SOURCE: “Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image,” in ELH, Vol. 66, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 405-37.

In the following essay, Cosgrove uses Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful to explore the connection between the beautiful and masochistic.

I.

The category of the sublime has not escaped the suspicion of concealing a sadistic component, though the category of the beautiful, tied to the sublime as a complement and an antithesis ever since Burke's decisive intervention in the history of aesthetics, has never been considered in the light of the masochistic. These hidden links are what the following paper sets out to explore through the medium of Gilles Deleuze's remarkable philosophical meditation on masochism, “Le Froid et le Cruel.”¹ While my larger goal is to speculate broadly on the ties of these aesthetic and psychological categories to each...