At initial glance, masochism appears to be counterintuitive for any discussion of maternity endeavoring to provide a tactical model for the liberating emergence of a new, autonomous maternal subject outside or beyond paternal control. The perverse schema of masochism seemingly justifies and extends the subjugation of the maternal figure specifically to the Law of the Father behind the otherwise fallacious and fantastical promise of transcendence achieved through permanently forestalled jouissance. Julia Kristeva has argued that what is commonly termed maternal masochism is merely a “form of anonymity that preserves the social norms” (Reference Charnon‐DeutschCharnon-Deutsch 1994, 170), commenting that “such close combat between maternal masochism and the law [has] been utilized by totalitarian powers of all times to bring women to their side, and, of course, they succeed easily” (Reference KristevaKristeva 1985, 150). What Kristeva identifies and objects to in regard to maternal masochism is an apparent passivity inherent in the structure that seemingly places the mother in a subservient role to that of patriarchy and the Law of the Father. This sentiment is echoed by numerous critics of masochism, where the predominant argument against the form of perversity is precisely that it serves as a codified exemplar of a nonprescribed, heteronormative ideal that is reterritorialized in order to supplement paternal law.

In this essay, I counter these dominant viewpoints regarding the liberating possibilities of a theory of maternal masochism through an exploration of Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby (1967). I argue that masochism—specifically that conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989)—typifies the experience of maternity represented within the novel and offers the maternal body the possibility of negotiating the phallogocentric economy. Specifically, I posit that the performance of masochism produces a “new” subject not in the service of the father, but rather beyond paternal law completely. This emergent subjectivity is the result of a perverse disavowal of the material conditions impressed upon the maternal body that is enacted and engendered by way of an ethical encounter with the unknowable child. In disavowing the Law of the Father, the maternal masochist becomes a law unto herself and molds the child in her own image, only to have her own identity altered in the process. This adaptation of Deleuzian masochism holds interesting possibilities for feminist philosophy, specifically theories of maternity, because it challenges the perceived inherent passivity of motherhood, and furthers projects, such as those of Lisa Guenther, that promote “nonpatriarchal meanings of motherhood” (Reference GuentherGuenther 2006, 9). Promoting this version of maternal masochism is not to glorify or gloss over the real material subjection of the maternal body, but to illustrate how the sacrifice of the mother can be utilized and revisited as a means of attaining a level of autonomy.

Deleuze's Masochist

In Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze argues that masochism, contrary to the traditional Freudian interpretation, is the desexualization of an object of libidinal attachment that is nevertheless retained by the psyche in a performance of conscious and tactical disavowal (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 117). Deleuze makes clear that pain is not sexualized by the masochist, whereby it would be reintroduced as a libidinally invested object, but instead pleasure is continuously disavowed (120). Repetition of the masochistic fantasy does not aim at the attainment of pleasure, but instead the act of repetition is resexualized and pleasure forestalled indefinitely, “better to be recovered as a reward or consequence, and as a law” (120). In Deleuze's schema, the “pain” the masochist receives is distributed by a maternal figure so that the fantasy shared by the two parties becomes a “utopian affair between a severe maternal mother and her son, a pact to disavow the father's phallus and the mother's lack and write the father out of his dominant position” (Reference RamsayRamsay 1992, 159).

Unlike traditional permutations of masochism, each of which retains the constant presence of the paternal or masculine function within the masochistic register, Deleuze's schema relies on the productive capability of fantasy and the transference of paternal law onto the mother.Footnote ¹ Contrary to sadism, which “achieves exclusive power in the father,” in Deleuze's revision the masochist, typically male, creates a symbolic order of fantasy centered on a heroine who embodies, both literally and figuratively, a host of maternal images (Reference StudlarStudlar 1988, 17). The performance of the heroine in the masochistic fantasy vacillates between the poles of the “sadistic woman” who is cold and brutal, and the hermaphroditic female who represents unencumbered femininity and sexuality (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 47). Most important, according to Deleuze, these disparate forms of femininity embodied by the masochistic heroine correspond directly to distinct images of maternity that, by way of the masochistic ritual, help the masochist “restore identification and oneness with her and be reborn into a ‘new man devoid of sexual love’” (Reference StudlarStudlar 1988, 43).

