ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 14 number 3 december 2009

egels famous descriptions of the masterslave dialectic, and the more general analysis of the struggle for recognition that it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dialectic has been very important to almost the entire Marxist tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysis (especially Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Donald Winnicott), existentialism (especially Jean-Paul Sartre), feminism (Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin, and Judith Butler), the Frankfurt School, contemporary German theorists of recognition (especially Axel Honneth), and arguably also post-structuralism.1 As one of the most enduring motifs of contemporary European philosophy it is even arguable that it has helped to hold together the usual suspects associated with this tradition, who, as Simon Glendinning has observed, seem to lack the methodological or thematic points of convergence to allow one to attribute any kind of unity to continental philosophy.2 It is plausible to suggest that the influence of the masterslave dialectic (even where it is argued against) grounds the enduring continental attempts to positively thematize inter-subjectivity, along with the various reasons proffered for why we should not begin with an atomistic assumption of a rational, self-interested agent. Bound up with the dominance of this idea, however, has been a corresponding treatment of sadism and masochism as complicit projects that are mutually necessary for one another in a manner that is structurally isomorphic with the way in which master and slave depend on one another in Hegels (and Karl Marxs) famous analyses. In clinical diagnoses it is almost invariably asserted that sadism and masochism are causally connected, with one of these

jack reynolds THE MASTER^ SLAVE DIALECTIC AND THE SADO-MASOCHISTIC ENTITY some deleuzian objections
pathologies being seen to derive from an inversion or displacement of the other. Gilles Deleuze, however, in Difference and Repetition, Coldness and Cruelty, and elsewhere, rejects the primacy of the masterslave dialectic (and the struggle for recognition) for understanding social relations, at least in so far as it relies upon the themes of negativity, contradiction, opposition, and he also rejects the resultant treatment of sadism and masochism. Moreover, if his symptomatology of the latter (especially masochism) convinces us that the masterslave dialectic not only does not understand these ways of existing but necessarily could not, then we are faced with an important challenge to any conception of social relations that is too closely tied to the

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/09/03001 1^16 2009 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250903407492

1 1

master^ slave dialectic

dialectic of lordship and bondage as it is sometimes known. While it might be maintained that sadism and masochism are but marginal and borderline cases that do not invalidate the more normatively inclined account of the structure of social life that has been thematized by the struggle for recognition, Deleuze will also give us reasons for doubting this. This paper, then, will be composed of four main sections: i, an exposition of Hegels treatment of the master slave dialectic; ii, a selective account of later understandings of social relations that are indebted to it; iii, a recital of Deleuzes objections to the masterslave dialectic and its reliance upon three key components: contradiction, opposition, and negativity; and iv, an argument, extending Deleuzes work, for the manner in which the masterslave dialectic has also been bound up with, and made possible, the belief in a sadomasochistic unity (i.e., the way in which they are envisaged as complementary opposites, or as causally connected symptoms). Finally, in conclusion, I will argue that Deleuze is right to suggest that there are different and mutually exclusive logics and symptoms involved in sadism and masochism, differences that have tended to be obscured partly because of the influence of the masterslave dialectic. I will also suggest that this points, more generally, to problems with what might be called, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, bad dialectical thinking, although not necessarily with the dialectic per se. including developmental, phenomenological, historical, and even in relation to nation formation and the conflict that obtains between nations. This means, however, that the masterslave dialectic is not merely a fiction, an elaborate thought experiment. It also has another status in Hegels work, being claimed to be both historically evidenced and inferred as a transcendental condition to explain social life and the necessary co-imbrication of the Iwe relation. To briefly describe the key stages of this dialectic, we need to start by noting Hegels view that our desire for objects (e.g., food) and the subsequent satisfaction of this desire permits a minimal experience of self-awareness. Nonetheless, this form of self-consciousness is primitive and unstable in that it requires that we incessantly desire and absorb various other objects to keep in touch with our self. This consciousness acts with violence towards its objects and sees them as things to be consumed. On this picture, then, desire begins as a kind of natural solipsism, naively self-centred, egoistic, and narcissistic. Hegel then envisages two consciousnesses coming together and each seeing a reflection or mirror of itself in the other. Each of the parties knows that the other is another for-itself in Hegels language. The immediate reaction to this experience of the others symmetry is that it relativizes our own subjectivity; we are one amongst others. Our independent conception of ourselves is put into question and this realization constitutes a torture of sorts since we are vulnerable to a perspective that is not our own. Our identity and freedom is shown to be radically dependent on others, and for this reason, as Robert Williams suggests, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, a plunge into relationality and otherness that is a loss of the self.3 The need is felt to overcome this particularity, to reinstitute ones own universality as ground of value, and there is thus an attempt to solicit the recognition from the other of ones own absolute freedom and independence. The two interlocutors hence both try to bring their subjective self-certainty of their value to objective expression. Each desiring subject asserts its

i hegel and the master^ slave dialectic

Despite its influence, the masterslave dialectic plays quite a small role in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegels account of the development of self-consciousness via a struggle for recognition, unlike say Hobbes state of nature idea, puts the other at the heart of the self, as a condition of self-consciousness and the ability to reflect on oneself as an I. It thus initiated a revolution in thinking about social life and identity, moving us away from conceiving of ourselves as fundamentally a monadological consciousness. Instead, self-consciousness is produced through historical encounters with others, and we can understand this in many different senses,

