Schulz’s Masochism and the Verbal Threshold of Shame

Masochism is deeply irrational: the masochistic subject can attain sexual bliss only when s/he has been tormented and humiliated. The essay reconstructs the sociohistorical context in which reflection on masochism has been developing. Drawing on psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Žižek), the author makes a distinction between Schulz’s private masochism and that which is demonstrated in his fiction and graphic works. All the variants of Schulz’s masochism reflect the problems of Polish Jews with assimilation, parodic references to courtly love (fin’ amors), and those elements of the writer’s biography which foreground shame that he felt as he was writing