What would happen if a sadist met a masochist in a mountain chalet? According to an old joke, the masochist would ask the sadist to hit him, but the sadist would reply: "I don't want to." These are often two positions of jouissance that can intervene in the logic of love life and in the eroticism of sexual encounters, giving rise to fantasmatic satisfactions.
The object a is where the jouissance that does not belong to the pleasure principle takes refuge, and each partner needs the other's body to lodge it, and although the jouissances intersect, there is however no communication between them.¹

In neurosis, masochism—like any other perversion—is harboured in the fantasy and does not involve a staging as in perversion, where the fantasy presents itself only in the sexual aspect. Although the sadist elevates jouissance to the absolute, he needs a support for his jouissance.² Sade thus creates the figure of a God to incarnate it and becomes an instrument of his jouissance. Without knowing it, he enjoys as a masochist. The masochist embodies identification with the rejected object: less than nothing, less than an animal that is being mistreated, a subject who has abandoned all privileges. "Moral masochism" is the subject's aspiration: "He is treated like a dog […], like an already mistreated dog". An object that is sold, that is exchanged.³

Severino meets Wanda—sublime like the goddess Venus—and gives himself to her body and soul, making her sign a contract according to which the torture will increase over time, until he has no more room for manoeuvre. The woman, out of love, lends herself here to embody the man's fantasy and transforms him into a low-class servant. She exceeds Severino's expectations, by lodging him in the servants' quarters, without heating, with only a piece of stale bread. Physical torture becomes psychological: Wanda tells him she no longer loves him. Masochism is also doubled with fetishism: furs are necessary for the staging.
However, Wanda fails to lodge her jouissance in these practices and falls in love with a "true" man, whom she proposes to whip Severino. Being mistreated by another man is unbearable for him. Degraded like a dog, yes, but castrated by another, no. Let's not be mistaken: masochistic jouissance is pure jouissance, but detached from the feminine body, as the novel demonstrates.

Although in these two positions each one is the support of the other's jouissance, sadism is not the reverse of masochism. Following Deleuze,⁵ quoted by Lacan, we observe precise incompatibilities in this "couple." For the sadist, the victim must not enjoy the abuse: it is the coercion that gives him satisfaction. For the masochist, the fact that the tormentor "knows" how to make him suffer is not a condition of jouissance either: the masochist wants to train his own executioner.
Dupe in his manoeuvring, the sadist turns himself into the object of the Other and becomes masochistic. For the latter, on the other hand, the Other is indifferent, as long as a partner is willing to play along. The encounter between a sadist and a masochist in a mountain chalet would once again prove that there is no sexual relation.

^[1] Lacan J., Le Seminaries, livre XIV, La Logique du fantasme, texte établi par J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil & Le Champ freudien, 2023, p. 326. Unpublished in English.

^[2] Ibíd., p. 334.

^[3] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge, Polity, 2019, pp. 122–124.

^[4] [The subheading and the entire section refer to von Sacher-Masoch L., Venus in Furs, 1870. Text available online: wikisource.]

^[5] Deleuze G., Coldness and Cruelty, New York, Zone Books, 1991.