Masochism and L’objet fou through Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

This paper argues that masochism is a panpsychic vertebra in the semiotic chain. Superventially and ontogenetically, it is an additional race (independent alacrity or amphigenesis) of the fact of the libidinal population of the unconscious regarding the morphometry of possible (i.e., exclusionary) behaviours, and hence a form of inner animism relating particularly to a newly proposed concept, totemic signification, in which methods of rearrangement and vicarious proscription emerge and traduce (i.e., lance or skewer) the widely constructive or suspensory mechanism of the ego. Masochism evinces its raiments and slander provided loss of behavioural sets of problematization and perplexity, a fact of paradoxicality which is tantamount to castration of the significand and which introduces ridicule, humiliation of the father-image, the scar of opprobrium, the patronage of the blood rite, etc. Consequently its primordial symbolic function is Phallic dis-identification and disavowal, a mechanism short of castration, and thusly its indulgence becomes the endogamous attempt to give birth (i.e., the misjudgment and conflation of the signification of the Genital and the Phallic), and becoming rightly connoted like behavioural lustration that paradoxically reinforces the act of abomination it amounts to self-correction subserving the perpetuation of locution. Then, masochism is de-rendered into its aggressive latencies—i.e., its culminant affective and aphoristic forms of territorialization—and situated in relation to Deleuzian and Guattarian desire, namely the absence of desire for the Oedipal violus or self-penetrative reprimand (the loss of distance early in space). Finally masochism is posited in necessary relation to L’objet fou, a conceptual apparatus serving the transient objectification and concomitant displaced superegoic constraint of the latter, which projects the “agency of the superego” (Deleuze, 1967, p. 123) as an “obscene and ferocious figure” (Lacan, 1901, p. 298) that specifically for masochism, militates infantile subversion namely intended to disabuse routinization of its debasement.