Summary
Gilles Deleuze: Cold and Cruel
Presentation of Sacher-Masoch Deleuze published the book about Sacher-Masoch in 1967. The year is important. At that time, Freud was one of the "obligatory" authors of the French theoretical scene, and his discovery of the "unconscious" was one of the strongest points in the dismantling of the sovereign subject. Writing against Freud at the time was not only not a widespread practice but also an undertaking that would, at the very least, be met with resistance. Deleuze, however, does just that. He does not deny Freud's genius insights (on the contrary), but he violently lashes out at Freud's sado-masochistic complex. A book about Sacher-Masoch is actually a book about Freud. Deleuze notes that the combination of sadism and masochism, as Freud sees it, is problematic in many ways. Therefore, Deleuze begins to read the works of the somewhat forgotten Sacher-Masoch and strongly questions the closeness of sadism and masochism. At the same time, in the virtuoso analyzes of Freud's works, the seeds of Deleuze's great ideas are visible, which he will develop with incomparable power and lucidity in his great books Difference and Repetition, Logic of Meaning and, later, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Planes. (F13)
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