12

reynolds
independence and self-identity by negating the other desiring subject. Most dramatically, the subject can reveal its universality and transcendence of its particular existence by risking its own life and seeking to kill the other, thus showing that the perpetrator is not tied to the preservation of their particular identity and natural animal existence but is instead invested in something greater. But, of course, the death of the other would be a false victory for the obvious reason that one cannot be acknowledged or recognized by a corpse. Each self-consciousness hence realizes that it needs both its own life and the life of the other. What Hegel calls the abstract negation of murder hence needs to be displaced in favour of determinate or limited negation. The point, then, is that one of the protagonists will back away from this struggle to the death and renounce their demand for genuine recognition of their independence, thereby also accepting that they are a dependent (slave-like) consciousness. On the other hand, the victorious protagonist succeeds in having their independence acknowledged. In a sense, they risked their life and stared death in the face in order to prove their independence. Asymmetrical relations of mastery and slavery are hence instituted, and this unequal recognition eliminates the prospect of brute violence or a literal struggle to the death. The dominant person lives for themselves (they eat and enjoy), whereas the slave works for another in order to survive. The slave is like a mirror that reflects an image of the master back to themselves (i.e., recognition that they are the master), but the master gives the slave no such reciprocal recognition but merely an image of their own desires; the slave is recognizing, while the master alone is recognized. This is not, of course, the end of the dialectical process, since another reversal takes place in which each begins to turn into its opposite. The masters victory is hollow, since they remain dependent on the slave both materially and psychically. Materially, over a period of time the master becomes a passive consumer, while the slave gets stronger and more skilled. In fact, the slave attains a certain kind of mastery in the way they are able to curb their desire, be disciplined, and develop their abilities and skills in a manner that their master never does. The lord has a desire for the object and enjoys it, but, because they do not work and produce an object with their labour, their desire lacks objectivity and is not externalized. The slave has a closer relationship to nature and a more materialized and objective manifestation of their freedom. They concretely apprehend through their activity how one can transform the world through collective labour and from this they acquire a sense of their own personal identity.4 The master is also always psychically dependent upon the slave continuing to recognize them as such. Not only is there always a chance that the slave might not do this despite the prospect of death (or, say, being sacked), but the master is inevitably haunted by the fact that they have essentially bribed the slave into acknowledging their independence. This is not the kind of recognition that the master wanted that is, recognition and respect from an equal. The master is hence confronted with a problem regarding the truth of their attempted selfassertion of their value and identity. If they believe the slave who they have extorted to flatter them, the master deludes him- or herself and lapses into false consciousness; if they do not believe the slave, they will be suspicious and paranoid. It is in this sense that the winner of the masterslave dialectic actually can be said to lose.5 If fear of death initially decided the position that each of the parties occupies in their relationship to one another, here too a dialectical reversal takes place. There is a sense in which the bravado of the master actually never really confronted the prospect of death (rather than overcame their fear of death), since the slave confronted this prospect first when they averted the struggle to the death and assented to be the slave. It is hence the slave rather than the master who has experienced their own limits and their finitude. The slave has experienced fear of death (of not being) and the absolute melting away of everything stable, something like a revelation of the essential aspects of self-consciousness, and as such is less attached to natural existence than the master. This is the basis, along with

13

master^ slave dialectic

physical labour, for an absolute negativity that can transform things and the slave gains a mind and will of their own. But despite this paradoxical reversal of the positions of master and slave, both are still what Hegel calls unhappy consciousnesses because of the relation of domination that persists between them. The master cannot gain genuine recognition of their independence and value, except that form of which they extort from the slave. The slave is dependent upon the master and is denied proper recognition of their freedom and humanity despite their skills and abilities. They are both hence unhappy and alienated. Various ideologies come to take hold to forestall the recognition of this unhappiness. Hegel describes three such ideologies: stoicism; scepticism; religion. This unhappiness and alienation can only be overcome, according to Hegel, by recognizing that my subjectivity is always mediated by my relations with others, by my being recognized within an inter-subjective context of rational interaction. In the end, Hegel envisages the two parties involved in the struggle for recognition as turning into independent craftspeople when they realize that they benefit more from rational cooperation and mutual recognition than political domination. As Williams suggests, being with the other is no longer a limitation or restriction on freedom but rather an enhancement and concrete actualisation of freedom.6 instance, that Phenomenology of Spirit contains all of the elements of the criticism concealed [i.e., his own criticisms], often already prepared and elaborated in a way that far surpasses Hegels own point of view.7 He points to the notion of the unhappy consciousness in conflict with itself as one such key point. He also mentions the struggle between noble and base consciousnesses. Marx says these sections contain the elements, though still in an alienated form, of a criticism of whole spheres like religion, the state, civil life, and the like.8 On Marxs view, Hegel also correctly sees that religion is an alienated expression of, and a protest against, the real suffering that obtains in unequal social relations. While he argues that Hegels philosophy does not address the cause of the suffering, the social conditions that prompt this false consolation, Hegels analysis in this regard clearly exerted a major influence upon Marxs critique of religion, and, although the lineage is more complicated, it also influenced Nietzsches masterslave typology of the advent of Judaeo-Christian morality.9 Likewise, we know that for Marx, as for Hegel, contradiction is seen to be a pivotal agent in historical change. Marx pays particular attention to the contradiction between two classes whose dialectical relationship to one another closely resembles that described by Hegel in the masterslave dialectic. Neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie can be properly understood unless they are considered as contradictory aspects of a single totality in which the forces of production expand through factories and socialized labour, but at the same time this conflicts with essential dependence on private property relations. Famously, the material abundance that is made possible by the former is frustrated by the latter, the anarchic inequality of the market, and the tension which obtains between them means that this economic and class divide must be overcome. ` In the 1930s, Alexandre Kojeve lectured on Hegel in Paris. At seminars attended by various French intellectual luminaries he foregrounded an existentialist (or Heideggerian) reading of the masterslave dialectic, arguing for the importance of facing up to the prospect of ones own death for freedom. Whether or not Sartre himself

ii the master^ slave dialectic after hegel

Without being able to dwell in detail upon the innumerable reinventions and revisions of the masterslave dialectic, a brief and selective sketch will suffice to intimate its importance in four areas Marxism, existentialism, feminism and psychoanalysis the last two of which are considered precisely because they are perhaps not as obvious as the first two. As almost goes without saying, Marx made extensive use of the masterslave dialectic in transforming Hegels purportedly idealist analysis into what subsequently came to be known as dialectical materialism. Marx comments, for

