The courtly lover’s narcissistic illusion conceals from him the traumatic strangeness of  ‘the Freudian Thing’.

Another way in which courtly love betrays its link with masochism is its emphasis on strict performance of codes. Masochism is to be distinguished from sadism in that it is a contract between two parties, in which the supposed victim is giving the orders, unlike sadism, in which the torment is uncontrolled.

The sublime lady-object (a ‘concrete maternal object of need’) is produced by the endless skirting of the target (the ‘unserviceable Thing’). The same paradox of detour is discernible in the phallic signifier, as it ‘stands both for the immediacy of jouissance and for its refusal (castration), so that jouissance can be reached only through the endless succession of symbolic desires. Thus the very agency that entices us to search for enjoyment induces us to renounce it.

The lady is a name for the Real that continually evades the grasp, a negative feature that functions as a positive one. She is pursued precisely because she is forbidden illustrating the notion of ‘the imp of the perverse’ (Edgar Allan Poe) a something done with no motive other than that it is prohibited, hence, a kind of subverted Kantian choice that has no ‘pathological’ motive.

The knight’s relationship to the Lady is thus the relationship of the subject-bonds-man, vassal, to his feudal Master-Sovereign, who subjects him to senseless, outrageous, impossible, arbitrary, capricious ordeals. It is precisely in order to emphasize the non-spiritual nature ofthese ordeals that Lacan quotes a poem about a Lady who demanded that her servant literally lick her arse: the poem consists of the poet’s complaints about the bad smells that await him down there (one knows the sad state of personal hygiene in the Middle Ages), about the imminent danger that, as he is fulfilling his duty, the Lady will urinate on his head…. The Lady is thus as far as possible from any kind of purified spirituality: she functions as an inhuman partner in the sense of a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires; as such, she is simultaneously a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random. This coincidence of absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the Lady her uncanny, monstrous character – the Lady is the Other which is not our ‘fellow-creature’; that is to say, she is someone with whom no relationship ofempathy is possible. This traumatic Otherness is what Lacan designates by means of the Freudian term das Ding, ‘the Thing’ – the Real that ‘always returns to its place’ , the hard kernel that resists symbolization.
The idealization ofthe Lady, her elevation to a spiritual, ethernal ideal, is therefore to be conceived of as a strictly secondary phenomenon: it is a narcissistic projection whose function is to render her traumatic dimension invisible. Deprived of every real substance, the Lady functions as a mirror to which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal. In other words – those of Christina
Rossetti, whose sonnet ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ speaks of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s relationship to Elizabeth Siddal, his Lady – the Lady appears not as she is, but as she fills his dream’s. For Lacan, however, the crucial accent lies elsewhere: The mirror may an occasion imply the mechanisms of narcissism, and especially the dimension of destruction or aggression that we will encounter subsequently. But it also fulfils another role, a role as limit. It is that which cannot be crossed. And the only organization in which it participates is that of the inaccessibility of the object. (Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 151.)

About Masochism – Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze demonstrates that masochism is not to be conceived of as a simple symetrical inversion of sadism. The sadist and his victim never form a complementary ‘sado-masochist’ couple. Among those features evoked by Deleuze to prove the asymmetry between sadism and masochism, the crucial one is the opposition of the modalities of negation. In sadism, we encounter direct negation, violent destruction and tormenting, whereas in masochism negation assumes the form of disavowal – that is, of feigning, of an ‘as if’ which suspends reality. Closely depending on this first opposition is the opposition of institution and contract. Sadism follows the logic of institution, of institutional power tormenting its victim and taking pleasure in the victim’s helpless resistance. More precisely, sadism is at work in the obscene, superego underside that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the ‘public’ Law. Masochism, on the contrary, is made to the measure of the victim: it is the victim (the servant in the masochistic relationship) who initiates a contract with the Master (woman), authotizing her to humiliate him in any way she considers appropriate (within the terms defined by the contract) and binding himself to act ‘according to the whims of the sovereign lady’, as Sacher-Masoch put it. It is the servant, therefore, who writes the screenplay – that is, who actually pulls the strings and dictates the activity of the woman (dominatrix): he stages his own servitude. One further differential feature is that masochism, in contrast to sadism, is inherently theatrical: violence is for the most part feigned, and even when it is ‘real’, it functions as a ·component of a scene, as part of a theatrical performance. Furthermore, violence is never carried out, brought to its conclusion; it always remains, suspended, as the endless repeating of an interrupted gesture.

