Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Sexual Alternatives, 18th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism, Erotic Literature - Literary Criticism, Psychology & Literature

Masochism

Name: Masochism
Author: Gilles Deleuze
ISBN: 9780942299540

by Deleuze, Gilles, Von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, McNeil, Jean

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Overview

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (b. 1835) was a Professor of History and a celebrated German novelist of the latter half of the 19th century. Here, in Venus in Furs, Masoch's most famous novel, one finds the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment and of course the perpetual and volatile presence of a terrible coldness. Yet what we actually encounter has little to do with these reductive caricatures.. "Deleuze's essay is an attempt to restore to Masoch's work the rigorous and informed philosophical examination that is due it. Deleuze's essay - the most profound study yet produced on the relations between Masochism and Sadism - seeks to develop and explain Masoch's peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity.

About the Author, Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII,Vincennes/Saint Denis. He published 25 books, including five in collaboration with Félix Guattari.