Xt. civil "courtesy" and cruel "BDSM" are two sides of the same coin; but then again, how would one bowing his head to Jesus one day, and citing Ragnar the other, and clinging to Satanic cross the other be anything but clueless...
Quoting this again;
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] writes about Her who does not really exist, as one who can only be perceived as an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Zizek wrote:
"...the Object can be perceived only when it is viewed from the side, in a partial, distorted form, as its own shadow - if we cast a direct glance at it we see nothing, a mere void. In a homologous way, we could speak of temporal anamorphosis: the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its absent point of reference. The Object, therefore, is literally something that is created - whose place is encircled - through a network of detours, approximations and near-misses.
Herein resides the function of those artificial obstacles that suddenly hinder our access to some ordinary object: they elevate the object into a stand-in for the Thing. This is how the impossible changes into the prohibited: by way of the short circuit between the Thing and some positive object rendered inaccessible through artificial obstacles.
The tradition of Lady as the inaccessible object is alive and well in our century - in surrealism, for example. Suffice it to recall Luis Bufiuel's That Obscure Object o/Desire, in which a woman, through a series of absurd tricks, postpones again and again the final moment of sexual re-union with her aged lover (when, for example, the man finally gets her into bed, he discovers beneath her nightgown an old-fashioned corset with numerous buckles which are impossible to undo . . .) . The charm of the film lies in this very nonsensical short circuit between the fundamental, metaphysical Limit and some trivial empirical impedi ment. Here we find the logic of courtly love and of sublimation at its purest: some common, everyday object or act becomes innaccessible or impossible to accomplish once it finds itself in the position of the Thing - although the thing should be easily within reach, the entire universe has somehow been adjusted to produce, again and again, an unfathomable contingency blocking access to the object...
What we have here is the inverted libidinal economy of courtly love: in courtly love I devote myself directly to the Lady, I posit my serving her as my supreme Duty, and for that reason woman remains a cold, indifferent, capricious Despot, an 'inhuman partner' (Lacan) with whom a sexual relationship is neither possible nor really desirable, whereas here I render the sexual relationship possible precisely by not positing it as my explicit goal... In other words, true love can emerge only within a relationship of 'partnership' that is animated by a different, non-sexual goal (see the novels of Marguerite Duras) . Love is an unforeseeable answer of the real: it (can) emerge(s) 'out of nowhere' only when we renounce any attempt to direct and control its course." [The Metastases of Enjoyment]
By seeing the Lady as the reality principle, neatly provides a case for the other side of the Virgin/Whore split. If Romantic Idealism of the Virgin and orthodox Xt. triumphed at one end,,, Zizek shows how the other side of Marxist-Communist Feminism and the sadomasochism of pornography evolved out of the same logic of courtly tradition:
Quote :
"For Zizek, the elevation of the Lady that takes place in courtly love isn’t a “spiritualization” but rather a distancing that treats the woman as an abstraction, a “cold, distanced, inhuman partner.” She is “by no means a warm, compassionate, understanding fellow-creature.” He quotes Lacan’s observation that in courtly love, the woman is a “terrifying, an inhuman power.” She is “never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. If she is described as wise, it is only because she embodied an immaterial wisdom or because she represents its functions more than she exercises them. On the contrary, she is as arbitrary as possible in the tests she imposes on her servant”. She is not a spiritual being, but represents “a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires,” and thus a kind of “automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random".
This radical, distanced, indifferent Otherness is what Lacan calls das Ding, the Real, the hard kernel of things that “resists symbolization.” The idealization of the lady is a projection that attempts to neutralize “her traumatic dimension.” The lady becomes a mirror on which the subject projects a narcissistic ideal.
The Lady takes the place of the Thing, the Real, the radical Otherness that is the object of desire but incapable of approach or symbolization. The Real is like Yahweh, the inscrutable biblical God; the Lady is in that position, inscrutable, inaccessible, arbitrary in her demands. The knight is in the position of Job, crying out against what appears to be a void. The knight is like the Psalmist who cries out in bewilderment at being forsaken.
The Lady and her lover set up a master-servant relationship, in which the man’s service takes on a dimension of masochism. She commands him, and he does whatever she requires of him, no matter how humiliating it may be.
Lest we be tempted to think this a Freudo-Lacanian invention, Chretien’s Lancelot provides an apt illustration. C. S. Lewis (ever sensitive to masochistic overtones) summarizes the story (Allegory of Love): “Lancelot sets out to find the Queen and almost at once loses his horse. In this predicament he is met by a dwarf driving a tumbril. To his questions, the dwarf—surly like all his race—replies, ‘Get in, and I will bring you where you shall have news of the Queen.’ The knight hesitates for a moment before mounting the cart of shame and thus appearing as a common criminal; a moment later he obeys. He is driven through the streets where the rabble try out upon him and ask what he has done and whether he is to be flayed or hanged. He is brought to a castle where he is shown a bed that he must not lie in because he is a knight disgraced. He comes to the bridge that crosses into the land of Gorre—the sword-bridge, made of a single blade of steel—and is warned that the high enterprise of crossing it is not for one so dishonored as he. ‘Remember your ride on the cart,’ says the keeper of the bridge. Even his friends acknowledge that he will never be rid of the disgrace. When he has crossed the bridge, wounded in hands, knees, and feet, he comes at least into the presence of the Queen. She will not speak to him. An old king, moved with pity, presses on her the merits of his service.”
She replies that “all his time is spilt for nought.” He will not win any thanks from the Queen. Lewis continues, “It is only later that he learns the cause of all this cruelty. The Queen has heard of his momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril, and this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her as sufficient to annihilate all the merits of his subsequent labours and hmiliations. Even when he is forgiven, his trials are not yet at an end. The tournament at the close of the poem gives Guinevere another opportunity of exercising her power. When he has already entered the lists, in disguise, and all, as usually, is going down before him, she sends him a message ordering him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himself be unhorsed by the next knight that comes against him, and then takes to his heels, feigning terror of every combatant that passes near him. The herald mocks him for a cower, and the whole field takes up the laugh against him: the Queen looks on delighted.” She finally relents and lets him fight.
As Lewis says, “The submission which Lancelot shows in his actions is accompanied, on the subjective side, by a feeling that deliberately apes religious devotion. Although his love is by no means supersensual and is indeed carnally rewarded in this very poem, he is represented as treating Guinevere with saintly, if not divine, honours. When he comes before the bed where she lies he kneels and adores her. . . . When he leaves her chamber he makes a genuflexion as if he were before a shrine”.
Zizek sees the same religious dimension, and generalizes it. Courtly love is not just a religious vision of love, but an attempt to grapple with the existential condition that we are in, confronted by a Real that remains beyond our comprehension of symbolization. We can only deal with this by pretending it’s better than it is, or by translating the Real into something we can grasp, translating the inaccessibility of the Real into something that we have created.
Zizek writes, “Within this perspective, courtly love appears as simply the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting up conventional obstacles to its attainability. When, in his seminar Encore, Lacan provides the most succinct formulation of the paradox of courtly love, he says something that is apparently similar, yet fundamentally different: ‘A very refined manner to supplant the absence of the sexual relationship is by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way. ' The point, therefore, is not simply that we set up additional conventional hindrances in order to heighten the value of the object: external hindrances that thwart our access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them, the object would be directly accessible—what such hindrances thereby conceal is the inherent impossibility of attaining the object”.
In this context, what the lover longs for isn’t sex, but response. Faced with a faceless Real, he longs for some sign from the lady-Real that she acknowledges his existence, that she responds to his pain, that she is not a machine: “in courtly love itself, the long-awaited moment of highest fulfillment, when the Lady renders Gnade, mercy, to her servant, is not the Lady's surrender, her consent to the sexual act, nor some mysterious rite of initiation, but simply a sign of love on the part of the Lady, the ' miracle' that the Object answered, stretching its hand out towards the supplicant”.
Zizek sees courtly love everywhere still. It’s not a medieval phenomenon only, but a contemporary one. The femme fatale is an heiress of the cruel lady of courtly love: “like the Lady, the femme fatale is an ‘inhuman partner', a traumatic Object with whom no relationship is possible, an apathetic void imposing senseless, arbitrary ordeals”.
He also sees the masochistic dynamics arising even in a world that claims to have renounced the Master-Servant model of love, in both its patriarchal or courtly love versions. There are ontological obstacles to the formation of truly equitable relationships among the sexes. At least, sexual relationship cannot achieve the reciprocity: “The problem is that once the relationship between the two sexes is conceived of as a symmetrical, reciprocal, voluntary partnership or contract, the fantasy matrix which first emerged in courtly love remains in power. Why? In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing, an ' inhuman partner' ; as such, the sexual relationship cannot be transposed into a symmetrical relationship between pure subjects. The bourgeois principle of contract between equal subjects can be applied to sexuality only in the form of the perverse-masochistic-contract in which, paradoxically, the very form of balanced contract serves to establish a relationship of domination. It is no accident that in the so-called alternative sexual practices (‘sadomasochistic' lesbian and gay couples) the Master-and-slave relationship re-emerges with a vengeance, including all the ingredients of the masochistic theatre. In other words, we are far from inventing a new ‘formula' capable of replacing the matrix of courtly love” (108-9)."
In the East, certain schools of Tantric/Vajrayana Buddhism employ this method from the Dom's point of view:
Quote :
Meaning of the Cakravartin in Tantric Buddhism.
"We thus return to the starting point, the love-play between yogi and yogini, god and goddess, and first examine the various feminine typologies which the tantric master uses in his rituals. Vajrayana distinguishes three types of woman in all:
The “real woman” (karma mudra). She is a real human partner. According to tantric doctrine she belongs to the “realm of desire”. The “imaginary woman” or “spirit woman” (inana mudra). She is summonsed by the yogi’s meditative imagination and only exists there or in his fantasy. The inana mudra is placed in the “realm of forms”. The “inner woman” (maha mudra). She is the woman internalized via the tantric praxis, with no existence independent of the yogi. She is not even credited with the reality of an imagined form, therefore she counts as a figure from the “formless realm”.
All three types of woman are termed mudra. This word originally meant ‘seal’, ‘stamp’, or ‘letter of the alphabet’. It further indicated certain magical hand gestures and body postures, with which the yogi conducted, controlled and “sealed” the divine energies. This semantic richness has led to all manner of speculation. For example, we read that the tantric master “stamps” the phenomena of the world with happiness, and that as his companion helps him do this, she is known as mudra (‘stamp’). More concretely, the Maha Siddha Naropa refers to the fact that a tantric partner, in contrast to a normal woman, assists the guru in blocking his ejaculation during the sexual act, and as it were “seals” this, which is of major importance for the performance of the ritual. For this reason she is known as mudra, ‘seal’ (Naropa, 1994, p. 81). But the actual meaning probably lies in the following: in Vajrayana the feminine itself is “sealed”, that is, spellbound via a magic act, so that it is available to the tantric master in its entirety.
Highest mistress of the world! Let me in the azure Tent of Heaven, in light unfurled Hear thy Mystery measure! Justify sweet thoughts that move Breast of man to meet thee! And with holy bliss of love Bear him up to greet thee! (Faust II, 11997–12004)
Since the yogi produces his wisdom companion through the imaginative power of his spirit, he can rightly consider himself her spiritual father. The inana mudra is composed of the substance of his own thoughts. She thus does not consist of matter, but — and this is very important — she nonetheless appears outside of her imagination-father and initially encounters him as an autonomous subject. He thus experiences her as a being who admittedly has him alone to thank for her being, but who nevertheless has a life of her own, like a child, separated from its mother once it is born.
As a master of unbounded imagination, the yogi is seldom content with a single inana mudra, and instead creates several female beings from out of his spirit, either one after another or simultaneously. The Kalachakra Tantra describes how the imagined “goddesses” spring from various parts of his body, from out of his head, his forehead, his neck, his heart and his navel. He can conjure up the most diverse entities in the form of women, such as elements, planets, energies, forces and emotions — compassion for example: “as the incarnation of this arises in his heart a golden glowing woman wearing a white robe. ... Then this woman steps ... out of his heart, spreads herself out to the heaven of the gods like a cloud and lets down a rain of nourishment as an antidote for all bodily suffering” (Gäng, 1988, p. 44).
As far as their external and autonomous existence is concerned, this is indeed the yogi’s conception. He does not accord even the real woman any further inherent existence. When, after the tantric ritual in which she is elevated to a goddess, she before all eyes returns home in visible, physical form, in the eyes of the guru she no longer exists as an independent being, but merely as the product of his imagination, as a conceptual image — even when a normal person perceives the girl as a being of flesh and blood.
But although her autonomous feminine existence has been dissolved, her feminine essence (gynergy) has not been lost. Via an act of sexual magic the yogi has appropriated this and with it achieved the power of an androgyne. He destroys, so to speak, the exterior feminine in order to internalize it and produce an “inner woman” as a part of himself. “He absorbs the Mother of the Universe into himself”, as it is described in the Kalachakra Tantra (Grünwedel, Kalacakra IV, p. 32).
The male tantric master now has the power to assume the female form of the goddess (who is of course an aspect of his own mystical body), that is, he can appear in the figure of a woman. Indeed, he even has the magical ability to divide himself into two gendered beings, a female and a male deity. He is further able to multiply himself into several maha mudras. In the Guhyasamaja Tantra, with the help of magical conjurations he fills an entire palace with female figures, themselves all particles of his subtle body.
He incarnates the entire tantric theater. He is director, actor, audience, plot and stage in one individual.
Such agitated games are, however, just one side of the tantric philosophy, on the other is a concept of eternal standstill of being, linked to the image of the maha mudra. She appears as the “Highest Immobile”, who, like a clear, magical mirror, reflects a femininity turned to crystal. An obedient femininity with no will of her own, who complies with the looks, the orders, the desires and fantasies of her master. A female automaton, who wishes for nothing, and blesses the yogi with her divine knowledge and holy wisdom.
Whether mobile or unmoving, erotic or spiritualized — the maha mudra is universal. From a tantric viewpoint she incarnates the entire universe. Consequently, whoever has control over his “inner woman” becomes a lord of the universe, a pantocrat. She is a paradox, eternal and indestructible, but nevertheless, like the whole cosmos, without an independent existence. For this reason she is known as a “magical mirror” (Naropa, 1994, p. 81). In the final instance, she represents the “emptiness”.
This becomes especially clear in the Hevajra Tantra. In staging of the ritual we encounter at the outset a real yogini (karma mudra) or at least an imagined goddess (inana mudra), whom the yogi transforms in the course of events into a “nothing” using magic techniques. By the end the tantric master has completely robbed her of her independent existence, that is, to put it bluntly, she no longer exists. “She is the Yogini without a Self” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, pp. 218–219). Thus her name, Nairatmya, literally means ‘one who has no self, that is, non-substantial’ (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 219). The same concept is at work when, in another tantra, the “ultimate dakini” is visualized as a “zero-point” and experienced as “indivisible pleasure and emptiness” (Dowman, 1985, p. 74). Chögyam Trungpa sings of the highest “lady without being” in the following verses:
Always present, you do not exist ... Without body, shapeless, divinity of the true. (Trungpa, 1990, p. 40)
In Vajrayana, the Shunyata doctrine (among others) of the nonexistence of all being, is employed to conduct a symbolic sacrifice of the feminine principle. Only once this has evaporated into a “nothing” can the world and we humans be rescued from the curse of maya (illusion). This may also be a reason why the “emptiness” (shunyata), which actually by definition can not possess any characteristics, is hypostasized as feminine in the tantras.
But they are not completely destroyed in the process of their violent spiritualization, but rather “sublated” in the Hegelian sense, namely “negated” and “conserved” at the same time; they are — to make use of one of the favorite terms of the Buddhist evolutionary theorist, Ken Wilber — “integrated”. This guarantees that the creative feminine energies are not lost following the material “dissolution” of their bearers, and instead are available solely to the yogi as a precious elixir. A sacrifice of the feminine as an autonomous principle must therefore be regarded as the sine qua non for the universal power of the tantric master. These days this feminine sacrifice may only be performed entirely in the imagination. But this need not have always been the case.
The tantric recognizes a majority of the feminine properties as extremely powerful. He therefore has not the slightest intention of destroying them as such. In contrast, he wishes to make the feminine forces his own. The tantric yogi unites with her not just in the sexual act, but above all through consuming her holy gynergy, the magical force of maya. To gain the “gynergy” for himself, the yogi must “kill” the possessor of the vital feminine substances and then “incorporate” her. Such an act of violence does not necessarily imply the real murder of his mudra, it can also be performed symbolically. But a real ritual murder of a woman is by like measure not precluded, and it is not surprising that occasional references can be found in the Vajrayana texts which blatantly and unscrupulously demand the actual killing of a woman. In a commentary on the Hevajra Tantra, at a point where a lower-caste wisdom consort (dombi) is being addressed, stands bluntly, “I kill you, o Dombi, I take your life!” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol. 1, p. 159).
The origin of these Buddhist “flame masses” from the Vedas becomes obvious when it is noted that the Vedic fire god Agni appears in the Buddhist tantras as the “Consumer of Offerings”. The symbolic burning of “sacrificial goddesses” is found in nearly every tantra. It represents every possible characteristic, from the human senses to various states of consciousness. The elements (fire, water, etc.) and individual bodily features are also imagined in the form of a “sacrificial goddesses”. With the pronouncement of a powerful magic formula they all perish in the fire. In what is known as the Vajrayogini ritual, the pupil sacrifices several inana mudras to a red fire god who rides a goat. The chief goddess, Vajrayogini, appears here with “a red-colored body which shines with a brilliance like that of the fire of the aeon” (Gyatso, 1991, p. 443).
A “burning woman” by the name of Candali plays such a significant role in the Kalachakra initiations... the “ignition of feminine energy”, a central event along the sexual magic initiation path of Tantrism.
The alchemic law of solve et coagole ("dissolve and rebuild”) is likewise a maxim here. We also know of such phoenix-from-the-ashes scenarios among the occidental mystics. For our study it is, however, of especial interest that this “inner fire” carries the name of a woman in the Time Tantra. The candali — as it is called — refers firstly to a girl from the lowest caste, but the Sanskrit word also etymologically bears the meaning of ‘fierce woman’ (Cozort, 1986, p. 71). The Tibetans translate “candali” as ‘the hot one’ (Tum-mo) and take this to mean a fiery source of power in the body of a tantra adept.
The candali thus reveals itself to be the Buddhist sister of the Hindu fire-snake (kundalini), which likewise lies dormant in the lowest chakra of a yogi and leaps up in flames once it is unchained. But in Buddhism the destructive aspect of the inner “fire woman” is far more emphasized than her creative side. It is true that the Hindu kundalini is also destructive, but she is also most highly venerated as the creative principle (shakti): “She is a world mother, who is eternally pregnant with the world. ... The world woman and Kundalini are the macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects of the same greatness: Shakti, who god-like weaves and bears all forms” (Zimmer, 1973, p. 146).
One text describes her as “lightning-fire”, another as the “daughter of death” (Snellgrove, 1959, p. 49). Then, level for level, the “hot one” burns out all the adept’s chakras. The five elements equated with the energy centers are destroyed in blazing heat. Starting from below, firstly the earth is burned up in the region of the navel and transforms itself into water in the heart chakra. Then the water is burnt out and disintegrates in fire in the throat. In the forehead, with the help of the candali the air consumes the fire, and at the crown of the skull all the elements vanish into empty space. At the same time the five senses and the five sense objects which correspond to the respective lotus centers are destroyed. Since a meditation Buddha and his partner inhabit each chakra, these also succumb to the flames. The Kalachakra Tantra speaks of a “dematerialization of the form aggregate” (Cozort, 1986, p. 130).
Lastly the candali devours the entire old energy body of the adept, including the gods who, in the microcosmic scheme of things, inhabit him. We must never forget that the tantric universe consists of an endless chain of analogies and homologies and links between all levels of being. Hence the yogi believes that by staging the destruction of his imperfect human body he simultaneously destroys the imperfect world, and that usually with the best intentions.
But what happens to the candali, once she has completed her pyrotechnical opus? Does she now participate as an equal partner with the yogi in the creation of a new universe? No — the opposite is true! She disappears from the tantric stage, just like the elements which were destroyed with her help. Once she has vaporized all the lotus centers (chakras) up to the roof of the skull, she melts the bodhicitta (male seed) stored there. This, on account of its “watery” character, possesses the power to extinguish the “fire woman”. She is, like the human karma mudra on the level of visible reality, dismissed by the yogi.
In the face of this spectacular volcanic eruption in the inner bodily landscape of the tantra master we must ask what the magic means might be which grant him the power to ignite the candali and make her serve his purpose. Several tantras nominate sexual greed, which brings her to the boil. The Hevajra Tantra speaks of the “fire of passion” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. xxix). In another text “kamic fire” is explicitly mentioned (Avalon, 1975, p. 140). The term refers to the Hindu god Kama, who represents sexual pleasure. Correspondingly, direct reference is made to the act of love in a further tantric manual, where it can be read that “during sexual intercourse the Candali vibrates a little and great heat arises” (Hopkins, 1982, p. 177).
The equation of the sexual act with a fire ritual can be traced to the Vedas, and was later adopted by Tantric Buddhism. There the woman is referred to as the “sacrificial fire, her lower portion as the sacrificial wood, the genital region as the flame, the penetration as the carbon and the copulation as the spark” (Bhattacharyya, 1982, p. 124). From a Vedic viewpoint the world cannot continue to exist without a fire sacrifice.