Masochism confronts us with the paradox of the symbolic order qua the order of ‘fictions’: there is more truth in the mask we
wear, in the game we play, in the ‘fiction’ we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask. The very kernel of the masochist’s being is externalized In the staged game towards which he maintains his constant, distance. And the Real of violence breaks out precisely when the masochist is hystericized – when the subject refuses the role of an object-instrument of  the enjoyment of his Other, when he is horrified at the prospect of being ‘B’ reduced in the eyes of the Other to objet a; in order to escape this deadlock, he resorts to passage l’acte, to the ‘irrational’ violence aimed at the other.

The psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love. (Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912))

BUNUEL – THE OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

The tradition of Lady as the inaccessible object is alive and well in our century – in surrealism, for example. Suffice it to recall LUIS Bunuel`s The Obscur Object of Desire, in which a woman, through a series of absurd tricks, postpones again and again the final moment of sexual reunion with her aged lover (when, for example, the man’ finally gets her into bed, he discovers
beneath her nightgown an old-fashioned corset with numerous buckles which are impossible to undo … ). The charm of the film lies in this very nonsensical short circuit between the fundamental, metaphysical Limit and some trivial empirical impediment. Here we find the logic ofcourtly love and of sublimation at its purest: some common, everyday object or act becomes inaccessible or impossible to accomplish once it finds itself in the position of the Thing – although the thing should be easily within reach, the entire universe has somehow been adjusted to produce, again and again, an unfathomable contingency blocking access to the object.

Bunuel himself was quite aware of this paradoxical logic: in his autobiography he speaks of ‘the non-explainable impossibility ofthe fulfilment ofa simple desire’, and a whole series offihns offers variations on this motif: in The Criminal Lift ofArchibaldo de la Cruz the hero wants to accomplish a simple murder, but all his attempts fail; in The Extenninating Angel, after a party, a group ofrich people cannot cross the threshold and leave the house; in The Discreet Chann of the Bourgeoisie two couples want to dine together, but unexpected complications always prevent the fulfilment of this simple wish … It should be clear, now, what detennines the difference with regard to the usual dialectic of desire and prohibition: the aim of the prohibition is not to ‘raise the price’ of an object by rendering access to it more difficult, but to raise this object itself to the level of the Thing, of the ‘black hole’, around which desire is organized. For that reason, Lacan is quite justified in inverting the usual formula of sublimation, which involves shifting the libido from an object that satisfies some concrete, material need to an object that has no apparent connection to this need: for example, destructive literary criticism. becomes sublimated aggressivity; scientific research into the human body becomes sublimated voyeurism; and so on. What Lacan means by sublimation, on the contrary, is shifting the libido from the void of the ‘unserviceable’ Thing to some concrete, material object of need that assumes a sublime quality the moment it occupies the place of the Thing.

ERIC ROHMER – MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD

We encounter a more refined variation on the matrix of courtly love in Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit chez Maud: courtly love provides the only logic that can account for the hero’s lie at the end. The central part of the film depicts the night that the hero and his friend Maud spend together; they talk long into the small hours and even sleep in the same bed, but the sexual act does not take place, owing to the hero’s indecision – he is unable to seize the opportunity, obsessed as he is by the mysterious blonde woman whom he saw the evening before in a church. Although he does not yet know who she is, he has already decided to marry her (the blonde is his Lady). The final scene takes place several years later. The hero, now happily married to the blonde, encounters Maud on a beach; when his wife asks him who this unknown woman is, the hero tells a lie – apparently to his detriment; he informs his wife that Maud was his last love adventure before matriage. Why this lie? Because the truth could have aroused the suspicion that Maud also occupied the place of the Lady, with whom a brief, non-committal sexual encounter is not possible – precisely by telling a lie to his wife, by claiming that he did have sex with Maud, he assures her that Maud was not his Lady, but just a passing friend.

Fragments of The Metastases of Enjoyment, Slavoj Zizek