14

reynolds
actually attended these lectures which remain debatable their influence was profound. Sartre and de Beauvoirs differing versions of existentialism both insisted that the masterslave dialectic was central to understanding social life. We will consider Sartres work shortly, but it is too often ignored that almost all of de Beauvoirs texts are punctuated by prolific references to Hegel, and Nancy Bauer convincingly argues that The Second Sex is a strikingly original act of philosophical appropriation of Hegels work and especially the idea of the masterslave dialectic.10 After all, as is well known, and sometimes controversial, in the Introduction to this book de Beauvoir argues that otherness is fundamental and unavoidable; no group ever sets itself up as the one, or as a unity, without targeting the others who it excludes from this oneness foreigners, outsiders, the mad, etc.11 Her implication is that the self (or community) needs to distinguish itself against such otherness in order to define itself as a unitary subject (or group). She also argues that we cannot fully understand this oneother dynamic unless we posit some kind of master slave dialectic along the lines of that which Hegel, and then Sartre, have argued for that is, unless we admit that there are mutual antagonisms between people, and some kind of hostility towards other consciousnesses. When these groups come into contact, however, through wars, trading, etc., this absolute notion of otherness is lessened and its relativity is made manifest.12 The first thing they realize is that this culture has also designated them as other, and that there is hence some kind of reciprocity. Given this suggestion that the positing of an absolute Other tends to break down through contact, de Beauvoir is faced with an obvious question. Why is it that one sex has been made the norm and the other sex so consistently rendered the Other? Why is it that the reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes? Women are not a minority. Historically speaking, there seems to have been no Hegelian death struggle between men and women, so how would this situation possibly have come about? De Beauvoirs answer is that, despite its centrality, Hegels account of the masterslave dialectic leaves something out that helps to explain why women might renounce their claims to independence. To summarize, we might say that for Hegel we desire to be recognized as a subject, a for-itself. For de Beauvoir, things are more complicated than that; we desire to be recognized as an in-itself, a thing too.13 By insisting on the fundamentality of this second desire, the desire to be a thing or object, she allows us to see how and why the two sexes might have conspired together to maintain a situation in which woman is Other. All of us want recognition, de Beauvoir (like Hegel) maintains, but we want it to be achieved once and for all, rather than engage in permanent struggle; we dream, she says, of rest in restlessness.14 So, men and women conspire, in bad faith, to posit woman as intermediary what de Beauvoir calls the dream of woman, a figure who is not quite an object and not quite a free subject in an impossible effort to escape the implacability of the struggle for recognition. Men and women have conspired together to achieve a state of rest in which recognition is achieved once and for all (women recognize men), and it is not a struggle. But human beings cannot achieve permanent recognition, for de Beauvoir, and the masterslave dialectic requires the constant negotiation of competing demands and desires. Womans status as intermediary is, of course, illusory, and all who are party to sustaining this delusion tacitly realize it. It is, ultimately, an unhappy situation for all involved, even if it is clearly to the material advantage of men. The masterslave dialectic has been an important touchstone for many other parts of feminist theory, perhaps most notably Benjamin and Butler.15 It has also been influential on psychoanalysis, even if Sigmund Freuds indebtedness to it is not immediately clear. Indeed, prima facie, one important difference seems to be that the concern with self and other in Hegel (and more particularly with another persons recognition) is not as important in Freud as the ways in which desire is polymorphously shaped from the subjects point of view. There are various drives, self-preservation drives and sexual drives, for instance, which tend to go through myriad changes as they are shaped in relation to the complexes, pre-eminently the Oedipus and

15

master^ slave dialectic

castration complexes.16 Nonetheless, it seems plausible to say that, for Freud, there is constitutive or systematic misrecognition built into the mummy, daddy, me triad (concrete interpersonal others), which is thereafter invested into objects of all kinds. Indeed, the naturalizing of this familial triad is what Deleuze and Guattari object to in Anti-Oedipus. On this understanding, then, rather than fundamentally disagreeing with some of the major postulates of the masterslave dialectic, Freud would just be more pessimistic than Hegel, Marx, and others, regarding the possibilities for simple recognition. We will return to Freud in the next section in relation to a consideration of the aetiology of masochism, but with Lacan the masterslave dialectic is rather more clearly foregrounded. The childhood encounter with another (e.g., a parent), or with the mirror, makes possible reflection upon ourselves as a stable I. Lacan gives us a developmental account of how the self or ego is produced through interaction and identification with others. Moreover, as Lacan (and subse quently Zizek) keeps saying, desire is desire of the other (big Other), which is another way of saying that desire is fundamentally the desire for recognition. The big Other may not exist, isolable anywhere in the world, but, on this view, the desire for recognition from this ideal witness or tribunal is nonetheless ubiquitous. More basically, we need to identify with certain norms and social conventions in order to function within society and avoid neuroses. Another way of understanding this claim that for psychoanalysis desire is the desire for recognition (and thus can be at least partly elucidated through Hegels masterslave dialectic17) is to ask how the talking cure works, in as much as it achieves some measure of success. When someones symptoms are recognized by the analysand (who remains neutral) they are often at least partly ameliorated, and, sometimes, they even seem to disappear. For Lacan, this suggests that the symptoms (or the patients unconscious) have some kind of intrinsic need to be recognized by an other. We might also note, further, that the child desires its mother (as absent object, or lack) and that in resolving the Oedipus complex the child comes to identify with the Father (big Other) and thus wants recognition from them. Recognition, then, is fundamental to nonpathological adult life. We might also note that sublime objects of ideology, on the Zizekian politicization of Lacan, can conspire to keep us in a situation of servitude, much as Marxists have held. Ideological fantasies revolving around certain master signifiers keep us in serfdom. And, of course, for Zizek and Lacan what is pivotal to understanding this situation is the concept of jouissance, perhaps best understood as transgressive pleasure, or a pleasurepain compound of some kind. We love and enjoy authority and relationships of power that are not good for us.18 This is something that Benjamins psychoanalytic feminism also explores, with the masterslave dialectic explicitly deployed in explaining what she refers to in the singular as the sadomasochistic fantasy and the pure culture of domination.19 But the question we will return to is whether such an explanation, which invokes a single syndrome and understands it via the struggle for recognition, is adequate.

