The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM - Timo Airaksinen, 2018

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• delight and pleasure are substituted for horror, mental pain, and physical suffering

• any of our normal definitions of terms such as violence, sex, pain, and enjoyment either lose their conventional meaning or become alien, ambiguous, controversial, or essentially contested.

• exploration of eros and the liberation of erotic potential from Puritan ethics

• pain and pleasure are related metonymically

• the direct function of pain is now to maximize pleasure, which in the S/M context seems to be a positive bodily sensation and in the case of disciplinary or humiliating activity a mental pleasure

• “Pain” and “pleasure” both refer to one self-identical thing, namely, what I want from this social exchange

• pain–pleasure pair is freely reversible

• horror and laughter in such a context come close to being interchangeable

• “[Death] is either an asymbolic, non-transcendental event, the last arbitrary sequence of events that precede it, or it is profoundly symbolic, concentrating all the life events into a single constellation of meanings, and from that totalizing perspective, irradiating them with a fresh light and value”

• life/death and pleasure/pain