It does not seem to me that one could say
that modern man has de-ritualized pain. I
only think that he has, how should I say,
distributed the ceremony. One part was transformed
by him into administration. What I mean is
that he has handed over one part to this strange
administration that, as I believe, never exists
in people without sacrifice, and that one
can call the police. Another part he has reproduced
in his fantasies, and this is the strange
sexual perversion that one calls masochism.
It was discovered or invented in an oppressed
country by the son of a policeman about a
hundred years ago. Gilles, I would like to
ask you what the strange and familiar word
“masochism” means.
The term masochism comes from Sacher-Masoch
who lived in Galicia in the second half of
the nineteenth century and left us an extremely
strange and important work. Masochism is known
as a perversion. The masochist subject searches
for and asks for pain from which he draws
sexual pleasure. Nothing appears more mysterious
than this link between sexual pleasure and
pain. However, if we define masochism this
way, we only take into account its content,
i.e. only its simply apparent content.
So please tell me, in this sexual, complex
behavior, that one calls masochism and also
sado-masochism, isn’t there, despite of
all of this, another thing, something more
than the pure and simple link between pleasure
and pain that is so frequently talked about?
Absolutely. Masochism would be difficult to
explain, if we would not have intervening
a certain condition in which the pain is searched
for. Besides the apparent content exist formal
conditions that help define masochism. The
first is that pain has to appear as a punishment.
This is why we don’t believe that moral
masochism derives from physical masochism,
but rather, on the contrary, that the physical
masochism of pain is derived from a deeper
moral masochism.
The second condition is the passive attitude
under which the pain is not only received,
but expected. That is what many masochist
behaviors testify to: the taste for being
attached, for being tied up; the taste for
being and staying in the waiting position.
The third formal character, very well observed
by psychoanalysts such as Theodore Reik, is
the importance that one attributes to fantasies
of the imagination or the fantasies of daydreaming.
Precisely because the masochist is somehow
alienated from his own activity, he gains
in imagination what he loses in action. He
asks from his active partner to submit herself
to an imaginary scenario or to obey to the
rules of a fantasy outside of which he would
not experience any pleasure. It is not exaggerating
to say that in masochism, contrary to what
happens in all the other perversions, the
fantasies of the imagination take on an autonomous
value, a proper function of autonomy.
This leads us to the fourth and final formal
condition. The masochist has determined all
the details of the scene during which he makes
himself passive and suffering. That is why
masochists often set up authentic contracts
with the woman they love. The novels of Sacher-Masoch
give numerous examples of such contracts,
where the masochist hero commits himself to
change his name or to dress up like a servant
in order to subject himself to the woman.
In his own love life, Sacher-Masoch actually
set up such contracts. A famous example begins
as follows: “On his word of honor, Mr. Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch undertakes to be the slave
of Mrs . von Pistor, and to carry out all
her wishes for a period of six months.“
You just explained to us the formal quasi-contractual
characters of masochism. But in how far can
these formal characters explain the concrete
behavior of masochism? What is the explicative
value that we find in them?
Well, we have already seen that it is insufficient
to define masochism with respect to its content,
i.e. the link between pain and sexual pleasure,
without taking into account the formal conditions,
in the frame of which this link is constituted.
The formal conditions amount to four: punishment
as a principle of pain; passivity as an attitude
of pain; fantasy as an autonomous value; and
the contract as a precondition.
As a result, masochism is an authentic ritualization
of pain, a kind of ritual passion. The entire
problem of masochism then turns out to be:
How do these rituals explain the apparent
content of masochism, i.e. the link between
pain and sexual pleasure?
Well, normally a punishment comes to sanction
a forbidden pleasure. The image or threat
of being punished forbids the pleasure, it
intervenes into it. The threat of punishment
belongs to the law as such. What we have to
note now is that the masochist operates a
singular rerouting of the law. He puts the
punishment first and acts then as if the law
allows or even requires him to experience
the forbidden pleasures. The same law that
forbids realizing a desire by means of the
following punishment becomes a law that punishes
first and then gives us the forbidden pleasures.
In other words, it is by submitting oneself
scrupulously to the law that the masochist
experiences the pleasure that this very law
interdicts. Psychoanalysis has very well observed
that this is a curious intervention into the
law. In addition, we have to mistrust the
appearance of weakness and passivity in the
personality of the masochist. Under this passivity,
under this ritual weakness resides mockery.
By rerouting the law away from its sense,
the masochist derides it. That is why, while
it may happen that irony is a little sadistic,
humor is often masochist. The masochist procedure
ritualizes pain, but at the same time it ridicules
the ritual of the law in general. As a consequence,
masochism appears as a rerouted passion, as
a comedy of authentic passion. Before Masoch
stages a false Messiah, his wife flogs him
and tells him: “I will make you a man, you
are not the Messiah” – an announcement
missing the coming of the true Messiah.
