“We believe that philosophy will not emerge unharmed from the Deleuzian adventure, but we know that it is up to us to show it and to bring it about”, wrote François Zourabichvili in the introduction to his book Deleuze. Une Philosophie de l’événement. This is an apt motto for the new issue of Multitudes, which focuses on “Masoch avec Deleuze”.
Four authors take up an article by Gilles Deleuze, first published in 1961 in the journal Arguments and reprinted for the first time now in Multitudes: “De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme” (From Sacher-Masoch to masochism). Christian Kerslake presents a very original inquiry into Deleuze’s first encounter with the concept of the unconscious and psychoanalysis, focusing on the track that leads from Bergson to Jung in Deleuze’s work. In his article entitled “Anti-Masoch”, Régis Michel, an art historian and restorer at the Louvre, proposes a “cartographie phantastique” of that which manifests itself in a “maso/miso analyse”, as he calls it. Masoch, he claims, undermines the epistemological apparatus of the Freudian unconscious, which was able to reinvent sex, but not the world: it gives way to the old demons of metaphysics, where the death drive triumphs.
François Zourabichvili, who died unexpectedly in April this year, conceives of masochism as the place where Desire, Art, and Law are articulated in the wake of Kant — and against him. Éric Alliez, who compiled the focus, follows the masochienne line at its most extreme: the annulment of the Name of the Father. For Deleuze, this is connected to an account of life of literature liberated from the passion of the signifiant and of combat against psychoanalysis, that “inhibits all production of desire”.
A second focus on “activist hoaxes” features articles by André Gattolin on a theory of hoaxes and their subversive potential; Erwan Lecoeur on the Yes Men and the hit to Dow Chemicals; and Andrea Natella, who gives an overview of the hoax in Italy, from Censor (1975) to Luther Blissett.
The full table of contents of Multitudes 25 (2006).