Recovering difference in the Deleuzian dichotomy of masochism-without-sadism

This paper reflects many years of ambiva-lence that this author has experienced in relation to the essay by Gilles Deleuze on Sade and Masoch: ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ from 1967. The ambivalence stems, on the one hand, from a recognition of the profound insights contained in Deleuze’s essay, and a sympathy for its recuperation of the specificity of Sacher-Masoch’s desiring system; and on the other hand, from a critical understanding of the account Deleuze gives of Masoch’s Platonic idealism compared to Sade’s Aristotelian demon-strativeness, since this, I will argue, is itself a reductive move that attributes the quality of a dichotomous set to the indeterminate possibilities of desiring systems. The claims about sexual pathology within ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ reflect a lack of knowledge about the medical history of sexuality, with the result that Deleuze’s conception of the incommensurability of sadism and masochism is naively typologised according to nineteenth-century psychiatric categories as if something beyond both this model and the conjunctive psychoanalytic one he critiques were not possible. At the time Deleuze wrote this piece he was entrenched in the lines of thought thatdominated his doctoral dissertation, published in that same period as Difference and Repetition (1968). In this work he elaborated a dualistic metaphysics of difference, complicating the opposition between difference and repetition by demonstrating how the properties of the one exist within the other, while nonetheless insisting on their inviolability as categories that cannot be fused or synthesised. ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ may then be expected to reflect this ontology, and it does to the extent that Deleuze prises apart the conjunctive concept of ‘‘sadomasochism’’ in order to show what is particular to Masoch’s desire contrasted to Sade’s. A presumed unity (sadomasochism) is here particularised as two incompatible psychic mechanisms (warm anal sadism vs. cold oral masochism). But ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ is a failed experiment in applying the philosophical concerns of Difference and Repetition – while arguing for the particularity of sadistic and masochistic desires, Deleuze elides the difference between desire and pathological category. In the first part of this paper I examine how Deleuze’s essay performs this move through an attitude of excessive realist credence towards psychiatric categories which extracts them from the intellectual context in which they arose. I attempt to restore a contextual appreciation to Masoch’s oeuvre and to the emergence of sexual categories of perversion in nineteenth-century alienist thought.