This rebirth, which is engendered by the masochistic fantasy where authority is distributed onto the maternal figure, results in the “new” a‐phallic subject and the production of a creature outside and beyond the phallic order.Footnote ² The masochist no longer identifies “with the phallic power of the father” but “finds its ego ideal in the mother” (Reference KoepnickKoepnick 1999, 127). Phallic desire is resexualized through constant disavowal, which allows for “an intrinsic transformation of energy,” a creature no longer encompassed by phallic determination (Reference De Bolle and De BolleDe Bolle 2010, 149). Deleuze's schema of “masochistic transcendence” is singular to the masculine subject, whereby he “clothes” the heroine in the image he desires and controls the parameters of the masochistic contract. These clothes, the “fur and velvet,” suspend the realization of sexual difference and the paternal threat of castration (Reference Geyskens and De BolleGeyskens 2010, 108). The father is therefore foreclosed from the masochistic fantasy, replaced by a pre‐Oedipal mother without lack that “births” not a man or woman, but a creature indicative of an “other sexuality than the genital one that is directed towards satisfaction and always refers to reproduction and to the role of the father” (109). The feminine, as indicative of the whole of the Western philosophical tradition, is a vessel for masculine transcendence and is barred from the opportunity to be reborn “anew” herself. What form then would the female masochist take in the symbolic economy of the fantasy? If the maternal figure is so crucial to the “rebirth” of the masochist, can Deleuze's theory be reformulated, as he did with Freud's, to include a maternal rebirth through a masochistic performance?

This essay will work toward a reevaluation of Deleuze's conception of masochism in order to arrive at a theory of performative mothering that allows for the “rebirth” of the maternal figure achieved through a reconstitution of the child's identity. The following will resituate Deleuze's formula of the male masochist/female torturer dyad to reflect the interaction between biological mother and infant, and illustrate how the masochistic fantasy enables not only the child but also the mother to signify outside the confines of the phallogocentric representational economy.

Deleuze's theory of the three syntheses of time offers a crucial compendium of the liberating potential of masochism; Deleuze's syntheses argue that “times are made in multiple synthetic processes” and “time is the result of the syntheses and not the other way round” (Reference WilliamsWilliams 2011, 3). Deleuze's first synthesis is the “living present” or habitus, and states that the human perception is the binding or contracting of numerous distinct phenomena into organized strata that constitute the “living present” (Reference Turetsky, Buchanan and SwibodaTuretsky 2004, 144). Whereas the first synthesis is a passive repetition that gives rise to “independent presentations” (146), the second, derived from Bergson, focuses on memory, namely the difference “in nature between the active memory—this is the psychological memory that makes recognition, reflection and representation possible—and the passive memory,” which is “pure or virtual memory” (Reference De Bolle and De BolleDe Bolle 2010, 139). In short, the second synthesis of time emphasizes the autonomy of the “pure past” as something cosubstantial with the living present, a virtual element to the actuality of experience. It is this “pure past” that the individual, according to Deleuze, must “delve” into in order to separate the libidinal drives from “original” objects and traverse the fantasy of wholeness (Ferenczi and Rank, quoted in Reference FaulknerFaulkner 2006, 46).

The third and final synthesis is engendered by this very process of installing oneself into the pure past and results in a cut or a fracture in time that reorders time and brings about the eternal return of pure difference. This cut is produced by a revolutionary or “excessive act” that separates the past from the future; in this formulation the past is “the time where one is not yet capable of the act” (Reference VossVoss 2013, 235–56), the present is a period of “becoming‐equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act,” and the future denotes the period in which the excessive act returns to the subject and dissolves its identity (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1968, 89). In the third synthesis of time, after taking part in the momentous act, the self is split and its older form dissolves, becoming “the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act” (89).

It is this very fracture, a splitting of the self into something wholly new, that, I argue, is possible through the performance of masochism. The “mining” of the pure past that is indicative of the second synthesis is a correlative of the masochistic disavowal of sexual difference in relation to the mother. The masochist “clothes” the female torturer in order to return to the “symbiotic relationship between the male child and the oral mother of the pregenital stage” (Reference Philips and HusseyPhilips 2006, 112). Tamsin Lorraine explains the production of the event or caesura by alluding to Deleuze's example of Hamlet: “to murder his uncle, Hamlet must become a self that would have made no sense to the self of the old order” (Reference LorraineLorraine 1999, 38). The masochist, however, through interaction with the maternal figure, produces a “new” man, an asexual creature with no correlation to the previous self.

