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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sado-Masochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911. By Laura Hinton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xiii + 279 pages.
In the early Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud first famously articulated his theory of sado-masochism. Over a scant few pages in an already slender volume, the father of psychoanalysis argued that the perversion of finding sexual pleasure in giving and taking pain constituted an oscillation of masculine and feminine identity within the human subject. Freud's opening salvo on the gendered meanings of sado-masochism laid the groundwork for several later influential papers, including, among others, "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," "A Child is Being Beaten," and "The Economic Problem in Masochism," not to mention perhaps his most provocative and controversial monograph, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. When it came to sado-masochism, Freud wrestled throughout his career with the question of instinctual primacy, shifting back and forth between arguing either that passive-feminine masochism or active-masculine sadism represented the original instinctual drive from whence its opposite number derived. In an adjacent section of the First Essay, where sado-masochism made its initial appearance in his oeuvre, Freud put forward his theory of scopophilia and exhibitionism--perversions closely related to sado-masochism--in which the subject derives pleasure from watching and performing sexual acts. This section, even briefer than the first, has proven enormously influential to later scholars, particularly an entire generation of feminist film theorists--including Laura Mulvey, Ann Kaplan, Teresa de Lauretis, and Constance Penley--intent on deconstructing the Freudian line on (male) vision, power, and sexuality, especially as it has apparently been made manifest in mainstream Hollywood cinema.
While expressing intellectual camaraderie with her feminist predecessors, in The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy Laura Hinton has made a significant contribution to the critical literature of vision and sado-masochism by doing something strikingly original, namely widening the historical and intellectual range of feminism's scopo-sexual concerns. What distinguishes Hinton's work is her ambition to demonstrate the hitherto neglected conceptual relationship between Freud and an unlikely coterie of eighteenth-century thinkers, the British philosophers of sentiment and sympathy, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Embedded in the philosophical writings of Locke, Hume, and Smith, Hinton asserts, is a preoccupation with sympathy and what sympathy means for human relationships. Far from an innocent and virtuous emotion that brings individuals into closer connection with one another, Hinton argues that sympathy, of necessity, requires the objectified distancing of one human subject from another that functions, in effect, like both "masculine" sadism and scopophilia. Indeed, if Hinton were to revise Freud's First Essay on sexual perversions, she might very likely add a section on sympathy. Closely related to her views on sympathy and sadism, Hinton demonstrates that fictions of sentiment and realism--the former...
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