In Western discussion about the maha mudra she is glorified by Lama Govinda (Ernst Lothar Hoffmann) as the “Eternal Feminine” which now counts as part of the yogi’s essential being. (Govinda, 1991, p. 111). According to Govinda she fulfills a role comparable to that of the muse, who up until the 19th century whispered inspiration into the ears of European artists. Muses could also become incarnated as real women, but in the same manner existed as “inner goddesses”, known then under the name of “inspiration”.
Fundamentally, the Buddhist tantric distinguishes three types of sacrifice: the outer, the inner and the secret. The “outer sacrifice” consists of the offering to a divinity, the Buddhas, or the guru, of food, incense, butter lamps, perfume, and so on. For instance in the so-called “mandala sacrifice” the whole universe can be presented to the teacher, in the form of a miniature model, whilst the pupil says the following. “I sacrifice all the components of the universe in their totality to you, O noble, kind, and holy lama!” (Bleichsteiner, 1937, p. 192)
In the “inner sacrifice” the pupil (Sadhaka) gives his guru, usually in a symbolic act, his five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), his states of consciousness, and his feelings, or he offers himself as an individual up to be sacrificed. Whatever the master demands of him will be done — even if the sadhaka must cut the flesh from his own limbs, like the tantric adept Naropa.
Behind the “secret sacrifice” hides, finally, a particular ritual event which attracts our especial interest, since it is here that the location of the “tantric female sacrifice” is to be suspected. It concerns — as can be read in a modern commentary upon the Kalachakra Tantra — “the spiritual sacrifice of a dakini to the lama” (Henss, 1985, p. 56). Such symbolic sacrifices of goddesses are all but stereotypical of tantric ceremonies. “The exquisite bejeweled woman ... is offered to the Buddhas” (Gäng, 1988, p. 151), as the Guhyasamaja Tantra puts it. Often eight, sometimes sixteen, occasionally countless “wisdom girls” are offered up in “the holy most secret of offerings” (quoted by Beyer, 1978, p. 162)
There are unmistakable statements from [Evola] about the “tantric female sacrifice” and the transformation of sexuality into political power. Like almost no other, the Italian has openly named the events that unfold in the mysteries of the yogis and then confessed to them: “The young woman,” he writes, “who is first ‘demonized’ and then raped, ... is essentially... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic” (Evola, 1983, p. 389). Rather, the man must encounter the woman in the “magic love” in order to divert her feminine energies.
According to Serrano the “killing” of the external woman (the karma mudra) is therefore necessary, so that the inner woman (the maha mudra) can be formed. The author does not shrink from discussing the “tantric female sacrifice” directly: “Only those who are able to love the woman so much [!] that they externally kill her [!] in order to make possible her inner rebirth will find the immortal city of Agarthi (or Shambhala)” (Serrano, 1982, p. 13).
“The secret path of yoga along which you are traveling is only for the warrior, for the initiated hero. It is not the path for the woman; because a woman has no chakras, no kundalini to awaken. ... A woman is the Kundalini. A woman has no soul. She is the soul. A woman has no eternity. She is eternity” (Serrano, 1984, pp. 102, 147).
“The authentic, absolute woman sacrifices herself voluntarily,” we read in NOS, “immolating herself in order to give her eternity to her lover. ... The beloved is now the hidden beloved, she who has died and buried herself in your bones and your veins. The female Sophia, guru of the soul, she who courses through the blood, the female philosopher, Sophia, wisdom, the dove, gnosis” (Serrano, 1984, pp. 147-148). Dying, his “wisdom consort” says to him, “I shall but love thee better after death. I give you my eternity.
Through this love, deadly for the woman, the man gains eternal life. In this context, Serrano plays upon the word AMOR, which does not just mean love, but also A-MOR, i.e., beyond death."
Saying I am not a homo is not how one defends oneself from BDSM when one defines it simply as a relinquishing of power and initiation into knowledge from endurance of any kind of pain for which either gender would not really matter.
So no.
BDSM and transgressive sacrality only works, *because* it is founded on the natural order of sexual roles, which as Bataille pointed out, lets the Prohibition redeem and reinstitute the rule. The ancient phallic and hermetic cult of Priapus was owing to establishing the Herm/Phallus as the Boundary, the Ego, borders being sacred to Hermes/Mercury.
What J.-Xt. did was cause a total rift and separation of the Rule as good, and the Prohibition as evil; it separated the Man and the Animal permanently, gradually evolving into Civil Courtesy/Political Correctness and SadoMasochism/Pornography.
The Carnival described by Bakhtin, the Saturnalia was the temporary overturn of the natural hierarchy between slave/master, man/woman, man/animal, etc.
Life at large is both border/boundary and center/ego. Like how a court intertwines both the King and the Clown, with crowns that are inversions of the other, and likewise authoritative speech tied to subversive humour. What abyss can be endured directly, needs the safety valve in the absurdity of a humourous clown. Elasticity.
Xt. cut the elasticity splitting into two kinds of hedonism: Pure Pleasure [Chivalry] and Pure Displeasure [BDSM]
Bataille wrote:
"Laughter, tears, poetry, tragedy and comedy - and more generally, every art form involving tragic, comic or poetic aspects - play, anger, intoxication, ecstasy, dance, music, combat, the funeral horror, the magic of childhood, the sacred - of which sacrifice is the most intense aspect - the divine and the diabolical, eroticism (individual or not, spiritual or sensual, corrupt, cerebral or violent, or delicate), beauty (most often linked to all the forms previously enumerated and whose opposite possesses an equally intense power), crime, cruelty, fear, disgust, together represent the forms of effusion which classical sovereignty, recognized sovereignty, undoubtedly does not conjoin in a complete unity, but which virtual sovereignty would, if we were to secretly attain it. I have not exhausted, I know, those sudden openings beyond the world of useful works, which - even if the supreme value of these openings is denied, as it is in our time, when the political game takes the place of sovereign displays - continue to be given to us. Whatever the term, moreover, it would refer to an ensemble so vast that one hesitates to choose one: yet the word festival, in a sense, names the modality that comes closest to sovereignty (but perhaps in fact the festival exists, like traditional sovereignty, only insofar as it is generally recognized, and so it has lost some of its power). Other terms, finally, would have little meaning in the absence of extensive commentary: terms such as joy, sorrow, pain, hunger and the consumption of food, extreme destitution and extreme wealth (more exactly the sud- den abundance of wealth), the gift...
In the world of the primacy of useful values, the overall meaning of these different forms never appears. But it was, on the contrary, the constant concern of archaic man to make that meaning clear, salient, and to give it a material aspect that would domi- nate. All the miraculous sensations, happy or unhappy, that are connected with the effusions I have spoken of were destined at a single point to flow freely, abundantly. Of course, this unity re- mained precarious; on the one hand, it constantly tended toward bipartition - essentially opposing the military and the religious, the temporal and the spiritual - on the other hand, toward feu- dal dispersion. But the first impulse concentrated in the hands of the one designated by a sign of election the virtues of combat and play, of sensuality and wealth, of sacred horror, of intoxication, of ecstasy and of all the arts. At times it became difficult to reconcile the irreconcilable, and substitute kings needed to take upon themselves what was precluded by royal dignity, as it was then understood: the carnival kings had, no doubt successively, the double privilege of drawing upon themselves death or the most joyful ridicule.
There was a lifting of the prohibition, but on condition that it be temporary; there was nothing in the prohibition that opposed this lifting. There were then no parti- tions dividing humanity into fundamentally separate worlds, into so many sealed compartments. If forms were opposed to each other, there was no need for going to the limit of the opposition. The awareness of a totality of opposed forms was maintained and it seemed easy to modulate the discordances. But since it set up a This is possible because Christianity brings into the religious sphere a division unlike the one that existed before it. Within the radical opposition between the attractive world of the good, of majestic forms, and the world of repulsion, of corruption and evil, Christianity associated eroticism unambiguously with evil. What in paganism was only the momentary reversal of the course of things became the lot of the damned, the share that came under God's eternal curse. Not only was eroticism the object of a defin- itive reprobation, because of the appeal to horror that precipitated its movements, but it became the inexpiable wrong, and something like an essence of evil.
Moreover, we are obliged to recognize the degree to which this way of looking at things was justified. The denial of animal sexuality and the repulsion that averted people from it never prevented desire from reclaiming its rights. In fact, these elements were an inducement, and we have seen that eroticism owes its value to the distaste we have for the animality of sex. Under such conditions, sexuality exerted an excess of agonizing attraction. Considered within the limits of the sinner's self-interest, evil has an excuse all the same: it is not sovereign evil having its reason for being in itself. Only eroticism is evil for evil's sake, where the sinner takes pleasure for the reason that, in this trespass, he attains sovereign existence.
In its establishment, Christianity took up in a renewed form the movement that set the first men against nature. Christians repudiated the pagan world in which transgression counterbalances the prohibition to form the totality. In this way, they revived within themselves the original drama that was the transition from animal to man: they did this with an efficacy all the greater because of the ignominious death on the Cross, before which they took their stand, maintaining transgression's moment of horror within themselves. But under these conditions the totality continued to exist only insofar as Christianity did not destroy what it had in view: that pagan world which it regarded, not without some justification, with the horror that the first men had of nature.
This gives meaning to the blackness that the condemned eroticism of the Christian ages was to assume. The sabbath was the blackest form, wherein the play of nocturnal terrors and the play of licentiousness were combined - wherein, above all, desire comes full circle and the consciousness of doing wrong, of [...I.]" [The Accursed Share]
The pagan roots of "BDSM" can be traced back to Greek rites of "Flagellation" and later in Petrarch's Satyricon;
Quote :
"In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in other cultures, there was an association between fertility (success in conceiving children) and some types of flagellation. For example, whipping the buttocks with nettles was supposed to increase fertility according to the ancients.
Flagellation was also considered an aphrodisiac, or stimulant of sexual desire. A man might be flagellated by a courtesan to restore his waning desire, as depicted in Fellini’s movie “Satyricon.” Greco-Roman art often depicts a sandal being used for erotic spanking or slapping. It can be surmised that much of this activity was consensual, since the person being whipped was seeking to get something out of it — arousal or fertility.
There are other depictions of the infliction of pain for erotic purposes, that was one-sided or non-consensual. These images involve slaves, or female prostitutes who were motivated primarily by payment for their participation.
Evidence of (non-consensual) bdsm fantasies in ancient Rome is provided by the “Satyricon” written by Petrarch, sometime in the first centuryof the Common Era.
For example in Book 4 Encolpius is given an aphrodisiac to drink. His hands are bound behind him and the servant girl Psyche fondles his penis, trying to arouse him. Psyche also pricks his cheeks with her hair pin to silence him when he tries to cry for help.
A bit later the man Encolpius and the woman Quartilla are forcibly bound together, for sport, by a group of young soldiers. The type of bondage used on Encolpius and Quartilla forces her mouth into intimate contact with his, her breasts rubbing against his chest, and their thighs each pressed into each other’s. As a result of the aphrodisiac he consumed Encolpius becomes “filled with lasciviousness” and begins performing on Quartilla who “on fire with a similar wantonness” shows no reluctance for the game, to the great amusement of the soldiers.
At the same time as he is thrusting into his bound partner Quartilla, a gay man mounts the bound Encolpius from behind. Though Encolpius is repulsed by this, he finds himself moving involuntarily in response to the intruder’s thrusts, just as fast and furiously as Quartilla is wriggling under him. The young soldiers find this spectacle quite ludicrous and burst into laughter, to the humiliation of Encolpius.
This is only a small sampling of the contents of the “Satyricon.” It should be enough to demonstrate that pleasure in bondage, humiliation, and forced sex were part of the human psyche long before the Marquis de Sade."
In the Initiatory festival of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Dumezil elaborates on the rites of Flagellation which had a sacred character; note that Prosperity and Fertility here belonged to the Polis/Cosmos as a whole, and a not a private debasement of fornicating for mind-numbing pleasure...
Public shaming contributed to arousing virility of the whole community, because of the predominantly effective shame & honour culture;
Dumezil wrote:
Februus, Fecundation and Gandharva
"Once at the end of every year, on the dies februatus in the middle of the month of februarius, the great purification called februatio took place. It was celebrated with the aid of various accessories termed (in the neuter plural) februa and ensured by divinities about whom the Roman historians no longer knew a great deal: luno Februa (Februata, or Febru(a)lis) and Februus. The rites were performed by a brotherhood that played no other role in Roman life but which, on that one day alone, threw aside all restraint. Two groups of Luperci, made up of young men from the equestrian order, ran through the city naked except for leather belts striking females with thongs of goatskin in order to make them fertile. We do not know what the concluding rites of this violent scenario were, although we do know that goats were sacrificed before the race through the city, that the bloodied sacrificial knife was wiped on the foreheads of the bands' two young leaders, and that they were expected to laugh at that point. We also know that the Luperci sacrificed a dogs.
There are "historical" accounts that claim to explain the origin of these rites. The Luperci, they say, were imitating the pastoralis iuventus, the young men who had gathered around Romulus and Remus. Their name, like that of the Lupercalia, was an allusion to the two brothers' foster mother, the she-wolf, and to their childhood in the wilderness, during which their hearts became hardened and the seeds of their harsh future were sown. Moreover, the race through the city was said to commemorate a particular episode in the brothers' lives: one day, when Romulus, Remus and their companions were lying naked, lazily watching their meat roast, they were warned that strangers were stealing their cattle. The two bands threw themselves into action without taking the time to dress. The group led by Remus had the good fortune to rescue the cattle and to return to the encamp- ment first, where they tore the barely cooked meat from the spits. "The victor alone," Remus declared, "has the right to eat of it." (It is reasonable to hazard that this singular feature had some corre- sponding moment in the rites that has not come down to us.) Finally, we are told that the flagellation of female passers-by referred to another, more scabrous incident in the Romulus story: having kid- napped the Sabine women for his men, the young leader discovered, to his annoyance, that they were sterile. He consulted an oracle, which replied: "Let a he-goat penetrate the Roman women!" An augur then rendered a somewhat more decorous interpretation of this robust injunction: the women were struck with goatskin thongs, and they conceived.
The type of feral and brutal brotherhood featured in this episode of Rome's religious life has already been illuminated by ethnogra- phy It is one of those "men-only societies" - societies characterized by disguises, initiations and extraordinary magical powers - such as can be found among almost all so-called semi-civilized peoples - societies that merit, at least in part, the description "secret," and which do not surface in public religious life except to oppose (and then overwhelmingly) the normal mechanism of that religion.
The early Indo-European world could not have failed to possess this essential organ of collective life, an organ of which the Germanic world, in ancient times and even into the Middle Ages, certainly pro- vides more than mere vestiges, and of which the winter and end-of- winter "maskers" of modern Europe are, in part, a bastardization. It seemed to me that the februatio of the Lupercalia must have been the Roman adaptation of such scenarios, and I supported this opin- ion with comparative arguments drawn principally from the Indo- Iranian world." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Also Flagellation in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and later exposition of these themes can be found in Michael Enright's fantastic and must read book [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], where the Queen exhorts the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon warriors into battle with shame, cruelty, sarcasm, mockery and cutting edge words... partly also evidenced in Beowulf.
After Christianization of paganism, the "Flagellation" of Christ takes on a hedonistic perversity.
Initiation through grace and salvation and "Endurance" take on a different tinge in meaning.
Xt. hedonistic endurance is not the same as the pagan/dionysian one, which Brown too noted of the sadomasochism inherent in Xt.:
Norman Brown wrote:
"The Platonic Eros is the child of defect or want. Its direction is away from the insufficient self; its aim is to possess the object which completes it (there is a Platonic residue in Freud's inadequate notion of object-choice). The Christian Agape, with its self-sacrificial structure, has the same basis in the insufficiency of the self, but in it the self can be completed by no object and therefore must be extinguished. In the words of Luther, "To love is the same as to hate one-self"; in the words of St. Augustine, "Love slays what we have been that we may be what we were not." From the psychoanalytical point of view, Platonic Eros is inseparable from an aggressive component, Christian Agape inseparable from a masochistic component." [Life Against Death]
While discipline[disciple-ship] is necessary phase of initiations, quitting your forum at the slightest feeling of failure is having looked like a good hedonist for success and immediate gratification.
But this is the modern error of what Rage has come to mean.
Rage is only all sparks and theatrics and blunt, blind force to the modern hedonist; while the rage of Achilles is a protracted fire, that is never extinguished through the journey of one's life.
Achilles' abandonment and desertion of his camp, his friends is not the extinguishing of his rage, or its flickering, but protraction lending it a more pronounced definition.
Certain principles like 'never give up, never give up, never give up' are personal "mantras" of the warrior set to the rhythm of the physical heart and the spirit, that once the rhythm is attained and the pendulum can swing spontaneously, one can close oneself off to maintaining that rage at the edge of one's sleeve... the Self Knows what to do and needs no inter-mediation. Long hours of Persistent discipline beyond pleasure/pain, gain/loss, victory/defeat.
Achilles is the Apollonian wanting to differentiate himself from home, a birth, and is care-full about his Name.
Odysseus is the Dionysian wanting to return home, a re-birth, and has forgotten his Name and has to inherit it.
"In our earliest written references to the Gorgon Medusa, she is simply a terrifying head4 and it is specifically her grim aspect (Il.XI.36-37), which is the source of the frightening power she possesses. In the Iliad we find her on both the aegis of Athene (Il.V.733-42) and the shield of Agamemnon (Il.XI.32-40), while in the Odyssey the mere threat of her head’s arrival is enough to make Odysseus take flight (Od.XI.633-36). In the early iconography of Medusa, her gaze is again emphasised through the bulging eyes and frontality that remain canonical in representations of the monstrous type. That it was Medusa’s sight which was viewed to be the specific source of her especial power is indeed confirmed by the fact that the decapitation episode itself can be dated back to the 7th century BCE,5 with a Cycladic pithos from c. 660 BCE even portraying a Perseus who cautiously averts his gaze while beheading her.
As both of her appearances in the Iliad are on martial wear, it would be logical to deduce that the affect of her gaze is there either to rout the enemy through fear or, more likely, to make them incapable of flight through that same emotion.
The issues of monstrousness and beauty, as well as their role as two complementary faces of female power, are eventually brought together—though perhaps not for the first time—in Ovid, who presents the myth of Medusa as a story of two halves (Met.IV.1080- 94). While Medusa’s former ability to incite men to action through her beauty is then countered by an ability to petrify them with her hideousness,8 the loss of the first of these powers through her transformation is then echoed in the loss of the latter through her decapitation and death. As becomes clear, Medusa’s parallel powers of attraction and petrification are both threats to the male—represented in the narrative by first Neptune and then Perseus—and must thus both be overcome through assertions of male—or in the case of Minerva, masculine—dominance.
For the overriding popular image of Medusa in contemporary culture is indeed that of a dangerous seductress, her hissing hair vampish, her gaze both alluring and unsettling. Though this image has only really begun to dominate in the last few decades, already in the 16th century, Natale Conti portrayed Medusa as a hyper-sexed and dangerous female. He attributes her transformation to her wilful violation of Minerva’s temple with Neptune, and identifies her as a didactic embodiment of “lust, boldness, and arrogance” (Mythologies X.1077).
Five hundred years later, an even more damaging transformation of Medusa can be found in the paintings of Nancy Farmer, more damaging because, unlike Conti, Farmer clearly believes that her own hyper-sexed Medusa has actually become empowered in her hands. The Somerset-based artist, whose other favourite subjects include devils and fairies—all of them highly sexualized—has a series of paintings dealing with Medusa. Farmer’s Medusa is decidedly beautiful, the only signs of her traditional monstrosity being her glamorously snaky hair, occasionally green skin, and the strategically placed locks that cover her eyes. Yet while Medusa’s status as a monster is always merely hinted at, the sexuality of the figure is consistently emphasised through the red lips, glasses of wine, and provocative poses that dominate Farmer’s Medusa iconography. Farmer’s most telling painting of Medusa—and indeed the image that chimes best with the rest of her work—is entitled “Medusa’s Gimps,” and portrays the Gorgon as a dominatrix. In this painting Medusa is again presented as highly sexual but more importantly, she is imagined as fully exerting her dominance over males, who are here protected from her deadly gaze by the very masks that identify their sexual subjugation.
Erich Neumann’s treatment of Medusa in his 1949 The Origins and History of Consciousness is one of the pivotal works of this movement, and its thesis is a remarkable one. For him, what the ancient Medusa represented was “The Great Mother” herself, her Gorgon sisters “The Infernal Feminine” from which Perseus can never escape. Far from being castrated, Neumann’s Medusa castrates, and the overpowering threat she represents to Perseus qua male can only be eliminated with the assistance of the male-friendly aspect of the female."
"In Odyssey xi, Homer does not specifically mention the Gorgon Medusa, "lest for my daring Persephone the dread; From Hades should send up an awful monster's grizzly head"; Harrison's translation states "the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon (Harrison 1922: 187, note 3)."
The whole of Nietzsche's ER can be seen as a BDSM rite in the face of the "Laughing Medusa" and the recurrence of nausea. In the face of impermanence and the flux of becoming, staring into the abyss, the terror of the reality principle, the face of the Monster makes all the more apparent the insignificance of man, and exposes Apollo as an illusion, as art/ifice, as the pleasure principle.
The ER is a cathartic, purifying mechanism, weeding and selecting the strong from the weak - the nihilists and the impotent who cannot create their own meaning in the face of meaninglessness.
"What is falling must also be pushed." is life as Dominatrix speaking from the mouth of Nietzsche. Amor Fati is an affirmative self-overcoming without submitting and resigning to nature.
