alive, and drunk on sunlight

But whereas in actual torture, according to Elaine Scarry, the prisoner’s body is split from the self and made a weapon against him or her, in medieval hagiography the martyr repudiates torture’s dualistic disposition by valorizing bodily suffering as a source of agency and power. The pained body becomes a weapon to be directed against the pagan regime. In this way, the martyr assumes the subversive potentiality of the masochist: he inhabits a world where pain results in ‘pleasure’ and torment in ‘joy’. Pain, experienced as delight by the saints, is not a symbol of the fleshliness that they wish to disavow so much as a symbol of their willingness to embrace the flesh as a source of power and subjectivity. Sebastian boasts: ‘My joys and all my delights are to endure pain and suffering for the love of my creator.’ Nor does pain generate fear: Sebastian declares earlier that he is not afraid of any pagan ‘threats’. This seems to confirm recent arguments that sadism, contrary to popular belief, is incompatible with masochism: the martyr, far from inflating the sadistic tyrant’s ego, causes its undoing. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who has written eloquently on this topic, asserts: ‘The concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy only; their processes and their formations are entirely different’; Anita Phillips, following Deleuze, calls the phrase sado-masochism a ‘misnomer’: ‘There is sadism, there is masochism, and the two don’t get on well together.’ This helps to explain why, when he is subjected miraculously to punishments himself, the emperor in the Sebastian play announces: ‘All you devils, come here! Consume my body and my soul’. Unlike the saint, the emperor’s sufferings do not produce experiences of joy or transcendence but ones of corporeal annihilation.