Masochism Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Through an interdisciplinary approach characterized by the analysis of philosophical and literary texts as much as from the analysis of artistic expression in cinema, performing arts and painting, my dissertation explores and agitates, through the notion of masochism, the boundaries between rationality and the drives. Philosophy has always placed as its cornerstone the question of boundaries. In order to formulate a concept that could dominate the world with the power of meaning, philosophy has always 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 research, but it is also the intrinsic structure of philosophy’s nature. 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. The question of masochism, making impossible a limit between good and evil, pain and pleasure, or life and death, pushes philosophical thinking towards a question that cannot grasp any kind of response and in this way checkmates the structure of meaning that philosophy purports. Taking the work of Jacques Lacan, in particular the notion of the Real, as the basis for my analysis on masochism, my dissertation investigates so-called moments of “negativity” in order to, on the one hand, bring to light through a psychoanalytic perspective the significance that masochism has for philosophical thought, and on the other, lead to a better comprehension of the division that characterized the subject as subject of meaning as much as subject of the drives.