"Solve for me the riddle that I saw, interpret to me the vision of the most solitary man!" [TSZ, Of the Vision and the Riddle]
Nietzsche wrote:
"My endeavour [was] to oppose decay and increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new ‘centre’... To the paralysing sense of general disintegration and incompleteness, I opposed the ‘eternal return’." [1883-1888/1969b, p. 224]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The great thought as Head of Medusa: all the world’s features petrify; a frozen death-head." [1884-1885/1980, p. 360]
Quote :
"In his unpublished notes, Nietzsche (1884-5/1980, p. 360) likened Eternal Return to the Head of Medusa, a truly petrifying image. Lou Salomé (1894/2001) witnessed Nietzsche’s horror when in 1882 he shared the idea with her:
"Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he first confided to me his secret, whose inevitable fulfilment and validation he anticipated with shudder. Only with a quiet voice and with all signs of deepest horror did he speak about this secret. Life, in fact, produced such suffering in him that the certainty of an eternal return of life had to mean something horrifying to him. The quintessence of the teaching of Eternal Return, later constructed by Nietzsche as a shining apotheosis to life, formed such a deep contrast to his own painful feelings about life that it gives us intimations of being an uncanny mask." (p. 130)
Another friend, Resa von Schirnhofer, observed in April of 1884: "With a petrified expression on his face, casting shy looks around him as if a horrible danger threatened should a listener hear his words, muting the sound with his hand over his mouth he announced to me in a whisper the secret ... There was something bizarre, even uncanny in what Nietzsche told me of the eternal return of the same..." (cited in Gilman, 1987, p. 157).
But what was it that terrified Nietzsche? Discussing Medusa in Aion, Jung (1934-54/1991) equated it with the “diabolical element whose destructiveness is an essential part of every psyche. Seen in this light, the stella maris stands for the fiery centre in us from which creative and destructive influences come” (p. 137). He also emphasised the danger in man’s journey towards selfhood: “on returning to his true self, he enters an abyss deeper than hell itself” (1934- 54/1991, p. 135). The reason why Nietzsche – that most articulate of philosophers – never explained his abysmal thought may well have been because it petrified him. It was like staring the medusa of psychosis in the face. Even delegating the task of teaching Eternal Return to his imaginary companion, Zarathustra, produced no direct disclosure.
It therefore seems possible that Nietzsche’s great thought was perhaps designed to ward off the dread of madness. In Ancient Greece, the Gorgoneion (Γοργόνειον) was a special apotropaic amulet showing the Gorgon’s head, and it was used by the Olympian Gods Zeus and Athena. This function of Medusa tallies with Nietzsche’s (1872/1993) early view of the monster as a guardian against the Dionysian frenzy and intoxication: “The figure of Apollo rose up in all its pride and held the Gorgon’s head to the grotesque, barbaric Dionysiac, the most dangerous force it had to contend with” (p. 19). This quotation suggests that perhaps only terror can effectively ward off terror. Intriguingly, Lucian (c. 120-180), well known to Nietzsche, emphasised that it was the beauty of Medusa that stunned her beholders and made them speechless so that they turned to stone in wonder (Garber & Vickers, 2003). In this respect, the seductive aspect of Medusa is reminiscent of the alluring sirens in Odysseus’ journey into the Underworld.
Nietzsche wrote:
"It returns, what finally comes home to me is my own Self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents." [1883- 1885/1969a, p. 173]
Jung wrote:
"Self-knowledge is an adventure that carries us unexpectedly far and deep." [Jung, 1955- 56/1989a, p. 520]
Nietzsche wrote:
"I often look back in wrath at the most beautiful things that could not hold me – because they could not hold me." [1882/1974, p. 247]
Nietzsche wrote:
"He who fights the monsters should watch it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze for too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." [1886/1990, p. 102]
"Returning to Pautrat, it is as if even he "forgets" the fundamental element of Nietzsche's meddling doctrine. Scoomized, he looks quickly away from the supposedly "most" literal and pragmatic a sect of Nietzsche's semiotic, looks away from the supposedly "most" lethal combat, looks awe from what Puatrat ends up - in the manner of Klossowski or Derrida - calling Nietzsche's "game". In this instant of looking away, Pautrat is corps/ed. Synapses are momentarily opened, vulnerable, penetrable, and primed for incorporation… And if "we" do not literally commit suicide when reading Nietzsche's corpus, then the "suicide" will have to take more metaphoric, nuanced, intricate, and subterranean forms - esoterrorist forms more socially productive for "those in the know". Violence lies at the root of Nietzsche's process of weeding out…
For Nietzsche himself, "Medusa" was an illocutionary principle, the desired perlocutionary effect of which was to exert lethal petrifaction on some readers, who would be medused, immobilized, rendered impotent. In general his task was to separate the men from the boys… the absolute "synthesis" and actual fusion of the "poet, the actor, and the viewer" and also, as he put it now in the 1880s, "the creator, the lover, the destroyer." [Nietzsche's Corpse]
Nietzsche wrote:
"What does "underprivileged" mean? Above all, physiologi- cally-no longer politically. The unhealthiest kind of man in Europe (in all classes) furnishes the soil for this nihilism: they will experience the belief in the eternal recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer shrinks from any action; not to be extingnished passively but to extinguish everything that is so aim- and meaning-less, although this is a mere convulsion, a blind rage at the insight that everything has been for eternities-even this moment of nihilism and lust for destruction.- It is the value of such a crisis that it purifies, that it pushes together related elements to perish of each other, that it assigns common tasks to meu who have opposite ways of thinking-and it also brings to light the weaker and less secure among them and thus promotes an order of rank according to strength, from the point of view of health: those who command are recognized as those who command, those who obey as those who obey. Of course, outside every existing social order.
Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a con- siderable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes-human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.
The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)." [WTP, 55, 1958]
Quote :
"The vision of eternal recurrence the first time is an unhinging vision: Waite postulates, "Nietzsche's own first encounter with his 'thought' apparently had the force of an inarticulate traumatic experience." Klossowski reads the unpublished search for scientific proof of the doctrine of recurrence as Nietzsche's attempt to disprove madness: "for this idea to be both horrible and exhilarating, there was also a second factor... for who was capable of receiving such an idea? Only a delirious intelligence." This irrational thought is more than a thought - it is a profoundly disturbing effect for Nietzsche, unhinging and unable to be reasoned away. Nietzsche's "greatest weight" actively "suspends the very principle of reality." Bataille writes
"Nietzsche's thought, which resulted in the sudden ecstatic vision of the eternal return, cannot be compared to the feelings habitually linked to what passes for profound reflection. For the object of the intellect here exceeds the categories in which it can be represented, to the point where as soon as it is represented it becomes an object of ecstasy - object of tears, object of laughter."
Klossowski reiterates this oscillation of reactions to this convulsive thought, founded upon the suddenness (the stopped time) of this unhinging vision (like the suddenness of iron filings snapped into place instantly by a concealed magnet):
"In short, the Eternal Return, originally, is not a representation, nor a postulate proper, it is an experienced fact and as thought, a sudden thought: phantasy or not, the Sils-Maria experience exercises its constraints as ineluctable necessity: terror and mirth in turn, within this felt necessity, will underlie from this instant Nietzsche's interpretations."
"We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking. This is an "economy" that can no longer be put in economic terms." [The Laugh of the medusa]
"Freud, in “The Infantile Genital Organization,” uses the myth of the Medusa to support his theory of castration anxiety. Pointing to the images of Medusa’s hair as snakes, he argues that her head and hair represents female genitals. He continues by arguing that as Medusa turns men to stone, she makes them stiff, which, for Freud, is symbolic of an erection. Thus, the boy is still in possession of his penis in the face of the horror of the feminine.
Cixous, by making psychoanalysis something to be mocked, mimicked, and laughed at, provides an example and method for a liminal laughter that revalues. Smashing, shattering, blowing up, and breaking up are all actions that laughter initiates to disrupt phallocentric language, a language that erases the feminine voice, sexuality, and sensation. For Nietzsche, laughter disrupts religious doctrine and other nineteenth century conceits, whereas, for Cixous, the disruption is in relation to phallocentric law and thus, tangentially, the narratives of psychoanalysis. This laughter questions the truths of those two institutions by making those truths a laughing matter. By laughing at the tenets of these institutions, their hierarchies and binaries become absurd, thus, a displacement of any notion of a fixed and / or stable truth occurs. However, this moment is more than simply cathartic because it is a moment of a bodily protestation that creates the revaluation of life-affirming values. The moments of laughter as critical analysis are diverse and distinct, but, examined on a continuum, they all demonstrate the body’s great reason and support a practice of transvaluation, including overcoming and affirmation."
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] - The ruby heart of the con-stellation Scorpius, is a deep bright red.
"Both the Arabic and Latin names for the star Ant-ares mean "heart of the Scorpion." Antares is Greek for “like Mars” or "rivaling Mars." Antares is sometimes said to be the "equal to Mars" or the "anti-Mars."" In the name of the Ant(i)-Ares itself, you have the most primeval manifestation of the Dom. archetype.
Quote :
"Wherever you find Scorpionic/Plutonian energies in the birth chart, you'll likely find the Medusa lurking in the shadows nearby... Intensity and betrayal are often a couple of the Medusa's favorite themes.
"I have seen, oh source of my life! the solar wheel which blazes and I have seen the Gorgonian the noble head of Medusa, that face, ah! I recognize it, I recognize the awful smell of a hatred which terrifies, I recognize the awful feminine sun which is putrefying, there I recognize my childhood, still and always my childhood, infected source, dirty wheel, severed head, evil woman, Medusa who pulls your tounge, could it be you who castrated me?" [Raymond Queneau]
"If on this cool globe which bears us, combs shape hair according to fashion, what their teeth untangle is perhaps the silent trace of some quite other nature, that of the constellations, the galaxies, the comets, a streak of fire there where coldness has set out the order of our houses. On heads hair rustles, as foreign to the fixity of concerns as the most transparent Medusas bathed in light through the waves." [Bataille]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] (Medusa defeated by the mirror)
"Morgan le Fay and the various permutations from Atropos the death goddess, to the triple goddesses of Greece, to Medea, to Medusa, to the original spelling of `murgen', `mor-gue,' (--means sea-born...also carries darker connotations):
"This lonely knoll was ever dear to me, and the hedgerow that hides from view so large a part of the remote horizon. But as I sit and gaze my thought conceives interminable spaces lying beyond that and supernatural silences and profoundest calm, until my heart almost becomes dismayed. And I hear the wind come rustling through these leaves, I find myself comparing to this voice that infinite silence: and I recall eternity and all the ages that are dead and the living presence and its sounds. And so in this immensity my thought is drowned: and in this sea is foundering sweet to me." [L'infinito / Giacomo Leopardi]
"That art which once Pallas Athena discovered when she wove into music the dire dirge of the reckless Gorgons which Perseus heard pouring in slow anguish from beneath the horrible snakey hair of the maidens,... when the virgin goddess had released that beloved man from those labors, she created the many-voiced song of flutes so that she could imitate with musical instruments the shrill cry that reached her ears from the fast-moving jaws of Euryale. ...What is fated cannot be escaped." [Pindar, Pythian Odes]
All thinkers who reflect upon the nature of representation, as well as on thought which pursues the 'eidos' are in danger of confronting Medusa's head. Thus, Aristotle, in The Politics (VIII) differentiates between instructive and cathartic music which is associated with Bacchic trances, whose instrument is the flute and which should be avoided. To prove his point, he refers to the myth of Athena. When she played the flute, her face became so distorted that she abandoned the instrument. It was in fact she who had invented the flute to imitate an unknown sound, virtually unrepresentable, i.e. the hissing of the snakes on Medusa's head as she was decapitated. As she played, she noticed in a spring that her features were becoming distorted and assuming the appearance of the Gorgon's mask. This once more introduces the Narcissistic theme and the blurring of the difference between Athena and her rival, which here arises from tragic art." [Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, and Archetypes.]
"Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone, Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain." [Shelley, Medusa]
Heidegger opined originary polemic confrontation does not destroy unity, it forms this. Polemic - Controversial - contra + versus... Truth turns "against-with" errors; likeness turns against-with "distortions", "contortions"...
The obvious corollary to this is while many errors may tendere [tend, ex-tend] and werg [verge] around truth, it may take as less as one critical error to ef-face truth in the face of perfect, unsuspicious mascurer-ing [masque, mask, blacken the face]. The torque sets off and of-sets the semblance. Torque - "Twisty" - "attractively feminine" is a slang for "girl". 'Twist' from the P.Germanic *twis- comes from the root "two" [O.E. Twa - fem.]. From 1570, 'Twist' - is the act or action of turning on an axis. The "double" [two-faced] wendh-s and viere-s [winds and wanders] perfectly masked...
Torture "infliction of great pain; agony" (12c.), and directly from Late Latin tortura "a twisting, writhing," from stem of Latin torquere "to twist, turn, wind, wring, distort" (see torque (n.)).
entwined... en-twin-ed
Twisting and turning in the dance of life, coming face to face with our selves
"Mother nature is the cruelest mistress of all. Give it time. Remember...Might is Right, and you are no match for Nature. Until then...lie, in waiting."
Initiation is putting to death the false ego, subduing of the "hissing of the snake" - the cessation of "conceptual proliferation" and endless discourse mutating like snakes twisting and twisting upon each other till words lose all meaning in a solipsism in the fangs of entwined entanglement...
"You must stop talking to yourself. Every one of us does that. We carry on an internal talk. We talk about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have to know if you want to live like a warrior. The frightening nature of knowledge leaves one no alternative but to become a warrior." [Don Juan]
Wheels upon wheels upon wheels... and the coils of time.
A-Mor.
Miguel Serrano wrote:
"'It has been said that the man who loves God needs seven incarnations in order to enter Nirvana and liberate himself, and that the man who hates him needs only three. it is without God but with his own "fury" that Parsifal achieved the Grail and his individuation, his Self, his totality. This is the difference between the Liquid Road and the Dry Road. We do not know whether, as well as his "fury", his Phobos, his fear of the Mother, Parsifal carried with him a "memory of a beloved", as he was supposed to have advised his friend Gawaine to do. Parsifal, with his "fury", or his hatred, was resisting a participation mystique. Samadhi, fusion with Adhi, the Primordial Being, doesn't await him at the end of his road. Because this would be the way of sainthood. What awaits him is Kaivalya, total separation, supreme individuation, Absolute Personality, the ultimate solitude of the Superman. This is the way of the magician, the Siddha, the tantric hero of the Grail. The cosmic isolation of the risen Purusha.
'In the west, there was once a way of individual initiation into love: the mystery of the Grail, of its Esoteric Order ofKnights and the hermeticism of the German and Provenial troubadours and of the Fedele d'Amore in northern Italy. The troubadours' esotericism became a sort of Platonism, or an alchemical Tantrism of the Left Hand. It possessed a ritual and an initiation by degrees, which went from the choice of the initiate by the "glance" of the Lady of the Castle - Beatrice, in the case of Dante -to the giving of a protective ring, a girdle (Brunnhilde's Girdle in the Nibelungenlied), a handkerchief or a glove. The initiate has been accepted. He is the Tantric Sadhaka. He then passes into the degrees of Fenhedor, "Suitor"; Precador, "Implorer"; "Bound Man" and Drut, he who has exchanged hearts, the betrothed - Rebis, the androgynous of the alchemists - he who has surmounted the ultimate test of Asag, uniting with his lady only in the mind; or rather, in the Maithuna, the mystical Tantric coitus. The Mysterium Coniunctionis. From there he should achieve resurrection, the state of definite separation, Individuation in the Absolute Personality, purushic, kaivalic, of which we have already spoken. With the face of the Beloved in his soul. In alchemy, the equivalent states are Nigredo, Albedo (from which come the names Albania, Albion, Albi) and Rubedo, resurrection in the red immortal energy-matter of Vajra. The Soror Mystica, the woman who is always at the side of the alchemist, is the Amasia Uxor, the magic bride of the troubadours' love esotericism. And she is the Yogini and Parastri, the initiated bride of Tantrism. 'This miraculous Hyperborean initiation comes from a great distance, from the original polar continent, where the female magicians, the priestesses of magic love, Morgana and Allouine, appeared. And also the women who, in the legend of the Grail, healed the wounded warrior and the Sick King. This mystery comes to us from an unfathomable distance. In the west, it was destroyed with the Cathars and the Templars, with the Minnesanger and the Fedele d' Amore, with the troubadours of the Languedoc, in the eternal war with the enemies of the divine myth. What had been a private, unique, aristocratic initiation has become vulgarised in the exotericism of the Church of Rome, which has taken possession of its symbols and adulterated them. The Gnostic Lady, Sophia, Woevre Saelde, the feminine Holy Spirit, Parakletos, the Dove, has been popularised as the Virgin Mary; the Exchange of Hearts, which is in reality the awakening of the Anahata chakra, has been externalised in the cult of the heart of Jesus. The crown of thorns and the rosary have replaced the Templars' alchemical rose of a thousand petals, the Sahasrara chakra, at the summit of the invisible skull. It is the assassination of the sacred way of Kundalini, of the Tantric road of the chakras.
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A hermetic initiation of solar love has been adulterated by an exoteric, lunar religion, by an anthropomorphic, exclusively materialistic cult. The initiation of "loveless love" has been destroyed, and man has gone over to the diffusion of a physical, matriarchal love, centered purely on the physical body of the woman, in which the externalised Eve triumphs, desecrating the warrior, imposing her female urgency and her "Demetrian" fever for procreation. Love has become human, all too human. The "loveless love" of the warrior, of the troubadour, is the mystery of the Grail. The love of the unresurrected woman and man is the Church of Rome, lunar Christianity. The initiatory poem has deteriorated into the novel, the popular literature and the unhealthy sexualism of our day. 'When we talk about the religion of love of the troubadours, of the initiated knights of the Grail, of the true Rosicrucians, we must try to discover what lies behind their language. In those days, love did not mean the same thing as it does in our day. The word Amor (Love) was a cipher, it was a code word. Amor spelt backwards is Roma. That is, the word indicated, in the way in which it was written, the opposite to Roma, to all that Rome represented. Also, Amor broke down into "a" and "mor", meaning Without-Death. That is, to become immortal, eternal, thanks to the way of initiation of A-Mor. A way of initiation totally opposed to the way of Rome.
'This is why Roma destroyed Amor, the Cathars, the Templars, the Lords of the Grail, the Minnesanger, everything which may have originated in the "Hyperborean Blood Memory" and which may have had a polar, solar origin. 'The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one's neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with "loveless love" (A-Mor, Without-Death), which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule."
""The Intellectual Dominatrix": (Aries rising tendencies); This Woman is a dare-devil, confident, adventurous, spontaneous, energetic, impulsive, quick-witted, and often takes the initiative. Careful, she has a hot temper, and She can be contrary, and impatient. She enjoys wrestling in either the physical or intellectual meanings, and loves nothing more than discovering your hidden fetishes and desires. You better be truly submissive to this Domme. She is sensually aggressive. She like a challenge, and enjoys nothing more than using Her superior intellect to utterly subjugate you. She excels at psychological Domination, and will often include essay writing in your training. Her costumes tend to be "armour" as opposed to sexually suggestive. HH She is prone to headaches, so make sure Her surroundings are as stress-free and comfortable as possible. The jewel Her sign should be adorned with is diamond, but if you really want to intrigue this Mistress; challenge Her mind with current events and find a specific intellectual pursuit that you can share with Her.
"The Earthly Pleasures Mistress": (Taurus rising characteristics); This Lady is refined, strong-willed, conservative, patient, sociable, and loving. She can also be jealous, stubborn, spoiled, and even greedy. She is classically beautiful, with strong features. She is very sensually straight-forward and is skilled in the basics of the sensual arts, especially a slow and steady seduction. This is a good Mistress for sensualists, those players who are not terribly masochistic. She enjoys visual stimulation, so Her playrooms will have lots of mirrors?She will usually have very plush dungeons stocked with foods, beverages, scents and other sensual pleasures, more for Her enjoyment than the submissive's. She practices Professional Domination in order to provide for Her materialistic desires. She is difficult to get in touch with sometimes, because She has other financial endeavours. She will enjoy sending you on lavish shopping trips as a method of punishment. She wears classically styled Fetish & Fantasy costumes of excellent quality, and rarely wears P.V.C. or cheap materials. Her neck can get quite tense, so you might ask Her if you could be honoured by giving Her a neck rub. The jewels She should be gifted with are emerald necklaces, but if you wish to keep this Mistress' interest, beg Her for the honour of lifetime servitude, and offer Her the finer pleasures in life, creature comforts, and emotional and financial stability.
"The Part-Time Domme": (Gemini rising Traits); This busy Woman is torn between different aspects of Her life. She is adaptable, versatile, witty, and communicative. She can be anything and everything She wants to be, and might be a student, parent/caregiver, artist, actor, or all of the above. She could be tense, superficial and maybe cunning. She prefers the "chase" over the actual relationship, and might surprise you by ordering you to tie Her up (or flog Her), just to keep things interesting. The fetish & fantasy player is in for a treat, as She can be quite perverse in her role-play. She definitely understands that a fantasy is not reality, which opens up all kinds of role-play possibilities. Domination is probably not Her permanent career aspiration or Her 24/7 "lifestyle" choice, yet She truly enjoys this duality. This Mistress enjoys submissives/masochists/fetishists who have a sense of adventure and like to try new things every visit. She has a small but adequate Fetish wardrobe, with costumes from every style and any material. She is prone to "floggers elbow", and Her hands and arms are easily strained. Ask if you may smoke in Her presence or dungeon, as Her lungs can be quite sensitive and She may have asthma. A nice piece of jewellery to adorn Her would be a moss-agate ring, but as a better effort to keep Her intrigued, you should keep your scene-related requests or suggestions interesting .She would enjoy you curled up at Her feet, reading aloud from one of Her books while She plots Her next adventure.
