428 / 450
428
E
UR
A
MERICA
(352). He chooses a “clumsy” saddle instead of his wife’s more
comfortable one to further his masochistic pleasure. As he goads a
stallion called “Firebird” into a frenzy gallop through the forest,
Penderton has a near-death experience. Barely able to whisper “I
am lost” and ready to give up life, Penderton “suddenly began to
live. A great mad joy surged through him” (354). As “in delirium,”
this ecstatic horse riding helps him achieve an orgasmic state and
makes him experience a kaleidoscopic vision. He feels as if “he had
soared to that rare level of consciousness where the mystic feels
that the earth is he and that he is the earth. Clinging crabwise to
the runaway horse, there was a grin of rapture on his bloody
mouth” (354). The macabre horse ride thereby becomes the
occasion for an extraordinary rapture.
This terrifying horse riding is illuminating because it signifies
Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “ex-stasy”
—
a passion of being outside
of oneself (1991: 6-7, 19-21). In writing about masochism, queer
theorists such as Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman attempt to
explore its liberating possibilities. In reclaiming “masochism” as a
privileged sexuality for the production of a new subjectivity,
Bersani deconstructs Freud and finds in him his most original and
subversive argument (“sexuality . . . as a tautology for masochism”)
that Freud fails to repress in his Oedipalized, heterosexualized, and
teleologically driven model of sexuality (Bersani, 1986: 39).
11
Silverman also sees in masochism a powerful occasion for creativity.
In
Male Subjectivity at the Margins
, she is interested in anatomizing
the kinds of male subjectivities that embrace femininity, castration,
alterity, and masochism. She links masochism to ecstasy
—
“an
identification which is a ‘rapture’ or ‘transport,’ the condition of
11
For Bersani, masochism is constitutive of sexuality (see Bersani,
Freudian Body
[1986], especially 34-47). The constitutive nature of masochism can be traced
back to the infant’s susceptibility to being violently but pleasurably overwhelmed
by stimuli. Accordingly, all of adult sexuality, not just some presumably marginal
“perversion,” is structured around the urge masochistically to repeat such
pleasurable self-shattering.