Beyond the Human in Masochism with Deleuze and Story of O

In 1954, the sexually explicit and at times violent novel Histoire d’O or Story of O was published in Paris under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. Utilising Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will approach masochism as the central organising force in Story of O, a force that works not only against subjectivity, but against psychoanalytic and all too human binary biologisms of sexuality and experience. I ask what masochism in Story of O eradicates and invents to enhance life, where life is understood as that which is beyond, and including, the human – what cures does it propose? Through an analysis of its aesthetics (or symptoms), I argue that Story of O produces what is not already recognisable, and it is through this minor, deterritorialising use of language that “an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 7). Through masochism, O experiences a “jubilance in the loss of both power and ego” (MacCormack, 2023, p. 144) that reaches beyond human experience and perception, challenging the “false Darwinian progression that places humans at the top” (Adams 2014, p. 28). It is through this joy that one would be amiss not to call pleasure that O enters a “becoming-animal” and a “becoming-pack” in a rushing towards a “becoming-imperceptible” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 279).