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117 Deleuze with Masoch Éric Alliez 1. Whether it is a question, indeed, of being oneself, being a father, being born, being loved, or being death, how can we fail to see that the subject, assuming he is the subject who speaks, sustains himself there only on the basis of discourse? It is thus clear that analysis reveals that the phallus serves the function of signifying the lack of being [manque à être] that is wrought in the subject by his relation to the signifier. (Lacan 1966, 594–595) 2. Chatting with him, I had sought to ‘discover’ and discern in his words the truth of ‘literature,’ but now everything is blurry and I can no longer recover it. (Wanda von Sacher Masoch 1906) 3. Obviously, once again, it is more than a matter of vocabulary ... (Deleuze 1977a, 130) -1. Take the case of S.A.D.E. [...] On the background of a static recitation of Sade’s texts, it is the sadistic image of the Master which finds itself amputated, paralysed, reduced to a masturbatory tic, at the same time as the masochist Servant finds himself, develops himself, metamorphoses himself, experiments himself, constitutes himself on the stage in function of the insufficiencies of the master. The Servant is not at all the inverted image of the master, and neither is he his repetition or his contradictory identity: he is constituted piece by piece, bit by bit, from the neutralisation of the master; he acquires his autonomy from the amputation of the master. (Deleuze & Bene 1979, 89–90) A question thrown to the children of the expired century: literature, what is it for, how does it work, and so on? There is an answer that engages Deleuze into literature, in the guise of an inevitable from where it leads [d’où ça mène]: literature, when it works, serves to annul the father and his lack (of being) [manque (à-être)] and his death (Death) [la Mort](this non-being from which every negation is fuelled by a symbolisation). On the basis of this line to be drawn over the father [de ce trait à tirer sur le père], of this practical necessity of annulment, independent of any aesthetic éric Alliez 118 intention, we can state the following corollary: implicating signs in becomings that are as singular as they are impersonal, literature only moves forward by derailing, by disorganising itself, through the forces thus freed from the agency [instance] of the letter, from the neurotic principle of literary autonomy and the passion of the signifier that is manifested in it through linguistics. As an absolute un-binding of the powers [puissances] of life from the power [pouvoir] of the father, and through a radical dis-identification from the names of the Father, the critique of psychoanalysis will—by a kind of Deleuzean consequence—be indissociable from a literary clinic, replacing the scene of writing with the subtraction, the minoration of literature ‘itself’ (La littérature?). This will even be its ‘test,’ the evaluation immanent to the exercise of non-style of a literature: that words, to make a sensation, owe it to us and to themselves no longer to make ‘Text,’ in this course that would have led them from symbolism to the Symbolic by way of another trinity ... Wankers (branleurs) of the Name-of-the-father—this provocative assertion, which might have once stirred Lacan, disqualifies the ‘motérialistes’ of the labour of the signifier and other assorted logothetes of the textual act. Knowing that the French scene was haunted by the inflation of the ‘Sadean text,’ whose pornographic autonomy—‘a textual book, textured of pure writing’ (Barthes 1971, 35)62 —rushes into a sado-modernism, Deleuze acquires the autonomy of his difference with regard to the new masters (we are in 196763 ) in ‘One Manifesto Less’ (avant la lettre),64 whose first title, mixing grace and disgrace, is as follows: Presentation of Sacher Masoch: Coldness and Cruelty. (But Deleuze had already published in 1961 a very first article entitled ‘From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism.’) Through this ‘literary approach’ (Deleuze 1967,14) from which it came to be named (‘masochism’), through its retroactive effect engaging in new relations, ‘the critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense),’ through this name taken against the grain of its common, victimological meaning (Coldness and Cruelty), in order to give its due to a ‘refinement of symptomatology’ (Deleuze 1967, 16) other than the one provided by Sadean anthropology, some were shocked to...

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