iii deleuzes objections to the master^ slave dialectic

Deleuze does not simply seek to refute all versions of dialectical thinking. Despite the reservations about the dialectic that he expresses in Nietzsche and Philosophy, in particular, Deleuze continually refers to the long history of the distortion of the dialectic.20 As the term distortion intimates, this does not entail a repudiation of the dialectic per se, but what are his reservations about this distorted version of it (which includes the masterslave dialectic)? Largely, they are to do with the manner in which it insists on understanding difference (and social conflict) through concepts like contradiction, opposition and negation, themes that are endemic to the masterslave dialectic in most of its guises, certainly in both Hegel and Sartres understanding. For Hegel, Marx, Honneth, and myriad figures in between, the opposition between the master and the slave, the landowner and the worker, is eventually supposed to be sublated and overcome, either by the movement of Geist, by material and structural

16

reynolds
transformation of the ownership of the means of production, or by a combination of the two. It is this teleological understanding of opposition and contradiction as both the cause of social transformation and the potential cure that Deleuze rejects. It is important to see, though, that it is not only the end of history grand narrative that accompanies some of the most famous versions of the masterslave dialectic, the delimitation of the future as both known and inevitable, that is called in to question. Rather, any priority given to the causal phenomena of opposition and contradiction (rather than paradox) also misconstrues difference by simplifying the complex of factors and problems that are at play.21 In fact, he suggests that the appearance of contradiction, such as in the reified contraries of the master and the slave but also any other structurally equivalent opposition, is but an epiphenomenon, a derivative ossification of a more fundamental swarm of differences (a productive multiplicity). He even provocatively tells us that contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends itself,22 suggesting again its derivative status. It is for similar reasons, as we have seen, that Deleuze and Guattari object to the Freudian model of social relations which focuses on familial contradiction (the mummy, daddy, me triad) as the key factor in the channelling of desire and the determination of the psyche, and which excludes from consideration investments in the broader social milieu.23 For Deleuze, all of these reinventions of the masterslave dialectic artificially and erroneously cut out a particular opposition from a larger milieu of overlapping perspectives, a multiplicity. The posing of an opposition or contradiction between two forces (when there is really a multiplicity of forces) is a key component in this simplification. In what sense, though, might it be said that there is a priority accorded to negativity by the master slave dialectic? Well, the other is primarily apprehended negatively, as a not-me who recognizes and apprehends a part of me that I cannot myself apprehend or control, and therefore alienates me from my transcendent projects in the world. This is certainly the case on Sartres analysis, as well as on Hegels and ` Kojeves, where the experience of this negativity is considered vital. To sum up, then, it seems plausible to claim, as Deleuze does, that the various versions of the masterslave dialectic privilege three fundamental tropes, namely contradiction, opposition, and negativity. Now these are clearly part of our experience of social life, but, according to Deleuze, they are not part of the fundamental level of desire, and the assumption that they are ensures that difference became subsumed by oppositional thinking and incommensurability became ignored. The next section will examine whether or not this is so in regard to the particular cases of sadism and masochism.

iv the connection between the master^ slave dialectic and the sado-masochistic entity: some deleuzian objections
Given the pervasiveness of the masterslave dialectic of social relations in European philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the general image of thought that it is arguably an instantiation of,24 it is perhaps not surprising, from a Deleuzian perspective, that the symptomatologies of sadism and masochism would also be conflated by many major theorists and clinicians in this period of time. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, written in 1808, portrays a dialectical relationship between self and other that privileges contradiction, negation and opposition, which are both phenomena themselves and also conceptual tools that are used to understand other phenomena. Shortly afterwards, nineteenth-century psychiatrists quickly came to refer to a sado-masochistic entity, arguing for the causal connection between these two pathologies as well as their mutual dependence upon one another as sustainable projects in the world (a sadist requires a masochist and vice versa). Is this an accident? Deleuzes work allows us to see, I contend, that it is not. The masterslave dialectic and the belief in what Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Sartre, Benjamin, and many others have called the sado-masochistic entity both rely on the tropes of opposition, contradiction, and negativity. Once we have called these prejudices into

17

master^ slave dialectic

question, Deleuze suggests that any adequate symptomatology, whether it be based on empirical data or the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, will show us that sadism and masochism are not adequately understood as opposing but mutually reinforcing modalities of being. But first, let us briefly attend to the connection between the masterslave dialectic and the positing of a sado-masochistic entity in the work of Sartre and Freud, two of the more influential theorists of the twentieth century. After all, if the masterslave dialectic (and the more general struggle for recognition) is a pivotal part of social life, and functions through negation, opposition, and contradiction, then one would suspect that sadism and masochism would be diverging responses to inter-subjective life that would find in their opposite at least a temporary solution to their respective needs and desires. Indeed, this is precisely what Sartre famously argues in Being and Nothingness. In his view, the relationship between sadism and masochism is basically equivalent with the structure of Hegels masterslave dialectic, except that Sartre, unlike Hegel, sees no possibility of overcoming this situation.25 For Sartre, we are envisaged to be perennially thrown back and forth between the attitudes of sadism and masochism in an ultimately impossible attempt to control how we are seen by others, and to eliminate the prospect of shame and alienation before the look of the other. All forms of desire and love are understood on this model, and Sartre arrives at this rather pessimistic conclusion on account of the fundamental role that he gives to the phenomenological experience of shame in the looker/looked-upon dyad on which he bases his analyses of concrete human relations. Sartre famously describes a person peering through a key-hole into the next room, entirely absorbed in their activity. Suddenly, though, they hear footsteps in the corridor behind them and they are aware that somebody is now watching them. No longer concerned with what is going on behind the door, they are aware only that they are the object of anothers look and that they are being evaluated and judged in ways that they cannot control. They are reduced to an object in that other persons perceptual field, and this, for Sartre, is the original meaning of relations with others.26 As such, the other is primarily apprehended negatively, as a symmetrical notme who recognizes and apprehends a part of me that I cannot myself apprehend or control, and therefore alienates me from my transcendent ` projects in the world. Michele Le Deouff calls this Sartres de facto solipsism.27 Although there are certain variations within the alternative roles that people might adopt as a response to the phenomenological feeling of shame, for Sartre one is essentially either the looker or the lookedat, and he insists that two people cannot simultaneously look at each other in his ontological sense. On his dialectic of social relations, the existence of a looker presupposes an interlocutor who is the looked-at, and sadism and masochism are two opposing ways of dealing with this dilemma we can constantly judge and objectify others and thereby seek to prevent the emergence of our social self, or we can try and induce others to see us exactly as we wish to be seen and thereby control their subjectivity. More to the point, a masochistic project requires a sadistic collaborator, and vice versa, even though on Sartres view both projects are doomed to failure since neither can be stably maintained. While empirical data and the literature of Sacher-Masoch and de Sade arguably undermine this analysis, since sadism and masochism seem to be more stable and enduring than Sartres account suggests, the key problem with it seems to be that certain assumptions simplify the mode of being of the masochist (and perhaps also the sadist, although that is nor our prime concern). Firstly, all is interpreted through the lens of this alienating look and an ensnared consciousness suddenly without time and history. When any particular background is given, however, it becomes clearer that what masochists generally want is not merely to be deliberately seen as an obscene object as Sartres analysis suggests (and hence to mitigate against the possibility of being surprised by how the other views us), nor to divest themselves of all subjectivity because of the anguish it induces. For SacherMasoch and Deleuze, masochism is a more complicated project than that, one that retains

