Mastery and Slavery: A Masochist Falls Asleep Reading Hegel

Among the defined sexual perversions, two emerged from the literary laboratory and bear the names of authors. As is well known, the term sadism refers back to Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Leaving aside some excesses in the Lacoste ancestral castle and in Paris, Sade’s sadism basically involved a monumental prison-fantasy. For its part, the term masochism has an Austrian origin: the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), whose propensities in the waning nineteenth century were so public that the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing named the complex of sexual pleasure from pain after him. Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs can be considered masochism’s founding literary text. It appeared in 1870, and is one of his few books that still can be read with pleasure. The narrative opens on a gallant note, the initial scene being located in a salon: “My company was charming,” we read. The visitor is none other than the heroine of the title: