This paper is a response to Mandy Morgan’s “Sado-Masochism and Feminist Desire: The Other Measure of True Love Bleeds.” It attempts to take her ambiguities in authorial voice and interrogation of sado-masochism in narrativity and within subjectivity as serious impasses for the understanding of a feminist transformative desire. Although far from touching on all dimensions of the text, the response essay indicates how the dilemma of violence itself erupts in the text and lays out the problematic with which Morgan struggles in all of its complexity. I discuss Morgan’s dialogue with the Lacanian Žižek in relation to his allusion to sexual violence and love. I also discuss some notions of love and trauma as it is framed within a Lacanian perspective.
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