ABSTRACT
I am not just a human being, I am a piece of meat. (Shiveley, cited in Hart 1998:67)
This chapter draws together themes raised in the previous chapters-the psychodynamics of abjection and the regulation of social boundaries-in a discussion of sadomasochism (S/ M), and the ways in which it might inform modern organizing. We draw upon secondary data from empirical research into S/M and accounts by S/M practitioners to argue that this genre of sexual behaviour can be understood as allowing those who indulge to express forbidden and dangerous desires, to respond to the compulsive return of the abject. As Sellers argues, the drive emphasized and exaggerated through the ‘lust’ of sadists and masochists, ‘by which we distinguish ourselves, is the lust for death whom we worship. Morbidly do we cultivate this instinct for what extinguishes itself’ (Sellers 1992:144-5). However, this apparent death-wish is the carrying further of a basic human instinct, rather than simply being an inversion of the lust for life. It has its own integrity. Moreover, playing it out enables participants to move towards and extend their individual physical and psychological limits-that is to say, S/M has the capacity to disorganize customary understandings of self, being, the body, desire and pleasure in the sense that it exposes their socially constituted nature by bringing them into a stark confrontation with corporeality.
