Ideological Representation and Power in Social Relations (RLE Social Theory) by Mike Gane

Author:Mike Gane [Gane, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138972261
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Sade and Masoch ‘present unparalleled configurations of symptoms and signs’ (16). It is not, however, a question of a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade and Masoch, nor indeed is it a question of textual signification. Rather, it is a kind of clinical phenomenology which on the one hand attends to the concrete forms of sadistic and masochistic experience which are depicted, and on the other is a critical analysis of the literary forms invented for the expression of this experience. Throughout his ‘presentation’ Deleuze insists on the necessity of taking into account the concrete formal conditions from which a particular association of pleasure and pain results (cf. 40, 65, and 88). A consequence of this is that something ‘foreign’ is introduced into the discussion of perversions, to the extent that perverse desire, in the form of its active assembly of these formal conditions, is shown as immediately plugging in to the outside, in to mythical, historical, political, juridical, aesthetic, metaphysical and even comical dimensions and forms of expression. These concrete formal conditions and forms of expression are not derivatives from some more primary, material level which can be interpreted in turn by reference to a supposed sado-masochistic entity. They are elements combined and transformed in the invention of ‘new forms of expression, new ways of thinking and feeling and an entirely original language’ (16).

A similar effect is produced in the book on Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari 1975) where, by a kind of magnification ad absurdum, Oedipal triangulation is made to appear as a particular state or figure of desire and no longer as the model or code for the interpretation of desire. Deleuze and Guattari seek to show how, in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the familial-Oedipal triangle is magnified as under a microscope and projected onto a map of the world; how other triangles, from which the family derives both its powers and its fragilities, are made to appear behind and branching out from the family; how one term of the family triangle is replaced by another term from outside, thereby defamiliarizing the Oedipal triangle, ‘deterritorialising’ it (cf. pp. 17–23). This ‘perverse use of Oedipus’ results in a kind of ‘molecularisation’ of the forms or terms of the Oedipal structure in the opening out of desire on an immanent plan: ‘desire is not then internal to a subject, any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictly immanent to a plan which it does not pre-exist, a plan which it must construct’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1977: 108). Such also might be the description of Robinson at the end of Tournier’s novel: ‘Robinson become elemental in his island itself rendered into the elements.’ The attainment of a level beyond subjective or organic forms, a Spinozist eternity.3

In Sacher-Masoch, as in the essay on Tournier and in so many of Deleuze’s books, there is a kind of ‘ascent to the impersonal’. The sadist’s victims and the masochist’s torturess are not subjects or persons. They are essential ‘elements’ required by the structure of the perversion.

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