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Moral masochism is performed through language, based on a sense of guilt, it is the most significant and most destructive. It is characterized by its apparent remove from sexuality and a loosening of ties with the loved object, attention being focused on the intensity of the pain, whatever its source. It is a matter of being able to sustain a certain level of suffering. Psychoanalysis has progressively shifted sadomasochism to the core of ‘normal’ individuals.

Nazism

From the moment he rose to power, Adolf Hitler implemented the National Socialist doctrine, of which one of the principal objectives was the extermination of all Jews in Europe as an ‘inferior race.’ Similarly, it was seen as necessary to remove all those considered ‘defective’ or bothersome to the social body. Thus Nazism treated homosexuality and mental illness as equivalents of Jewishness according to their theory of hereditary degeneration.

Hysteria

This condition’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that unconscious psychological conflicts are expressed in a theatrical manner and in symbolic form, through paroxysmal physical symptoms. (I mentioned them, screaming, ragged breathing, blocked diaphragm, the need to lie down on one’s back, the tendency to drop to one’s knees, the cries, indifference to being watched by others or even experiencing pleasure in it, slapping one’s own face being the epitome, an actor rehearsing in front of a mirror, crying jags, nervous breakdowns, lying on the ground, messages left on the answering machine saying “I’m begging you, please” and ending in a sort of groan, audible even on the machine.)

Desire

It is connected to mnemic traces, to memories, it is realized through the unconscious and hallucinatory reproduction of perceptions that have become ‘signs’ of satisfaction. The demand is addressed to another, it is apparently directed at an object, this object is not essential because the demand is a demand for love. Desire is directed toward a fantasy, towards an imagined other, it is the desire to be the object of another’s desire and desire for absolute recognition by another at the cost of a fight to the death, which Lacan identifies with the dialectic of the master and the slave.

Schizophrenia

A type of mental illness with symptoms that include incoherence of thought, emotion, and action thinking, withdrawal and delirious activity. A pure state of insanity characterized by the subject’s internal entrenchment. The patient, male or female, falls into such a state of delirium that he or she seems to lose his sense of reality.

Night and day, eyes staring, eyelids never raised or lowered. Attempts are made to speak with the afflicted, he or she does not hear. A shard torn from the tomb, a kind of victory of life over death or death over life. But abruptly able to stop trembling and slowly say “the angels are all white.” (According to the clinical case of Louis Lambert.)

Loss of vital contact with reality and intent on not being himself.

There is “schizophrenic art,” wild, like art made by children and primitive peoples.

Foucault refuses to make any diagnosis but finds in the madness of Artaud, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Hölderlin the final instance of the work of art: “Where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates its time of truth.”

Applications

I see myself primarily in the two statements: Paranoid individuals love their delusion as they love themselves. And: It is a matter of being able to sustain a certain level of suffering. And in others on contempt and delusions of persecution that lead to destruction.

I recall having said, in reference to Seen from Above, that rape was good, “of course rape is good, otherwise we couldn’t bear it.” There was no doubt in my mind, at the time it seemed to me to be inarguable. I was quite simply: paranoid.