Rosemary's Baby

Ira Levin's gothic horror novel Rosemary's Baby utilizes the trope of monstrous pregnancy in order to comment on the use of reproductive technologies to ensure the production of a heteronormative future that secures the proliferation of the dominant social formation. The novel centers on Rosemary Woodhouse, an ideal mother‐in‐process who closely resembles Kristeva's Western fantasy of sacred femininity, who finds herself enveloped in a plot to impregnate her with the son of Satan and thereby bring about the reign of the anti‐Christ.

The first half of the novel is concerned primarily with Rosemary's attempts to get pregnant with her struggling actor husband, Guy. Yet amid the apparent congeniality of their lives, we begin to see the productive sexuation and hystericization of Rosemary at the hands of her neighbors, the Satan‐worshipping Minnie and Roman Castevets. Just as Michel Foucault locates the decline in population during the Victorian period as the catalyst for the “technical incitement to talk about sex” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1978, 23), following the “accidental” death of their first host (Terry), Roman and Minnie focus on preparing Rosemary for pregnancy. Minnie, who comes to serve as a maternal figure for Rosemary, offers incessant advice on the subject and redirects every conversation back to the prospect of pregnancy, while Guy, who has joined the coven himself, puts “red circles on the calendar” to indicate when Rosemary is ovulating (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 76).

Complementing the coven's politicization of sexual conduct is the way in which the formation creates a discourse of reason and rationality that structures reality in such a way that it legitimizes the hystericization of Rosemary and makes it possible for the coven to regulate and control her body. Once it is clear that Rosemary is indeed pregnant, she is coerced into visiting the obstetrician Dr. Abe Sapirstein, a ranking member in the satanic coven, who then initiates a second and more pervasive discursive network that simultaneously shields Rosemary from any competing ideology and categorizes her behavior during the gestation process as psychotic. Dr. Sapirstein systematically instructs Rosemary not to look at books concerned with maternity and not to “listen to [her] friends either” because their conflicting opinions regarding her pregnancy challenge the rationality of the coven's discourse (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 115). Furthermore, when Rosemary begins to suffer from extreme abdominal pains and confides in Sapirstein that she thinks it is an “ectopic pregnancy,” he warns her again to dispense with all of her motherhood texts and assures her that the pain is normal (118). When Rosemary begins to challenge the rationale, she is deemed mentally ill and is drugged by Sapirstein before being confined to the Bramford apartment building. Once Rosemary begins to threaten the stability of the coven's project, she is categorized as deviant, and the discursive network that once operated relatively passively is now afforded the ability to “cure” her deviance through regulation and discipline.

The discourse of sexuality and rationality that we observe in the novel works toward establishing a structure of normative principles that coerces Rosemary into willingly participating in the optimization of her maternal body by reproductive technologies. Having established that Rosemary is a threat to the coven's ultimate goal, Minnie begins to intervene directly as she sets up a stringent routine in which every morning Rosemary will ingest a homemade “milkshake” that will aid in her pregnancy. As Levin describes, following the conception of the child, “each morning at eleven Minnie brought over what looked like a watery pistachio milkshake” that is characterized as “cold and sour” (117). When Rosemary questions Minnie about the ingredients of the milkshake, she refuses to reveal its specific contents, only implying that it will facilitate the birth of a son and not a daughter (117). The “milkshake” becomes a recurring theme throughout the novel that serves to comment on the way that reproductive technologies, in this case something that aids in the production of a specific subject desired by the social formation, strip women of what was once considered the locus of feminine power.

Initially, the narrative of Levin's novel is concerned with a woman whose identity is libidinally intertwined with the desire to reproduce, a desire that is subsequently appropriated and reterritorialized by the coven in order to ensure the production of the anti‐Christ. However, supplementing this strictly Foucauldian depiction of biopower is a complex representation of two maternal figures central to Deleuze's masochistic formula: the primitive hetaeric mother and the beloved Oedipal mother. According to Deleuze, of all the differing permutations of female torturer that are present in Sacher‐Masoch's corpus, they are all variations of two feminine constructs: the hetaeric woman, who is the “generator of disorder,” and the sadistic woman, who is a patriarchal construct in service of the masculine (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 47). For Deleuze, the narrative of the masochist “is enacted in between these two extremes” so that they “do not represent the masochistic ideal but rather the end points between which this ideal swings, like the span of a pendulum” (50).Footnote ³

