 Honneth does this with the work of Winnicott in The Struggle for Recognition.

18 This paragraph and the preceding one are indebted to the interpretation of Matthew Sharpe in a guest lecture he gave for a course of mine.

19 See Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 55 and 52. Benjamin understands such fantasies and practices as fundamentally about the desire for recognition, but her account of masochism is distorted via the centrality she accords to the Story of O which, from a Deleuzian perspective, gives us the world of the sadist, with O better understood as a “quasi-masochist” rather than as evincing a form of masochism proper. Why this is so will become clear shortly.

20 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 268.

21 Ibid. 50.

22 Ibid. 268.

23 Deleuze and Guattari 100.

24 It seems to be a particular instantiation of what Deleuze calls the dogmatic image of thought, which functions through the categories of opposition, similitude, analogy, and identity. See Difference and Repetition 137.

25 More accurately, Sartre sees no possibility of redemption in Being and Nothingness. His abandoned but subsequently published Notebooks for an Ethics is rather more optimistic.

26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 259.

27 Le Doeuff 62–63.

28 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 377.

29 Freud, The Three Essays on Sexuality.

30 Idem, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

31 See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 111–13. See also Widder 412. This paper also shows very well Deleuze's indebtedness to Freud, something that is hinted at in this paper but not developed.

32 Deleuze, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” 130.

33 Ibid. 125.

34 Idem, “Coldness and Cruelty” 40.

35 Smith xvi.

36 Inversely, doctors are themselves also said to be artists, at least in the grouping of particular symptoms together.

37 Some parts of the analysis of these differences over the next page were previously published in an essay of mine in Parrhesia: A Critical Journal of Philosophy 1 (2006) (http://www.parrhesiajournal.org), but the material on the relationship between law and pleasure has been developed since that time.

38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 5.

39 Idem, Logic of Sense 353. The “perverse structure” is seen here to be more fundamental than the “other-structure.”

40 Idem, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” 129.

41 Idem, “Coldness and Cruelty” 72.

42 Ibid. 70.

43 Ibid. 71.

44 Idem, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” 126.

45 See Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 56.

46 This is the well-made claim proposed by Nathan Widder, and I agree. See “The Time is Out of Joint” 413.

47 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 353.

48 Ibid. 346.

49 For more detail on this, see Kerslake.

50 Merleau-Ponty 94.

51 Many philosophers disagree with me about this, but see any of these essays of mine: “Transcendental Priority and Deleuzian Normativity” 101–08; “Deleuze's Other-Structure” 67–88; “Wounds and Scars” 144–66; “Deleuze and Dreyfus on l’habitude, Coping and Trauma in Skill Acquisition” 539–59.