>>I agree that leftist circles may be overpopulated by men who are
bossy bottoms, which is another reason to object to 'auto-critique.'<<
I don't know if it works as another reason.
I think it might be necessary, for the sake of clarification if little else, to distinguish between three particular concepts, let's say: self-transparency; auto-critique; and self-criticism.
{and, the threat of violence that is implied in the masochistic stance is exactly that which is expressed every time leftist men insist _simultaneously_ that women should 'lead' and that those women who do not wish to take this position are traitors, not real women. the same could be said for white folks who hold a simultaneously idealised version of black people and become especially aggressive every time they are confronted with a black person who says 'this is not me'. the targets of the this leftist masochist's aggression is never really other men or other white people, just those who refuse to be their venus in furs.}
>>BTW, I don't think that S/M is 'emancipatory' or 'transgressive' at
all.<<
I'm sure this will disappoint some, but perhaps not enough. we're back to the murky issues of repetition and difference it seems, and the issues of readers and authors, irony and cynicism.
>>And the fear of _not_ getting the joke is an anxiety that
individualism capitalizes upon.<<
one could easily reverse this and say that the jokester's ability to deny complicity, hence the assumption of an individuality, is the individualism that is at work here. but I actually think that individuality, in either or these senses, is still premised upon a certain form of sociality which -- ironically -- annihilates individuality.
getting something signals a belonging, a conformism.
>> It does, however, serve to neatly theatricalize the invalid and
yet persistent problematics of non-Marxist Western philosophy that
revolve around the Individual/Civil Society (e.g. Subject/Object,
Self/Other, and Freedom/Determination).<<
but the distance which separates marxism from western philosophy is not always as clear as one would wish, especially since to claim that marxism has settled the tensions of western philosophy is to already place one squarely on the side of an idealised image of western philosophy, and not the radical materialism of marx.
>>Coming back to philosophy per se (as opposed to S/M as a
theatricalization of invalid problematics), I don't think that Sade
and Sacher-Masoch can be put into a symmetrical opposition.<<
this is deleuze's argument, and I think it's an interesting one to pursue. in two sense: there is therefore no contract that could be drawn up between the two which would be commensurate (as in the designation S&M), much like the surplus of the wage contract; and they work on very different registers as you note below.
>>They open different lines of inquiry: the former involves the
questioning of moralism while the latter may lead to the investigation
of social reproduction in terms of a dialectic of submission and
authority.<<
Kant v. Hegel?
>>See Kaja Silverman's _Male Subjectivity at the Margins _, for
instance, about the latter.<<
I'll take a look at silverman when I get the chance.
angela