You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Judith Le Soldat's Voluntary Servitude: Masochism and Morality1 arrives at a moment when our world faces an impasse of meaning and desire: it is imploding in hegemonic crusades, galloping atrocities against the weak, the poor, the dispossessed, leaving the mind oscillating between shock paralysis and psychosis. The English edition of this work (originally published in German in ) was conceived at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; it emerged from an intrusion of yet another plague, exposing crisis and rupture.
Volutary Servitude speaks directly to this condition, laying bare the psyche and its drives where psychoanalysis seemingly dares not look—the coiled presence of the ubiquitous Aggressionstrieb, the drive for destruction. Le Soldat forces us to confront the painful truth of our ambivalence: proclivity toward both servitude and freedom, cruelty and care. It is the entanglement of drive, jouissance, and social disavowal that her writing articulates with uncompromising clarity.
Judith Le Soldat emerged as an enfant terrible of the Zurich psychoanalytic scene in the 1980s and 1990s—relentless in her pursuit of psychoanalysis as a clinical, cultural, and sociological force. She is concerned with humanity's masking of its barbarism—with its pursuit of pulsional pleasure—under the guises of repression, disavowal, masochism, and selective amnesia. Precisely these unpalatable, unmediated, and ethically charged drives remain intolerable to the listening subject, ultimately to the analyst.
My own endeavor, to carry Le Soldat's acumen across the Atlantic, was nothing less than an attempt to infuse clinical discourse with the vitality of drive, a sine qua non of subjectivity. I first
encountered her work during my training at the Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich—an institute known for its audacious curricula and its commitment to the singular, often provocative, theoretical voice. The experience of being introduced to Le Soldat's thought remains vivid, almost cinematic: a di