The invention of sadism? : the limits of neologisms in the history of sexuality

How important is a new word for the development of newly imagined sexual pathology? In the case of the neologism ‘sadism’ at the fin de siècle, strangely, this invention was both pivotal and incidental. One of the strongest inspirations we may take from the work of Thomas Laqueur is to interrogate the role of neologisms in relation to new discursive categories in the history of sexuality. If we track sexual concepts across long periods of time, as Laqueur does for masturbation, then deeper issues of the relationship of these concepts to structures of identity, economy, teleology and modernity are revealed. But doing so requires that the neologisms invented at precise historic moments be both recontextualized in relation to earlier ambient discourses, and problematized as stable constructs in the ongoing development of their usage. This article is a sketch of this kind of genealogical work in relation to ‘sadism’, as part of a larger inquiry into how this sexuality construct became available in the post-Second World War era to the Frankfurt School philosophers, and in more sensationalized form, to countless other thinkers, writers and film makers as an explanation for Nazi genocidal cruelty (Moore, 2009). Sadistic sexual perversion as the desire of the concentration camp guard or Gestapo interrogator was a ready-made topos in the aftermath of the Holocaust, because from the moment the neologism had been invented, ‘sadism’ encompassed the slippages between even the lightest forms of fantasmagoric sexual pleasure in the pain of others, the violent cruelty of sexual murderers and the social violence of tyrannic historical figures. In unravelling these slippages, I do not want to suggest that the 19th-century construct was actively composed of several elements; rather I recognize this multiplicity of meaning as my own framework of deconstructive analysis