Freed From Desire. Foucault’s Conceptualization of Sadomasochism as a Practice of Liberation from the Dispositif of Sexuality

My paper will investigate the notion of S&M as a placeholder that allows us to investigate the link between power and powerlessness. As Michel Foucault maintained, S&M can be a way to free the subject from the servitude of desire because is a transforming practice “able to show unknown ways of taking pleasure in unusual parts of the body”. If, in fact, desire (as a product, for Foucault, of the dispositif of sexuality) is always socially controlled, then the pleasure of S&M can enact practices of freedom that checkmate the dispositif of sexuality itself. Drawing on the psychoanalytic account I derive from Lacan (with reference in particular to the notion of Real), I argue that the weak point of the Foucauldian analysis is the idea that the non-sovereignty of the self depends only on exterior factors. Even if Foucault acknowledges the non-sovereignty of the self (hence his discussion of multiple dispositifs), in order to resist power and social constraints (including those imposed by psychoanalysis), he ignores, or pretends to ignore, the drives that jeopardize the self as subject able to understand and control what controls him. My purpose is to show that thinking about S&M as a practice of freedom from desire misrepresents the drive that characterizes S&M itself and leads to the same paradox that characterizes western philosophy as a whole, namely the formulation of a subject without an unconscious. The question at hand will be whether it is possible identify the subject with the willful subject of philosophy or if masochism, a practice that presents itself as willful, allows us to see how consciousness is always checkmated by unconscious drives. The focus of my paper will be in showing how despite Foucault’s claim, S&M is not a willful practice of freedom but an expression of the drive.