(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In the book Presentation de Sacher Masoch Deleuze presents a psychodynamic analysis of the German history professor Leopold Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus and Furs from 1870. One of the purposes of the analysis is to draw a distinction between the Marquis de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who, according to Deleuze, are unjustly linked through the term sado-#masochism. This pair of terms is characterized by the psychoanalyst Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his overview of sexual pathology, Psychopatia sexual# from 1886, and is confirmed by Freud. Deleuze claims that in order to dissolve the misleading clinical link between the two types of perversion and to bring out the disparity between these two writings and the diagnoses they have given their names to, a literary approach will be more appropriate than a clinical one. Mario Perniola, who highlights the text on Sacher-Masoch as the one of Deleuze's texts that has meant the most to his own work, reads it so that masochism becomes "the characteristic opposite" of sadism. That doesn't prevent masochism from being either outright opposite of or for that matter a complement to sadism, which a literary analysis according to Deleuze shows. Rather, masochism represents another world, a world all its own, with a different language, other techniques and other effects. Masoch has according to Deleuze no name given to this ancient perversionone because he suffered from it, but because he turned the symptoms of masochism into literature, transformed them into the literary and produced a new image of masochism by making contract it is always based on to the most essential and primary sign. In a broader perspective, according to Eugène W. Holland, Sacher-Masoch's deviant life practices had i Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis a distinctive strategic value in Europe in the period after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions: "the function of soliciting and enduring punishment for the Masochian masochist was to invalidate the law of the father in the socio-symbolic order and emerge triumphant oneself". Deleuze himself notes that Masoch links the masochistic practice to ethnic minorities and the role of women in these minorities. Masochism becomes an act of resistance, "uneacte de résistance", which is inseparable from a minority humor.
I Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus and Furs we meet the peculiar story of the nobleman Severin Kusiemski and his female companion Wanda von Dunajev. They are part of a minority, noble and sleepy, but none the less part of a minority. And like most minorities, they reflect the society they are surrounded by, including and perhaps especially the prevailing power structures. Wanda is a woman who likes to dress in fur, preferably just that, apart from the whip. They enter into a pact, that is, Severin signs a contract that makes him the absolute slave of the woman, absolutely because according to the contract she also gets permission to take his life, if she wishes. As a slave, Severin is transformed into the subdued and submissive Georg. However, a duality emerges that surpasses maso-
chism as perversion. The masochist laughs under his leather boot, and "humour", writes Deleuze, "is the triumph of the ego over the superego". The relationship between Severin and Wanda is, as we understand, quite crazy, passionate and stormy. At the same time, it is so stylized and precisely described that the masochistic relationship stands out as a philosophical critique of power. Nikolaj Frobenius writes in the foreword to the Norwegian translation that "the powerless has taken control. The power is ridiculously small, the fur a leather trap, the whip a withered twig". It is tempting here to refer to the much-quoted aphorism no. 52 from 1917, because here Kafka writes about the value of submitting to power: "In the duel between you and the world you shall second the world" Masochism becomes a form of resistance as the masochist through his submissions ends up subverting the law, subverting and deforming it. Michael Uebel points out in the article "Masochism in America" from 2002 that Deleuze is the one who most strongly insists on the connection between masochism as a life practice and as a technique of political resistance.
See main case https://www.nytid.no/deleuze-og-motstandens-filosofi/
