Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ as a form of “nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject,” arguing that the desire for masochism originates in the overwhelming sensations that greet newborns and infants.³⁴ In turn, this understanding of masochism marks sexuality, in psychoanalytic terms, as “an aptitude for the defeat of power by pleasure, the human subject’s potential for a jouissance in which the subject is momentarily undone.”³⁵ Following this logic, Bersani argues that jouissance is “‘self-shattering’ in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries.”³⁶ Since sexuality is therefore inextricably tied to masochism and self-annihilation, Bersani argues that it can provide a way to conceive of subjectivity without identity.

      Bersani is interested in sexuality and sadomasochism insofar as they offer modes of theorizing gay male subjectivity. Bersani’s investment in the radicality of gay male sex in tandem with his understanding of sexuality as a masochistic, that is to say, self-shattering, enterprise leads him to argue that homosexual desire is rife with “anti-communitarian” impulses due to its “perverse” structures. In other words, he embraces the negative spin that conservatives placed on homosexuality in the wake of AIDS: that homosexuals were not interested in monogamy, becoming part of the normative community, or upholding the ideals of individuality. Bersani argues that these anticommunitarian impulses are born from the homosexual investment in sameness (homo-ness), which he marks as a mode where there is not an investment in identity or the self. Bersani writes, “New reflections on homo-ness could lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome (a view that, among other things, nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness.”³⁷ Bersani’s valorization of similarity over difference pushes him toward sadomasochism as a way of creating similarity through the annihilation of the ego.³⁸

      There are many ways that we can read Bersani and Foucault as articulating parallel claims about pleasure producing a way to exist outside of subjectivity. Foucault describes this as a space exterior to the disciplinary formations of subjectivity, while Bersani fixates on the shattering of the ego. Bersani’s use of psychoanalysis is a notable difference from Foucault, though Bersani reads Freud and Foucault as sharing a commitment to thinking pleasure outside of genital sexuality.³⁹

      While not necessarily calling forth the clinical tradition that Foucault takes issue with, Bersani’s invocation of jouissance and self-shattering does announce the fact that he is talking about a different sort of subject and a different sort of masochism, even as the end results—pleasure and protest—are similar. While Foucault is intrigued by the possibilities of pleasure as an externality that the subject produces, Bersani is invested in the subject’s depth. That is to say, his masochism is the result of unconscious relations that evoke guilt, shame, and the desire for self-annihilation. Though this destruction of the ego occurs in protest against various regimes of normativity, it is still a subject governed by an interiority and as such enriches our ability to talk about relationality, temporality, and emotion within the framework of masochism, pleasure, and exception.

      Within queer theory, others have taken up Bersani’s investment in the psychoanalytic subject and articulated the equation of queerness with social disruption and exceptionalism even more forcefully. “Queerness,” Lee Edelman argues, “undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already foreclosed.”⁴⁰ In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive Edelman links the queer disruption of normative narratives to the death drive. For Edelman the death drive, as “the articulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, . . . names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.”⁴¹ Although Edelman does not name it this, we might, following Freud, consider this internal drive toward social death a form of masochism. In contrast to Bersani’s description of self-annihilation as internal to the subject and his or her desires, Edelman describes subjects whose futures are foreclosed because of the external dictates of normativity. Instead of working toward a queer project of assimilation to reclaim those futures, he issues a call to arms: “And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.”⁴² This explicit link between queerness and its position outside of reproductive time allows us to see that practices of self-annihilation interrupt the subject’s linear temporality on both a macro and a micro scale. Queerness, then, in Edelman’s reading is inextricable from the death drive, temporal suspension, and masochism.

      Homosexuality, queerness, community, self-annihilation, and jouissance are not equivalent terms, yet they are all put in relation to each other against reproduction and modernity. The link between these concepts is masochism, which, I argue, is the term that creates the outside to modernity in this strain of queer theory. Masochism, these theorists argue, dislocates the subject and its claims to agency by replacing it with temporal suspension, sensation, objectification, and passivity. The links between these concepts are facilitated by a shared politics of marginality, which we might understand in keeping with Judith Butler’s formation of queerness in “Critically Queer” as “never fully owned but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes.”⁴³ As a practice of self-annihilation, S&M lies outside the bounds of liberal subjectivity; it forms the outside to how the subject has traditionally been understood. Jouissance, the queer, homosexual desire, and stasis lie exterior to the folds of liberal subjectivity. In this formation of queerness, sadomasochism is presented as exceptional. Foucault, Bersani, and Edelman all take masochism to mark a privileged space outside the norm; Bersani and Edelman see it as a way to resignify an already marginalized space, while Foucault sees it as the creation of a new possibility for being.

      By underlining the link between Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Foucault, Bersani, and Edelman, however, I am doing more than illustrating the way that masochism has been read as enacting a form of social critique; I am pointing to the particular formations of self that undergird these formulations of masochism. Bersani’s and Edelman’s use of a psychoanalytic account of masochism produces the idea of a universal subject, a subject who is most easily legible in these accounts as a gay white male. This specificity has been much criticized.⁴⁴ While Foucault’s explicit desire to use S&M to distance himself from prevailing discourses of subjectivity gives us pause, several aspects of his discussion of S&M speak to certain assumptions about identity. Most importantly, Foucault imagines an equivalence of power between partners, such that he describes it as a chess game in which reversals of power are straightforward and part of the practice, rather than located external to the actors. By taking this model of community and self-formation for granted, though it is a part of a particular gay male subculture, Foucault fails to accommodate difference.

      Difference occupies a complicated space within queer theory; it is often caught in the collision between theorizing subversion and rescripting agency. The clash between movements to expand rights to marginalized subjects and the desire to work outside of the disciplinary trappings of subjectivity has informed how racial and gendered difference is approached in queer studies. José Esteban Muñoz describes the failure to work with identity as an “escape or denouncement of relationality” that “distanc[es] queerness from what some theorists seem to think of as the contamination of race, gender, or other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference. In other words, antirelational approaches to queer theory are romances of the negative, wishful thinking, and investments in deferring various dreams of difference.”⁴⁵ Chandan Reddy echoes Muñoz’s argument and pushes it further to argue that sexuality as a frame silences race. Sexuality, Reddy writes, “names the normative frames that organize our disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiries into our past and into contemporary racial capitalism.”⁴⁶ While sexuality has offered much as a site of analysis in queer studies, especially as a space to examine particular modes of marginalization, it tends to subordinate race and block the other avenues through which race might speak.⁴⁷ In СКАЧАТЬ