A Threat Which Nature Allows: Bersani's Masochistic Rhetoric

Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” connects pleasure to suffering through the child’s fantasy of being beaten.

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality explains sexual perversions, childhood sexuality, and the transformation from the latter to the former through the process of sexual maturation.

Leo Bersani’s “Desire and Death” reads Baudelaire's poetry to show, mostly with Freud and removed from LaPlanche, that death and pleasure are inextricable.

Bersani’s “Is the Rectume a Grave?” recuperates for its defensive and life-preserving value the gay, masochistic lifestyle choices that manifested themselves personally and politically during the 1980s AIDS crisis.

Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art reads several of Freud’s texts alongside works of fiction and art in order to show through Freud’s emissions and omissions that masochism lies at the heart of (or is synonymous with) human sexuality.

“Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering, as a threat to the stability and integrity of the self—a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive” (Bersani 60).

I’m drawn to this sentence because of its structure, its passivity, its repetitions. I’m becoming a fan of the long dash. In a chapter called “Pleasures of Repetition,” it’s the sentence’s own threat of masochism which most intrigues me. First, the grammatical subject and verb of the sentence—“Human sexuality is constituted”—omits by its passive structure the sentence’s subject from the very sexuality being constituted. We’re led to ask, “constituted by whom?” or “constituted for whom?”—both questions the sentence answers after the long dash. But the sentence is not interested in showing by or for whom human sexuality is constituted in this first part; instead, where the preposition would be, we get the redirection of the word “as.” As it is being used here (in my sentence and Bersani’s), “as” is a comparative adverb (or an adverb of manner) which establishes a simile; this is also the case with the second time we see “as” in the sentence. The first part of the sentence can now be read as such:

Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering [is constituted], as a threat to the stability and integrity of the self [is constituted]. . .

“As” can be read, “in the same way as.” Bersani uses “as” to compare the three constitutions: “Human sexuality,” “a kind of psychic shattering,” and “a threat to the stability of the self.” The use of “as” to create similes of these objects, I argue, turns the sentence twice around those similes; the vertigo of the turns—the “inconclusive movement of perceptual verification on our part between the repeated terms” (73)—might allow us to too easily dismiss or ignore the insistent passivity and the unnarratated repetitions that the sentence twice effaces, perhaps as a “threat to the stability and integrity of the” simile and, thus, of the sentence’s rhetoric. Psychically shattered similes?

Note Bersani’s careful use of rhythm and parallel structures in this first part of the sentence to put pressure on the words “kind” and “threat.” He positions them both just after the turns of “as” and the indefinite article “a”; he positions them before prepositions. So as far as constitutions go, he’s comparing human sexuality’s to kind’s and threat’s. The noun “kind,” as in “a kind of,” means “a sort of” or “a (person or thing of a kind)” or an individual that is, or may be, included in the class in question, though not possessing its full characteristics.” “Kind” in “a kind of” does not have a constitution; it is a word that constitutes the need for another constitution. “Threat” means “a declaration of hostile determination or of loss, pain, punishment, or damage inflicted in retribution for or conditionally upon some course.” Both “kind” and “threat” point away from themselves, “a kind of” to a category or sort, and “threat” to pending violence. “Human sexuality,” the next part of the sentence shows, points to masochism. That the sentence sets up the simile, human sexuality : kind : threat, suggests we read the sentence through its displacements and re-signfications, that we should expect these turns and effacements. The sentence demands we look toward objects, predicates, and omissions (emissions?), not toward subjects, for meaning. Bersani’s rhetoric—with its constitutions buried within, its repetitions and ultimate inability to narrate its own passivity, even its big, long dash in the middle—has taken a masochistic turn.

The most apparent repetition in the sentence, the word “threat,” is, in my imagination, Bersani throwing the reader a bone, reminding her to look more closely, to play his game a little longer for a greater reward. That he chose “threat” to repeat and not any of the others is an obvious stamp of masochistic behavior: the repetition of threat. Indeed, Bersani writes just a few sentences later, “The compulsion to repeat presumably unpleasurable, repressed experience could therefore be understood as a permanent tendency on the part of the ego to resexualize its structure” (61). The “compulsion to repeat” the word “threat” and the repressed passive construction “is constituted” signify the inability to narrate the sentence’s actual pleasures: the violent constitutions.

Lining up all three of these kinds of constitutions one beside the other begs the question: who is their master? The second part of the sentence obfuscates the answer to that question when it hides the sentence’s one acting agent, masochistic nature, within an inverted sentence structure. To find the libertine in the second part of the sentence—“a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive”—I found it helpful to strip the sentence and examine it naked: a threat which nature allows. Human sexuality, the kind of psychic shattering so much like trauma it’s scary, and the repeated threat to the self: Bersani is saying that perhaps we survive them only because our masochistic nature has allowed us to survive them. We are, after all, at the mercy of our masochistic nature, the libertine, it seems, of both human sexuality and this sentence. We finally do appear as “us” at the end of the sentence, dependent for our existence in the syntax on the fact of our never being a subject, never acting, never satisfying our own rhetorical pleasures. We’ve turned up in the end “to survive.”