"Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (b. 1835) was a Professor of History and a celebrated German novelist of the latter half of the 19th century. Here, in Venus in Furs, Masoch's most famous novel, one finds the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment and of course the perpetual and volatile presence of a terrible coldness. Yet what we actually encounter has little to do with these reductive caricatures." "Deleuze's essay is an attempt to restore to Masoch's work the rigorous and informed philosophical examination that is due it. Deleuze's essay - the most profound study yet produced on the relations between Masochism and Sadism - seeks to develop and explain Masoch's peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity."--BOOK JACKET.