Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs Book

I never realized masochism and politics go so well together. And this from someone who enjoys watching MSNBC. Deleuze begins his march through this insensitive topic by drawing a distinction between it and sadism through the uses of humor:

"A popular joke tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: 'Hurt me.' The sadist replies: 'No.' This is a particularly stupid joke, not only because it is unrealistic but because it foolishly claims competence to pass judgment on the world of perversions. It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim. Neither would the masochistic tolerate a truly sadistic torturer."

Reading this I wrote in the margins, "Ha, ha. It looks like ole Gilles is having some fun at the expense of the Left. Oh no, here comes Badiou and Zizek with their pitchforks!" But I wasn't that far off in my facetiousness: Deleuze is making an argument for what perverse behavior and counter-intuitive thinking can tell us about our politics.

How do you explain Kafka and friends overcome with laughter at Kafka's reading of The Trial? How come disciples of Socrates couldn't contain themselves either at the death of their beloved teacher? Or put another way, why do we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the narrative conceits of crappy novelists?

Waiting, disavowal, suspense, fetishism, fantasy aren't isolated, private phenomena. One needs to believe that one is not dreaming, even when one is. Marquis de Sade's Juliette advises two weeks of abstaining from lustful behavior. If you can manage that then lie down and imagine for yourself different wanton acts. One will move you more powerfully than the rest and it will become like an obsession - write it down!!

Sounds like a cheap form of psychoanalysis. But this leads to the penultimate chapter, "Humor, Irony and the Law." In one of his notes Pascal suggests that God is no more than all the mores in a culture as a limit defined by its own law. The wrath of God is no more than the chorus of everyone's disapproval we hear in our own language, which they have yet to address to us directly (thus, nightmares and bad dreams). Plato set up "The Good" as the basis of all law: Christianity followed. Kant subverted this basis, changing it to "The Law" itself: our current human rights regime followed. What is "The Law", really? Who knows, since it's as unknowable as God. We in the West have simply replaced one inscrutable world system for another, even as atheists are convinced they have all the answers. "The Good" is now dependent on "The Law" and Kafka found all this amusing:

"Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is," Deleuze writes, "but leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment. This is the world described by Kafka."

A friend of mine read The Goldfinch recently. She was stopped dead in her tracks by Tartt quoting Nietzsche: "We have art in order not to die from the truth." Looking Nietzsche's line up online she found everyone quoting it and no one interested in its origins. "Radiohead reviewers like to quote it erroneously (too)," she discovered. Unlike Tartt quoting it optimistically the words actually come from a Nietzsche entry labeled Pessimism in Art. This friend, brilliant as ever, describes for us the masochism others receive from novel reading she is unwilling to allow herself, "The increasing delay in the plot: those narrative deferments which deliberate teasings I'll never get used to - just tell them about your dead phone Theo! - and that judder to an halt only when the requisite chapter of wisdom is served." After considering Nietzsche's words ("How liberating is Dostoevsky!") she appends this excellent thought, "No beauty as consolation here."