ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 14 number 3 december 2009 H egel’s famous descriptions of the ‘‘master–slave dialectic,’’ and the more general analysis of the struggle for recognition that it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries. This dialectic has been very important to almost the entire Marxist tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysis (especially Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Z ˇ iz ˇek, and Donald Winnicott), existentialism (especially Jean-Paul Sartre), feminism (Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin, and Judith Butler), the Frankfurt School, contemporary German theorists of recog- nition (especially Axel Honneth), and arguably also post-structuralism. 1 As one of the most enduring motifs of contemporary European philosophy it is even arguable that it has helped to hold together the ‘‘usual suspects’’ associated with this tradition, who, as Simon Glendinning has observed, seem to lack the methodological or thematic points of convergence to allow one to attribute any kind of unity to ‘‘continental philosophy.’’ 2 It is plausible to suggest that the influence of the master–slave dialectic (even where it is argued against) grounds the enduring ‘‘continental’’ attempts to positively thematize inter-subjectivity, along with the various reasons proffered for why we should not begin with an atomistic assumption of a rational, self-interested agent. Bound up with the dominance of this idea, however, has been a corresponding treatment of sadism and masochism as complicit projects that are mutually necessary for one another in a manner that is structurally isomorphic with the way in which master and slave depend on one another in Hegel’s (and Karl Marx’s) famous analyses. In clinical diagnoses it is almost invariably asserted that sadism and masochism are causally connected, with one of these ‘‘pathologies’’ being seen to derive from an inversion or displacement of the other. Gilles Deleuze, however, in Difference and Repetition, ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty,’’ and elsewhere, rejects the primacy of the master–slave dialectic (and the struggle for recognition) for understanding social relations, at least in so far as it relies upon the themes of negativity, contradiction, opposition, and he also rejects the resultant treatment of sadism and masochism. Moreover, if his sympto- matology of the latter (especially masochism) convinces us that the master–slave dialectic not only does not understand these ways of existing but necessarily could not, then we are faced with an important challenge to any conception of social relations that is too closely tied to the jack reynolds THE MASTER^SLAVE DIALECTIC AND THE ‘‘SADO-MASOCHISTIC ENTITY’’ some deleuzian objections ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/09/030011^16 ß 2009 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250903407492 11