Masochism. A Challenge for Ethics

Philosophy has always placed as its cornerstone the question of boundaries. In order to formulate concepts that could dominate the chaos giving meaning to the world, philosophy has tried to demarcate the boundaries of everything – humanity, morality, law, nature, culture, life, and philosophy itself. The necessity for rationality’s boundaries is not just the methodology and the object of philosophical speculation, but it is, indeed, the most intimate expression of philosophy conceived as ethics. On the contrary, psychoanalysis gives an account of those moments of human existence that can be neither grasped nor understood since they are the moments in which the drives obtrude the life of the subject threatening its ethical assumptions. The enigma of masochism – making impossible a limit between good and evil, pain and pleasure, or life and death – pushes philosophical thinking towards questions that cannot grasp any kind of response and, in this way, challenge the structure of meaning that ethics affirms. Criticizing both Foucault’s and Deleuze & Guattari’s ethics of sexuality and taking the work of Lacan – in particular the notion of the Real – as the basis for my analysis on masochism, I investigates so-called moments of “negativity” in order to, on the one hand, bring to light through a psychoanalytic perspective the significance that “perversion” has for philosophical thought, and on the other, lead to a better comprehension of the division that, characterizing the subject as subject of meaning as much as subject of the drives, jeopardizes ethics itself.