[2]Sigmund Freud, "A Child is Being Beaten," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press) vol. 17, pp.175-204.
[3]Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 201.
[4]"A Poem is Being Wriiten," Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp.177-214.
[5] Chrétien and his continuator always referred to the romance as Le Chevalier a la charrette ("The Knight of the Cart"), but the work is often called Lancelot or Lancelot du Lac, after its protagonist. The insistent insertion of the nom propre by Chrétien's critics echoes the similar demand voiced by the characters in the text to know exactly who Lancelot is, as if the name corresponded to the identity of the text - as if the corpus of Lancelot and the textus of Lancelot were one. As we shall see, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch similarly became an unwilling nom du père.
[6] Gaston Paris, "Etudes sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac," Romania 10 (1881), pp.465-96; Romania 12 (1883), pp.459-534 (where he mints the term amour courtois). Jean Frappier critiques the moralizing stance shared by Paris and Wendelin Foerster (editor of the influential 1889 edition of Lancelot) in Chrétien de Troyes, l'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris: Hatier, 1957, rev. 1968), ch. 5, but elsewhere affirms a conflict between Chrétien's morality and Marie's command ("Le Prologue du Chevalier de la Charrette et son interpretation," Romania 93 (1972), pp.337-77). Further on this "gap," see Richard L. Michener, "Courtly Love in Chrétien: The 'Demande d'amour," Studia Neophilologica 42 (1970), pp.353-60; and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, "Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot)" in The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: A Symposium, ed. Douglas Kelly (Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1985), pp.137-8.
[7] Bruckner, p.138. This "romance" is fully realized in Jerome Mandel's "Proper Behavior in Chrétien's Charrette," French Review 48 (1975), pp.683-9.
[8] Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, tr. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, rpr. 1991). 9Throughout this essay I will be playing on the ambiguity of Lancelot being Lancelot (the equivalency between the nom propre of the body of the work and that of its protagonist), so that whether in italics or not, "Lancelot" should always be understood as a jeu de mots.
[10] The quotation is taken from Gilles Deleuze, where it refers to Masoch's project in his novels, but I would like to fashion a larger claim from it. Gilles Deleuze, "Coldness and Cruelty," in Masochism, tr. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 12. [Originally published as "Le Froid and le Cruel" in Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, 1967.]
[11] I shall be drawing upon but modifying Deleuze's work in "Coldness," making it less psychoanalytic/Lacanian and more Foucauldian by embedding it (over-elaborating it) in a reading of power and its functions, without reference to the impotent triumvirate of ego, id, and superego.
[12] Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.39.
[13] See The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957, rev. 1970, frequently reprinted), pp.127-147.
[14] It would be interesting to connect this "surplus" (which will be discussed, in its Lacanian sense, later in this essay) with the interpretive surplus Marie de France plays with in the prologue to her Lais (ed. A. Ewart [Oxford: Blackwell, 1947], ll.9-16). Chrétien likewise toys with this idea of surplus as "significance" in his prologue, as we shall see.
15 "She had no tunic or coat over it, only a short mantle of rich cloth and marmot fur." Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart (Le Chevalier de la Charrete), ed. and tr. William W. Kibler (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981), ll.4580-2. Further citations by line number only; translation has sometimes been slightly modified to make it more literal. I have also consulted the various MS variations and resources recorded in <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/docs.html"> The Charrette Project </a>, most useful because it contains a searchable etext of Foerster's edition.
16Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Masochism, p. 147.
[17] As Deleuze observes, "It is essential to the masochist that he should fashion the woman into a despot, that he should persuade her to cooperate and get her to 'sign' ... The masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself" (21-2).
[18] Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.22.
[19] "Surplus," as already noted, is Marie de France's word for "significance"; she also uses it as a synonym for the sex act in her description of Guigemar's love-making: "bien lur conviege del surplus, / De ceo que li autre unt en us!" ("I hope they will enjoy whatever else / others do on such occasions," ll.533-4). See Robert W. Hanning, "'I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose': Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature," in Medieval Texts & Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), p.35.
[20] Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (1987), p. 217.
[21] "My friend, you will have to suffer."