A Defense of Masochism -

Anita Phillips

St Martins Pr

1998

165 páginas

5h 30m

ISBN-10: 0312192584

Amazon.com Review
Ever since "masochism" was coined in the late 19th century by Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, it has been misconceived as sadism's weaker counterpart, but Anita Phillips, editor of the British academic journal Interstice, explodes this myth, arguing that masochism is "highly autonomous." The art of acting out masochistic fantasies, she writes, is "being hurt in exactly the right way and the right time, within a sophisticated, highly artificial scenario." Phillips turns to Freud, Jung, Foucault, and Leo Bersani to fashion a new definition of masochism, delving into popular culture to demonstrate both its necessity and the major influence it has had on Western culture--from David Lynch's Blue Velvet to Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose, as well as the martyred images of Christ in the New Testament. She argues that masochism is a healthy part of the human psyche that takes secret pleasure in enduring imagined and real suffering at the hands of another when the subject knows that gratification is the ultimate outcome. Written with wit and authority, A Defense of Masochism is sure to provoke some highly charged discussions on the nature of sexuality. --Kera Bolonik
From Kirkus Reviews
With wit, grace, and theoretical rigor, Phillips ventures into the black vinyl depths of masochism and reclaims it. In Phillips's view, the very concept of masochism has been misunderstood for some years now, stripped of import and culturally defused in a way that benefits no one. Her ``project,'' as she defines it, means rescuing masochism from - its identity as a sickness, as something pathological, and setting it back into the context of diverse human experience and artistic creativity.'' To do so, Phillips, editor of the British journal Interstice, takes an erudite approach, reconsidering the literary history of the term and its gradual perversion by an army of psychiatrists. From her perspective, masochism cannot be equated only with the death drive - it has too much to do with life. Perhaps her most compelling argument focuses on the link between creativity and masochism, in which she connects the intricacies of creative sublimation to the complexities of masochistic desire. And all artists, Phillips dares to suggest, are masterful masochists. In her definition, the term doesn - t apply to sexual practice so much as to a desire for self-shattering experience, anything that tears down ego-boundaries and releases the individual into a kind of bliss, or jouissance. And masochists, she writes, are adept at seeking out such experiences, taking in the whole life-and-death cocktail: hardship, pain, pleasure, ambivalence, ecstasy. Phillips makes insightful connections, using her intelligent, conversational prose style to defuse complex ideas. Although Phillips does go so far as to explain the very stylized rituals of S/M exchanges, her purpose is merely to emphasize their symbolic import, not to reduce masochism to an acceptable form of kinkiness. Instead, she hopes to simply take the pejorative sting out of the word, and examine the way in which masochism can infuse a single individual with multiple possibilities. A fascinating argument for the power of masochism to integrate Eros and Thanatos, dark and light, desire and its inevitable loss.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Há muito tempo um livro não me surpreendia tão agradavelmente quanto “A defense of masochism”. Num mundo em que qualquer texto de não-ficção leva o rótulo abrangente de “ensaio”, Anita Phillips fez just ao título de ensaísta stricto senso, na melhor tradição do patrono Montaigne: uma abordagem ousada aliada a um texto primoroso. A ousadia já começa na contestação do significado que a autora aplica a “masoquismo”, fugindo do diagnóstico psiquiátrico (de Krafft-Ebbing a Freud) que originou a palavra e de suas associações imediatas com dor, e propondo uma definição em que o cerne do fenômeno está nas fantasias altamente elaboradas e roteirizadas. Visto desta forma, o masoquismo deixa de ser um pólo oposto do sadismo e se revela como um elemento essencial da sexualidade humana, e, numa visão ainda mais abrangente, de todo processo criativo. Toda fantasia é, em algum grau, masoquista. Depois de estabelecer esta premissa, a autora analisa como o masoquismo se manifesta na arte, nas políticas de corpo e gênero, na formação da psique. Arremata com uma comparação entre a fantasia masoquista e a ascese mística.