Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs book pdf download

Author: Gilles Deleuze

About the Author: Gilles Deleuze (French Gilles Deleuze) (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and the fine arts from the early 1950s until his death in 1995. Plateau 1980, co-writing both with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be one of his greatest creations. Philosopher Adrian William Moore ranks him among the “greatest philosophers”, citing Bernard Williams’ criteria for a great thinker. Although he has described himself in the past as “pure metaphysics,” his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Gilles Deleuze, along with many Marxist-inspired neo-Spinosists such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, was one of the key figures in the great flowering of Spinoza studies in continental philosophy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (or the rise of French Spinoism post-structuralist-inspired), which was Spinoza’s second revival in history, after Neo-Spinozism of great importance in German philosophy and literature in about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Deleuze’s preoccupation with and reverence for Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. As Pierre Macherry stated, “An important part of Deleuze’s work is devoted to reading philosophers: Stokes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc. But an individual position on this list will be assigned to Spinoza, because of the philosophical interest with which he corresponds.

Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs book pdf download By Gilles Deleuze

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze’s essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch’s ”peculiar way of ‘desexualizing’ love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity.” He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them—Masoch and Sade—lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part. Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch’s novels, was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here—fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness—these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch’s eroticism.

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