File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0312, message 62


From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Sat,  6 Dec 2003 06:55:12 -0500
Subject: RE: deleuze - masochism



L./All,

Paul Mann addresses the move to masochism in a smart neologism "Masocriticism" 
in a book by the same name.  Drawing on Bataille, de Sade, and some one else, 
he explores what is masochistic in meta-analylsis and the impossibility of the 
avante-garde, particularly as the latter forms (yet another) "stupid 
underground."  (Mann also has a great deal to say about Dadaism and Surrealism 
in his other book, The Death of The Death of Theory in the Avant-Garde....this 
isn't the exact title, but it gets at a central thesis.)

In a slightly I am given to understand that Nick Land's The Thirst for 
Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism is an important work on 
masocritism, but I'll admit that its been years since I've read it.  Such 
an "admission," though, is it own kind of academic masochism, an emission, 
an "ad(vertising) mission" that is a form of "dropping names" as one 
might "drop acid," producing a Derridean double-move wherein the pharmakon 
works in two different ways simultaneously.  "Dropping names" such that one is 
both sending one into a kind of psychedelic swirl, and also cauterized.  

As a side-note, I note that the "Slavoj" contains an interesting--and perhaps 
descriptive--simultaneity w/ "salvo":  A simultaneous discharge of firearms, a 
sudden outburst.  As I tried to suggest in my post on Col. (kernel)Kripke, 
there is in Zizek an attempt to arrest such slides, and a question I have w/ 
regard to masochism is whether such a move is not a premier masochistic 
example.  Perhaps it is not, but there does seem to be something that resonants 
with masochism in the sentiment:  "Even if we do not take things seriously, 
even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing the them."  The 
impossibility of elminating "false consciousness," turns into a strange "doing 
it anyway" jouissance that perhaps is masochistic.  

To keep moving, I would pick up the closing sentiment w/ regard to the "Rat has 
become the universal means of exchange" and caustically stretch it across, say, 
Deleuze's reading of Rats in the B-movie Willard.  Deleuze writes, "It is all 
there...the proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a becoming-molecular that 
undermines the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality; there is 
a sinister choice since there is a 'favorite' in the pack with which a kind of 
contract of alliance, a hideous pact, is made; there is the institution of an 
assemblage, a war machine or criminal machine, which can reach the point of 
self-destruction; there is a circulation of impersonal affects, an alternate 
current that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings, and 
constitutes a nonhuman sexuality; and there is an irresistable 
deterriorialization that forestalls attempts at professional, conjugal, or 
Oedipal reterritorialization.  (Are there Oedipal animals with which one 
can 'play Oedipus,' play family, my little dog, my little cat, and then other 
animals that by contrast draw us into an irresistable becoming?  Or another 
hypothesis:  Can the same animal be taken up by two opposing functions and 
movements, depending on the case?)"

To be sure there's much to unpack here, perhaps across the lines of masochism, 
but as this quote has already over stayed its welcome, perhaps such threads 
might be picked up at another time, by others, or set aside entirely.  

g                



Quoting Lydia Perovich <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>:

> This year's Summer issue of the journal October was dedicated to Dada, and 
> going through some of those articles tonight I accidentally came across a 
> text by George Baker in which he analyzes Dada, esp. work of Picabia, via 
> Deleuze’s anti-Freudian elaboration of masochism.
> 
> Deleuze completely (with one important hesitation) rejects Freud’s continuum
> 
> between sadism and masochism and interprets masochism as not an enactment of
> 
> the reception of the punishment from the Father but as its reversal… as the 
> whipping of the Father himself.  What is it that is being beaten in a man 
> who is at the receiving end of the aggression and finds pleasure in it? His 
> 'likeness' with his father, his belonging to a genus; the Father (or if you 
> will, the Law that H/he bequeathed) in his ghostly omni-presence.
> 
> The whole of modernism is masochistic in this way, grants Baker, and the 
> whole of it is marked by this passage through self-annihilation in order to 
> be able to come to the other end self-generically reproduced. Dada, however,
> 
> is unique in many ways. First lesson to keep in mind in the war against 
> patriarchy is that a direct shattering of the Father won’t do it for it 
> always ends up in a resurrection, most often through a sadistic reassertion 
> (in sadism, there is indeed Daddy around every corner, says Deleuze).  Dada 
> held the ground of consistent masochism until the sadism of Surrealism took 
> over the European artistic scene.
> 
> What Dada also did was to put Father (along with other master-signifiers 
> Language, the Phallus, and Money) directly back into existential economies 
> down from the throne of the invisible regulators.  At 'normal' times Father 
> is normally (already) dead and in his place there's the Law. What Dadaists 
> did was to put this figure back into circulation (in performances, writing, 
> collages etc) which paradoxically instead of reviving seemed to be weakening
> 
> Paternity – once Father was visible, present, in the exchange, even 
> apparently obeyed, He was also within reach.
> 
> Baker partly agrees with critics of Deleuze’s utopian vision of Masochism as
> 
> politically naïve – Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman point out that Deleuze 
> omits to acknowledge that the ultimate success of the Sadistic position is 
> inducing the victim to believe in a ‘liberation’ and ‘pleasure’ of being a 
> victim. Baker also says that indeed Dada was a utopia too.
> 
> In light of all this, and before I venture into Cosmopolis: how do we think 
> la littérature mineure and la langue mineure would figure here?  Kafka’s 
> work is pretty Masochistic… to be bluntly political, do 'minor language' and
> 
> becoming-minor always entail a moment of self-annihilation, of the 
> killing-of-Father-inside, a Simone Weil maneuver?
> 
> L.
> 
> And as a passage to DeLillo… Baker starts with Jean-Joseph Goux's 'general 
> equivalents' Language, the Phallus, the Father and Money as the 
> "master-signifiers that rule over the respective economies of the sign, the 
> object, the subject, and the commodity." DeLillo starts Cosmopolis with a 
> quote from Primo Levi about life in a concentration camp: “Rat has become 
> the universal means of exchange…”
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*  
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail  
> http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%
2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca
> 
> 




   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005