According to Deleuze, the aforementioned figures of femininity present in the masochistic fantasy correspond to three distinct “images” of maternity that form a symbolic order that disavows the paternal function. The hetaeric mother is chaotic and disruptive to the patriarchal order in her complete disavowal of masculinity, whereas the Oedipal mother represents the arrival of the paternal function and the castration necessary to enter the Symbolic Order (Reference SchafferSchaffer 1990, 55). The hetaeric or uterine mother represents a surplus of sexuality, whereas her counterpart, the Oedipal mother, is the manifestation of utmost coldness and distance that is linked to the figure of patriarchal control (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 55). The “ideal” for the female torturer is the oral mother, an amalgamation of the two maternal figures, which engenders “a single momentary Aufhebung” that transforms the son (Reference BogueBogue 2007, 11). What is crucial to understand from Deleuze's conception is that the oral mother is as much a creation of this event as the a‐phallic man due to the fact that the woman achieves the role of oral mother precisely by facilitating the rebirth. This rebirth is ultimately predicated on the adoption of these disparate techniques by the heroine in order to expunge the father from the masochistic fantasy.Footnote ⁴

Hutch and Minnie

Deleuze's first maternal figure is that of the Oedipal mother who is in congress with paternal authority and represents the threat of sadism in the masochistic fantasy (Reference De Bolle and De BolleDe Bolle 2010, 106). The Oedipal mother in Deleuze's formulation is at once castrated and yet whole due to the fact that she possesses phallic power in relation to the paternal figure and the Law of the Father, since she herself is the maternal image that has been constructed through the prism of patriarchy. In Levin's novel, the Oedipal mother correlates with the figure of Minnie Castevet, the elderly tenant of the Bramford apartments and the matriarch of the satanic coven, who is not only associated with her husband, Roman, the leader of the cult, but with the devil himself.Footnote ⁵ As with Deleuze's Oedipal mother in the masochistic triumvirate where the “mother‐representative is the accomplice and the young girl is the victim,” Minnie is the representative of satanic power within the novel, even more so than her husband, and Rosemary is that very mother‐in‐process, the victim, who is conditioned in the image of the phallic mother to bring forth the offspring of the devil (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 61). Minnie is represented as whole in several ways; most notably she is aware of how Rosemary's baby should be raised, constantly monitoring its progress during gestation, providing herbal remedies to ensure its health, and suggesting the proper obstetrician (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 117).Footnote ⁶ It is precisely the Oedipal or phallic mother accompanied by the paternal function who impresses upon the heroine her sadistic traits, always threatening and attempting to condition the heroine to become a replica of her (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 48–49).

The second of Deleuze's mothers coalesces in the figure of Edward “Hutch” Hutchins, Rosemary's friend from New York, who plays an integral part in exposing the Bramford coven conspiracy and is ultimately murdered by the Castevets as a consequence. Despite the fact that he is a man, he serves as a maternal figure for Rosemary after her traumatic schism from her home city of Omaha, where “she had left an angry, suspicious father, a silent mother, and four resenting brothers and sisters” (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 14). During her time before moving to the Bramford, Hutch had “bucked her up with strong tea and talks about parents and children and one's duty to oneself” and “sent her to a night course in philosophy at NYU” (15). As with Deleuze's hetaeric mother, the “mother of the cloaca and the swamps” who threatens to disrupt the paternal function, the emphasis that Hutch places on “duty to oneself” is one of the first instances of his intrusion and disruption of patriarchal authority as he constantly collides with Guy's vision of how Rosemary should act. Throughout the novel, Hutch is consistently that recollection for Rosemary that compels her not to conform to the prescribed identity set forth by the satanic coven and her husband, and he ultimately becomes that “voice” of memory from outside the symbolic network that they have created that threatens to destabilize their plan.

However, though Hutch serves as a maternal figure for Rosemary during the early portions of the novel, it is his influence on the heroine after his death at the hands of the coven that allows him to become a destabilizing force. In the novel, the Bramford apartment building serves as a closed symbolic register that is represented as an inversion of typical reality. Rosemary is consistently hystericized by Minnie Castevet, who shields her from the rational discourse of doctors other than Abe Sapirstein. Hutch is precisely a representation of the semiotic in this instance because he introduces a necessary counter‐discourse into the hegemony instituted by the coven in the Bramford apartments, but one that is indirect and never merely a contrasting representation. From the moment that Rosemary and Guy decide to move into the apartment building, Hutch is suspicious, not only of the Bramford itself, but of its occupants, leading him to give Rosemary a book titled All of Them Witches that details the history of Adrian Marcato, a nineteenth‐century Satanist who is subsequently revealed to be the father of Roman Castevet, the leader of the coven. Even after his demise, Hutch lingers within Rosemary's psyche, situated on the margins of her memory, returning as a semiotic presence in order to inform her actions.

