Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self

The Theatricalization of Love

175 The Theatricalization of Love Masochism is theatricalized love. To access what this statement may mean requires casting a patient glance at a sensitive portrayal of embodied erotic submission. A rich and potent description of this kind is offered in a novel written by the person who gave masochism its name: Leopold Sacher-­ Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870). The novel unfolds the relationship between Severin von Kusiemski—­ a self-­ proclaimed dilettante listlessly flirting with the fine arts—­and Wanda von Dunajew, a rich, young widow. Severin introduces Wanda to his fantasies of subordination to women in general—­ and to her in particular. The novel presents the progressive enactment of these gradually intensifying scenarios of humiliation. The literary merit of the novel is unrelated to imagery, plot, descriptive insight, or quality of dialogue. Its import resides, rather, in its constituting an outstandingly candid psycho-­ literary exploration into a usually hidden sphere of thought, feeling and desire. Masoch is not interested in explaining his characters. He leaves his readers unguided, inviting them to make (or not) their own sense of the bewildering world they are entering. His focus is, rather, on what his heroes do or say. Given the explicit nature of the events and the obvious way in which they draw on autobiographical material, Masoch’s disinterest in shaping or in controlling meaning-­making is remarkable. This blend of part autobiography and sustained unapologetic frankness, turns the novel into a rare gateway through which masochistic eroticism may be accessed by a philosophy of lived acting, especially when attempting to take in, rather than pathologize, the evasive phenomenology of such self-­ dramatization. Masochism’s loving aspect (and in Masoch, it is love), is one of the features that distances it from sadism—­ as does its theatricality.1 Unlike pornographic descriptions of male masochism, in Masoch’s novel, creating an erotic relationship out of pre-­ planned role-­ playing does not take the form 176 acts 176 acts of mere sexual encounters, but of prolonged enactments of roles: intimacy is being organized according to a predetermined script, in which self-­ unmaking and self-­ objectification can be willed, embraced, and offered as part of an erotic bond. To trace such connections between acting and love forms an alternative to the political or psychoanalytic discourse that has come to monopolize reflections offered in this terrain. Etiological accounts of masochism—­ the masochist as punishing a father figure by standing in for it; or as being punished by a father/mother substitute—­ attempt to understand why masochism exists. Cultural accounts—­ the male masochist as subverting or reinforcing patriarchal hegemony—­ seek to understand the political relationship of masochism to gendered hierarchies. But neither causality nor ideology exhaust the prisms through which masochistic theatricality ought to be understood. To analyze masochism through the vocabulary of a dramatic experience reveals how stylized submission may become a genuine interplay between theater and love. Apart from offering a detailed scrutiny of masochism as love, by presenting an attempt to totally theatricalize one’s life, Masoch’s work also becomes a unique meditation on lived role-­ playing. True, few actors would envy the exclusiveness and devotedness that Masoch’s protagonists exhibit in their wholesale transformation of life into theater. On the other hand, such exclusiveness itself creates a qualitatively distinct dramatic experience: unexpected dimensions of the process of animating fictions are revealed, and the limits of self-­ shaping through performance are explored. Can one intentionally turn one’s life into a play? What shape would such existence take? Could it be a blessing? Is there a point at which one’s self-­ shaping performance has gone so far that it may no longer constitute role-­ playing? Masoch’s novel gives rise to such questions;—­ not in the abstract, but in the context of a living process in which one’s happiness depends upon repeated enactments of intimacy. The Pictorial Basis of Masochism Understanding the novel’s presentment of love as a multi-­ layered theatrical process, should begin by focusing on its use of icons: the process of turning oneself into a structural component of a carefully choreographed scene. The novel’s visual and discursive dialogue with Titian’s Venus with a Mirror enables a probing of this particularly rich dimension, because the relation- The Theatricalization of Love 177 ship between Severin and Wanda both responds to and transforms Titian’s painting. The painting that the narrator accidentally sees in Severin’s...