Perversion the Social Relation

n8Slavoj Ëizekochist. Sadism involves a relationship of domination, while masochismis the necessary first step toward liberation. When we are subjected to apower mechanism, this subjection is always and by definition sustainedby some libidinal investment: the subjection itself generates a surplusenjoyment of its own. This subjection is embodied in a network of "material"bodily practices, and, for this reason, we cannot get rid of oursubjection through a merely intellectual reflection—our liberation hasto be staged in some kind of bodily performance, and, furthermore, thisperformance has to be of an apparently "masochistic" nature, it has tostage the painful process of hitting back at oneself.And did Sylvia Plath not adopt the same strategy in her famous"Daddy"? "What she does in the poem is, with a weird detachment, toturn the violence against herself so as to show that she can equal her oppressorswith her self-inflicted oppression. And this is the strategy of theconcentration camps. When suffering is there whatever you do, by inflictingit upon yourself you achieve your identity, you set yourself free." 5This also resolves the problem of Plath's reference to the Holocaust, thatis, the reproach of some of her critics that her implicit equation of heroppression by her father to what the Nazis did to the Jews is an inadmissibleexaggeration: what matters is not the (obviously incomparable)magnitude of the crime, but the fact that Plath felt compelled to adoptthe concentration camp strategy of turning violence against herself as theonly means of psychic liberation. For this reason, it is also far too simplisticto dismiss her thoroughly ambiguous hysterical attitude towardher father (horror at his oppressive presence and, simultaneously, herobvious libidinal fascination by him—"Every woman adores a Fascist,the boot in the face"). This hysterical knot 6 of the libidinal investment ofone's own victimization can never be undone. That is to say, one cannotoppose the "redemptive" awareness of being oppressed to the "pathological"enjoyment the hysterical subject gains from this very oppression,interpreting their conjunction as the result of the liberation frompatriarchal domination as an unfinished project (to paraphrase Habermas),that is, as the index of split between the "good" feminist awarenessof subjection and the persisting patriarchal libidinal economy, whichchains the hysteric up to patriarchy, making her subordination into aservitude volontaire. If this were the case, then the solution would besimple: one should enact what, apropos of Proudhon, Marx character-