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Sadism and Film:
Freud and Resnais
condition, for the sake of which the subject will even willingly expe
rience the unpleasure of pain." The masochist, shattered into sexuality
by the pain he at once suffers and enjoys, then adds, "retrogressively,"
"the sadistic aim of causing pains" to his original aim of achieving
mastery over another person, and he does this in order to prolong or to
renew his masochistic pleasure "through his identification of himself
with the suffering object" (14:128-29). But the sexualizing pain on
which this new sadism depends throws into question the original
sadism towhich, Freud argues, it is belatedly added. If, as Freud puts it
in theThree Essays, "all comparatively intense affective processes, in
cluding even terrifyingones [spill over into] sexuality," (7:203) is it
not likely, indeed inevitable, that the "unpleasure" caused to the ego
by the "outpouring of stimuli" from the external world had already
introduced the subject tomasochistic pleasures, without, as itwere, his
having first to go through the three-stage process of an instinctual vi
cissitude? In other words, the very drive to exercise mastery over the
world can only be conceived of as a response to thepleasurable pain of
having been overwhelmed by stimuli from the outside, a response that,
as we can now see, may be complicated by a sexual motive. If the sex
ual vicissitude of hate is originally, as we argued a moment ago, a self
preservative defence on the part of the ego, the self-preservative in
stinct itself is perhaps "tainted" by an erotic complicity with the very
threat to self-preservation.
There is, as itwere, no logical moment in the subject's life for the
non-sexual sadism of stage one. This naturally collapses Freud's cher
ished opposition between the ego instincts and the sexual instincts, an
opposition perhaps cherished for its capacity to obscure some danger
ous truths.For it turnsout, on the one hand, that self-preservationmay
not be as simple and as unambiguous an instinctas we tend to thinkof
it, and, on the other hand, that the "love" thatpresumably attaches us
to objects may not be so different from the self-preservative "hate"
thatwould eliminate objects. For the Freud faithful to his own nor
malizing sexual orthodoxy, love may be "hardly to be distinguished
from hate in its attitude toward the object" in the pre-genital stages,
but, happily, once "the genital organization is established," love fi
nally does "become the opposite of hate." He does, it is true, in the
paragraph following this assertion, remind us that love "frequently
manifests itself as 'ambivalent'-i.e., as accompanied by impulses of
hate against the same object." The explanation he gives for this is, in
terestingly enough, not only that the component of hate "is in part de
6 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
rived from the preliminary stages of loving which have not been
wholly surmounted"; he also refers to "reactions of repudiation by
the ego-instinct, which, in view of the frequent conflicts between the
interestsof the ego and those of love, can find grounds in real and con
temporarymotives. In both cases, therefore, the admitted hate has as
its source the self-preservative instincts" (14:139).
But even this extraordinary passage does not go far enough. For, in
implicitly collapsing the opposition between ego-instincts and the
sexual instincts, and in grounding that collapse in the sexualizing ef
fect of the "outpouring of stimuli" from the external world as well
as in the derivation of such sexual vicissitudes as sadism and ambiva
lent love from the ego's self-preservative efforts to get rid of objects,
the subtext of "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" gives us a forbid
dingly dense rationale-we might almost say apology-for human de
structiveness. The admixture of hate and love in our object-relations is,
most profoundly, not the result of "the frequent conflicts between
the interests of the ego and those of love"; rather, such ambivalence is
in the ego's erotic interest. Shattered masochistically by the external
world's "outpouring of stimuli," the ego, in hating others, self-pro
tectively re-creates the passion of its own imminent disintegration.
The authentically self-preservative move is in the projection and the
identification: in sexual sadism, the ego ecstatically suffers at a dis
tance. In fact, the infliction of pain on those we love could be thought
of as a necessary deflection of the self-shatteringpleasure they give us,
as our resistance and surrender to the eroticizing stimuli with which
those we love bombard us. Hate allows us to be destroyed once again
by the world-or rather, this time to play at being destroyed
through our identification with the pain of those we would master.
In a sense, then, "instincts" have no "vicissitudes." Not only is
the dualism of ego-instincts and sexual instincts of dubious value;
such classificatory notions as "reversal into its opposite" and
"turning round upon the subject's own self' obscure the fact that we
merely stage differential repetitions of that original situation in
which an infant's fragile ego is at once nearly overwhelmed and born
into sexuality by stimuli it is not yet able to "contain." There is a
passing recognition of this fundamental identity of all the stages
throughwhich an instinct is said to pass when Freud notes that "the
only correct statement tomake about the scopophilic instinctwould
be that all the stages of its development, its auto-erotic, preliminary
stage as well as its final active or passive form, co-exist alongside of
Sadism and Film 7
one another; and the truthof this becomes obvious," he adds crypti
cally but profoundly, "if we base our opinions, not on the actions to
which the instinct leads, but on themechanism of its satisfaction"
(14:130).