"The Mom-Dom": (The rising sign of Cancer); This warm, loving Domme is emotional, intuitive, imaginative, and very definitely nurturing. The opposite of Her many moods could include over-sensitivity, depression, and emotional neediness. She might be an older Woman, but even if She's young She will give excellent spankings and be wonderfully sympathetic to infantalists. She will always try to feed you, and may include food in your role-play, or even deny you food as a punishment. She is a highly spiritual creature, and Her sensuality always includes esoteric practices. She is a huge romantic, so you better bring Her chocolates AND flowers every visit. She is always on the lookout for the perfect house-slave to assist Her in maintaining Her comfortable dungeon (which is usually in Her home), and serve at Her many private fetish parties. If you are a dedicated slave, She'll never abandon you. She enjoys wearing sheer materials, voluminous skirts and puffy sleeves with tight corsets, and classic shoes and boots (but rarely platforms). Her breasts are usually soft, large and natural. Be the dutiful child and offer to be Her kitchen maid and help to prepare a sumptuous feast; set an elaborate table with fine china, flowers and candles, and clean Her kitchen after. Give this Mistress silver coloured surgical stainless steel rings beaded with pearls. (I know one "Mother-Domme" who has those kind of rings in Her labia.) Or, ask Her if you may run a hot, scented bubble bath for Her.
"The Fashionable Dom": (Leo [ascendant] the lioness); This trendy babe has the best Fetish wardrobe over any other Mistresses. Latex? Rubber? Leather? 9" Stiletto platforms? Ballet boots? She has it all? She is very self-confident, and extremely Dominant. She will be generous, creative, loyal and enthusiastic. Sensual play is all a big game to Her. Scenes always include high drama, total grandeur, and maybe a few risks. The negative side of this Mistress' personality can include vanity, egoism, self-absorption, and a taste for vengeance. She will be quite bossy. This Dominatrix has an extremely powerful sensual drive, which causes Her to exhaust a submissive if She visits with them too much. Visit this woman regularly so She does not forget you, but keep the visits at least a month apart. She will be physically fit, very well "presented" (perfect makeup, thick lush and silky hair, long sharp nails etc.) and have all the latest Fetish/Fashion magazines. Her love of Fashion is quite fetishistic, and She enjoys visiting with latex-lovers, boot fetishists, and subs who are interested in physical beauty. Do not slobber on Her clothes; She'll be furious if you mark, dirty, or otherwise damage any part of Her costume. She has a massive Fetish wardrobe, and frequently wears Fetish attire outside of sessions. Looking down Her nose at Her many slaves will cause Her back pains later in Her life. You can appease this Diva with a ruby set in a dramatic pendant on a gold chain, or better yet Fetish Fasion magazines. Clothes are important to this Dominatrix, so bartering a scene in exchange for a trip to Northbound, or He and She could be very successful.
"The All-Business" Domme: (Virgo rising characteristics); If you are looking for a highly skilled Dominatrix who is meticulous and ordered, this is the Mistress for you. She will have extremely clean, organised, well maintained, and sanitary playrooms. On the other hand, She can be fussy, analytical, hypercritical, and a perfectionist. She may not be terribly passionate, but She thoroughly enjoys making sure the minute details of the scene are just right. She will have the playrooms lit with exactly the right amount of candles, have the perfect music for your specific fantasy, and be wearing the most appropriate fetish outfit for your desires. If you have a very difficult or specific scenario that (in your humble opinion) other Dommes have had difficulty creating, this Mistress will make your fantasies perfect reality. She is also a good choice to visit for Medical Scenes. Professional Domination is this Woman's' chosen career, and She is very serious about Her vocation. This Mistress is very financially responsible, and is open to discussions or negotiations of a financial nature. This Mistress will always be available for a session if She has time in Her schedule, and you will get exactly the session you have paid for, to the exact minute. She will have a large, expertly co-ordinated Fetish wardrobe to appease Her many clients. A gift that may appease Her is a sardonyx paper weight, but the most logical gift for Her would be the right submissive to be Her paperwork or office slave. If you submissives feel you are up to the standards of this Mistress, you might assist in organising/maintaining Her tedious business concerns to help make Her incredible Domination business even more successful.
"The Youthful Dom": (Libra rising personality traits); This charming play-mate is diplomatic and idealistic. She likes gentleness in Her submissives, and enjoys sharing with Her play-partners. The other side of this Dominas' personality might include indecisiveness, gullibility, and flirtatiousness. She is very concerned that Her submissives' needs and desires are met, and will frequently ask if you are enjoying yourself, therefore She is often misunderstood as being unconfident, or even submissive. This Dominatrix may sometimes find Herself being "topped from the bottom", but She will not be too concerned about gaining control of the submissive. This is not really important to Her, as the main point to the scene is the submissives' enjoyment. The "youthful Domme" is an excellent choice for nervous submissives who are new (novices) to Professional Domination. This Mistress is exuberant, malleable, and fun. She will laugh a lot, and be almost shy at times. Expect Her to wear a little more lingerie than most Mistresses, and be really into P.V.C. mini-skirts and bra-tops. Her lower back may be easily strained or often tense, so the smart submissive will politely offer a back-rub to Her. Golden showers may be an occasional problem for this Mistress as She might be prone to urinary problems. Always bring a little present for this Mistress (She would be thrilled with any sapphire baubles) as she is fascinated by the finer things in life. A submissives' worldly experience, knowledge and wisdom is very intriguing to this young or young-at-heart Mistress.
"The Sensual Mistress": (Pure Scorpio rising); This is the stereotypical "bad-girl" Dominatrix. She is sexy, dynamic, mystical, intuitive, powerful and magnetic. If you desire this type of Domina, be prepared for the negative side of Her highly volatile and contradictory nature. She can be obsessive/compulsive, secretive, superstitious, and truthful or moralistic to a fault. Do NOT anger Her, She will never forget your misdeed, and thoroughly enjoy planning the perfect punishment for when you least expect it. This Dominatrix is a good choice for masochistic slaves who can give as much as this Mistress will demand. This Mistress is extraordinarily passionate, sensually energetic, and divinely deviant. Her sessions will bring a submissive/slave/fetishist to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of depravity at the same time. She loves giving showers, and She will tease the submissive to the point of insanity. She is very serious about exploring Her Dominant and Sadistic nature, and has no time for those who are into just a superficial, kinky experience. She has no problem using Her sensuality, and even sexuality to get what She wants. She is at Her intellectual and physical best late at night, perhaps between the hours of 8 p.m. and 4 am. This Sirens' wardrobe is always very sexy, and She enjoys wearing fetish attire that exaggerates or accentuates Her breasts, waist, hips, and legs. Her favourite colours are maroon, crimson, or blood-red with black. (Like the Black Widow.) The body areas ruled by Her sign are Her genitals, urinary tract, and pelvic area, but Her mind is Her erogenous zone.. If you wish to bring this Mistress's favourable attention towards your submissive self, always be utterly truthful to Her. If you are lying, She will know. Give Her a challenge, not a battle of wills. She will thrive on creating a perversity in Her slaves that rivals Her own twisted and wicked nature.
"The Party-Girl" Domina: (Sagittarius rising traits); This Dominatrix is highly optimistic, philosophical, and loves the freedom that Professional Domination gives Her. She is always ready to have a good time. However, She may be restless, irresponsible and even careless, but She is trusting, and reliable in Her affection for Her submissives. Her creativity is boundless, and She loves to engage in risky fetish and fantasy play. She will often have wild or multicoloured hair and nails. She will be at every fetish party or event, but will always be late. This Mistress is difficult to contact before noon. Her collection of costumes is usually very colourful, and She enjoys wearing jewel-toned Patent Leathers, and multi-coloured body-hugging latex. Her hips and thighs are Her favourite body part, and She takes great pains to keep them toned and strong, sometimes spending too much time on them during Her workout. She might allow you the pleasure of massaging Her tense thighs, or If She professionally participates in this activity, She would enjoy "thigh-domination"--wrapping Her legs around a lucky submissives neck and squeezing. Oversized topaz or amber gems really catch Her eye, but if you want to get on the good side of Her, offer this Dominatrix a trip to an out-of-town Fetish Convention, but do not expect Her to be at your "beck-and-call", as She is very independent.
"The Feminist Mystress." (Capricorn rising characteristics.) This Womyn prefers the company of other Womyn, but She is not necessarily a lesbian or a man-hater. She firmly believes in the superiority of Womyn. She is disciplined, reserved, and prudent with the male species. She may also be pessimistic about male-female relationships. She might be suspicious of any financial negotiations you might propose, and She is very rigid in Her dealings with men. You better be utterly subservient to this Womyn, and dedicate yourself to pleasing Her, or She'll quickly lose any interest in training you. If you do manage to satisfy Her demands, She will expect lifetime loyalty from you, and She will be your lifetime protector. This Mistress is a good choice for submissives who have no desire to receive any empathy from their Mistress as She can be exceptionally severe, or be creative in Her many ways to humiliate you. Sometimes, She does not allow you any safe-words. In your submissive perception She may not be paying enough attention to you, but She never lets you--or your next predicament-- out of Her mind. This confident Womyn prefers to wear black leather pants with fitted black leather vests, and shoes or boots with a low heel. Offer Her tributes of black onyx jewellery, or black leather accessories and clothing. If you want to warm up Her icy exterior, you should prove yourself to be reliable, serious, and have a definite non-sexual, or spiritual purpose to your visits with Her.
"The Mystery Domme", (Aquarius rising tendencies.) This Mistress is inventive, secretive, and honest. She may also be unemotional, contradictory and perverse. She likes to enjoy Herself with the company of others, and her private nature is quite intriguing to submissives/slaves. She is experimental, and She will usually have an extensive collection of gadgets and tools--particularly electrical devices. This mysterious Mistress is cool, detached, and never speaks of Her personal life. Obviously, She is the perfect choice for those submissives who desire mystery in their life. She will prefer to meet you at your home, office, hotel, or a Studio She shares with other Dominants. She will instruct you to wait naked on your knees (maybe in the bathroom or closet), with your clothes neatly folded on the chair and the tribute in an envelope. Sometimes She will order you to use your tie as a blindfold, and all this before She enters the room! (The submissive rarely sees Her arrive or depart.) She may wear a wig, and heavy makeup, and Fetish costumes that are not too revealing. (The submissive will never see Her "non-Mistress" appearance.) She will frequently kick off Her heels and go barefoot in a session as Her legs and ankles are over-sensitive, or, She will discover a favourite pair of boots and wear them with every outfit. This Domina appreciates gifts of turquoise jewellery, but She is prone to anemia and blood sugar problems, so an offering of juice would be appropriate as well. If the submissive can handle Her impersonal nature, he will feel like a spy on a secret mission, as every meeting with Her feels so deliciously clandestine. Even if She expresses an interest in your personal life, do not pry into this Woman's personal life. She prefers Her submissives to be focused on the moment, happy with Her good company, and interested in having fun.
"The New-Age Domina": (Pisces rising traits); This Woman is spiritual, esoteric, compassionate, self-less, kind and considerate. She also tends to be "flighty", vague and a dreamer. She may lack "earthly" boundaries, as Her mind is usually up in the clouds. She dislikes physical vulgarity, and enjoys a sensual exchange based on spiritual and intellectual challenges. Her mood is either very tranquil, or very morose. Her playrooms might have lots of plants, pillows, rugs, indirect sunlight, and/or multicoloured mood lighting. She has lots of crystals on display, and She often wears new-age symbols as tattoos or jewellery. She can not do a session without candles or incense. Many of Her published photos depict her wearing attractive and feminine-- but not necessarily fetish clothing. She will wear fetish clothes, but only if the submissive specifically and respectfully asks Her to. This is the Mistress to visit if you are a foot fetishist, as Her feet are always in need of a good massage. She will enjoy the submissive pampering Her feet with scented oils and lotions, and She will always have a well-loved collection of favourite shoes and boots. She tends to have minor liver or lymphatic dysfunctions, and enjoys drinking herbal teas to detoxify Her system. Treat Her as your earth-bound Goddess and bring Her offerings of moonstone. To be this Dominas' favourite submissive, you should offer to build Her a meditation room, a sunroom, or a beautiful garden with small ponds, waterfalls and fountains."
This miraculous Hyperborean initiation comes from a great distance, from the original polar continent, where the female magicians, the priestesses of magic love, Morgana and Allouine, appeared. And also the women who, in the legend of the Grail, healed the wounded warrior and the Sick King. This mystery comes to us from an unfathomable distance. In the west, it was destroyed with the Cathars and the Templars, with the Minnesanger and the Fedele d' Amore, with the troubadours of the Languedoc, in the eternal war with the enemies of the divine myth. What had been a private, unique, aristocratic initiation has become vulgarised in the exotericism of the Church of Rome, which has taken possession of its symbols and adulterated them. The Gnostic Lady, Sophia, Woevre Saelde, the feminine Holy Spirit, Parakletos, the Dove, has been popularised as the Virgin Mary; the Exchange of Hearts, which is in reality the awakening of the Anahata chakra, has been externalised in the cult of the heart of Jesus. The crown of thorns and the rosary have replaced the Templars' alchemical rose of a thousand petals, the Sahasrara chakra, at the summit of the invisible skull. It is the assassination of the sacred way of Kundalini, of the Tantric road of the chakras.
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A hermetic initiation of solar love has been adulterated by an exoteric, lunar religion, by an anthropomorphic, exclusively materialistic cult. The initiation of "loveless love" has been destroyed, and man has gone over to the diffusion of a physical, matriarchal love, centered purely on the physical body of the woman, in which the externalised Eve triumphs, desecrating the warrior, imposing her female urgency and her "Demetrian" fever for procreation.
"The two mystics whose writings I engage with both wrote at this time. Catherine of Siena wrote in the late 14th century (so, 1350-80), and Hadewijch, wrote in the 13th. Both women evidence through their writings a passionate, erotically driven, love for Christ that is characterized by their physical suffering and most importantly, the meaning and significance of that suffering for their relationship to Christ. They speak of a complex psychological relationship characterized by pain, suffering, longing, and ecstasy. Hadewijch produced vast amounts of mystical writings, mainly in the forms of poetry, and her works are considered to be of great importance to the Catholic spiritual tradition. Her writings express a passionate, erotic love for Christ who she describes as ‘Love itself’.
The submissive is able to fully and completely submit and surrender to the dominant because she understands that he will never harm her. All actions, are actions of love.
Fourth, and perhaps most interesting, the purpose of this submission in both dynamics, is to experience a closeness and intimacy unequalled by any other relationship or experience. The purpose of this way of relating to Christ in the case of the mystic, and to the dom, in the case of the sub, is to transcend the everyday experience of love, and experience an ecstasy found only when completely and utterly subsumed by the other.
The dom wants the desire of the sub. He wants the sub to desire to sacrifice and suffer for him. Bataille articulates the dynamic of this form of relatedness, ‘The object of sensual desire is by nature another desire. The desire of the senses is the desire, if not to destroy oneself, at least to be consumed and lose oneself without reservation.’8 This is the desire that the dom wants, and that Catherine of Siena, writing in 1370, claimed Christ wants from her. Catherine writes in the third person, and it is universally accepted that when she speaks of ‘the soul’ and ‘her’ she is referring to herself,
Then, the Eternal Truth seized and drew more strongly to Himself her desire, doing as He did in the Old Testament; for when the sacrifice was offered to God, a fire descended and drew to Him the sacrifice that was acceptable to Him; so did the sweet Truth to that soul, in sending down the fire of clemency of the Holy Spirit, seizing the sacrifice of desire that she made of herself...9
...it is true that both the guilt and the penalty can be expediated by the desire of the soul, that is, by true contrition, not through the finite pain endured, but through the infinite desire; because God who is infinite, wishes for infinite love and infinite grief.1
Nothing is ever forced. It would simply not be interesting or exciting if anything were forced. Forcing anything misses the entire point. It’s all psychological. He wants me to want to sacrifice myself to him. It’s the desire he wants not the suffering. The suffering is just a manifestation of the desire to totally submit.
For Catherine, what Christ desires is her desire. When expressing her reservations about the efficacy of any of her actions in pleasing God, his response to her is this, again, writing in the third person,
...although their works are finite and done in finite time; but, inasmuch as they possess the virtue of desire, and sustain their suffering with desire and contrition...their pain is held worthy.’12 He goes on; ‘...finite works are not valid, either as punishment or recompense, without the condiment of the affection of love.
Like the suffering of the submissive in the sub-dom relationship, it is the desire, which Catherine understands as being intimately connected to love, which gives the act of suffering meaning. Without this desire, without this love, there is no submission and there is no purpose to it.
Hadewijch expresses this dynamic too. God does not want anyone to sacrifice or worship or love him that does not truly desire to do so. The desire to love God is seen by her as a blessing. She writes,
But if to anyone this kind of godliness never comes, The King does not desire his beauty. If by his mercy it comes to you even slightly, You will see that the King desires you.
In an article titled ‘Once a Catholic’, published in the magazine Skin Two, Julia Collings reconfirms this connection between the particularly Catholic tradition of sacrifice and BDSM practice,
Offering oneself up to a higher truth is the purest thing that one can do. Whenever I enter into a sub-dom relationship, it is an attempt to emulate the offering up of the self to God. Over and over as a Catholic schoolgirl, I heard the words of Mary quoted and recited: “I am the handmaid of the Lord”. It instilled in us the command to go out and be submissive...The act of masochistic submission is symbolic of the greater, religious submission...we are asked to put our faith completely in the higher force...As in Catholicism so in SM, in that without consent, the act of submission is meaningless. The experience of emotional/physical pain is nothing unless given into gracefully.15
This is powerfully echoed by the words of Christ, as described according to Catherine of Siena:
I wish therefore, that the works of penance and of other corporal exercises should be observed merely as means, and not as the fundamental affection of the soul.’16 [The soul should adopt these works of penance] ‘as a means, and not as an end. For if she takes them as an end she will be obliged, some time or other, to leave them, and will remain empty.
It is not the ‘macerating of the flesh’ that Christ the dom wants,
...but the will should be dead and annihilated in everything and subject to My will, and this slaying of the will is that due which, as I told you, the virtue of discretion renders to the soul, that is to say, hatred and disgust of her own... sensuality, which is acquired through self-knowledge. This is the knife which slay and cuts off all self- love founded in self-will. These then are they who give Me not only words, but manifold works, and in these I take delight.
The Christ of Catherine’s locutions, the ‘Eternal Truth’ who conveys all of this to her, desires nothing less than the absolute annihilation of her will and her self-love. This is not in a specifically sexual way, but the erotic nature of the desire to submit is a means to this end, and resonates in her writings. But neither He nor Catherine, nor indeed, the submissives interviewed, see this as a bad thing. In fact it is the complete and utter submission and relinquishment of the will that allows for the mystic / sub to experience the greatest pleasure, and through this pleasure, a transcendental experience.
Catherine’s reported locutions from Jesus are those of a dominant to a submissive,
Very pleasing to Me, dearest daughter, is the willing desire to bear every pain and fatigue, even unto death, for the salvation of souls, for the more the soul endures, the more she shows she loves Me; loving Me she comes to know more of My Truth, and the more she knows the more pain and intolerable grief she feels...
I have shown you, dearest daughter, that the guilt is not punished in this finite time by any pain which is sustained purely as such, And I say that the guilt is punished by the pain which is endured through the desire, love, and contrition of the heart; not by virtue of pain, but by virtue of the desire of the soul; inasmuch as desire and every virtue is of value, and has life in itself, through Christ crucified.... In this way, and in no other, are virtues of value, and in this way, pains satisfy for the fault, by the sweet and intimate love acquired...
Both the mystic’s relationship with God and the submissive’s relationship with her Dom are characterized by a deep and unshakable trust that, as one of the submissives says, “they would never do anything to hurt me.”
A sub-dom relationship is just that, it is a relationship. The acts engaged in are not one-off events that occur between people who do not know each other.
For Catherine of Siena, trust is the defining characteristic of her relationship to God. Those who truly suffer, are those who do not trust God, and instead put more value and more trust in themselves and their own understanding of what is best for them. She writes, ‘It is because I do not love that I trust in myself rather than in God."
Hadewijch, writing in the 12th century, articulates this safe space and the trust implicit in her relationship with Christ, as follows,
‘I fancied I would suffer without harm, Being thus fettered in love, If she willed to make me understand All the narrowest paths of her requirements. But if I think of reposing her grace,
She storms at me with new commands. She deals blows in a wonderful way: The greater her love, the more crushing her burden!’
Here, Hadewijch expresses this same understanding; that suffering can occur without harm and also that the more one trusts Love (her synonym for Christ), the more love offers. Hadewijch is perhaps best able to illustrate the fourth and final characteristic that both the mystics and the submissives have in common; that of the purpose of the relationship and the violent acts within them, of achieving an intimacy with the other, that transcends all else.
When the soul can think of nothing else But experiencing his kiss and being immersed in him, That is a life conformed to God and to his pleasure. If one thus gives up his whole self to Love alone, God desires his beauty and adorns him with it, According to his pleasure, according to Love’s mode of action.
