Perversion the Social Relation

The Masochist Social Link 1259 Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, "Enjoy Your Fight!—Fight Club as aSymptom of the Network Society" (unpublished manuscript).10 For the most systematic exposition of these two levels, see Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).n Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: The Communist Problem (Oxford:Polity Press, 2.000).12. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of MassUtopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 144.13 Quoted from Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, 144.14 With regard to this point, the crucial figure of the Soviet cinema is not Eisenstein,but Alexander Medvedkin, appropriately named by Chris Marker "the last Bolshevik'*(see Marker's outstanding documentary The Last Bolshevik from 1993). Whilewholeheartedly supportive of the official politics, including forced collectivization,Medvedkin made films that staged this support in a way that retained the initial ludicutopian-subversive revolutionary impulse. For example, in his Happiness from 1935,in order to combat religion, he shows a priest who imagines seeing the breasts of anun through her habit—an unheard-of scene for the Soviet film of the 1930s. Medvedkuithus enjoys the unique privilege of an enthusiastically orthodox Communistfilmmaker whose films were all prohibited or at least heavily censored.