Hutch's influence on Rosemary is framed within the novel not so much as a “voice” from the past in her head, but as a feeling or impulse, a sensation that causes her to be suspicious of the coven as well. Here, the correlation among the semiotic realm, the archaic mother, and the figure of Hutch become even more pronounced as all three function to introduce multiple meanings into language and disrupt signification. Prior to Hutch's intervention, there was no ambiguity or counter‐discourse to influence Rosemary; it is only through Hutch that there is a necessary disruption in the coven's symbolic order. However, it is important to keep in mind that Deleuze's hetaeric mother is not the masochistic ideal, which is a collaboration between the two essential maternal figures. The hetaeric mother represents disruption and chaos to the patriarchal order, yet, I would argue, she is a mother only in the sense that she gives birth to the child and not due to a responsibility to the Other. Masoch's hetaeric mother, March, disappoints and ultimately shatters the masochistic relationship because she embodies the role the masochist wants “up to a point, but which she stops playing when she refuses to wear the fox skin and wears instead ‘prostitutey’ clothes, i.e., those of the hetaeric mother” (Reference Sinzelle, Preston and HoareSinzelle 1989, 169). The hetaeric mother, like Hutch, emphasizes “duty to oneself” rather than a responsibility to the Other, which is necessary to counter the Oedipal discourse of paternal control, yet doesn't present an ideal model of maternity as a practice and as a performance (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 15).

One cannot make the mistake of placing these two maternal figures, the hetaeric and the Oedipal mother, in the typical binary opposition of “good” and “bad” mothers. On the one hand, the hetaeric mother, as we have seen, is individualistic, the primitive mother who represents fertility and is chaotic and more concerned with destabilizing the foundations of the patriarchy. The Oedipal mother, on the other hand, can easily be viewed as the “good” mother in that she produces a son in the image of the father and reproduces patriarchal control. However, each of these represents opposite ends of the maternal spectrum and presents characteristics that the heroine, in our case Rosemary, must navigate in order to truly construct her own version of maternity.

The forms of maternity indicative of Deleuze's schema coalesce into a figure that completely banishes the necessity of the paternal function. The Oedipal mother is associated with the patriarchy, yet her authoritative position is necessarily incorporated in order for the maternal body to occupy a role of power within the symbolic network created by the masochistic contract. When Rosemary takes ownership and names her son at the conclusion of the novel, she embodies the Oedipal mother's authoritative position, yet simultaneously debases the father by changing the name to one of her choosing. Here we see the incorporation of not only the Oedipal mother, but the hetaeric mother as well. The hetaeric mother, who emphasizes duty to oneself and corresponds to the chaos of the semiotic, is a necessary counterpoint to the stringency of the Oedipal mother who is in service to the child and the father completely. The influence of the hetaeric mother stresses individuality and selfhood, which is crucial in order for the maternal body not to be subsumed completely by the child or the paternal function. When Rosemary chooses to mother, she binds her identity to her son, but not at the expense of her own, instead choosing a hybrid identity, a dual selfhood.

The Maternal Masochist

In order for the maternal subject to be born anew through the production of an a‐phallic child, she must first undergo a symbolic and figural death, a subjective reterritorialization that conditions her for the performance of maternity that creates the caesura in time. This very death, as Deleuze illustrates in Difference and Repetition, takes essentially two forms: death as “the disappearance of the person, the reduction to zero of this difference that constitutes the ego” and death that is related primarily to the transcendental nature of the death instinct, that “radical outside” that is imposed from the exterior (Reference De Bolle and De BolleDe Bolle 2010, 13). Deleuze clarifies the distinction in Cinema II: The Time‐Image, claiming that the second is “death from the outside” or an affirmation of the death instinct (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1985, 214) that opens up unto the “third synthesis of time where the future is conceived not only from the past but also from the future as such, the future of the eternal return of death and rebeginning” (Reference PistersPisters 2012, 145). Deleuze's main example of the progression from personal death to that of the death drive is the character that is likened to Lazarus, who “returns from death, from the land of the dead; he has passed through death and is born from death,” then begins to move “inexorably towards a death from the outside, which comes to him as the other side of the absolute” (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1985, 214). The subject in between the two deaths is “an instantiation of a people yet to come,” a zombie or undead creature that is “the actualization that something has both happened and is happening” (Reference Wallin and JagodzinskiWallin 2012, 265–66).