When writing of the ultimate intimacy shared by a true a full surrender to God, Hadewijch writes; ‘And they will greet with one single greeting. And that kiss will be with one single mouth, And that fathoming will be of one single abyss,
And with a single gaze will be the vision of all That is, and was, and shall be.
We can see this desire to experience a mitsein or being-with the Other is almost always achieved both in the case of the mystics in relation to God, and in the case of submissives in relation to their partner,. And it has affects. Once one has experienced this intense form of transcendental intimacy, nothing else can compare with it. Both dominant partners, Christ for Catherine & Hadewijch, and Sir for Jane, become incomparable lovers. As Anna puts it ‘They want you to believe that they are the only person who can please you.’28 As Bataille writes, ‘In speaking of their raptures, mystics wish to give an impression of a pleasure so great that the pleasure of human love does not compare.’29
So how is this achieved? In the case of Jane and Sir,
By the things they say, how they treat your body, how they love your body, how they are fascinated by you. No one has ever shown so much love and fascination with your body. They know every single inch of it. If I put on a pound, Sir can tell immediately. He even knows when my period is due by the feel of the texture of my cervix.
No earthly pleasure can compete with the pleasure given by God to the mystic, as we have seen from the writings of Hadewijch. As Bataille writes: ‘It would be inexcusable to speak of eroticism without saying essentially that it centres on joy. A joy, moreover, that is excessive.’30
Hadewijch acknowledges how strange it must be for those who have not experienced such an intimacy, and particularly such an intimacy achieved through violence, to understand it;
People afraid of any pains in love Certainly cannot understand What can be won be souls Who are always submissive to Love Who receive from her hand heavy blows Of which they remain wholly unhealed, And who mount on high and are knocked down again."
Catharsis in the mouth of weaklings means escape from identity... a temporary relief from reality they experience as euphoria and cleansing... to return to a blank slate.
Fetish is a way of rendering harmless what you cannot have control, nor capacity over - the BDSM culture of the Dom in military uniforms or vice versa strong men in kittenlove cosplay is an obsession with either wanting to experience what you do not have the power to, or mocking it into a fetish and disarming realities, anxieties that you feel threatened by... this is not catharsis.
Foucault was a commie who believed procreation and victorian attitudes of sexual puritanism was a social construct that grew out of Xt. practice of confession of sins... and he would be right in that, but then typically, the conclusion becomes sex itself is a social construct, etc. etc.
His view that Modern BDSM as a display is a continuation of Xt. is a precursor to Zizek's view that Chivalry and Cruelty are two sides of the same.
Moving beyond pain and pleasure is not make "it" the same, but to possess an equanimity that takes pain and pleasure [two different things] with the same self-interestedness.
The flagellatin custom among the Spartans was initiating "young boys", not adult weaklings;
Quote :
"The boys in Sparta were lashed with whips during the entire day at the altar of Artemis Orthia, frequently to the point of death, and they bravely endured this, cheerful and proud, vying with one another for the supremacy as to which one of them could endure being beaten for the longer time and the greater number of blows. And the one who was victorious was held in especial repute. This competition is called 'The Flagellation,' and it takes place each year."
In the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], it was the epheboi that were flogged.
The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was part of the I.E. cattle raid rites. Breaking the pot tied at a height to release the milk or cheese was symbolic of releasing the sun within and coming of age. These were pots guarded by the fierce Mother. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is a famous part of the krishna cycle of warrior legends, about getting to the sun, or reaching the sun, becoming the victorious son/sun; passed into folklore as 'strictness' of 'mere' mother and 'naughy' child.
The Goddess is a stone cold idol. It does not speak.
But maybe it speaks only to Erika the Eunuch. She has such beautiful ears for it like a good ass.
Apparently in the cult of Cybele, the Goddess Spoke to the priests and told them to prostrate before her. Even if the myth of Adonis trampled by the boar sent by the goddess or was the ire of the goddess herself was true, the self-castration of the priests had ultimately nothing to do with cutting off the corn head and annual vegetation rites and rebirth that the priests were miming.
The threshing of the rice and winnowing to separate the seed from the husk was a sacred ceremony for the Indo-Greeks. The crops were beaten to dehusk them.
This practise, an age old custom, is also the reasoning behind the Shiite Ashura, where they self-flagellate in mourning for Hussein on the last day of Muharram.
Self-flagellation and beating at one's chest and one's body is part of the funeral dirge, like what was mourned in the cult of the Cybele was the putting to death and regeneration of the vegetation spirit, the green man.
Erika the Eunuch has nothing to be ashamed of. She is a good Xt. Its not as though she were the kind of weakling who dials people up from yellow pages, all this and more, without a clue about what she is. One day she is a boxer, one day she is a saviour of orphans, then an artist, a language translator and then a chairman of a mensa village. Its not as though she was just all hot air.
No, no, Erika the Eunuch is not the quintessential symptom and product of the Pussification of Mankind. She is a warrior. We know that because she posed with a plastic sword.
She only plays the part to find something to feel victimized and enraged about and then show the world what a fearsome cannibal she is in the inside. Her manboobs bounce as they heave with rage and her cleavage as deep as her IQ.
Its not as though Erika the Eunuch could not command other girls, to then play the part of the sub with no insecurity; it is assumed she does. It is assumed she is capable of many other manly things.
Those who possess are possessed, and should they have nothing to do with exploiting eunuchs, its because They are insecure, and not because they dont give a turd.
Whatever.
In the martial custom of Japan, a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was the Trusted Other or to whom one entrusted the Honour of meeting their end or their punishment or their release... I believe the japanese Pinku films of deranged BDSMs are vulgar versions of the same ethic.
Mishima's novels have a distinct masochistic edge to them, as later his own hara kiri. A theater of self-cruelty;
Quote :
"The more indispensable the role of punishment in the introduction of pleasure, the more tightly the pleasure links to punishment. To put it differently, punishment provides access to pleasure. The masochistic attempt, Mansfield contends, is a flight toward the future by controlling the anticipation of suffering:
Pleasure is always available, but only after punishment has been experienced.... Masochism, therefore, is all about the control of anticipation. Because the punishment has been got out of the way psychically, the masochist has nothing to fear from pleasure: “Instead of suffering anxiety [the masochist] has exposed himself to suffering. Instead of being afraid of humiliation, disgrace or punishment, he has brought it about himself, thus mastering a hard destiny. By anticipating all these sensations he deprives them of their terrors. The masochistic mechanism is—with regard to its direction—a flight toward the future. In Reik’s first (sadistic) phase, the subject performs on the other the objectification that the other performs on it: “As you do to me, so do I to you.” In the second, intermediate phase, the other remains the imagined object, but loses its agency. The violence the subject performs on the other is now matched by the violence it performs on itself: “As I do to you, so do I to me.” This leads inevitably to the third, truly masochistic phase, where the other is reinvented as the dominant: “As I do to me, so you do to me.”
Reik sees a masochistic play as a rehearsal of the drama of punishment and pleasure. The scenario of punishment and pleasure is turned into theater to gratify the masochist’s desire. The masochist plots the scenario of these three phases entirely under his control. There is no external domain of authority regulating his pleasure and administering punishment upon him. The authorized, dominant Other is fictionalized, or to put it differently, the authority is a mere internalization of a fantasy. The subject directs this theater of punishments and sanctioned pleasures; the imagined future, where these structures would be realized, never arrives. The drama he directs is a mere rehearsal of an everlasting play. If the works he produces present only a rehearsal of an everlasting play, can we understand his tmasochistic/theatrical death as Mishima’s final stage?"
But more needs to be said with regard to all of this, esp. the relation between the Agrarian mother and the masochist.
In general, there is no question of shame experienced by a male masochist in front of a female dom. because, as I;ve been saying,
1. There is nothing directly sexual about it.
2. From the psychological view point, the dom. represents the strict father and not the mother.
3. The masochist believes the one who is being beaten is the father whose likeness he is, and not himself. Who is shamed is his father that he wants to annul, the father who tried to beat him is displaced into the image of the mother.
The Deleuzian theory is beating off the father from oneself and giving birth to oneself, shedding off one's past skin and rebirth via the mother alone, but a mother who really stands as the image of the cruel father.
This is why Zizek astutely relates the atheistic communism with pornographic and BDSM violence; communism was the annulment of the father and birth from a blank state, where the mother doesn't really exist. The project of the creation of the New Man.
Xt. chivalry and the idealization/idolization of the mother/virgin was the other side feeding into this perversion.
Deleuze differentiates how Sado-Masochism is not the same, but two different symptoms coinciding into a SM syndrome. Sade and Masoch were two different people with two different sets of aesthetics.
Deleuze wrote:
""It is too idealistic… and therefore cruel." [Doestoevsky, The Insulted and Injured]
With Sade we witness an astonishing development of the demonstrative use of language. Demonstration as a higher function of language makes its appearance between sequences of description, while the libertines are resting, or in the interval between two commands. One of the libertines will read out a severe pamphlet, or expound inexhaustible theories, or draft a constitution. Alternatively he may agree to hold a conversation or a discussion with his victim. Such moments are frequent, particularly in Justine, where each of the heroine's torturers uses her as a listener and confidante. The libertine may put on an act of trying to convince and persuade; he may even proselytize and gain new recruits (as in Philosophy in the Bedroom). But the intention to convince is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, ins oct toe ducat. He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. Ge is not even attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author. The point of the exercise is to show that demonstration is dental to violence. It follows that reasoning does not have to be shared by the person to whom it is addressed any more than pleasure us meant t be shared b the object from which it sis derived. The acts of violence inflict on the victims are a mere reflection of a higher form of violence to which the demonstration testifies. Whether he is among his accomplices or among his victims each libertine, while engaged in reasoning, is caught in the hermit circle of his own silutude and uniqueness - even if the argumentation is the same for all the liberty. In every respect, the sadistic "instructor" stands in contrast to the masochisic "educator".
We have to distinguish two factors constituting a dual language. The first, the imperative and descriptive factor, represents the personal element; it directs and describes the personal violence of the sadist as well as his individual tastes; the second and higher factor represents the impersonal element in sadism and identifies the impersonal violence with an Idea of pure reason, with a terrifying demonstration capable of subordinating the first element.
In Sade we discover a surprising affinity with Spinoza - a naturalistic and mechanistic approach imbued with the mathematical spirit. This accounts for the endless repetitions, the reiterated quantitative process of multiplying illustrations and adding victim upon victim, again and again retracing the thousand circles of an irreducibly solitary argument. Krafft-Ebing senses the essential nature of such a process: "In certain cases the personal element is almost entirely absent. The subject gets sexual enjoyment from beating boys and girls, but the purely impersonal element of his perversion is much more one evidence… While in most individuals of this type the feelings of power are experienced in relation to specific persons, we are dealing here with a pronounced form of sadism operating to a great extent in geographical and mathematical patterns.
In the work of Masoch there is a similar transcendence of the imperative and the descriptive toward a higher function. But in this case it is all persuasion and education. We are no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the more because she is unconsenting and unpersuaded. We are dealing instead with a victim in search of a torturer and who needs toe ducat, persuade and conclude an alliance with the torturer in order to realize the strangest of schemes. This is why advertisements are part of the language of masochism while they have no place in true sadism, and why the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them. The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations. The middle ages distinguished with considerable insight between two types of commerce with the devil: the first resulted from possession, the second from a pact of alliance. The sadist thinks in terms of institutionalized possession, the masochist in terms of contracted alliance. Possession is the sadist's particular form of madness use as the pact is the masochist's. It is essential to the masochist that he should fashion the woman into a despot, that he should persuade her to cooperate and get her to "sign". He is essentially an educator and thus runs the risk inherent in educational undertakings. In all Masoch's novels, the woman, although persuaded, is still basically doubting, as though she were afraid: she is forced to commit herself to a role to which she may prove inadequate, either by overplaying or by falling short of expectations. The dictional undertaking of Masoch's heroes, their submission to a woman, the torments they undergo, are so many steps in their climb toward the Ideal. It is therefore not surprising that masochism should seek historical and cultural confirmation in mystical or idealistic initiation rise. The naked body of a woman can only be contemplated in a mystical frame of mind, as is the case in Venus. This fact is illustrated more clearly still in The Divorced Woman, where the hero, Julian, under the disturbing influence of a friend, desires for the first time see his mistress naked. He begins by invoking a "need" to "observe", but finds that he os overcome by a religious feeling "without anything sensual about it" (we have here the two basic states of fetishism).
The ascent from the human body to the work of art and from the work of art to the Idea must take place under the shadow of the whip. Masoch is animated by a dialectical spirit. While Sade is spinozistic and employs demonstrative reason, Masoch is platonic and proceeds by dialectical imagination. Masoch's relation to Plato is evidenced not only by the ascent to the realm of the intelligible, but by the whole technique of dialectical reversal, disguise and reduplication. In the adventure with Ludwig II Masoch does not know at first whether his correspondent is a man or a woman; he is not sure at the end whether he is one or two people, nor does he know during the episode what part his wife will play, but he is prepared for anything, a tur dialectician who nows the opportune moment and seizes it. Plato showed that Socrates appeared to be the lover but that fundamentally he was the loved one. Likewise the masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself. Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously ons several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse.
Pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a "nonlanguage" (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken). However this task can only be accomplished by an internal splitting of language: the imperative and descriptive function must transcend itself towards a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal. When Sade invoke a universal and analytical Reason to explain that which is most particular in desire, we must not merely take this as evidence he is a man of the eighteenth century; particularly and the corresponding delusion must also represent an Idea of Pure reason.
Similarly when Masoch invokes the dialectical sprit, the spirit of Mephistopheles and that of Plato in one, this must not merely be taken as proof of his romanticism; here too particularity is seen reflectively in the impersonal Ideal of the dialectical spirit. In Sade the imperative and descriptive function of language transcends itself towards a pure demonstrative, instituting function, and in Masoch toward a dialectical, mythical and persuasive function. These two transcendent functions essentially characterize the two perversions, they are twin ways in which the monstrous exhibits itself in reflection.
It may seem obvious that the sadist and the masochist are destined to meet. The fact that one enjoys inflicting while the other enjoys suffering pain seems to be such striking proof of their complementarity that it would be disappointing if the encounter did not take place. 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 judgement on the world of perversions. It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim. Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. He does of course require a specie "nature" in the woman torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate and persuade it in accordance with his secret project, which could never be fulfilled with a sadistic woman." [Coldness and Cruelty]
"Since the transcendent function in Sade is demonstrative and in Masoch dialectical, the role and the significance of descriptions are very different in each case. Although Sade's descriptions are basically related to the function of demonstration, they are nevertheless relatively independent creations; they are obscene in themselves. Sade cannot do without this provocative element. The same cannot be said of Masoch, for while the greatest obscenity may undoubtedly be present in threats, advertisements or contracts, it is not a necessary condition. Indeed, the work of Masoch is on the whole commendable for its unusual decency.
Underlying the work of Sade is negation in its broadest and deepest sense. Here we must distinguish between two levels of negation: negation (the negative) as a partial process and pure negation as a totalizing Idea. These two levels correspond to Sade's distinction between two natures, the importance of which was shown by Klossowski. Secondary nature is bound by its own rules and its own laws; it is pervaded by the negative, but not everything in it is negation. Destruction is merely the reverse of creation and change, disorder is another form of order, and the decomposition of death is equally the composition of life. The negative is all-pervasive, but the process of death and destruction that it represents is only a partial process. Hence the disappointment of the sadistic hero, faced with a nature which seems to prove to him that the perfect crime is impossible: "yes, I abhor Nature." Even the thought that other people's pain gives him pleasure does not comfort him, for this ego-satisfaction merely means that the negative can be a sieved only s the reverse of positivity. Individuation, no less than the preservation of a reign or a species are processes that testify to the narrow limits of secondary nature. In opposition to this we find the notion of primary nature and pure negation that override all signs and all laws, free even from the necessity to create, preserve or individuate. Pure negation needs no foundation and is beyond all foundation, a primal delirium, an original and timeless chaos solely composed of wild and lacerating molecules. But in point of fact this original nature cannot be given: secondary nature alone makes up the world of experience, and negation is only ever given in the partial processes of the negative. Therefore original nature is necessarily the object of an Idea, and pure negation is a delusion; but it is a delusion of reason itself. Rationalism is not grafted onto the work of Sade; it is rather by an internal necessity that he evolves the idea of a delusion, an exorbitance specific to reason.
In The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom the libertine states that he find excitement not in "what is here", but in "what is not here", the absent Object, "the idea of evil". The idea of that which is not the idea of the No or of negation which is not given and cannot be given in experience must necessarily be the object of a demonstration (in the sense that a mathematical truth holds good even when we are asleep and even if it does not exist in nature). Hence the are and despair of the sadistic hero hen he realizes how paltry his own crimes are in relation to the idea which he can only reach through the omnipotence of reasoning. He dreams of a universal, impersonal crime, "which is perpetually effective, even when I myself cease to be effective so that there will not be a single moment of my life, even when I am asleep, when I shall not be the cause of some disturbance." the task of the libertine is to bridge the gulf between the two elements, the element at his actual disposal and the element in his mind, the derivative and the original, the personal and the impersonal. The system expounded by Saint Fond (Where Sade develops most fully the idea of a pure delirium of reason) asks under what conditions "a particular pain, B" produced in secondary nature would necessarily reverberate and reproduce itself ad infinitum in primary nature. This is the clue to the meaning of repetitiveness in Sade's writing and of the monotony of sadism. In practice, however, the libertine is confined to illustrating his total demonstration with partial inductive processes borrowed from secondary nature. He cannot do more than accelerate and condense the motions of partial violence. He achieves the acceleration by multiplying the number of his victims an their sufferings. The condensation on the other hand implies that violence must not be dissipated under the sway of inspiration of impulse, or even be governed by the pleasures it might afford, since those pleasures would sell bind him to secondary nature but it must be exercised in cold blood, and conduced by this very coldness, the coldness of demonstrative reason. Hence the well known apathy of the libertine, the self-control of the phonologist, with which Sade contrasts the deplorable"enthusiasm" of the pornographer. Enthusiasm is precisely what he dislikes in Retif, and he could rightly say (as he always did when justifying himself publicly) that he at least had not depicted vice as pleasant or gay but as apathetic. This apathy does of course produce intense pleasure, but ultimately it is not the pleasure of and go participating in secondary nature (even of a criminal ego participating in a criminal nature), but on the contrary the pleasure of negating nature within the ego and outside the ego, and negating the ego itself. It is in short the pleasure of demonstrative reason. It is through the intermediary of description and the accelerating and condensing effect of repetition the the demonstrative function achieves its strongest impact. Hence it would appear that the obscenity of the descriptions in Sade is grounded in his whole conception of the negative and of negation.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud distinguished between the life instincts and the death instincts, Eros and Thanatos. But in order to understand this distinction we must make a further and more profound distinction between the death or destructive instincts and the Death Instinct. The former are actually given or exhibited in the unconscious, but always in combination with the life instincts; this combination of the death instincts with Eros is as it were the precondition of the "presentation" of Thanatos. So that destruction, and the native at work in destruction, always manifests itself as the other face of construction and unification as governed by the lea sure principle. This is the sense in which Freud is able to state that we do not find a No (pure negation) in the unconscious, since all opposites coincide there. By contact when we speak of the Death Instinct, we refer to Thanatos, the absolute negation. Thanatos as such cannot be given in psychic life, even in the unconscious: it is, as Freud pointed out in his admirable text, essentially silent. and yet we must weak of it for it is a determinable principle, the foundation and even more of psychic life. Everything depends on it though as Freud points out, we can only speak if it in speculative or mythical terms.
he distinction between the death or destructive instincts and the Death Instinct seems in fact to correspond to Sade's distinction between the two natures or the two elements. The sadistic hero appears to have set himself the task of thinking out the Death Instinct (pure negation) in a demonstrative form, and is only able to achieve this by multiplying and condensing the activities of component negative or destructive instincts. But the question now arises whether there is not yet another "method" besides the speculative sadistic one.
Freud ha analyzed forms of resistance which in various ways imply a process of disavowal. Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating not even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it. The clearest example given by Freud is fetishism: the fetish is the image o substitute of the female phallus, that is the means by which we deny that the woman lacks a penis. The fetishist's choice of a fetish is determined by the last object he saw as a child before becoming aware of the missing penis (a shoe, for example, in the case of a glance dieted from the feet upward). The constant return to this object, this point of departure , enables him to validate the existence of the organ that is in dispute. The fetish is therefore not a symbol at all, but as it were a frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration; it represents the last point at which it was still possible to believe…. Thus it appears that fetishism is first of all a disavowal ("No, the woman does not lack a penis"); secondly it is a defensive neutralization (since, contrary to what happens with negation, the knowledge of the situations it is persists, but in a suspended, neutralized form); in the third place it is a protective and idealizing neutralization (for the belief in a female phallus is itself experienced as a protest of the ideal against the real; it remains suspended or neutralized in the ideal, the better to shield itself agains the painful awareness of reality).
There can be no masochism without fetism in the primary sense. The way in which Masoch defines his idealism or "supersensualism" seems at first sight rather trivial. Wh believe in the idea of a perfect world? asks Masoch in The Divorced Woman. What we need to do is to "put on wings" and escape into the world of dreams. He does not believe in negating or destroying the world not in idealizing it: what he does is to disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy. He questions the validity of existing reality in order to create a pure ideal reality, an operation which is perfectly in line with the judicial spirit of masochism. It is not surprising that this process should lead straight into fetishism. There is a desire for scientific observation, and subsequently a state of mystical contemplation. Pleasure is postponed for as long s possible and is thus disavowed. On the one hand the subject is aware of reality but suspends this awareness; on the other subject clings to his ideal. The masochist is therefore able to deny the reality of pleasure at the very point of experiencing it.
