In Coldness & Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze splits Freud's notion of sadomasochism as a single and complete phenomenon into two distinct tendencies, sadism and masochism. In this paper we will show that for Deleuze, both sadism and masochism can be isolated as instances of feedback: each is a particular type of transcendental short circuit. By taking sadism and masochism as the two extreme examples of the mind's reacting with itself, and by linking these examples with well-known tendencies in philosophy and literature, we hope to link certain aspects of mental activity with particular basins of attraction, laying a groundwork for a new understanding of the mind and ultimately for a conflation of the physical and the mental itself.