Specifically as it pertains to the maternal body, the Deleuzian first death applies to the trauma of birth and the transformation of that body from a subject‐on‐trial, where the body's “unity is called into question by the other within,” to a maternal subject (Reference OliverOliver 1993, 13). This corresponds to the sacrifice that Kristeva discusses in Revolution in Poetic Language, whereby the sacrificial act “puts an end to previous (semiotic, presymbolic) violence” in order to totalize the chaotic motility of the semiotic into the strata of the symbolic (75). The rupture of the subject‐on‐trial, the mother/child dyad, is essentially the creation of the social order through the instituted repression of the death drive whereby the symbolic “confines semiotic violence by means of the symbolic law” (Reference KeenanKeenan 2005, 36). This sacrifice establishes a metonymic relationship between the sacrificed and the deity, whereby the former can consistently be replaced, the sacrifice performed ad infinitum (39). In the case of the mother, the child is theologized as that for which all are subjected and all discourse is coordinated and categorized as “for” or “against” the child (Reference EdelmanEdelman 2004, 3–15). Yet the mother, having experienced this initial “death,” becomes the scapegoat, the sacrificed materiality that establishes the symbolic, and therefore, like Kristeva's poet, comes to interiorize the very death that founds the social order.

Symbolically oversaturated and disciplined to be a mother, the result of the traumatic birth of the self within is a subject between two distinct poles of identity; she is neither merely a woman in that she has become pregnant, yet she is not fully recognizable as a mother having not yet performed the prescribed duties. In short, this maternal‐body‐in‐process, which is distinct from Kristeva's subject‐on‐trial, comes to figure in the “intermediate space of the unrepresentable Thing” of the undead that Slavoj Žižek identifies in Interrogating the Real (Reference ŽižekŽižek 2005, 157). Žižek terms this “undead” form that is the surplus produced by over‐symbolization as the lamella, or that “indestructible‐immortal life that dwells in the domain ‘between the two deaths,’ that emerges as the ultimate object of terror” (160).

This death conditions the maternal‐body‐in‐process for the very “push” into the “pure past” that Deleuze claims is indicative of the second synthesis of time and is necessary for the detachment of libidinal investment. To return briefly, Deleuze promotes an action whereby a subject delves into the pure past, the reservoir of memory that grounds the present, in order to expose one's libidinal attachments and the repetitive behavior that stems from them in order to “step in the direction of progressive repetition” (Reference FaulknerFaulkner 2006, 47). Deleuze uses the example of Proust's hero, who “must fall in love with Albertine, re‐play all the games of deception and separation, and then resolve to finally break with her” in order to free his “libidinal energies” (47). Keith Faulkner likens this to Ferenczi and Rank's “positive transference,” which results in the transmission of deeply seated libidinal investment onto the analyst; however, as it pertains to the maternal‐body‐in‐process, it takes the form of mimesis, of a mimetic reproduction of the initial sacrifice indicative of birth (Reference FinkFink 2007, 138). The event of the birth, of the traumatic schism that splits the mother/child dyad, establishes symbolic continuity that posits the latter as the structuring principle for maternal identity; the child is established as the deity that the mother is constantly sacrificed for (Reference KristevaKristeva 1984, 77). To be clear, as Dennis Keenan points out, mimesis is not the “imitation of an object, but instead a reproduction of the trajectory of its enunciation” (Reference KeenanKeenan 2005, 40). For the maternal‐body‐in‐process, to merely mimic the object would be to reproduce the ideologically saturated and consecrated images of maternity therefore merely suppressing semiotic motility in a static theological image (Reference KristevaKristeva 1984, 57). It is instead a mimesis of the sacrifice, of the trauma of birth, that exalts gestation and the process of separation from the mother, thereby “prevent[ing] the imposition of the thetic from hiding the semiotic process that produces it” (58). In short, this attention to the initial sacrifice, to the place and time where the maternal body and the child were unified yet distinct, keeps the child from being theologized because, by reproducing the sacrifice, the maternal body forgoes this very separation. The initial step in this mimetic process takes the form of recreating the initial unity shared between mother and child before the entrance of phallic law.

