A Presentation of “Presentations”

Gilles Deleuze believed that Sacher-Masoch had a unique role to play. He recognized Sacher-Masoch as a great writer while masochism was for him a particularly important psychosocial feature of modernity – much more complex than a simple opposite of sadism. Reenacting and exposing his symbolic castration, the masochist subverts the traditional version of cultural identity since he shows that it comes from the Other and the Other gives it meaning. The essay places Deleuze reading Sacher-Masoch in the context of the literature of transgression and the twentieth-century changes in the understanding of masochism and human sexuality in general