In Masoch's novels, it is the moments of suspense that are the climactic moments. The masochistic rites of torture and suffering imply actual physical suspension (the hero is hung up, crucified or suspended). The woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a photograph. She suspends her gestures in the act of bringing down the whip or removing her furs; her movement is arrested as she turns to look at herself in a mirror. We should note here that the art of suspense always places us on the side of the victim and forces us to identify with him, whereas the gathering momentum of repetition tends to force us onto the side of the torturer and make us identify with the sadistic hero. Repetition does occur in masochism, but it is totally different from sadistic repetition: in Sade it is a function of acceleration and condensation and in Masoch it is characterized by the "frozen" quality and the suspense.
We are now in a position to account for the absence of obscene descriptions in the work of Masoch. The function of the descriptions subsists, but any potential obscenity is disavowed or suspended, by displacing the descriptions either from the object itself to the fetish, or from one part of the object to another part, or again from one aspect of the subject to another. What remains is a strange and oppressive atmosphere, like a sickly perfume permeating the suspense and resisting all displacements. He is a master of the atmospheric novel and the art of suggestion. The settings in Sade, the castles inhabited by his heroes are subject to the brutal laws of darkness and light that accelerate the gestures of their cruel occupants. The settings in Masoch, with their heavy tapestries, their cluttered intimacy, their boudoirs and closets, create a chiaroscuro where the only things that emerge are suspended gestures and suspended suffering. Both in their art and in their language Masoch and Sade are totally different.
The fundamental distinction between sadism and masochism can be summarized in the contrasting processes of the negative and negation on the one hand, and of disavowal and suspense on the other. The first represents a speculative and analytical manner of apprehending the Death Instinct - which can never be given - while the second pursues the same object in a totally different way, mythically, dialectically and in the imaginary. With Sade and Masoch the function of literature is not to describe the world, since this has already been done, but to define a counterpart of the world capable of containing its violence and excesses. It has been said that an excess of stimulation is in a sense erotic. Thus eroticism is able to act as a mirror to the world by reflecting its excesses, drawing out its violence and even conferring a "spiritual" quality on these phenomena by the very fact that it puts them at at the service of the senses." [CC]
"The heroines of Masoch have in common a well-developed and muscular figure, a proud nature, an imperious will and a cruel disposition even in their moments of tenderness and naiveté. The oriental courtesan, the awe-inspiring Tsarina, the Hungarian or the Polish revolutionary, the servant-mistress, the armatian peasant girl, the cold mystic, the genteel girl, all share these basic traits: "Whether she is a princess or a peasant girl, whether she is clad in ermine or sheepskin, she is always the same woman: she wears furs, she wields a whip, she treats men as slaves and she is both my creation and the true Sarmatian Woman." But beneath this apparent uniformity we may distinguish three very different types of women.
The first type is that of the Grecian woman, the pagan, heater or Aphrodite, the generator of disorder. Her life, in her own words, is dedicated to love and beauty; she lives for the moment. She is sensual; she loves whoever attracts her and gives herself accordingly. She believes in the independence of woman and in the fleeting nature of love; for her the sexes are equal: she is hermaphrodite. But its is Aphrodite, the female principal, that triumphs - as Omphale unmans Hercules with woman's attire. She conceives equality merely as the critical moment at which she gains dominance over man, for "man trembles as soon as woman becomes his equal." She is modern, and denounces marriage, morality, the Church and the State as the inventions of man, which must be destroyed.
At the other extreme we find the sadistic woman. She enjoys hurting and torturing others, but it is significant that her actions are prompted by a man or otherwise performed in concert with a man, whose victim she is always liable to become. It is as though the primitive Grecian woman had founder her Grecian man or Apollonian element, her virile sadistic impulse. Masoch often introduces a character which he calls the Greek, or indeed Apollo, who intervenes as a third party to incite the woman to sadistic behavior.
What is the essential masochistic element, the scene between the two boundaries where the crucial action takes place? What is the intermediate feminine type between the heater and the sadist? In a "conte rose", The Aesthetics of Ugliness, he describes the mother of the family: "an imposing woman, with an air of severity, pronounced features and cold eyes, who nevertheless cherishes her little brood." Martscha is described as being "like an Indian woman or a Tartar from the Mongolian reset"; she has "the tender heart of a dove together with the cruel instincts of the feline race." Nature herself is cold, maternal and severe. The trinity of the masochistic dream is summed up in the words: cold - maternal - severe, icy - sentimental - cruel. These qualities point to the difference between the woman torturer and her "counterparts", the heater and the sadist; their sensuality is replaced by her super sensuous sentimentality, their warmth and their fire by her icy coldness, their confusion by her rigorous order.
The sadistic hero, jet as much as the feminine ideal of Masoch, professes an essential coldness which Sade calls "apathy". The "apathy" of the sadist is essential directed against feeling: all feelings, even and especially that of doing evil, are condemned on the grounds that they bring about a dangerous dissipation which prevents the condensation of energy and its precipitation into the pure element of impersonal and demonstrative sensuality. The coldness of the masochistic ideal has a quite different meaning: it is not the negation of feeling but rather the disavowal of sensuality. It is as if sentimentality assumed in thus instance the superior role of the impersonal element, while sensuality held us prisoner of the particularities and imperfections of secondary nature. The function of the masochistic ideal is to ensure the triumph of ice-cold sentimentality by dint of coldness; the coldness is used here, as it were, to suppress pagan sensuality and keep sadistic sensuality at bay. Sensuality is disavowed, and no longer exists in its own right; thus Masoch can announce the birth of the new man "devoid of sexual love". Masochistic coldness represents the freezing point, the point of dialectical transmutation, a divine latency corresponding to the catastrophe of the Ice Age. But under the cold remains a super sensual sentimentality buried under the ice and protected by fur; this sentimentality radiates in turn through the ice as the generative principle of new order, a specific wrath and a specific cruelty. The coldness is both protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle: it protects super sensual sentimentality as inner life, and expresses it as external order, as wrath and severity.
Masoch was acquainted with the work of his contemporary Bachofen, an eminent ethnologist and Hegelian jurist. Is not Bachofen, as much as Hegel, the inspiration behind the dream at the beginning of Venus? Bachofen distinguished three eras in the evolution of humanity.
The first is the hetaeric or Aphrodite era, born in the lustful chaos of primeval swamps: woman's relations with man were many and fickle, the feminine principle was dominant and the father as "Nobody" (this phase, typified by the ruling courtesans of Asia, has survived in such institutions as temple prostitution).
The second, or Demetrian era, dawned among the Amazons and established a strict gynocraetic and agricultural order; the swamps were drained; the father or husband now acquired a certain status but he still remained under the domination of the woman.
Finally the patriarchal or Apollonian system established itself, matriarchy surviving in degenerate Amazonian or even Dionysian form. masoch's three feminine types can easily be recognized in these three stages, the first and third eras being the limits between which the second oscillates in its precarious splendor and perfection.
How does the Greek ideal become transformed into the masochistic ideal, the chaotic sensuality of the hetaeric era into the new order of gynocratic sentimentality? Obviously through the catastrophe of the glacial epoch, which accounts for both the repression of sensuality and the triumphant rise of every. In the masochistic fantasy, fur retains its utilitarian function; it is worn less for the sake of modesty than from fear of catching cold. "Venus must hide herself in a vast fur lest she catch cold in our abstract northern clime, in the icy realm of Christianity." Masoch's heroines frequently sneeze. Everything is suggestive of coldness: marble body, women of stone, Venus of ice, are favorite expressions of Masoch; his characters often serve their amorous apprenticeship with a cold statue, by the light of the moon The woman in the dream, at the beginning of Venus, expresses in her speech a romanic nostalgia for the lost world of the Greeks: "You cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity… you modern men, you children of reason… as soon as you try to be natural you become vulgar… Stay in your northern mists and Christian incense… You do not need the gods - they would freeze to death in your climate." That is indeed the essence of the matter: the catastrophe of the Ice Age having engulfed the world of the greeks and with it the type of the Grecian woman, both sexes found themselves impoverished. Man became coarse and sought a new dignity in the development of consciousness and thought; as a reaction to man's heightened consciousness woman developed sentimentality, and toward his coarseness, severity. The glacial cold was wholly responsible for the transformation: sentimentality became the object of man's thought, and cruelty the punishment for his coarseness. In the coldhearted alliance between man and woman, it is this cruelty and sentimentality in woman that compel man to thought and properly constitute the masochistic ideal.
Like Sade, Masoch distinguishes two natures, but he characterizes them differently. Coarse nature is ruled by individual arbitrariness: cunning and violence, hatred and destruction, disorder and sensuality are everywhere at work. Beyond this lies the great primary nature, which is impersonal and self-conscious, sentimental and super sensual. The specific element of masochism is the oral mother, the ideal of coldness, solicitude and death, between the uterine mother and the Oedipal mother." [CC]
"Sade equates the mother with with secondary nature, which is composed of "soft" molecules and is subject to the laws of creation, conservation and reproduction; the father by contrast only belongs to this nature through social conservatism. Intrinsically he represents primary nature, whuc is beyond all constituted order and is made up of wild and lacerating molecules that carry disorder and anarchy: pater site Natura prima.
Therefore the father is murdered only insofar as he departs from his true nature and function, while the mother is muredred because she remains faithful to hers. As Klossowski has shown with the greatest insight, the sadistic fantasy ultimately rests on the theme of the father destroying his own family, by inciting the daughter to torture and murder the mother. In sadism the Oedipal image of woman is made, as it were, to explode: the mother becomes the victim par excellence, while the daughter is elevated to the position of incestuous accomplice. For since the institution of the family and even the law are affected by the maternal character of secondary nature, the father can only be a father by overriding the law, by dissolving the family and prostituting its members. The father represents nature as a primitive anarchic force that can only be restored to its original state by destroying the laws and the secondary beings that are subject to them. The ultimate aim of the sadist is to put an effective end to all procreation, since it competes with primary nature. What makes Sade's heroines sadistic is their sodomitic union with the father in a fundamental alliance against the mother. Sadism is in every sense an active negation of the mother and an exaltation of the father who is beyond all laws.
In "The Passing of the Oedipus Complex", Freud points to two possible outcomes: the active-sadistic, where the child identifies with the father, and the pasisve-masochistic, where he takes instead the place of the mother and desires to be loved by the father. The theory of partial impulses allows for the coexistence of these two entities and thus lends support to the beleig in the unity of sadism and masochism. Freud says of the Wolf Man: "In his sadism he maintained his ancient identification with his father; but in his masochism he chose him as a sexual object."
So when we are told that the character who does the beating in masochism is the father, we are entitled to ask: Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? The masochist feels guilty, he asks to be beaten, he expiates, but why and for what crime? Is it not precisely the father-image in him that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed and humiliated? What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father's likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father. Hence the father is not so much the beater as the beaten.
A point of great significance in the fantasy of the three mothers is the symbolic transfer or redistribution of all paternal functions to the threefold feminine figure: the father is excluded and completely nullified. Most of Masoch's novels contain a hunting scene which is described in minutae detail: the ideal woman hunts a bear or a wolf and despoils it of its fur. We could interpret this symbolically as the struggle of woman against man, from which woman emerges triumphant. but this would be a mistake, since woman has already triumphed when masochism begins, the bear and the fur have already been invested with an exclusively feminine significance. The animal stands for the primitive hetaeric mother, the pre-birth other, it is hunted and despoiled for the benefit of the oral mother, with the aim of achieving a rebirth, a parrthenogenetic second birth in which the father has no part. it is true that man reappears at the opposite poe, on the sid eof the Oedipal mother: but this reappearance of man is compatible with masochism only to the extent that the Oedipal mother maintains her rights and her integrity; not only does the man appear in effeminate, transvestite form (the Greek in Venus), but in contrast to what happens in sadism, the mother representative is the accomplice and the young girl is the victim. Where the sadistic man happens to triumph, as he does at the end of Venus, all masochistic activity ceases; like the Forms in Plato, it withdraws or perishes rather than unite with its opposite, sadism.
However, the transfer of the functions of the father not the three mother images is only one aspect of the fantasy. The main significance of the fantasy lies in the concentration of all the maternal functions in the person of the second mother, the oral or "good" mother. It is a mistake to relate masochism to the theme of the bad mother. The whole tendency of masochism is to idealize the functions of the bad mother and transfer them onto the good mother. THe function of prostitution belongs specifically to the uterine, hetaeric mother, and is transformed by the sadistic hero into an institution designed to destroy the Iedipal mother and make the daughter into an accomplice. The dream of universal prostitution, as it appears in Sade's "society of the friends of crime", is embodied in an objective institution that aims to destroy the mother and give preferment to the daughter (the mother becomes an outcast and the daughter a partner). In Masoch on the contrary the ideal form of prostitution is based on a private contract whereby the masochist persuades his wife, in her capacity as good mother, to give herself to other men. Thus the oral mother as the ideal of masochism is expected to assume all the functions of the other female figures; in taking on these functions, she transforms and sublimates them. Prostitution should not therefore be regarded as a common feature that links up the two perversions. The important difference in this case is that in masochism the woman assumes the function of prostitution in her capacity as honest woman, the mother in her capacity as the good oral mother. We should not regard this as proof that sadism and masochism share in a common nature. This concentration of functions in the person of the good oral mother is one of the ways in which the father is canceled out, and his parts and functions distributed among the three women. The way is thus made clear for the struggle and the epiphany of the three women, which will eventually result in the trumph of the oral woman. In short the three women constitute a symbolic order in which and through which the father is abolished in advance - for all time. This eternal, timeless supremacy of the mother can only be expressed in the language of myths, which is therefore essential to masochism: everything has already happened, and the entire action takes place between the mother images (thus the hunt and the conquest of the fur). The masochist experiences the symbolic order as an inter maternal order in which the mother represents the law under certain prescribed conditions; she generates the symbolism through which the masochist expresses himself. It is not a case of identification with the mother, as is mistakenly believed. The threefold division of the mother literally expels the father from the masochistic universe. There is a disavowal of the mother by magnifying her ("symbolically the mother lacks nothing") and a corresponding disavowal of the father by degrading him ("the father is nothing", in other words he is deprived of all symbolic functions).
What are the masochistic defenses against both the reality and the hallucination of the father's aggressive return? The masochistic hero must evolve a complex strategy to protect his world of fantasy and symbols, and to ward off the hallucinatory inroads of reality (or to put it differently, the real attacks of hallucination). This procedure is constantly used in masochism, is the contract. A contract is established between the hero and the woman, whereby at a precise point in time and for a determinate period she is given every right over hi. By this means the masochist tries toe exorcise the danger of the father and to ensure that the temporal order of reality and experience will be in conformity with the symbolic order, in which the father has been abolished for all time. Through the contract, that is through rational and temporarily determinate act, the masochist reaches toward the most mythical and the most timeless realms, where the three mother-images dwell. Finally, he ensures that he will be beaten; what is beaten, humiliated and ridiculed in him is the image and the likeness of the father, and the possibility of the father's aggressive return. It is not a child but a father that is being beaten. The masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part.
But how shall we account for the fact that even in the contract the masochist requires a third party, the Greek? Why should he so ardently desire this third party? The answer is that the Greek, while he undoubtedly evokes the danger of the aggressive return of the father, also stands for something more - something of an entirely different kind, namely the hope of a rebirth, the projection of the new man that will result from the masochistic experiment. The Greek is a compound figure combining various elements: when he is idealized he foreshadows the outcome of masochism and stands for the new man; in his sadistic role, by contrast, he represents the dangerous father who brutally interrupts the experiment and interferes with the outcome. Let us remind ourselves of the fundamental structure of fantasy in general, for the art of masochism is the art of fantasy. Fantasy plays on two series, two opposite "margins", and the resonance thus set up gives life to and creates the heart of the fantasy. In masochism the two symbolic margins are the ueterine mother and the Oedipal mother; between them and moving from one to the other is the oral mother, the core of the fantasy. The masochist plays on the two extremes and causes them to produce a resonance in the oral mother. He thereby invests her with an amplitude which repeatedly brings her very close to the figures of her rivals. The oral mother must wrest from the uterine mother her hetaeric functions (prostitution) and from the Oedipal mother her sadistic functions (punishment). At either end of her pendulum like motion, the good mother must confront the third party; the anonymous uterine mother and the sadistic Oedipal mother. But in point of fact (unless things take a turn for the worse as a result of the hallucinatory return of the father) the third party is never invited or sought after for its own sake, but to be neutralized by the substitution of the good mother for the uterine and the Oedipal mother. Sadism and Masochism do not together constitute a single entity; they ae not respectively made up of partial impulses, but each is complete in itself. The masochist's experience is grounded in an alliance between the son and the oral mother; the sadist's in the alliance of father and daughter. In both cases this alliance is confirmed by the respective disguises. In masochism the masculine impulse is embodied in the role of the son, while the feminine impulse is projected in the role of the mother; but in point of fact the tw impulses constitute one single figure; felinity is posited as lacking in nothing and placed alongside a virility suspended in disavowal (just as the absence of a penis need not indicate lack f the phallus, its presence likewise need not indicate possession of the phallus). Hence in masochism a girl has no difficulty in assuming the role of the son in relation to the beating mother who possesses the ideal phallus and on whom rebirth depends. Similarly, in sadism, it becomes possible for the boy to play the role of a girl in relation to a projection of the father. We might say that the masochist is hermaphrodite and the sadist androgynous…
They represent parallel worlds, each complete in itself, and it is both unnecessary and impossible for either toe niter the other's world. We cannot at any rate say that they are exact opposites, except insofar as opposites avoid each other and must either do so or perish. This very opposition tends unfortunately to suggest possibilities of transformation, reversal and combination. Yet there is between sadism and masochism an irreducible dissymmetry: sadism stands for the active negation of the mother and the inflation of the father (who is placed above the law); masochism proceeds by a twofold disavowal, a positive idealizing disavowal of the mother (who is identified with the law) and an invalidating disavowal of the father (who is expelled from the symbolic order)." [CC]
"There is a fundamental aesthetic or plastic element in the art of Masoch. It has been said that the senses become "theoreticians" and that the eye, for example, becomes a human eye when its object itself has been transformed into a human or cultural object, fashioned by and intended solely for man. Animal nature is profoundly hurt when this transmutation of its organs from the animal to the human takes place, and it is the experience of this painful process that the art of Masoch aims to represent. He calls his doctrine "supersensualism" to indicate this cultural state of transmuted sensuality; this explains why he finds in works of art the source and the inspiration of his loves. The lover embraces a marble woman by way of initiation; women become exciting when they are indistinguishable from cold statues in the moonlight or paintings in darkened rooms. Venus is set under the sign of Titian, with its mystical play of flesh, fur and mirror, and the conjunction of cold, cruelty and sentiment. The scenes in Masoch have of necessity a frozen quality, like statues or portraits; they are replicas of works of art, or else they duplicate themselves in mirrors.
Sade's heroes, by contrast, are not art lovers, still less collectors. In Juliette, Sade explains why: "Ah, if only an engraver could record for posterity this dine and voluptuous scene! But lust, which all too quickly crowns our actors,might not have allowed the artist tie to portray them. It is not easy for art, which is motionless, to depict an activity the essence of which is movement." Sensuality is movement. In order to convey the immediacy of this action of one soul against another, Sade chooses to rely on the quantitative techniques of accumulation and acceleration, mechanically grounded in a materialistic theory: reiteration and internal multiplication of the scenes, precipitation, overdetermination. (The subject is at once parricide, incestuous, murderer, prostitute and sodomite.) Number, quantity and quantitative precipitation were the specific obsessions of sadism. Masoch, on the contrary, has every reason to rely on art and the immobile and reflective quality of culture. In his view the plastic arts confer an eternal character on their subject because they suspend gestures and attitudes. The whip or the sword that never strikes, the fur that never discloses the flesh, the heel that is forever descending on the victim, ar the expression, beyond all movement, of a profound state of waiting closer o the sources of life and death. The novels of Masoch display the most intense preoccupation with arrested movement; his scenes are frozen, as though photographed, stereotyped or painted. In Venus it is a painter who says: "Woman, goddess… do you not know what it is to love, to be consumed by longing and passion?" And Wanda looms with her furs and her whip, adopting a suspended posture, like a tableau vivant: "I want to show you another portrayt of me, one that I painted myself. You shall copy it." "You shall copy it" suggests both the sternness of the order and the reflection in the mirror.
Waiting and suspense are essential characteristics of the masochistic experience. Hence the ritual scenes of hanging, crucifixion and other forms of physical suspension in Masoch's novels. The masochist is morose: but his moroseness should be related to the experience of waiting and delay.
It has often been pointed out that the pleasure-pain complex is insufficient to define masochism; but humiliation, expiation, punishment and guilt are not sufficient either. It is argued, justifiably, that the masochist is not a strange being who finds pleasure in pain, but he is like everyone else, and finds pleasure where others do, the simple difference being that for him pain, punishment or humiliation are necessary prerequisites to obtaining gratification. However, this mechanism remains incomprehensible if it is not related to the form and in particular to the temporal form that makes it possible. Thus it is a mistake to treat the pelasure-pain complex as a raw material able intrinsically to lend itself to any transformation, beginning with the alleged transformation of sadism into masochism. Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences waiting in its pure form. Pure waiting divides naturally into two simultaneous currents, the first representing what is awaited, something essentially tardy, always late and always postponed, the second representing something that is expected and on which depends the speeding up of the awaited object. It is inevitable that such a form, such a rhythmic division of time into two steams, should be "filled" by the particular combination of pleasure and pain. For the same time as pain fulfills what is expected, it becomes possible for pleasure to fulfill what is awaited.The masochist waits for pleasure as something the is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure. He therefore postpones pleasure in expectation of the pain which will make gratification possible. The anxiety of the masochist divides therefore into an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain.