Rather than a female torturer, in maternal masochism it is the child that is “clothed” by the mother. Deleuze takes great pains to illustrate that the heroine is positioned between the pair of maternal images and is clothed by the masochist in order to construct the masochistic ideal, where the heroine embodies chosen characteristics from each maternal pole (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 50). In our formulation of maternal masochism, the mother accepts and then immediately disavows the presence of paternal law, using it as a ground on which to construct an ideal image of maternity. This process, whereby both the masochist and the torturer agree to a performance that disavows both reality and the role of the father, is precisely what the audience witnesses when Rosemary initially begins to mother her child, Adrian, when, despite his horrific appearance, she chooses to ignore his characteristics:

Here the maternal body “clothes” the paternal law evident in the child, and immediately a contract is established between Rosemary and her child, where the former, in the role of the masochist, begins to regulate and reconfigure the identity of the child in her own image, rather than in that of the father.Footnote ⁷ As with Deleuze's formulation of masochism, Rosemary initially, before the construction of the masochist's symbolic order, scopically “clothes” the child in an ideal image that has no resemblance to the father, but instead takes on characteristics that the mother feels are ideal, tendencies stemming directly from the mother's identity. As the mother, she asserts her role immediately in the contract, stating “in case you're curious, I happen to be the lady who's been supplying all that milk you've been drinking. I'll bet you thought it comes in bottles, didn't you. Well it doesn't; it comes in mothers, and I'm yours” (244). In this upsurge of the semiotic, the maternal body presents an image of pre‐Oedipal wholeness before castration through the child, assuming the position of regulator and giver of life.

The institution of the masochistic contract produces what Deleuze labels in Difference and Repetition as a fracture or caesura in time, which is defined as: “to throw time out of joint, to cause the sun to explode, to throw oneself into a volcano, to kill God or the father” (89). By performing the role of mother, the maternal body perversely disavows the originary schism between mother and child, choosing instead to mime the “sacrificial slaying” (Reference KristevaKristeva 1984, 79). The caesura, the “moment of the split of the subject,” is preceded by a “disruptive summons to action” whereby the “past takes on the characteristics of something that is ‘too big for me’” (Reference BogueBogue 2010, 41). Following Rosemary's discovery that her child is alive, she states that “the thing to do was kill it … grab it and throw it out of the window. And jump out after it” (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 240). To kill the baby would only constitute a return of the same, as indicated in the opening chapters when the reader learns of the “dead baby wrapped in newspaper” found in the basement, and the death of the Castevets' previous tenant, Theresa Gionoffrio, who committed suicide by leaping from a window (26–38). Rosemary's performance of mothering merely reenacts the “signifying path” of the sacrifice that founds the symbolic in order to disrupt it. At every instance her actions subvert those of the coven; she informs Laura‐Louise that she is “rocking him too fast” and then “untied the neck gown” around her child's head that was far too tight (242–43). Kristeva claims that “sacred ‘representations’” that precede the sacrifice mime “the signifying path” and “opens it up to the motility where all meaning is erased” (Reference KristevaKristeva 1984, 79). Rosemary's mimetic performance of masochism absorbs and reorients the maternal behavior of the coven, disrupting and resignifying the production of the child; she not only “clothes” the child to hide paternal law, but also actively works to subvert all of its traces. In doing so, she not only “recreates” the child, but binds it to her own identity so that they are cosubstantial. Deleuze argues that during the production of the caesura, which he characterizes as the third synthesis of time, “the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth” (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1968, 89–90). Deleuze's comments on the production of multiplicity and the destruction of the self are crucial because the act of mother, the action that is “too big” for the self, is incommensurable with singularity; the performance of maternity cannot be reduced to a sole identity.

The reconstitution of the child by the maternal figure not only debases the father and banishes paternal law, albeit temporarily, but transforms the masochist into an a‐phallic subject through a process of binding its identity to the mother (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1967/1989, 66). Deleuze makes it clear that the violence directed at the masochist is intended to facilitate the masochist's rebirth wholly from the maternal figure (98). Furthermore, Deleuze states that in Masoch's The Divorced Woman, “Anna longs to be worthy of her task, to whip Julian and to be able at last to say to him: ‘You have been through the ordeal, now you are a man’” (98). The heroines in Masoch's narratives are not beating the masochist in order to mold him into a paternal figure, but “obliterating his role and his likeness in order to generate the new man,” a man that is born solely of the feminine rather than falling under phallic law (99). The process whereby the mother binds her identity to the child is yet another instance of miming the sacrifice, of giving up a singular identity for hybridity, and it results in a child who reflects a “feminine future,” rather than a phallic horizon.