18

reynolds
subjectivity and activity in the manner in which their accomplice is seduced into being a quasisadist (this term quasi is very important, as we will see), and it is this process, along with the associated rituals, that is pleasurable. Indeed, Sartres analysis gives little attention to the sense in which masochism constitutes an attempt to subvert, or play with, the typical relationship between pleasure and the law, something that Deleuzes more psychoanalytic account develops. Moreover, Sartres explanation is unable to account for Sacher-Masochs explicit desire for a third party to intervene between him and the woman he loved (and their contractual arrangements), precisely because part of what is at stake, for Sacher-Masoch, is to show how the contract that attempts to preclude this eventuality is necessarily undermined. On Sartres analysis, masochism and sadism seek to exclude the third and shore up a dyadic relationship,28 and he hence underestimates the performative dimension of masochism, the way in which a law is set up precisely for it to be problematized and turned against itself over a long period of time. That being said, opposition, contradiction, and negation also undergird Freuds psychoanalytic treatment of sadism and masochism in much the same way as they do Sartres. It is well known that Freuds meta-psychological model changed throughout his career, but less recognized is the transformation of his position on sadism and masochism which included reversing the order of priority that he thought obtained between them. In his famous 1905 essay The Three Essays on Sexuality, sadism was classified as one of the component instincts of sexuality, with masochism a secondary phenomenon, an inversion of sadism.29 In the analysis of Little Hans, Freud would not admit the existence of any kind of separate aggressive instinct alongside those sexual and self-preservation instincts. Later on in his work, however, he argued for a rather different distinction: one between life instincts and death instincts, and it was the phenomena of sadism and masochism which led to this later hypothesis and the famous positing of a death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and elsewhere.30 At this stage, he also maintained that masochism or internal cruelty was more fundamental than aggression against others. He did not completely recapitulate his earlier view in that he argued for a death instinct rather than an aggressivity instinct, but he certainly argued for the priority of the death instinct through the complex histories of moral masochism that seemed to him to point to a temporal priority of inward aggression over outer aggression. Why is masochism thought to testify to the existence of a tendency to self-destruction that is more fundamental than sadism? Basically, this is because initially there are no outer objects for the child. Sadistic desires to hurt others must hence derive from the more basic masochistic desires to harm oneself, and such desires must come from some prior instinct. Importantly, for Deleuze, Freud also suggests that the repetition of something occurs prior to its being pleasurable. As such, this repetitive principle (which he understands as a move to inertia and hence akin to the death instinct) is prior to the pleasure principle. Some measure of repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, yet when carried to inordinate lengths repetition becomes a means of throwing off adaptations and reinstating earlier psychic positions. The compulsion to repeat, for Freud, can hence be seen as the effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and also marked by the total draining of energy, i.e., death. Deleuze is quite critical of this materialist understanding of the death instinct as ultimately reducible to a desire to return to an inorganic state,31 but in Coldness and Cruelty he is attentive to this argument and is certainly more impressed with this account than he was with Freuds earlier position, which held that our sadistic drives, if unable to express themselves outwardly, would turn inward and attack the self (e.g., through a cripplingly strong super-ego and the experience of guilt). Nonetheless, as Deleuze comments:
When Freud discovered the existence of a primary masochism he made a great advance in analysis, because he gave up trying to derive masochism from sadism. It is true that the inverse derivation is no more convincing: the masochist and the sadist have no more chance of being united in the same individual

19

master^ slave dialectic

than they have of meeting each other in the outside world, contrary to what the droll story suggests.32

On Deleuzes view, both of Freuds positions presuppose an aetiological connection between sadism and masochism, and, moreover, that the one is explicable in terms of the other. In an inter-subjective sense, each is also seen as giving the other what they want; they are complementary opposites. As Deleuze points out, however, any philosophical analysis or clinical aetiology of sadism and masochism depends first of all on a good symptomatology,33 and it is the latter which he argues has been missing in the conflation that is the sado-masochistic entity. In fact, he argues that the linking of these two pathologies issues forth from a confusion of syndromes with the specific symptoms involved in the two kinds of behaviour.34 As Daniel W. Smith notes in his translators Introduction to Essays: Critical and Clinical, the components of the concept are the symptoms, the signs of the illness, and the concept becomes the name of a syndrome, which marks the meeting place of these symptoms, their point of coincidence or convergence.35 Deleuze claims, then, that sado-masochism is a crude syndrome, a badly analysed composite of symptoms that is reliant upon hasty causal assumptions. But rather than the rectification of this being solely a medical concern in which we analyse symptoms and come up with a label to explain them (such as Lou Gehrigs disease), this logic of symptoms actually requires paying attention to the novels of Sacher-Masoch, progenitor of the term masochism, as well as those of de Sade, progenitor of the term sadism. These were the two basic perversions in psychiatry in the nineteenth century, and, in a superficial but nominally accurate sense, these perversions were named after the two men who suffered these illnesses. More profoundly, however, Deleuze suggests that these authors must be seen as clinicians themselves, revealing symptoms of a way of life. He goes so far as to acclaim Sacher-Masoch, in particular, as a great clinician of civilization,36 precisely because he manages to make clear how different and