Disavowal, suspense, waiting, fetishism and fantasy together make up the specific constellation of masochism. Reality, as we have seen, is affected not by negation but by a disavowal that transposes it into fantasy. Suspense performs the same function in relation to the ideal, which is also relegated to fantasy. Waiting represents the unity of the ideal and the real, the form or temporality of the fantasy. The fetish is the object of the fantasy, the fantasized object par excellence. We should say, however, that there is no such thing as a specifically masochistic kind of waiting, but rather that the masochist is morose, by which we mean that he experiences waiting in its pure form. For example, Masoch arranged to have a healthy tooth pulled out while his wife, dressed in furs, stood before him with a threatening air. What is true of masochistic writing is equally true of masochistic fantasy: there is no specifically masochistic fantasy, but anther a masochistic art of fantasy.
The masochist needs to believe that he is dreaming even when he is not; sadism offers no such discipline in the art of the fantasy. Maurice Blanchot has given an excellent analysis of the position of Sade (and of his characters) in relation to fantasy: "His own erotic dream consists in projecting the unreal dynamic of his sensuous enjoyment on to characters who are not dreaming but acting… Therefore the more this eroticism is dreamt, the more it requires a fiction from which dreams are excluded and where debauchery is fully actualized." In other words, Sade needs to believe that he is note reaming even when he is. In sadism a powerful force of paranoid projection transforms the fantasy into the instrument of a fundamental and sudden change in the objective world. Clairwil dreams that her wickedness never ceases to impinge on the world even while she is asleep. Hence the pleasure-pain potential characteristic of the fantasy requires for its realization that real characters should experience actual pain, while pleasure accrues to the sadist inasmuch as he can continue to dream that he is not dreaming.
Juliette gives the following advice: "For a whole fortnight abstain from all lustful behavior; distract and entertain yourselves with other things… Then lie down in the dark and little by little imagine different wanton acts. One of these will affect you more powerfully and become like an obsession, and you must then note it down and promptly put it into action." In this way the fantasy acquires maximum aggressive power, systematization and capacity of intervention in the real world: the Idea is projected withe extraordinary violence. The masochistic use of fantasy is totally different: it consists in neutralizing the real and containing the ideal within the fantasy. In our opinion the difference in the use of the fantasy determines to a certain extent the difference in content. The sadist's destructive relation to the fetish must be interpreted in the light of his projective use of fantasy. To say that the destruction of the fetish implies a belief in the fetish (As profanation) is said to imply a belief in the sacred) is to indulge in meaningless generalities. The destruction of the fetish is a measure of the speed with which projection takes place, and of the way in which the dream as such is eliminated and the Idea erupts into the real waking world. By contact, the constitution of the fetish in masochism points to the inner force of the fantasy its characteristic of patient waiting, its suspended and status power, and the way in which the ideal and the real are together absorbed by it.
Fundamentally, masochism is neither material nor moral, but essentially formal. Theodore Reik distinguished four basic characteristics of masochism:
1. The "special significance of fantasy", that is the form of the fantasy (the fantasy experienced for its own sake, or the scene which is dreamed, dramatized, ritualized and which is an indispensable element of masochism).
2. The "suspense factor" (the waiting, the deaf, expressing the way in which anxiety affects sexual tension and inhibits its discharge)/
3. The "demonstrative" or, more accurately, the persuasive feature (the particular way in which the masochist exhibits his suffering, embarrassment and humiliation).
4. The "provocative fear" (the masochist aggressively demands punishment since it resolves anxiety and allows him to enjoy the forbidden pleasure).
It is curious that Reik, no less than other analysts, neglects a fifth factor which is very important": the form of the contract in the masochistic relationship. The contract represents the ideal form of the love-relationship and its necessary precondition. A contract is drawn up between the subject and the torturess, giving a new application to the idea of the jurists of antiquity that slavery itself is based on a contract. The masochist appears to be held by real chains, but in far he is bound but his word alone. The masochistic contract implies not only the necessity of the victim's consent, but his ability to persuade, and his pedagogical and judicial efforts to rein his torturer. The tightening of the contractual bond indicates that the function of the contact is to lay down the law, which once established, becomes increasingly cruel and restrictive toward one of the parties (in this case the initiator of the contract). The function of the masochistic contract is to nest the mother-image with the symbolic power of the law. the question remains why a contract is necessary, and why it develops as it does toward extreme severity. In any case there is no doubt that masochism cannot do without a contract, either actual or in the mid of the masochist (as in the phenomenon of pagisme).
We have now seen the two aspects of the "culturism" of Masoch, the aesthetic aspect which is expressed in the model of art and suspense, and the juridical aspect which is expressed in the model of the contract and of submission. By contest, Sade is not only supremely indifferent to the resources of the work of art, but he regards the contract and any appeal to its authority, or indeed any idea or theory connected with it, with the deepest hostility. The sadist heaps derision on the principe of the contract. According to Masoch, it is essentially the work of art and the contract that makes possible the transition from a lower nature to the great Nature, which is sentimental and self-conscious. For Sade, on the contrary, the transition from secondary nature to primary nature implies no suspense or system of aesthetics, but an attempt to establish a mechanism of perpetual motion, and with it institutions of perpetual motion. Sade's secret societies, his societies of libertines, are institutional societies; in a for, Sade thinks in terms of "institutions", Masoch in terms of "the contract". The juridical distinction between contact and institution is well known: the contract presupposes in principle the free consent of the contacting parties and determines between them a system of reciprocal rights and duties it cannot affect a third par and is valid for a limited period. Institutions, by contrast, determine a long-term state of affairs which is both involuntary and inalienable; it establishes a power or an authority which takes effect against a third party. But even more significant is the difference between the contract and the institution with respect to what is known as a law: the contract actually generates a law, even if this law oversteps and contravenes the conditions which made it possible the institution is of a very different order in that it tends to render laws unnecessary, to replace the system of rights and duties by a dynamic model of action, authority and power. Ins host, the specific impulse underlying the contact is toward the creation of a law, even if in the end the law should take over and impose its authority upon the contract itself; whereas the corresponding impulse at work in the car of the institution is toward the degradation of all laws and the establishment of a superior power that sets itself above them.
Sade's conception of institutions is more positive and profound, and his relation to revolutionary ideology is accordingly a couple one: he rejects any contractual conception of the republican regime and is even more strongly against the idea of the law. He found in the Revolution what he hated most : the law and the contract, which he regards as the two main obstacles thats till prevent the French from achieving a true republic. Sade seems to have developed this idea to its ironic and perhaps also its oct serious conclusion; he asked which institutions would require the fewest possible laws, and ultimately no laws at all (laws "so lenient and so few…"). Laws bind actions; they immobilize and moralize the. Pure institutions without laws would by definition be models of free, anarchic action, in perpetual motion, in permanent revolution, in a constant state of immorality. "Insurrection… is not a moral state of affairs; it has nevertheless to be the permanent condition in a republic. It would be both absurd and dangerous to require that those who are to ensure the perpetual subversion of the established machinery should be moral, for the state of a moral man is one of peace and tranquility, while the state of immorality is one of perpetual unrest resembling the necessary state of insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member." Granted that both the contract and the law are in the nature of mystifications, the law being used by despotism for its own purposes, and granted that the institution is the only form of political organization that differs essentially from both law and contract, where should we look to for the perfect institution - the one that banishes contracts and allows only the barest minimum of laws? In reply, Sade points to the ironic possibility, under these conditions, of making atheism, calumny, theft, prostitution, incest and sodomy - even murder - into institutions, and shows furthermore that they are necessarily the types of the ideal institution, the institution in perpetual motion. He stresses in particular the possibility of instituting universal prostitution and he attempts to refute the "contractual" objection to such "universalization. There is a profound political insight in Sade's conception of the revolutionary republic as an institution based on opposition to both law and contract; but this conception is ironic through and through because it is sexual and sexualized, as if deliberately to challenge any attempt to think of politics in legalistic or contractual terms. We should expect to find in Masoch a comparable tour de force, the humorous converse of Sade's." [CC]
"The classical conception of the law found its perfect expression in Plato and in that form gained universal acceptance throughout the Christian world. According to this conception, the law may be viewed either in the light of its underlying principles or in the light of its consequences. From the first point of view, the law itself is not a primary but only a secondary or delegated power dependent on a supreme principle which is the Good. If men knew what the Good was, or knew how to conform to it, they would not need laws; the law is only a representative of the Good in a world that the Good has more or less forsaken. Hence from the point of view of its consequences, obedience to the law is "best", the best being the image of the Good. The righteous man obeys the laws of the country of his birth or residence, and in so doing acts for the best, even though he retains his freedom of thought, freedom to think of the Good and for the sake of the Good.
This conception, which is seemingly so conventional, nevertheless conceals elements of irony and humor which made political philosophy possible, for it allows the free play of thought at the upper and lower limits of the scale of the law. The death of Socrates is an exemplary illustration of this: the laws place their fate in the hands of the condemned man, and ask hat he should sanction their authority by submitting to them as a rational man. There is indeed a great deal of irony in the operation that seeks to trace the laws back to an absolute Good as the necessary principle of their foundation. Equally, there is considerable humor in the attempt to reduce the laws to a relative Best in order to persuade us that we should obey them. Thus it appears that the notion of law is not self-sufficient unless backed by force; ideally it needs to rest on a higher principle as well as on a consideration of its remote consequences. This may be why, according to the mysterious text in the Phaedo, the disciples present at the death of Socrates could not help laughing. Irony and humor are the essential forms through which we apprehend the law. It is in this essential relation to the law that they acquire their function and their significance. Irony is the process of thought whereby the law is made to depend on an infinitely superior Good, just as humor is the attempt to sanction the law by recourse to an infinitely more righteous Best.
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant gave a rigorous formulation of a radically new conception, in which the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but on the contrary, the Good itself is made to depend on the law. This means that the law no longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive its authority, but that it is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form. For the first time we can now speak of The Law, regarded as an absolute, without further specification or reference to an object. The moral law is the representation of a pure form and is independent of content or object, spheres of activity or circumstances. The moral law is The Law, the form of the law and as such it cannot be grounded in a higher principle. Kant, by establishing that The Law is an ultimate ground or principle, added an essential dimension to modern thought: the object of the law is by definition unknowable and elusive. It operates without making itself known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what the are, as in the case of Oedipus. Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is, but leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment. This is the world described by Kafka. If the law is no longer based on the Good as a preexisting, higher principle, and it is valid by virtue of its form alone, the content remaining entirely undetermined, it becomes impossible to say that the righteous man obeys the law for the sake of the Best. In others words, the man who obeys the law does not thereby become righteous or feel righteous; on the contrary, he feels guilty and is guilty in advance, and the more strict his obedience, the greater his guilt. This is the process by which the law manifests itself in its absolute purity, and proves us guilty. The two fundamental propositions of the classical conception are overthrown together: the law as grounded in the further principle of the Good; the law as sanctioned by righteousness. Freud was the first to recognize the extraordinary paradox of the conscience. It is far from the case that obedience to the law secures a feeling of righteousness, "for the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful" is the behavior of his conscience toward him; Freud goes on to remark on " the extraordinary severity of conscience in the best and most tractable people."
Freud resolved the paradox by showing that the renunciation of instinctual gratification is not the product of conscience, but on the contrary that conscience itself is born of such renunciation. Hence it follows that the strength and severity of conscience increases in direct proportion to the strength and severity of the renunciation. Conscience is heir to the repressed instinctual drives. "The effect of instinctual renunciation on the conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the superego and increases the latter's aggressiveness (against the ego)." in Lacan's words, the law is the same as repressed desire. The law cannot specify its object without self-contradiction, nor can it define itself with reference to a content without removing the repression on which it rests. The object of the law and the object of desire are one and the same, and remain equally concealed. When Freud shows that the essential nature of the object related to the mother while that of desire and the law relates to the father, he does not thereby try to restore a determinate content to the law; he does indeed almost the opposite, he shows how the law, by virtue of its Oedipal origins, must of necessity conceal its content in order to operate as a pure form which is the result of a renunciation both of the object (the mother) and of the subject (the father).
The classical irony and humor of Plato that had for so long dominated all thinking on the subject of the law are thus turned upside down. The upper and lower limits of the law, that is to say the superior principle of the Good and the sanction of the righteous in the light of the Best are reduced to nothingness. All that remains is the indeterminate character of the law on the one hand and the specificity of the punishment on the other. Irony and humor immediately take on a different, modern aspect. They still represent a way of conceiving the law, but the law is now seen in terms of the indeterminacy of its content and of the guilt of the person who submits to it. Kafka ives to humor and irony their full modern significance in agreement with the transformed character of the law. Max Brod recalls that when Kafka gave a reading of The Trial, everyone present, including Kafka himself, was overcome by laughter - as mysterious a phenomenon as the laughter that greeted the death of Socrates. A spurious sense of tragedy dulls our intelligence; how many authors are distorted by placing a childishly tragic construction on what is more often the expression of an aggressively comic force! The comic is the only possible mode of conceiving the law, in a peculiar combination of irony and humor.
In modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law. This leads us back to Sade and Masoch, who represent the two main attempts at subversion, at turning the law upside down. Irony is still in the process or movement which bypasses the law as a merely secondary power and aims at transcending it toward a higher principle. But what is the higher principle no longer exists, and if the Good can no longer provide a basis for the law or a justification of its power? It is significant that Sade attacks the regime of laws as being the regime of the tyrannized and of the tyrants. Only the law can tyrannize: "I have infinitely less reason to fear my neighbor's passions than the law's injustice, for my neighbor's passions are contained by mine, whereas nothing stops or contains the injustices of the law." Tyrants are created by the law alone: they flourish by virtue of the law. Sade's hatred of tyranny, his demonstration that the law enables the tyrant to exist, form the essence of his thinking. The truant speaks the language of the law, and acknowledges no over, for he lives "in the shadow of the laws." The heroes of Sade are inspired with an extraordinary passion against tyranny; they speak as no tyrant ever spoke or could ever speak; theirs is the counter-language of tyranny.
We now note a new attempt to transcend the law, this time no longer in the direction of the Good as superior principle and ground of the law, but in the direction of its opposite, the Idea of Evil, the supreme principle of wickedness, which subverts the law and turns Platonism upside down. Here, the transcendence of the law implies the discovery of a primary nature which is in every way opposed to the demands and the rule of secondary nature. It follows that the idea of absolute evil embodied in primary nature cannot be equated either with tyranny - for tyranny still presupposes laws - or with a combination of whims and arbitrariness; its higher, impersonal model is rather to be found in the anarchic institutions of perpetual motion and permanent revolution. Sade often stresses the fact that the law can only be transcendd toward an institutional model of anarchy. The fact that anarchy can only exist in the interval between two reigns based on laws, abolishing the old to give birth to the new, does not prevent this divine interval, this vanishing instant, from testifying to its fundamental difference from all forms of the law.
"The reign of laws is pernicious; it is inferior to that of anarchy; the best proof of this is that all governments are orced to plunge into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitutions." The law can only be transcended by virtue of a principle that subverts it and denies its power.
While the sadian hero subverts the law, the masochist should not by contrast as gladly submitting to it. He simply attacks the law on another flank. What we call humor - in contradistinction to the upward movement of irony toward a transcendent higher principle - is a downward movement from the law to its consequences. By scrupulously applying the law we are able tod demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or to conjure. The law is no longer subverted by the upward movement of irony to a principle that overrides it, but b the downward movement of humor which seeks to reduce the law to its furthest consequences. A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest application of the law, the result in every case is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it). It is a demonstration of the law's absurdity. The masochist regards the law as a punitive process and therefore begins by having the punishment inflicted upon himself; once he has undergone the punishment, he feels that he is allowed or indeed commanded to experience the pleasure that the law was supposed to forbid. The essence of masochistic humor lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction of a desire under threat of subsequent punishment is converted into one which demands the punishment first and then orders that the satisfaction of the desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment. Theodor Reik gives an excellent analysis of this process: masochism is not pleasure in pain, to even in punishment; at most, the masochist gets a preliminary pleasure from punishment or discomfort; his real pleasure is obtained subsequently, in that which is made possible by the punishment. The masochist must undergo punishment before experiencing pleasure. It would be a mistake to confuse this temporal succession with logical causality: suffering is not the cause of pleasure itself but the necessary precondition for achieving it. "the temporal reversal points at a reversal of the contents. The previous 'You must not do that' has been transmuted into 'You have to do that!'… The same process is reflected in the other features of masochism, such as disavowal, suspense and fantasy, which should be regarded as so many forms or aspects of humor. The masochist is insolent in his obsequiousness, rebellious in his submission; in short, he is a humorist, a logician of consequences, just as the ironic sadist is a logician of principles.
In the other modern discovery that the law increases the guilt of the person who submits to it, the masochist in his turn finds a new way of descending from the law to its consequences: he stands guilt on its head by making punishment into a condition that makes possible the forbidden pleasure. In so doing he overthrows the law as radically as the sadist, though in a different way. The Oedipal content which always remains concealed, undergoes a dual transformation - as though the mother-father complementarity had been shattered twice and asymmetrically. In the case of sadism the father is placed above the laws; he becomes a higher principle with the mother as his essential victim. In the case of masochism the totality of the law is invested upon the mother, who expels the father from the symbolic realm." [CC]
"It is already apparent that in his attempt to derive the law from the contract, the masochist aims not to mitigate the law but on the contrary to emphasize its extreme severity. For while the contract implies in principle certain conditions like the free acceptance of the parties, a limited duration and the preservation of inalienable rights, the law that it generates always tends to forget its own origins and annul these restrictive conditions. Thus the contract-law relationship involves in a sense mystification. To imagine that a contract or quasi contract is at the origin of society is to invoke conditions which are necessarily invalidated as soon as the law comes into being For the law, once established, violates the contract in that it can apple to a third party, is valid for an indeterminate period and recognizes no inalienable rights. This process of invalidation of the contract by the law is reflected in the peculiar progression of Masoch's successive love-contracts, the terms of which become increasingly strict, as if to prepare the way for the law that will eventually override them. Since the law results in our enslavement, we should place enslavement first, as the dreadful object of the contract. One could even say, as a general rile, that in masochism the contract is caricatured in order to emphasize its ambiguous destination. The contract may indeed be said to exemplify the very type of a culture-bound relationship that is artificial, Apollonian and virile, as opposed to the natural, chthonic relations which bind us to the mother and the woman. In the contractual relation the woman typically figures as an object in the patriarchal system. The contract in masochism reverses this state of affairs by making the woman into the party with whom the contract is entered into. Its paradoxical intention extends even further in that it involves a master-slave relationship, and one furthermore in which the woman is the master and torturer The contractual basis is thereby implicitly challenged, by excess of zeal, a humorous acceleration of the clauses and a complete reversal of the respective contractual status of man and woman. Hence we have once more a sort of demystification of the contract, inasmuch as it is made deliberately to promote slavery and even death at the service of the woman and the mother. The ultimate paradox is that such a contract should be initiated, and the power conferred, by the victim himself, that is to say the male party. Sade's ironic attitude to the 1789 Revolution is that the Revolution would remain sterile unless it gave up making laws and set up institutions of perpetual motion; it is paralleled by Masoch's humorous attitude to the revolutions of 1848 and the Panslavic movement: he suggests that contracts should be drawn up with a terrible Tsarina, thus ensuring the most sentimental but at the same time the coldest and severest law." [CC]
"The same threat which, when experienced as coming from the father and linked to his image, has the effect of preventing incest, has the reverse effect when entrusted to the other and associated with her image: t then makes incest possible and ensures its success. Here the transference is very effective. As a general rule castration acts as a threat preventing incest or a punishment that controls it; it is an obstacle to or a chastisement of incest. But when it is linked with the image of the mother, the castration of the son become the very condition of the success of incest: incest is assimilated by this displacement to a second birth which dispenses with the father's role. "interrupted love" is an important feature of masochism; its function is to facilitate the masochist's identification of sexual activity with both incest and send birth, a process which not only saves him from the threat of castration but actually turns castration into the symbolic condition of success.
The masochistic contract generates a type of law which leads straight into ritual. The masochist s obsessed; ritualistic activity is essential to him, since it epitomizes the world of fantasy. Three main types of rite occur in Masoch's novels: hunting rites, agricultural rites and rites of regeneration and rebirth. They echo the three fundamental elements: the cold, that requites the conquest of the fur, the trophy of the hunt; the buried sentimentality and sheltered fecundity which agriculture demands, together with the strictest organization of work; and finally that very element of strictness, that cruel rigor which regeneration and rebirth demand. The coexistence and interaction of these three rites sum up the mythical complex of masochism.
