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 discussing Edelman, for example, Reddy wants to historicize his hypothesis in order to open the possibility of subversion and non-normativity to spaces that are not dictated by sexuality. In this way, he seeks to point to networks of affinity between, say, the illegal alien and the queer. He writes that as normativity spreads, “the sinthomosexual [the equation of queerness with the death drive] is not absorbed but displaced onto other cultural subjects and figures. . . . Surely one meaning of the queer ought to be a figure that reveals the corrosive vitality of the death drive that coincides with the establishment of a universal social order.”48 In this reformulation, sexuality is not the only political frame at work; it does not amend race but allows its structure to exist with, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not, that of sexuality.
In short, this history of reading for exceptionalism has disavowed difference in its quest to decenter the subject. This is the omission that Muñoz and Reddy allude to. When sexuality is placed at the core of exceptionalism, other markers of difference are either forgotten or marginalized. What, however, would it mean to see masochism not as a practice of exceptionalism or subversion but as an analytic space where difference is revealed? Here, I would like to take a moment to reemphasize the political potential of masochism’s plasticity. Rather than speaking exclusively to subversion, this mobility allows us to see the multiple ways that people experience power and how that shapes the terms of their embodiments. We see glimpses of those spaces throughout my readings of these theorists’ concepts of masochism, but I would like to argue for another type of reading practice, empathetic reading, which would center difference, flesh, and multiplicity.
Though thinking about flesh means thinking about embodiment, it articulates a particular relationship to embodiment in that it is mediated through the social. Flesh connects bodies to the external world by emphasizing the various conditions that make bodies visible in particular ways; it is about power and difference. Historically, flesh is the province of marginalized subjects. Even before Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman is “shut up in her flesh, her home,” to equate women and racialized others with flesh was to repeat a Cartesian dualism in which the body was inferior to the mind.49 Hortense Spillers, for example, describes the transformation of black bodies into flesh as one of the artifacts of the transatlantic slave trade. Spillers writes, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. . . . Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies . . . we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding.”50 This dismembering of bodies into flesh is part of the equation of blackness with depersonalization and nonsubjectivity. Spillers argues that this traffic in bodies (and I am using this resonance with Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women” deliberately) marks the production of flesh as a tactic of domination. Flesh connotes objectification, woundedness, and a lack of agency. Yet dismissing it is also problematic. As Spillers notes, “The flesh is the concentration of ‘ethnicity’ that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away.”51 As such, flesh occupies