incommensurable sadism and masochism are. While Freud and Krafft-Ebbing and much of the medical profession repeatedly linked the two, hence the positing of a single sado-masochistic syndrome, literature can show us their radical differences by isolating particular ways of existing, and by giving us what we might call a more radical phenomenology that allows the differentiation of true symptoms from false syndromes that generalize. Let us consider, then, some of the main differences that Deleuze highlights between these two typologies.37 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze tells us that sadism functions by ascending to principles, but principles understood as some kind of original force, whereas masochism descends towards consequences to which one submits with all-too-perfect attention to detail, and it tends to involve demonstration by absurdity and working to rule.38 In Coldness and Cruelty, where this difference is given far more prolonged attention, sadism is said to focus on the institutions that render the law unnecessary and even obsolete. Replaced by a dynamic model of action and authority, sadism seeks the degradation of all laws and the establishment of a superior power. But, for Deleuze and de Sade alike, the impetus behind sadism is not simply the desire for power over others. Rather, it seeks to suspend what Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, calls the entire otherstructure itself.39 The key aspect of sadism consists in the idea that the law can be best transcended through a kind of institutional anarchy that ascends to reasoned principles but reasons and principles that somehow exceed and promulgate themselves and that thus question our everyday normativity. An idea is taken to extremes, compulsively repeated. By contrast, Deleuze tells us that masochism highlights the way in which it is the contract, or agreement (tacit or otherwise), between parties and people that generates the law, before then focusing in detail on the inevitability of the way in which the subsequent development of the law then ignores or contravenes the very declaration that brought it into being. For him, these are very different ways of treating and overturning the law. Rather than rely on the moral law of

20

reynolds
convention, sadism surges upwards to find rationality, living its own life, devoid of reference to custom, but masochism immanently shows the unjustifiable severity of law in the performative enaction of it. More to the point, they instantiate different ways of responding to the relationship between law (including social norms) and pleasure. As Deleuze puts it in From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism:
Generally, there are two ways of interpreting the operation by which the law separates us from a pleasure. Either we think that it repels it . . . so that we can obtain pleasure only through a destruction of the law (sadism). Or we think that the law has taken the pleasure into itself, is keeping it for itself; it is then by scrupulously devoting ourselves to the law and its consequences, that we will taste the pleasure it has forbidden us.40

This succinctly captures the different logics at stake in masochism and sadism, and suggests that they are far from complementary opposites; the fantasy of the masochist is not, for example, predominantly about a sadist inflicting pain upon them. On the contrary, according to Deleuzes analysis of Sacher-Masochs work, the masochist may not even find pain pleasurable. It is more likely that the experience of pain is a precondition of pleasure, not the same as it, and that the inter-subjective seductions and anticipations also offer a different kind of pleasure. Moreover, unlike the sadist who sees the law as needing to be destroyed for pleasure, the masochist finds pleasure in the performative dimensions of the law. They join the law in a sense, but surreptitiously subvert it from within. Both sadism and masochism, on Deleuzes account, are a response to patriarchal law, the former which seeks pleasure in the abolition of law (pleasure and law are viewed as antithetical), the latter which seeks pleasure in the law. Likewise, the attitude to fantasy is also very different. As Deleuze observes, masochists need to believe that they are dreaming even when they are not, but sadism needs to be actual for sadists to believe that they are not dreaming even when they are.41 It is difficult to see how these very

different attitudes towards the law (including social norms) and pleasure can co-exist in any given dyad, or the sense in which a causal and psychological connection might obtain between them in any single psyche. We can draw this contrast more tightly by noting that Deleuze also intimates that there is an important difference between sadism and masochism in their relation to the calculable. Number, quantity, and quantitative evaluations and repetitions are the obsessions of sadism, but they are not the focus of the more culturalist and aesthetic masochist.42 The relation to, and experience of, time involved in these two modalities is also markedly distinct, as we have already partly seen in Sartres failure to understand masochism. Although both sadism and masochism aim, according to Deleuze, to suspend the time of the living-present, they do this very differently; they involve a respective acceleration and deceleration of time.43 Things speed up with the calculations of time and the sadistic expansion of principles beyond law; the living-present becomes so compressed and hurried as to be obliterated. On the other hand, masochism is about a certain experience of waiting that tries not to anticipate or circumscribe the future by weighing it down with the expectations that are built into the habitual present. As we see detailed in Sacher-Masochs novels, both the seduction and the rituals involved may be insidiously slow, allowing a relationship to slowly transmogrify and the depth of ones co-imbrication with their interlocutor, who can never be an unequivocal master, to build and build. Upon consideration of the work of SacherMasoch and Sade, then, Deleuze argues that we are struck by the impossibility of any encounter between a sadist and a masochist.44 Not only are they different modes of being with differing logics but he also insists, contrary to Freud, that the existence of a person who is a masochist, for example (and the reverse also applies), does not imply the existence of an antagonistic sadist who inflicts suffering upon the masochist. Deleuze argues that a genuine sadist would never tolerate a willing masochist accomplice, and the whole point of masochism on his analysis is that any so-called punisher must first be educated and