In Wolf and She-wolf the heroine asks her suitor to let himself be sewn into a wolf's skin and to live and howl and be hunted like a wolf. The ritual hunt is instrumental to rebirth; by taking possession of the trophy of the primitive, uterine mother, the second mother, that is to say the oral mother, acquires the power to bring about a rebirth. This second birth is independent both of the father and of the uterine mother; it is a parthenogenesis. The oral mother is mistress of the Law - what Masoch calls the law of the commune, in which the hunting, the agrarian and the matriarchal elements become fully integrated. The oral mother alone remains triumphant; she is the common essence of agriculture, matriarchy and rebirth. Hence the dream of agrarian communism which recurs throughout the work of Masoch and underlies his "blue tales of happiness". A deep bond is forged between the commune, the law of the commune embodied in the oral mother, and the man of the commune, who can only be born by reborn of the oral mother." [CC]
"The two principle male figures in Masoch's work are Cain and Christ. Their sign is the same, the sign of Cain prefiguring the sign of the cross which used to be written as X or as +. Cain is a "tiller of the ground" and the favorite of the mother: Eve greeted his birth with cries of joy, but did not rejoice at the birth of bel, the "keepr os sheep", who is on the father's side. The mother's favorite went so far as to commit a crime to sever the alliance between the father and the other son: he killed his father's likeness and made Eve into the goddess-mother. (Herman Hesse's strange novel, Demian, interweaves Nietzschean and masochistic themes: the mother-goddess is identified with Eve, a female giant who bears on her forehead the mark of Cain.) Masoch is attracted to Cain not only because of the torments he suffers but also by the very crime that he commits. His crime should not be regarded as a sadomasochistic archetype, for the entire project falls squarely within the world of masochism, with its attendant features of loyaly to the maternal rule, dedication to the oral mother, expulsion of the father, and its elements of humor and provocation. Cain's "heritage" is a "mark"; his punishment by the father represents the aggressive, hallucinatory return of the latter; so much for the first episode.
The second episode is the story of Christ: the likeness of the father is once more abolished. ("Why has thou forsaken me?"), but here it is the Mother who crucifies the Son; in the masochistic elaboration of the Marian fantasy, the Virgin in person puts Christ on the cross; this is Masoch's version of "the death of God". By putting him on the cross and thus placing him under the same signs s the son of Eve, the Virgin carries on the aim of the mother-goddess, the great oral mother: she ensures the pathogenetic second birth of the son in his resurrection. But again, it is not the son who dies so much as God the Father, that is the likeness of the father in the son. The cross represents the maternal image of death, the mirror in which the narcissistic self of Christ (Cain) apprehends his ideal self (Christ resurrected).
Why should such a terrible punishment be inflicted upon Cain, and why should Christ's torture be so unbearable? Why is Christology an all-pervasive element in the work of Masoch? While Sade was concerned above all with rationalistic and atheistic, masonic and anarchistic societies, Masoch gave his attention the mystical agrarian sects of his day (such as those found in the Austrian Empire). Two of his novels, The Fisher of Souls and The Mother of God actually deal with these sects; they are among his finest.
To become a man is to be reborn from the woman alone, to undergo a second birth. This is why castration, and the "interrupted love" which represents castration, cease to be an obstacle to or a punishment of incest, and become instead a precondition of its success with the mother, since it is then equated with a second, autonomous and parthenogenetic rebirth. The masochist practices three forms of disavowal at once: the first magnifies the mother, by attributing to her the phallus instrumental to rebirth; the second excludes the father, since he has no part in this rebirth; and the third relates to sexual pleasure, which is interrupted, deprived of its gentility and transformed into the pleasure of being reborn. The final objective of Masoch's work expresses itself in the myth that embraces both Cain and Christ: Christ is not the son of God, but he new Man; his likeness to the father is abolished, he is "Man on the Cross, who knows no sexual love, no property, no fatherland, no cause, no work…"
There is no doubt that the masochist lives in the very depths of guilt; but far from feeling that he has sinned against the father, it is the father's likeness in him that he experiences as a sin which must be atoned for. Hence guilt is turned completely upside down: it is both at its deepest and its most absurd. It is an integral part of the masochist's triumph, and ensures his liberation. Indeed it is indistinguishable from humor. It is quite inadequate to say, as Reik does, that the punishment resolves the anxiety arising from guilt, and makes possible the forbidden pleasure.
We have traced a progression from the contract to the myth, through the intermediary of the law; for the law transcends the contract but leads us straight into ritual and myth. By means of the contract the paternal function of applying the law was transferred to the mother, resulting in the most radical transformation of the law. The law now ordains what it was once intended to forbid; guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment makes permissible what it was intended to chastise. The law has become essentially maternal, leading into those regions of the unconscious where the three images of the mother hold supreme sway. The contract represents a personal act of will on the part of the masochist, but through the contract, and the vicissitudes of the law that issues from it, the masochist is led back into the impersonal realm of fate, whih finds expression in the myth and in the rites described. The situation that the masochist establishes by contract, at a specific moment and for a specific period, is already fully contained timelessly and ritually in the symbolic order of masochism. For the masochist, the modern contract as it is elaborated in the bedroom corresponds to the oldest rites once enacted in the swamps and the steppes. The novels of Masoch reflect this twofold history and bring out the identity between its most modern and its most ancient forms." [CC]
"Beneath the sound and fury of sadism and masochism the terrible force of repetition is at work. What is altered here is the normal function of repetition in its relation to the pleasure principle: instead of repetition being experienced as a form of behavior related to a pleasure already obtained or anticipated, instead of petition being governed by the idea of experiencing or reexperiencing pleasure, repetition runs wild and becomes independent of all previous pleasure. It has itself become an idea or ideal. Pleasure is now a form of behavior related to repetition, accompanying and following repetition, which has itself become an awesome, independent force. Pleasure and repetition have thus exchanged roles, as a consequence of the instantaneous leap, that is to say the twofold process of desexualization and resexualization.
There is a kind of mysticism in perversion: the greater the renunciation, the greater and the more secure the gains; we might compare it to a "black" theology where pleasure ceases to motivate the will and is abjured, disavowed, "renounced", the better to be recovered as a reward or consequence, and as a law. Pain in this case has now equal significance ay all; on the contrary it represents a desalination which makes repetition autonomous and give it instantaneous sway over the pleasures of resexualization. Eros is desexualized and humiliated for the sake of a resexualized Thanatos. In sadism and masochism there is no mysterious link between pain and pleasure; the mystery lies in the desexualization process which consolidates repetition at the opposite pole to pleasure, and in the subsequent resexualization which makes the pleasure of repetition seemingly proceed from pain. In sadism no less than in masochism; there is no direct relation to pain: pain should be regarded as an effect only.
Sadistic Superego and Masochistic Ego.
The ultimate victory of the sadist are the mother and the go. His ego exists only in the external world: this is the fundamental significance of sadistic apathy. The sadist has no other ego than that of his victims; he is thus monstrously reduced to a pure superego which exercises its cruelty to the fullest extent and instantaneously recovers its full sexuality as soon as it diverts its power outward. The fact that the sadist has no other ego than that of his victims explains the apparent paradox of sadism, its pseudomasochism. The libertine enjoys suffering the pain he inflicts upon others; when the destructive madness is deflected outward it is accompanied by an identification with the external victim. the irony of sadism lies in the twofold operation whereby he necessarily projects his dissolved ego outward and as a result experiences what is outside hi as his only ego.
In masochism the superego is not negated as the ego is in the sadistic operation; the superego retains in appearance its power to pass judgement. Furthermore, the more power it retains, the more this power appears derisory, a mere disguise for something else; the beating woman embodies the superego but only in an utterly derisory capacity, as one might display the hide of an animal or a trophy after the hunt. For in reality the superego is dead - not, however, as the result of an active negation but of a "disavowal". Humour is the triumph of the geo over the superego, to which it seems to say: "You see, whatever you do, you are already dead; you only exist as a caricature; the woman who beats me supposedly stands for you, and yet it is in fact you yourself who are being beaten in me… I disavow you since you negate yourself." The ego triumphs, and asserts its autonomy in pain, its pathogenetic rebirth from pain, pain ring experienced as inflicted upon the superego. We do not believe, as Freud did, that humor is the expression of a strong superego. Humour is the operation of a triumphant ego, the art of deflecting and disavowing the superego, with all its masochistic consequences. Thus there is pseudosadism in masochism, just as there is a pseudomasochism in sadism. This specifically masochistic sadism, which attacks the superego in the ego and outside it is not in any way related to the sadism of the sadist. Suspense points to the new status of the ego and to the ideal of rebirth through the agency of the maternal phallus. The process of disavowal is linked to castration not contingently but essentially and originally; the expression of fetishistic disavowal, "No, the mother does not lack a phallus", is not one particular form of disavowal among others, but formulates the very principle from which the other manifestations of disavowal derive, namely the abolition of the father and the rejection of sexuality. Nor is disavowal in general just a form of imagination; it is nothing less than the foundation of imagination, which suspends reality and establishes the ideal in the suspended world. Disavowal and suspense are thus the very essence of imagination, and determine its specific object: the ideal.
The maternal phallus does not have a sexual character, but is rather the ideal organ of a neutral energy which in its turn generates the ideal ego of parthenogenetic rebirth, the "new Man devoid of sexual love". It is because of this split in the ego of the masochist and in view of the super personal element which produces it, that we were able earlier to speak of the impersonal element in masochism while nevertheless maintaining the primacy of the ego. But even as masochistic desexualization reaches its highest point, resexualization proceeds simultaneously in the narcissistic ego, which contemplates its image in the idea ego through the agency of the oral mother.
The cold purity of thought in sadism stands in contrast to the iciness of imagination in masochism. As Reik indicated, it is fantasy which must be regarded as the primary theater of masochism.
While the Death Instinct is never actually "given", it becomes an object for thought in the superego in sadism and for the imagination in the ego in masochism. This corresponds to Freud's observation that it is only possible to speak of a Death Instinct ins peculate or in mythical terms. Either the ego undertakes a mythical operation of idealization, in which the mother-image serves as a mirror to reflect and even produce the "ideal ego" as a narcissistic ideal of omnipotence, or else it launches into speculative identification and uses the father-image to produce a superego which in turn appoints an "ego-ideal" as an ideal of authority which brings into play forces from outside the subject's narcissistic ego." [CC]
"The masochist is saying, with all the weight of his symptoms and his fantasies: "Once upon a time there were three women…" He tells of the war they wage on one another, resulting in the triumph of the oral mother. He introduces himself into this age-old story by means of a very specific act, the instrument of which is the modern contract - with the most curious consequences, for he abjures the father's likeness and the sexuality which it angers, and at the same time challenges the father-image as the repressive authority which regulates this sexuality and which is constitutive of the superego. In opposition to the institutional superego he now establishes the contractual partnership between the ego and the oral mother. Intermediate between the first mother and the third mother, or lover, the oral mother functions as an image of death, holding up to the ego the cold mirror of its twofold rejection. But death can only be imagined as a second birth, a parthenogenesis from which the ego reemerges, liberated from the superego as well as forms equality. The reflection of the geo in and through death produces the ideal ego in the conditions of independence and autonomy which obtain in masochism. The narcissistic ego contemplates the ideal ego in the maternal mirror of death: such is the story begun by Cain with the aid of Eve, continued by Christ with the aid of the Virgin Mary, and revived by Sabattai Zwi with the help f Miriam, and such is the masochistic visionary, with his prodigious vision of "the death of God". But the narcissistic ego benefits from this split in that it becomes resexualized in proportion as the ideal ego becomes desexualized. This is why the most extreme punishments and the most intense pains acquire in this context such a very peculiar erotic function in relation to the death-image. They represent on the one hand, in the ideal ego, the desexualization process which liberates it both from the superego and from the father's likeness, and on the other hand, in the narcissistic ego, the resexualizaton that allows it to enjoy the pleasures that the superego forbids.
Sadism likewise tells a story. It relates how the ego, in an entirely different context and in a different struggle, is beaten and expelled; how the unrestrained superego assumes an exclusive role, modeled on an inflated conception of the fathers role - the mother and the ego becoming its choice victims. Desexualization, now represented by the superego, ceases to be of a moral or moralizing character, since it is no longer directed upon an inner ego but is turned outward, upon external victims who take on the equality of the rejected ego. The Death Instinct now assumes the character of a Thought of a fearful nature, an idea of demonstrative reason, and resexualization bears on the "ego ideal" of the sadistic "thinker", who thus turns out to be one very way the opposite of the masochistic visionary. Indeed, he recounts a different story altogether." [CC]
"The belief in a sadomasochistic entity is not really grounded in genuine psychoanalytic thinking but in pre-Freudian thinking which relied on hasty assimilations and failty etiological interpretations that psychoanalysis merely helped to make more convincing, ins tea of questioning their reality.
The genius of Sade and that of Masoch are poles apart; their worlds do not communicate, and as novelists their techniques are totally different. Sade expresses himself in a form which combines obscenity in description with rigor and apathy in demonstration, while the art of Masoch consists in multiplying the disavowals in order to create the coldness of aesthetic suspense.
Medicine distinguishes between syndromes and symptoms, a symptom being the specific sign of an illness, and a syndrome the meeting-place or crossing-point of manifestations issuing from try different origins and arising within variable contexts. We would like to suggest that sadimasochism is a syndrome that ought to be split up into irreducible causal chains.
The fact that their names have been linked with two basic perversions should remind us that diseases are named after their symptoms rather than after their causes.
1. Sadism is speculative-demonstrative, masochism dialectical imaginative;
2. Sadism operates with the negative and pure negation, masochism with disavowal and suspension;
3. Sadism operates by means of quantitative reiteration, masochism by means of qualitative suspense;
4. There is a msaochism specific to the said and equally a sadism specific to the masochist, the one never combining with the other;
5. Sadism negates the mother and inlets the father, masochism disavows the mother and abolishes the father;
6. The role and significance of the fetish, and the function of the fantasy are totally different one act case;
7. There is an aestheticism in masochism, while sadism is hostile to the aesthetic attitude;
8. Sadism is institutional, masochism contractual;
9. n sadism the superego and the process of identification play the primary role, masochism gives primacy to the go and to the process of idealization;
10. Sadism and masochism exhibit totally different forms of desexualization and resexualization;
11. Finally, summing up all these differences, there is the most radical difference between sadistic apathy and masochistic coldness.
These eleven propositions taken together should account not only for the differences between sadism and masochism, but equally for the differences in the literary techniques and in the art of Sade and Masoch." [CC]
As if weaklings had any choice but to submit... and because they have none, they make a path out of it to save face.
It is assumed that an already castrated weakling can still offer herself for castration, as if there was anything present to own. Assumptions are the biggest mothers.
"Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means "harm-joy". It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune. It is also borrowed by some other languages. An English term of similar meaning (but with no noun equivalent) is "to gloat"; which means to feel, or express, great, often malicious, pleasure, or self-satisfaction, at one's own success, or at another's failure.
Little-used English words synonymous with schadenfreude derive from the Greek word, epichairekakia (ἐπιχαιρεκακία, first attested in Aristotle). Nathan Bailey's 18th-century Universal Etymological English Dictionary, for example, contains an entry for epicharikaky that gives its etymology as a compound of ἐπί epi (upon), χαρά chara (joy), and κακόν kakon (evil). A popular modern collection of rare words, however, gives its spelling as epicaricacy.
An English expression with a similar meaning is Roman holiday, a metaphor from the poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by George Gordon, Lord Byron, where a gladiator in Ancient Rome expects to be "butchered to make a Roman holiday" while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.
Another phrase with a meaning similar to Schadenfreude is "morose delectation" (delectatio morosa in Latin), meaning, "The habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts". The medieval church taught that morose delectation was a sin. French writer Pierre Klossowski maintained that the appeal of sadism is morose delectation.
An English word of similar meaning is "gloating", where "gloat" means "to observe or think about something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight" (e.g. to gloat over an enemy's misfortune). Gloating is differentiated from Schadenfreude in that it does not necessarily require malice (one may gloat to a friend about having defeated him in a game without ill intent), and that it describes an action rather than a state of mind (one typically gloats to the subject of the misfortune or to a third party).
South African terminology in colloquial terms would be lekker vir jou.[further explanation needed]
The Finnish language contains a word with a meaning similar to schadenfreude, vahingonilo, which literally means "joy of misfortune". Likewise, Swedish also has a term equivalent to schadenfreude: skadeglädje, which translates literally as "injury joy" (the joy of watching someone's injury, be it figurative or literal).
The Dutch word leedvermaak (literally translatable as "suffer entertainment") is said to be a calque of the German "Schadenfreude.
The Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish languages have similar terms in the forms skadefro, skadefryd, and skadeglädje (with the same meanings).
The Arabic language contains the term shamaatah, which, according to the Arabic thesaurus means "to enjoy the calamity upon the enemy".
The French uses joie mauvaise (bad or evil joy) and a few similar terms in a sense close to Schadenfreude.
Portuguese possesses no single word that can exactly translate the term, but it has a common adage for the same emotion covered by schadenfreude in other languages, pimenta nos olhos dos outros é refresco, which means "to have someone else's eyes peppered is a refreshment" or, more literally, "pepper in someone else's eyes is [to the unaffected] a refreshing drink". According to popular folklore, this might often be the consequence of one putting an olho gordo over another person and the consequential failure that might ensue to their fate. To consciously place a bad omen on someone and then relish with their affliction is called agourar. The meaning of the verb agourar is ambiguous, though, as it might imply just common ill omen (for example, the literal, folkloric bird of ill omen)."
"Laughter. - Laughter means: to gloat, but with a good conscience." [JW, 200]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others [schadenfreude], the lust to rob and rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing economy of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly, wasteful, and on the whole most foolish—but still proven to have preserved our race so far." [JW, 1]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Life—that is continually shedding something that wants to die; life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against anything that is growing weak and old in us, and not just in us. life—therefore means: being devoid of reverence for the dying, the wretched, the aged? always being a murderer? and yet old Moses said: “thou shalt not kill!”" [JW, 26]
"Mature epochs that have the right to be proud of their humanity are still so full of fear, so full of superstitious fear of the “cruel and wild beast” (although the pride these more humane ages feel is actually caused by their mastery of this beast), that even obvious truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by agreement, because they have the appearance of helping bring the wild beast back to life after it had finally been killed off. Perhaps I am taking a risk in allowing a truth like this to escape: let other people recapture it and make it drink the “milk of pious reflection” until it lies quiet and forgotten in its old corner. – People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about. An example of this is the mistaken ideas about tragedy that have been nurtured by both ancient and modern philosophers. This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine.
Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy. And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate of metaphysical tremblings, derives its sweetness exclusively from the intervening component of cruelty. Consider the Roman in the arena, Christ in the rapture of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the stake or the bullfight, the present-day Japanese flocking to tragedies, the Parisian suburban laborer who is homesick for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who unfastens her will and lets Tristan und Isolde “wash over her” – what they all enjoy and crave with a mysterious thirst to pour down their throats is “cruelty,” the spiced drink of the great Circe.
We clearly need to drive out the silly psychology of the past; the only thing this psychology was able to teach about cruelty was that it originated from the sight of another’s suffering. But there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer, – and wherever anyone lets himself be talked into self-denial in the religious sense, or self-mutilation (as the Phoenicians or ascetics did), or into desensitization, disembowelment or remorse in general, or into puritanical penitential spasms, vivisections of conscience or a Pascalian sacrifizio dell’intelletto – wherever this is the case, he is secretly being tempted and urged on by his cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of self-directed cruelty.
Finally, people should bear in mind that even the knower, by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination and, often enough, against the wishes of his heart (in other words, to say “no” when he would like to affirm, love, worship), this knower will prevail as an artist of cruelty and the agent of its transfiguration. Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, – there is a drop of cruelty even in every wanting-to-know." [BGE, 229]
If one does not learn how to submit to oneself, one would easily be putty in another's hands.
Self-acceptance is total and unabashed honesty with oneself. And at some point, the need for lies, for clutches, for grips and railings, will need to fall off; and young birds learn to fly. The attaining of self-mirth at the vision of exactly what we are, make lies unnecessary.
The relinquishing of power before another is a farce when one is not conscious of the power of possessing oneself.
How can you relinqush what you do not have?
How many lies can you do without?
How little dialectics can you do without?
How potent is your self-disgust? Can it kill you? Can it recreate you?
Schadenfroh is passive observation, while gloating is active action:
Quote :
Nietzsche wrote:
"To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human, principle to which even the apes might subscribe." [1887]
"Nietzsche (1887/1967) described schadenfreude as pleasure at the passive observation of another party’s misfortune. Because the observer does nothing to “earn” schadenfreude, Nietzsche viewed the pleasure of schadenfreude as lesser than pleasure that is actively earned. He also suggested that those experiencing schadenfreude are less empowered than those who actively “make others suffer” by directly defeating them in competition. Pleasure in actively and directly causing a rival’s adversity may be referred to as gloating, especially when it is experienced as an empowered state of superiority that is lorded over the defeated rival (Ortony et al., 1988). Like Nietzsche, we believe that the emotion concept of schadenfreude should describe a particular pleasure at adversity that is distinguishable from other pleasure (e.g., pride and joy). We also believe that schadenfreude should describe a particular pleasure at another’s adversity that is distinguishable from other pleasure at another’s adversity (e.g., gloating). More specifically, the malicious pleasures of schadenfreude and gloating should be experienced differently, with schadenfreude less pleasurable, less empowering, and more passive and indirect than gloating. Schadenfreude and gloating should also be expressed differently, because gloating should be boastful and triumphant in nature and schadenfreude should be more furtive. The experience and expression of schadenfreude and gloating should be corroborated by the quite different ways that the two malicious pleasures position the self in social relations. Whereas gloating is an experience and expression of superiority over others, the muted pleasure of schadenfreude is based in passivity and concerns about inferiority and powerlessness. Thus, the distinctions between schadenfreude and gloating can be conceptualized in terms of the (1) features of the event, (2) appraisals of the event, (3) experience of pleasure, and (4) expression of pleasure. These distinctions are shown..."
