The Racial Contract of White Masochism

In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), his introduction of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870). Having rightly emphasized the contract as the most important political aspect of masochism, and precisely the feature that psychoanalysis, as a theory of sexuality, could not account for, I argue that Deleuze nonetheless fails to confront the racial contract that renders this masochism white. By failing to confront the racial contract that informs not only the social contract but also the sociality implicit in the masochistic contract, Deleuze idealizes masochism. Drawing from queer of color critique, and especially from the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, I show the ways in which anti-Blackness supplements the masochistic contract in the effort of the sexual parties to reach for that modality of desire that approximates death. Notwithstanding Deleuze’s powerful critique of the complementariness that psychoanalysis wrongly establishes between sadism and masochism, I conclude this article by showing how the racial contract makes it possible for sado-masochism to become complementary in this case.