21

master^ slave dialectic

seduced into behaving in a manner that he terms quasi-sadistic, which he rigorously distinguishes from sadism proper. They are more akin to separate ways of life that admit of no such clear-cut oppositionality, and the perceived failure of one of these two attitudes does not motivate us, as Sartre suggests in Being and Nothingness and Freud suggests in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, to adopt the alternative perspective. Sadism, and more particularly masochism, hence challenges the masterslave dialectic and looms as something that it cannot adequately explain without simplifying or falsifying what is involved, most notably by the positing of a sado-masochistic entity. But is it not possible that these aspects of social and sexual life might be accounted for by a new and improved version of Hegels master slave dialectic? Might it not be said that both the sadist and the masochist are tacitly involved in something like a struggle for recognition with the other in which they each attempt to attain to the universal? To put it another way, perhaps the inability to achieve mutual recognition often leads to a totalizing desire for domination, as Benjamin maintains. The move to absolute negation evinced by the sadist, and even the desire for submission found in O in The Story of O are seen by her to represent a particular transposition of the desire for recognition.45 The position of the sadist does seem able to be accommodated within the terms of the Hegelian system and its psychoanalytic developments. Likewise, Benjamins Hegelian-inspired analysis of O does make perspicuous certain features regarding why one might consent to, and even wish for, submission to a powerful other. Deleuze, however, would maintain that something more subtle is at stake with masochism proper, as opposed to the quasi-masochism he would associate with O. Recognition and social norms (law and the relation to pleasure) are precisely what is being played with in masochism, and the desire for masochistic relationships is not reducible to a desire for submission. In fact, it is the whole activepassive, powerfulimpotent binary that is disrupted. Now this is not to say that masochism is entirely outside of the desire for recognition, but that this desire is bound up with other desires (along the lines of the Freudian death drive) that are not so easily understood in terms of a battle for recognition, and that it also plays with this desire for recognition and its putative primacy. Indeed, this account of the death instinct (and associated desires, like masochistic ones) as central to life rather than opposed to it is very important to Deleuze in differentiating his view from those indebted to the masterslave dialectic, since there is a sense in which the Hegelian and Sartrean positions oppose life and death: self-consciousness is made possible by a formative encounter with the threat of death (a restricted conception of death), and the significance of life and its relation to freedom is secured through this opposition.46 This opposition between life and death is perhaps not so stable, however. What if there is this death instinct that is part of life (and not a simple aggressivity instinct), rather than something that is opposed to it, as Deleuzes appropriation of Freud maintains? This is a question that Hegels account of desire and social life does not really consider. Of course, even if it were accepted that masochism testifies to a form of desire (and inter-subjective life) that the Hegelian story does not have the resources to comprehend, it might still be responded that sadism and masochism are but marginal cases, the exception that proves the rule, which is the dialectic of recognition enumerated in so many different ways by philosophers over the last couple of hundred years. Deleuze, however, would disagree. The formal characteristics of both sadism and masochism are seen to be present, to greater and lesser extents, in all of us, and, as my reconstruction would have indicated, I think he is right about this. These two affective (and logical) tendencies cannot be thought of simply as pathological activities on the margin of normality. This does not, however, entail a direct repudiation of the masterslave dialectic or the struggle for recognition that it so evocatively describes. After all, such a view clearly captures some of the constitutive conflicts in social life and it explains a movement towards normalization and integration that is bound up with communicative action. As Jurgen Habermas and Honneth would

22

reynolds
maintain, many ethical norms do depend upon reciprocal recognition of self-conscious agency and identity. Following Deleuze in Logic of Sense, we might say that the struggle for recognition offers an important theoretical elaboration of the other-structure, which he describes as organizing and regulatory.47 On the other hand, Deleuzes philosophy and the literature of Sacher-Masoch and de Sade clearly highlight the significance of something more akin to what Deleuze himself calls the perverse structure. This structure is one that subsists beneath the sweetness of contiguities and resemblances which allowed us to inhabit the world. Nothing subsists but insuperable depths, absolute distances and differences, or, on the contrary, unbearable repetitions.48 Deleuze frequently associates this perverse structure with both masochism and the Freudian death instinct,49 and he shows that this involves a movement of desire and a structure of interpersonal relations that is not reducible to those thematized by the masterslave dialectic (the other-structure). He also wants to make the stronger claim, however, that the perverse structure is a condition for the other-structure, and it is here that I want to distance myself from him and maintain that these movements are equi-primordial. Both desires are present in us: a desire for the stable and law-like which makes possible communicative norms, as well as a subversive desire. To ignore the latter, or to attempt to explain it within a form of dialectical thinking that is ensnared by contradiction, opposition, and negation, is to perpetuate what Merleau-Ponty calls a bad dialectic.50 Likewise, however, to privilege the perverse over the normative through a sometimes illegitimate use of transcendental arguments in which a neutral order of transcendental priority also surreptitiously becomes an ethico-political one, is to risk lapsing into dogmatism. I cannot make good on this claim here,51 but suffice it to say that I think we are better served seeing their co-imbrication. In such a manner, we can be attentive to the consequences of models of social life (and thinking) that privilege opposition, contradiction, and negation, without rendering such accounts inert, sterile, or non-fundamental. To consign the desire for recognition to secondary status is not necessary, but we need to see that it is not the telos of social life. This assumption blinds us to the complicated and multifarious dimensions of sociality, desire, and sexuality, particularly those evinced by masochism.

notes
The author would like to thank Philipa Rothfield for her comments on this paper, Jon Roffe for discussions about Deleuze and masochism, and the Australian Research Council for financially supporting this research. 1 For an account that makes this plausible, see the final chapters of Robert Sinnerbrinks Understanding Hegelianism. 2 In The Idea of Continental Philosophy, Simon Glendinning has claimed that no such philosophical unity can be found. I argue against this in Continental Philosophy and Chickening Out 255^72. 3 Williams 67 . 4 Of course, Marxs critique is that this notion of personality development through labour is applicable only when the worker produces a whole chair and has some involvement in design. In the factory life that is typical of early capitalism, workers produce merely one tiny part and become an alienated appendage of the factory machine. Although factories may not be the main structural apparatus for production in late capitalism, such analyses still seem salient. 5 Williams 74. 6 Ibid. 68. 7 Marx 28. 8 Ibid. 9 This is perhaps especially evident in Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morals. While the Deleuzian interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of active and reactive forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy downplays this element, it is difficult to dispute the influence of Hegels ontological account of mastery and slavery on Nietzsches own revaluation of values.

