Overview
Gilles Deleuze’s “Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Le froid et le cruel,” published by Les Éditions de Minuit in France in 1967, is a philosophical study of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Its central claim is that sadism and masochism, commonly treated as a symmetrical pair of perversions under the composite term “sadomasochism,” are in fact essentially distinct systems, differing in origin, mechanism, and aesthetic. Deleuze develops this argument by moving continually between a close reading of Masoch’s texts and a critical rearticulation of post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts. In this sense the book is at once a work of literary criticism and an early instance of Deleuze’s own philosophical project, one that anticipates “Difference and Repetition” (1968) and, later, “Anti-Oedipus” (1972, co-authored with Félix Guattari).
About the Author
Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925, Paris – 4 November 1995, Paris) was one of the leading French philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Educated in Paris, he obtained the agrégation in philosophy in 1948 and subsequently taught at lycées in the provinces. From 1960 to 1964 he held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), during which time he published “Nietzsche and Philosophy” (1962) and became close to Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon, and it was during this period, following “Bergsonism” (1966), that the present book was written and published. In 1968 he defended his two doctoral theses, published as “Difference and Repetition” and “Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.” In 1969 he was appointed to the newly founded University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, an experimental institution born of the reforms following May 1968, where he taught until his retirement in 1987. It was at Vincennes that he met the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, with whom he would produce the “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” volumes, “Anti-Oedipus” (1972) and “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), among other collaborations. Deleuze suffered from severe respiratory illness in his later years and died at his home in Paris in 1995.
Sacher-Masoch and “Venus in Furs”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (27 January 1836, Lemberg [present-day Lviv, Ukraine] – 9 March 1895, Lindheim, Germany) was an Austrian writer and journalist. A prolific author widely read in his own time for fiction set in his native Galicia, he is remembered today almost exclusively as the author of the novella “Venus in Furs” (Venus im Pelz, 1870), part of an unfinished cycle titled “The Heritage of Cain.” The novella tells of its protagonist, Severin, who petitions the woman he adores, Wanda, to enter into a contract of servitude, pursuing sensual fulfillment through humiliation and domination. It was this text that furnished the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing with the basis for coining the term “masochism,” after Sacher-Masoch’s name, in his 1886 “Psychopathia Sexualis.” Deleuze’s book takes this equation of masochism with Sacher-Masoch as its point of departure, while setting out to recover precisely what that equation had obscured about the singularity of Masoch’s literary project.
Publication Background
The book’s origin lies in an essay Deleuze published in 1961 in the journal “Arguments” (no. 21), titled “De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme.” Deleuze substantially revised and expanded this earlier essay into the 1967 volume, issued by Minuit as part of its “Arguments” series. At the time, Masoch was scarcely read in France, and where he was discussed at all, it was almost invariably as Sade’s negative image or as sadism turned inside out. Deleuze’s book takes this reception history itself as an object of critique, seeking to “present” (présentation) Masoch anew as an author in his own right, disentangled from Sade. The first edition included, as an appendix, the complete text of Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” in Aude Willm’s French translation — a pairing that underscores the sense in which “présentation” meant more than commentary: it meant presenting the author himself anew to French readers. The book’s publication, during Deleuze’s tenure at Lyon and between “Nietzsche and Philosophy” (1962) and “Difference and Repetition” (1968), places it squarely within the formative period of what is often called Deleuze’s early philosophy.
Bibliographic Information (French Original)
- Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Le froid et le cruel, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, coll. “Arguments,” 1967. Includes the complete text of Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” in Aude Willm’s translation.
- Reissued by 10/18, 1974.
- Current paperback edition: coll. “Reprise” no. 15, Minuit, 2007.
Translation History
The standard English translation is by Jean McNeil, published as “Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty,” first in 1971 and reissued in an expanded 1989 edition; the 1989 edition also includes McNeil’s translation of Masoch’s “Venus in Furs.”
A Spanish translation by A. M. García Martínez, “Presentación de Sacher-Masoch” (Madrid, Taurus, 1973), also exists.
Two Japanese translations have appeared to date: an earlier translation by Shigehiko Hasumi, published as “Masoch and Sade” (Shobunsha, 1973, reissued in a revised format in 1998), and a newer translation by Chiaki Hori, published as “Presentation of Sacher-Masoch: Coldness and Cruelty” (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2018).
Content
The book’s chapters run as follows: “Sade, Masoch, and Their Language,” “The Role of Descriptions,” “How Far Does the Complementarity of Sade and Masoch Extend?,” “Masoch and the Three Women,” “Father and Mother,” “The Novelistic Elements of Masoch,” “The Law, Humor and Irony,” “From Contract to Rite,” “Psychoanalysis,” “What Is the Death Instinct?,” and “Sadistic Superego and Masochistic Ego.”
