Sadism is the failure of desire, and desire is the failure of sadism

Sadism is the failure of desire, and desire is the failure of sadism. The expression condenses a cycle in which each attempt to overcome the distance between oneself and another person undoes its own aim: sadism tries to possess the other’s flesh, but instrumental control cannot capture the freedom that makes the other a subject; desire, in turn, risks abandoning reciprocity by seeking possession. The failures are connected, not separate: each pursuit can tip into the other, and neither secures the completed appropriation it seeks.

The Failure Built into Desire

Desire begins in an embodied relation. A person’s own incarnation can awaken the other’s body as flesh, but the movement changes when that person seeks to take possession of the other’s body. The reciprocity of incarnation breaks: instead of remaining troubled by the other’s embodied presence, the pursuer surpasses their own body toward possibilities that would appropriate the other’s flesh. This is where desire turns toward sadism—not as an unrelated impulse, but as a peril contained within desire itself. The opposite peril arises when someone becomes absorbed in their own disturbance and asks nothing of the other except to serve as the look through which their own flesh is realized. In either direction, reciprocity gives way to appropriation.

Sadism’s Instrumental Contradiction

In sadism, control proceeds like a technical experiment: the sadist calmly tries instruments one after another, as a locksmith tests keys. The scene seems governed by determinism, since the right means appear to promise an automatically attained end. Yet that end depends on the other person’s free and complete cooperation, so it remains at once predictable and unpredictable. What the sadist seeks is therefore contradictory: an outcome produced by calculated technique that must also appear as an unconditioned act of freedom.

The contradiction reaches its visible limit in the victim’s abjuration, when freedom appears to choose its own submergence in flesh. The body pants, occupies a position imposed by the torturers rather than one it would assume spontaneously, and is held inert by cords. It becomes flesh, but the spectacle is not simply the triumph of control: the body is also the image of a freedom broken and enslaved. The sadist’s apparent success depends on a freedom that the act simultaneously seeks to overcome.

Why the Project Disintegrates

Sadism’s failure is also built into the effort to turn flesh into an instrument. An instrument points beyond itself toward a use, a future, and a network of other means: a hammer, for example, has its place because nails and a picture to be hung give it a task. But flesh, as unutilizable facticity, cannot remain flesh once it is subordinated to such a purpose. The attempted complex of flesh-as-instrument therefore disintegrates: technical use converts the body into an instrumental thing, while the body’s fleshliness resists being integrated into the system of purposes that would make it useful.

The contradiction becomes decisive at the moment of apparent achievement, when the sadist has before him a panting body. Its incarnation has made its absolute contingency visible: it is there, but there is no goal that can be assigned to it. The sadist can neither grasp it as flesh nor incorporate it into an instrumental order without losing the very materiality he sought to possess. What remains is disconcertment and contemplative astonishment, or a return to embodied disturbance—to the level where flesh is disclosed to flesh. As sadism approaches its goal, it gives way to desire.

The two projects thus expose each other’s limit. Sadism fails because possession cannot preserve the body as flesh while making it a usable object; desire fails when the attempt to take the other’s body breaks the reciprocity on which embodied relation depends. The book describes satiation, or so-called physical possession, as a way out of their circle: sexual tumescence manifests incarnation, while entering into or being penetrated symbolically realizes the sadistic and masochistic attempt at appropriation. Yet pleasure does not fulfill either project. It ends both desire and sadistic passion without satisfying them, leaving the expression’s reversal intact: neither pursuit can attain the completed possession it promises.

Freedom Beyond the Sadist’s Reach

A further failure lies in the object the sadist ultimately seeks: the victim’s transcendent freedom. The more persistently the sadist treats the other as an instrument, the more that freedom escapes. It can be acted upon only after being made into an objective property of the other as object—a worldly freedom reduced to dead possibilities. But the sadist seeks to recover his own being-for-others, and the only other available in this assault is the other as an object in the world, whose images of the sadist’s violence cannot deliver the freedom he wants to possess. Control can produce a spectacle, but it cannot secure the other as a free subject; the contradiction that drives the expression therefore remains unresolved.