23

master^ slave dialectic

10 Bauer. See esp. chapter 5. Much of the following summarizes her analysis, and some of the translations of The Second Sex that I cite below are also Bauers own translation rather than Parshleys. 11 De Beauvoir 16 ^18. 12 Ibid.17 . 13 Ibid.171^72. 14 Ibid.172^73. 15 See, for example, Butlers Subjects of Desire, and Benjamins The Bonds of Love and Like Subjects, Love Objects. 16 Comments like these were made to me by Philipa Rothfield. 17 Honneth does this with the work of Winnicott inThe Struggle for Recognition. 18 This paragraph and the preceding one are indebted to the interpretation of Matthew Sharpe in a guest lecture he gave for a course of mine. 19 See Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 55 and 52. Benjamin understands such fantasies and practices as fundamentally about the desire for recognition, but her account of masochism is distorted via the centrality she accords to the Story of O which, from a Deleuzian perspective, gives us the world of the sadist, with O better understood as a quasi-masochist rather than as evincing a form of masochism proper. Why this is so will become clear shortly. 20 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 268. 21 Ibid. 50. 22 Ibid. 268. 23 Deleuze and Guattari 100. 24 It seems to be a particular instantiation of what Deleuze calls the dogmatic image of thought, which functions through the categories of opposition, similitude, analogy, and identity. See Difference and Repetition 137 . 25 More accurately, Sartre sees no possibility of redemption in Being and Nothingness. His abandoned but subsequently published Notebooks for an Ethics is rather more optimistic. 26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 259. 27 Le Doeuff 62^ 63. 28 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 377 . 29 Freud, TheThree Essays on Sexuality. 30 Idem, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 31 See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 111^13. See also Widder 412. This paper also shows very well Deleuzes indebtedness to Freud, something that is hinted at in this paper but not developed. 32 Deleuze,From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism 130. 33 Ibid.125. 34 Idem,Coldness and Cruelty 40. 35 Smith xvi. 36 Inversely, doctors are themselves also said to be artists, at least in the grouping of particular symptoms together. 37 Some parts of the analysis of these differences over the next page were previously published in an essay of mine in Parrhesia: A Critical Journal of Philosophy 1 (2006) (http://www.parrhesiajournal. org), but the material on the relationship between law and pleasure has been developed since that time. 38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 5. 39 Idem, Logic of Sense 353. The perverse structure is seen here to be more fundamental than the other-structure. 40 Idem, From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism 129. 41 Idem,Coldness and Cruelty 72. 42 Ibid. 70. 43 Ibid. 71. 44 Idem, From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism 126. 45 See Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 56. 46 This is the well-made claim proposed by Nathan Widder, and I agree. See The Time is Out of Joint 413. 47 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 353. 48 Ibid. 346. 49 For more detail on this, see Kerslake.

24

reynolds
50 Merleau-Ponty 94. 51 Many philosophers disagree with me about this, but see any of these essays of mine: Transcendental Priority and Deleuzian Normativity 101^ 08; Deleuzes OtherStructure 67^ 88; Wounds and Scars 144 ^ 66; Deleuze and Dreyfus on lhabitude, Coping and Trauma in Skill Acquisition 539^59. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition. Trans. J. Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1996. Kerslake, Christian. Deleuze and the Unconscious. London: Continuum, 2007 . Le Doeuff, Michele. Hipparchias Choice: An Essay ' Concerning Women, Philosophy etc. Trans. T Selous. . Oxford: Blackwell,1991. Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel. Hegels Dialectic of Desire and Recognition. Ed. J. ONeill. Albany: State U of New York P,1996. 37^ 48. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP,1964. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford: Oxford UP,1998. Reynolds, Jack. Continental Philosophy and Chickening Out: A Reply to Simon Glendinning. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 .2 (2009): 255^72. Reynolds, Jack.Deleuze and Dreyfus on lhabitude, Coping and Trauma in Skill Acquisition. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14.4 (2006): 539^59. Reynolds, Jack. Deleuzes Other-Structure: Beyond the Master^Slave Dialectic but at What Cost? Symposium 12.1 (2008): 67^ 88. Reynolds, Jack. Transcendental Priority and Deleuzian Normativity: A Reply to James Williams. Deleuze Studies 2.1 (2008): 101^ 08. Reynolds, Jack. Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time (and the Ethics) of the Event. Deleuze Studies 1.2 (2007): 144 ^ 66. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. London: Routledge,1994. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for an Ethics. Trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1992. Sinnerbrink, Robert. Understanding Hegelianism. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007 . Smith, Daniel W. Introduction. Essays: Critical and Clinical. Ed. Gilles Deleuze. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997 xi ^ liii. . Widder, N. The Time is Out of Joint ^ And So Are We: Deleuzean Immanence and the Fractured Self. Philosophy Today 50.4 (2006): 405^17 .

bibliography
Bauer, Nancy. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy and Feminism. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. Parshley. London: Penguin,1972. Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love. London: Virago,1990. Benjamin, Jessica. Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP,1995. Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP,1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. Masochism. Trans. J. McNeil. New Y ork: Zone, 1991. 9^142. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton. New Y ork: Columbia UP,1994. Deleuze, Gilles. From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism. Trans. C. Kerslake. Angelaki 9.1 (2004): 125 ^33. Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. M. Lester. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New Y ork: Columbia UP,1983. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley. New Y ork: Viking,1977 . Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth,1986. Freud, Sigmund. The Three Essays on Sexuality. Trans. J. Strachey. New Y ork: Basic,1962. Glendinning, Simon. The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.

25

master^ slave dialectic

Williams, Robert. The Concept of Recognition in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. A. Denker and M.Vater. New York: Humanity, 2003. 59^92.

Jack Reynolds Philosophy Department School of Communications Arts and Critical Enquiry Rm 203, Humanities Building 2 La Trobe University Bundoora VIC 3086 Australia E-mail: jack.reynolds@latrobe.edu.au