Masochism or Bust

The masochistic identification I highlighted at the start of this book cuts against the liberal, bourgeois sense of self as autonomous and whole. It also cuts against certain leftist notions of the self as purposeful and rational. The masochistic identification is instead unwilled and unconscious and, at least in the eyes of liberals and conservatives, unconscionable because it trespasses intersubjective space. Freud’s patients witnessed an act of violence that was external and became the catalyst for their retroactive traumatization, encapsulated in the fantasy “A child is being beaten,” through which they discover themselves: “I am being beaten.” Both the fantasy and the identification are extimate: I only come to know my repressed fantasy by encountering it outside myself, first, in a scene of violence that does not directly involve me and, second, in talk therapy, where my words and ideas are again external—voiced by something more than me. Lacan has a term for the ocular reversal I have in mind here: the gaze. The gaze is not a vehicle of mastery, contrary to how that term has devolved. The gaze is, for Lacan, the point where mastery falls apart.1 If I am looking at a picture, let’s say a film, and encounter the gaze, I encounter it as external to my conscious will and control. I encounter it outside myself in the picture, where something awry appears to see me, indicating something about my desire. Suddenly, I am in the picture, outside myself, yet never more in touch with the intimate core of my desire, which, more often than not, appears revolting, a distortional stain on the otherwise intact image.

The images that flooded social media of students harassed by the police who had stormed their campuses, dismantled their encampments, and slammed their peers and their professors to the ground in order to arrest them and others were not only deplorable. They were stained with the jouissance of the police, who either sadistically enjoyed harming students or—a generous reading—increased their violence to disavow and distance their masochistic involvement in the images, the lives, they were desecrating. If Freud is correct, the traumatizing incident is not the fact of violence itself, no matter how brutal or unjust, but rather the unconscious fantasy, which submits the spectator, the activist, and the cop to the same masochistic structure of enjoyment. Not only is this unsettling, but it also comes with the recognition that desire is at play even in our most compassionate acts of witnessing.

In the heady days of the student encampments, when student group after student group announced they were occupying their campus in solidarity with Palestinians and calling for the university’s immediate divestment from the instruments of slaughter (tech, weapons, finance), I found myself talking about the events and their significance nonstop to anyone who would listen to me. I felt, and I would often say to others, “My students are brave. They are putting themselves on the line for a righteous cause and exposing university corruption. I’m so proud of them.” My partner corrected me, “Well, they’re not your students.” She was correct. While I am a CUNY professor, and CCNY (The City College of New York) was one of the battlegrounds for divestment where students were met with brutal physical and legal force, they were not my students (as far as I know).2 I was chastened by the thought that I was overstepping, inserting myself in a situation where I had no direct, personal tie, where my protectiveness of my students might have been misguided, and from the comfort of my home and Instagram feed no less. The truth is that I still do not know if I was right or wrong to say “my students,” and part of my point is that not knowing where to put oneself is inextricable from the fantasy Freud dislodged from his patients and made a general psychic structure.

There are other ways of interpreting generalized masochism. Jean Laplanche posits the “enigmatic” or “untranslated message” as a way of distancing masochistic form from any particular content.3 He calls himself a “masochistic translator,” winking at his theory of masochistic translation: “I am perhaps a masochistic translator, but, as you know, one can be a happy masochist.”4 Long before we can speak, we are, Laplanche theorizes, bombarded by enigmatic messages, fragments of adult language suffused with unconscious enjoyment. Although we learn to speak this language, neither we nor the adults who subjected us to the enigmatic messages know how to translate the enigma. It is and remains a thorn in the ego, a lacuna wherein we fantasize about the other’s (and our) desire. According to Laplanche, we learn to desire through this enigma. In other words, all desire is masochistic desire because it spins off from the enigma that the other (the authority figure) implants in us from birth. The fantasy “A child is being beaten” is one way of giving content to a form that has no substance and is traumatizing for that reason. Its (and our) only ground is masochism.

Laplanche helps bridge the gap between the fantasy “A child is being beaten,” and the general structure of masochism. Yet what remains disturbing and provocative about Freud’s essay is its suggestion that political dissatisfaction can be extremely libidinally satisfying. Wasn’t my utterance, “my students,” an attempt to put myself there in the position of someone with something to lose? Or was it an attempt to put others there without their choosing? Masochism or sadism?

I am not convinced that what I said, although factually wrong, was incorrect, any more so than the statement “We are all Palestinians” is incorrect. While this statement is factually wrong and intolerable to the liberal mindset, which sees only particulars and aggregates of particulars, it is correct insofar as it underlines our universality, a universality defined by nonbelonging. Israel and the United States have decided that Palestinians do not belong and are sadistically murdering them to see that they don’t. Colleges and universities have decided that the student protestors for a free Palestine do not belong and are joining forces with the police to see that they don’t.5 Belonging is always a conservative wish because it depends on exclusion.6 The wish to belong is sadistic. That is why nonbelonging and the masochism that supports it is on the side of the Left.

Although masochism and sadism are often entangled, as they are in Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” they can never be identical. The choice is not whether to put oneself in the masochistic position. According to Freud, that choice is already made and replayed unconsciously. One must take responsibility for one’s masochism, identify with it, or exclude it.

The student activists chose to identify with the dispossessed. They are a model for us all.

It’s masochism or bust.