“Negation” and “Disavowal”: A Stylistic Opposition
Deleuze’s argument proceeds on two intertwined levels. The first is a matter of literary criticism proper, isolating the differences in style and technique between Sade’s and Masoch’s writing. According to Deleuze, Sade’s prose is governed by demonstrative reason, operating through “negation” — the violent nullification of existing institutions and morality. Masoch’s texts, by contrast, unfold within a suspended temporality (suspense), sustaining an ideal in a state of indefinite abeyance not through negation but through “disavowal,” a mechanism by which the imagination gives that ideal concrete, sensuous form. This movement of embodiment surfaces as what is commonly called fetishism — images of women, furs, statuesque poses, and the like.
Psychoanalytic Reformulation: The Sadistic Superego and the Masochistic Ego
The second level recasts this stylistic distinction in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Deleuze rejects the Freudian scheme in which sadism and masochism are treated as two faces of a single psychic apparatus (an opposition of superego and id), proposing instead that each has its own distinct psychic configuration: the “sadistic superego” on one side, the “masochistic ego” on the other. Alongside this, he examines how paternal and maternal imagery function differently in Masoch (the disavowal of paternal authority, the displacement of desire onto an idealized, cold mother-figure), and from this arrives at a reinterpretation of the “death instinct” as a principle common to both structures. For Deleuze, the pain at work in sadism and the pain at work in masochism are both subordinate to the repetition compulsion, a function more fundamental than the pleasure principle itself.
“Irony” and “Humor,” and the Contract
The book’s treatment of law is another of its central concerns. The sadistic subject adopts the gesture of “irony,” seeking to transgress and nullify the law outright. The masochistic subject, conversely, adopts the gesture of “humor,” submitting to the letter of the law with such excessive, literal-minded rigor that the law itself is rendered ridiculous and mocked from within. From this contrast Deleuze derives the theme of the “contract” central to masochism: unlike a punitive law imposed from without, the contract that Masoch’s protagonists conclude with their mistresses institutes suffering voluntarily, on the basis of mutual consent between the parties. Here Deleuze locates a movement from contract to “rite” — a passage into something that precedes and underlies the generation of law itself, prior to any question of punishment.
Taken as a whole, the book can be read as an attempt to reposition sadism and masochism, respectively, as a mode of modern rationalist and patriarchal domination (sadism) and a mode of resistance to it conducted through imagination, contract, and humor (masochism). At the heart of the book lies its determination to read Masoch’s work not merely as erotic literature, nor as a mere complement or inversion of Sade, but as a body of texts operating at a higher critical register.
Reception
From the time of its publication, the book was well received, including within psychoanalytic circles. In his “Seminar” XIV (1966–67), Jacques Lacan described it as the finest text ever written on masochism. Among literary scholars, Ronald Bogue has argued that Deleuze’s primary aim was not to answer traditional literary-historical questions about Masoch but rather to delineate the system of thought informing the whole of his corpus, situating the book as an attempt to rehabilitate Masoch as the author of a perverse idealism aimed at subverting the Kantian conception of law. Bogue further locates the book’s significance not only in its suggestiveness from both a psychoanalytic and a critical standpoint, but in the way it reconfigures the relationship between literature and philosophy as such.
At the same time, the book has accumulated substantial critical scrutiny. Recent scholarship, while granting that Deleuze’s emphasis on the contract accurately captures a political dimension of masochism that psychoanalysis as a theory of sexuality could not account for, has argued that Deleuze leaves unexamined the racial contract implicit in that same contractual relation — a
critique of the unmarked whiteness of the masochism Deleuze idealizes, advanced in particular by Amber Jamilla Musser in “Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism” (2014). Frida Beckman, among other scholars examining the intersections of race and power in Deleuze’s work, has raised related concerns.
Influence
The book’s influence on later thought and criticism has been wide-ranging. Its refusal to treat sadism and masochism as a simple conceptual pair, understanding each instead as a distinct configuration of power and desire, has been noted for its affinity with the analysis of power and sexuality in Michel Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” (from 1976 onward). In feminist criticism, Kaja Silverman drew on Deleuze’s account of masochism in “Male Subjectivity at the Margins” (1992) as a framework for analyzing male masochistic fantasy in film, addressing the “feminization” of the male body in the face of patriarchal authority. In queer theory, Leo Bersani draws on the book in “Homos” (1995) in his discussion of masochism as a means of disrupting normative sexuality. The book’s key concepts — contract, rite, suspense — have also served as a recurring point of reference in cultural studies of BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism) practice since the latter half of the twentieth century, providing theoretical grounds for understanding masochism not as mere submission but as a consensual reversal of power.
Within Deleuze’s own body of work, the themes this book draws out — suspense, disavowal, the death instinct — carry over, in part, into the later collaborations with Guattari, most notably into the theory of desiring-machines in “Anti-Oedipus” and the discussion of the body without organs in “A Thousand Plateaus.” The skepticism toward Freudian interpretations of desire (as reducible to personal history and Oedipal conflict) that this book articulates would be developed into a more systematic critique of psychoanalysis in the collaborative work with Guattari that followed.
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