Pathology or intervention? – Deleuze’s masochism and its relation to parody

In his 1967 work, Presentation of Sacher-Masoch – Coldness and Cruelty (2007), Gilles Deleuze famously distinguishes the symptomatologies commonly designated by the names Masochism and Sadism, arguing that despite their shared feature of algolagnia, they are more rigorously approached as two very distinct regimes, having nothing to do with the ‘economy’ of the other. In the work’s preface, Deleuze also notes about Sacher-Masoch himself: ‘His whole oeuvre remains influenced by the problem of minorities, of nationalities and of revolutionary movements’ (2007: 9). Deleuze identifies that, within Masoch’s oeuvre, the masochist is he (normally a ‘he’) who insists on the contract. This insistence is neither to honour any particular contract or contracting per se, nor to safeguard himself within it, but to perform, through parodying it to its letter and pushing its operation towards its own limit, the inherent injustice that is its inexorable outcome. This article seeks to explore, using Masochistic ‘humouring’ or mockery of the contract as example, what might constitute a practice of intervention in regimes of power, and in which instances these iterations serve instead only as gestures of complicity with the injustices of the established logics. The article seeks to clarify, at the level of mechanism, a region of parody’s slippery operation, one which would determine the criteria for it to be intervention, as opposed to functioning as compliance and ‘bare repetition’ or ‘repetition of the Same’ (see Deleuze 2004: 27).