Indeed, by the time scopophilia is discussed, themonotonous per
sistence of thatmechanism has become clear.With sadism-masochism,
a final paragraph subverted the original outline of a process leading
from sadism tomasochism by suggesting that sadism is a projected
masochism, although Freud persists in seeing thismasochism not as
originary but "retrogressively" affecting the sadism of stage one. "A
primarymasochism, not derived from sadism in themanner I have de
scribed, seems not to be met with." Only a footnote added in 1924 (and
no textual modification) informs the reader that "in later works (cf.
'The Economic Problem ofMasochism.' 1924c) relating to problems
of instinctual life I have expressed an opposite view" (14:128). In the
case of scopophilia and exhibitionism, it is immediately after outlin
ing a three-step process inwhich the first step is "looking as an activ
itydirected towards an extraneous object" thatFreud reverses himself
and announces, for the scopophilic instinct, "a yet earlier stage than
thatdescribed as (a). From the beginning of its activity the scopophilic
instinct is auto-erotic: ithas indeed an object, but thatobject is part of
the subject's own body." Not only is this preliminary stage
"interesting," as Freud notes, "because it is the source of both the situ
ations represented in the resulting pair of opposites" (just as both
sadistic and masochistic relations with others could be said to derive
from the originary masochism that allows us to survive, even to find
pleasure, in the imbalance between the ego and external stimuli); "the
mechanism of its satisfaction" is (again, as in sadism and masochism)
returned to in stage three,when the auto-erotic pleasure is given again,
this time by someone else's look (14:129-30). Sexuality, far from sus
taining the object-relations intowhich it inevitably draws us, continu
ously brings us back to the ego, to the auto-eroticism which others can
stimulate but to which they are essentially irrelevant. Others-more
generally, the external world-by impinging painfully on conscious
ness, initiate us to a solipsistic jouissance, and if our sexual life keeps
returning us to others, it is perhaps-and perhaps ideally-to coerce
them into providing us with a pleasure fromwhich their image can be
excluded.
The middle section of "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" should
alert us to the a-symmetry of the essay's beginning and concluding
8 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
cally linked to aggression against the self and against others.With the
Freudian death instinct, the fragile analytic fantasy of a nonsexual
sadism (step one of the three-step process described in "Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes") benefits from a fantastic promotion to the status
of a biological inheritance. Throughout his laterwork Freud will con
tinue to insist on what he calls in Civilization and Its Discontents "the
ubiquity of non-erotic aggressiveness," even though, in that 1930
work, he is forced to recognize that the satisfaction of aggressive in
stincts "is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissis
tic enjoyment" (21:121). Can we repudiate, or destroy, objects outside
of a relation-a relation of passion-to them?
model not theirmother but their own selves.' Most women, according
to Freud, love narcissistically. And object love in heterosexual men is
partially motivated by a nostalgia for the narcissism they have pre
sumably given up. Strongly narcissistic women (similar in this to chil
dren, great criminals in literature, 'cats and the large beasts of prey')
'have the greatest fascination formen . . . as ifwe envied them for
maintaining a blissful state of mind-an unassailable libidinal posi
tion which we ourselves have since abandoned' (14:89). Thus in the
very best of cases (which, inFreudian terms,would mean cases of post
Oedipal genital heterosexuality), the sexual always involves a turning
away from the other."4
But this turningaway from is equivalent to an erotic concentration
on the object. It is as if any strong interest in others inevitably in
12 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
(which has been themost important source for our thinking about the
identificatoryprocess). And more specifically, might therebe a type of
narcissistic identification in our responses to art for which neither
psychoanalytic theories of narcissism nor psychoanalytic approaches to
art have been wholly able to account?
though he and Sonya never quite begin an affair. This trio becomes a
quartet with the arrival of Helen Wiener (Elaine Stritch), presumably
a former lover of Claude. From the very beginning of the film, it is
hardly any secret thateverything is being invented by Clive. The whole
thing is frequently presented as a first draft, with scenes that are
erased just after having begun, or re-played to get a more satisfactory
version. Gielgud's off-voice provides a running commentary on his in
ventions, which also include largely unexplained scenes of collective
violence. There are explosions that are apparently manifestations of
some terroristviolence in the city, and we see the police rounding up
people and herding them into an enormous stadium. The fictive nature
of all these events is underlined by such things as the cardboard back
drop of beach and sea in scenes thatare meant to suggest a terrace over
looking the sea in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a terrace the characters enter
and leave through a door on the other side of which is a house in a
(probably European) city. Characters also enter a building with a neo
classical facade and an International Style interior. In one scene, it is
even Clive's voice that comes out of Sonya's mouth for a moment.
When Helen firstopens the door of her hotel room, it leads directly to
a corridor; when she opens it to let inClaude, there is, to our surprise, a
staircase leading down to the door. Kevin's brother, a famous foot
baller, jogs through several scenes, including the one inHelen's hotel
bedroom.