suspension

all quotes by gilles deleuze from masochism: coldness and cruelty

"as soon as we read masoch we become aware that his universe has nothing to do with that of sade. their techniques differ, and their problems, their concerns and their intentions are entirely dissimilar."

"georges bataille explains that the language of sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of a victim."

"[sade] is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. he 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 the demonstration is identical to violence. it follows that the reasoning does not have to be shared by the person to whom it is addressed any more than pleasure is meant to be shared by the object from which it is derived. the acts of violence inflicted on the victims are a mere reflection of a higher form a 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 hermetic circle of his own solitude and uniqueness."

"similarly the imperatives uttered by the libertines are like the statements of problems referring back to the more fundamental chain of sadistic theorems: 'i have demonstrated it theoretically,' says noirceuil, 'let us now put it to the test of practice.'"

"the sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations. . . possession is the sadist's particular form of madness just as the pact is the masochist's."

"sade is sponozistic and employs demonstrative reason, masoch is platonic and proceeds by dialectical imagination."

"[masoch] is prepared for anything, a true dialectician who knows the opportune moment and seizes it. plato showed that socrates appeared to be the lover but that fundamentally he was the loved one. . . 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 on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation or 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 toward a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal. . . in sade the imperative and descriptive function of language transcend itself toward a pure demonstrative, instituting function, and in masoch toward a dialectical, mythical, and persuasive function."

"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."

"disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor 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."

"[masoch] does not believe in negating or destroying the world nor 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. . . 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."

"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 phemomena by the very fact that it puts them at the service of the senses."

"a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim. . . neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. he does of course require a special 'nature' in the torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate and persuade it in accordance with his secret project."

"it would never occur to the sadist to find pleasure in other people's pain if he had not himself first undergone the masochistic experience of a link between pain and pleasure."

"we are inevitably led back to the problem of syndromes: some syndromes merely attach a common label to irreducibly different disturbances. biology warns us against over-hasty acceptance of the existence of an uninterrupted evolutionary chain. the fact that two organs are analogous need not mean that there is an evolutionary link between them."