In the symbolic order created by the mother/child contract, the maternal body produces this a‐phallic creature by taking ownership of the child so that their identity is intertwined, creating the very individual that Deleuze alludes to who is not beholden to genital sexuality. We have already seen how Rosemary reconstitutes her imaginary relationship with her son by way of altering her perception of his physical attributes; however, the way she transforms herself is by renaming the infant, altering him as a signifier. Named Adrian Steven by the cult, Rosemary responds:

In this instance, Rosemary literally abolishes the name of the father, but, more important, binds herself to the child by taking up the position as mother. The result of Rosemary's renaming is that the coven begins to chant “Hail Andrew” and “Hail Rosemary, mother of Andrew,” illustrating that the rebirth of the two are essentially linked (245). Here both the child and the mother are reborn together as something completely new. The signifier “Rosemary, mother of Andrew” does not point solely to her as a maternal body, but to a machinic assemblage of mother and child that is the a‐phallic creature. This act of renaming, of creating an interconnected web of identity that is relational between mother and child, is not unlike the naming practices of adoptive or queer mothers. As Julie Marie Thompson notes in Mommy Queerest: Contemporary Rhetorics of Lesbian Maternal Identity, in certain lesbian relationships, “the couple bestow on the child a hybrid form of their last names, either by giving the child a hyphenated last name or by creating a single name” and in doing so “ties the child's identity to both mothers” rather than merely the birth mother (Reference ThompsonThompson 2002, 125). Thompson emphasizes that this practice is more symbolically than legally weighted, as “it is all but ignored in public legal discourse,” but acknowledges that it is a custom commonly utilized in order to legitimize the adoptive family as a whole (125). More to the point, the hyphenated name not only legitimizes both mothers, but also creates a hybrid identity that has no relation to paternity, and instead points to the authority of the maternal body. If we recall, Deleuze claims that in the third synthesis there is a “becoming‐equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act” (Reference DeleuzeDeleuze 1968, 89). In Rosemary's Baby our heroine becomes equal to the act of mothering, which destroys her singular subjectivity in exchange for a dual identity shared with an a‐phallic creature that reflects her legitimacy.

The Futural Horizon

Traditional interpretations of masochism either reduce the performance to little more than an aesthetic fantasy or, specifically as it pertains to the maternal or feminine body, argue that it reinforces patriarchal domination. These readings overlook the liberating potentials of the masochistic performance by viewing it as a perverse reproduction of phallic law, rather than a set of practices that subverts phallicism by altering the very structuring principle that reflects its power. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman emphasizes that discourse is structured according to the figure of the Child in a process he terms “reproductive futurism,” whereby the marginalization of nonheteronormative bodies is legitimized according to their relationship to the child (Reference EdelmanEdelman 2004, 25–28). The reproduction of phallicism depends on a futural horizon whereby the child serves as a structuring principle that reflects its authority. Through maternal masochism, the child does not abject the mother in exchange for phallic law, but instead expels the father and reflects the authority of the maternal body.

In Rosemary's Baby the future of the satanic coven relies on the anti‐Christ offspring that reflects the phallic law of Satan through the complete abjection of the maternal body. However, in Levin's text, through the performance of the masochistic contract, Rosemary produces the very caesura that Deleuze argues reorients and redistributes the order of time, producing an asexual creature that does not reflect phallic authority. Rather than the traditional progression whereby the child disavows the mother, subsequently relegating her to the “outside” of phallic law, the performance of masochism results in the abjection of the father. In the final portions of Rosemary's Baby, we see the coven chanting, but they are exceedingly peripheral, whereas Rosemary and Andrew occupy a central position in the symbolic economy (Reference LevinLevin 1967, 245). Rather than the maternal body, it is the representations of phallic authority and the Father that are marginalized. Instead of reinforcing the conception of masochism as submission, the novel reveals how the masochistic contract is a mimetic performance of the original sacrifice, a disruptive procedure that contributes to the development of maternal subjectivity.