Sadism and masochism

Abstract

"There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy1, often involving either painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and Deleuze2). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I instead propose a rather more speculative way of teasing out the differences between them, interpreting them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s non-oppositional typology of sadism and masochism, as it is expressed in Difference and Repetition and ‘Coldness and Cruelty’. Although a counter-intuitive typology to advocate, in what follows I will argue that the analytic tradition evinces the more sadistic tendencies and the continental tradition the more masochistic tendencies. Of course, this is not to reductively suggest that each and every analytic philosopher literally suffers, ad hominem, a sadistic pathology, which is clearly not the case – there are plenty of individual philosophers who trouble or fall between the terms of this taxonomy