Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction 9781623564117, 9781623563592, 9781501304484, 9781623563554

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Leo Bersani

ii

Leo Bersani A Speculative Introduction Mikko Tuhkanen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Mikko Tuhkanen, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Fahrenheit 451 (grey series) Electric charge on paper, 2012 © Troika Selections from the J. M. Coetzee Archives are reprinted courtesy of J. M. Coetzee and Harry Ransom Center The University of Texas at Austin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tuhkanen, Mikko, 1967- author. Title: Leo Bersani : a speculative introduction / Mikko Tuhkanen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The first introduction to Leo Bersani’s work, providing a chronological overview of his thought and detailing his contributions to literary studies and especially critical theory”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020019036 (print) | LCCN 2020019037 (ebook) | ISBN 9781623564117 (hardback) | ISBN 9781623563592 (paperback) | ISBN 9781623560690 (eBook) | ISBN 9781623563554 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Bersani, Leo--Criticism and interpretation. | Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. Classification: LCC PN75.B45 T84 2020 (print) | LCC PN75.B45 (ebook) | DDC 801/.95092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019036 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019037 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6411-7 PB: 978-1-6235-6359-2 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6355-4 eBook: 978-1-6235-6069-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Leo, obviously

Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction

viii ix 1

Part One  Wanting Being 1 2 3 4

The Psychoanalytic Subject What Is an Individual? (A Deleuzean Query) Performativity and Speculative Politics The Antisocial Thesis

19 47 79 117

Part Two  The Correspondence Thesis 5 6 7

Whither Narcissus? Saving Frivolity, or, on Sociability and Spandrels The Virtual Unconscious

139 167 191

Part Three  … But Is It Art? 8 9

Fascinating Rhythm Leo Bersani’s Speculative Aesthetics

Works Cited Index

225 253 283 311

Acknowledgments Friends, colleagues, co-conspirators: Eyal Amiran; Leo Bersani; Joan Copjec; Tim Dean; Elizabeth Freeman; Jay Garcia; Emily Johansen; Tuula Juvonen; Amy Martin; Ellen McCallum; David McWhirter; Doug Mitchell; Haaris Naqvi; Mary Ann O’Farrell; Maarit Piipponen; Peter Rehberg; Nicholas Royle; Ray Ryan; Jenelle Troxell; Olli-Pekka Tuhkanen; Michelle Maria Wright; folks at Texas A&M University, the University of Tampere, and the University of Helsinki; and the contributors to Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond. And everyone else, everywhere. A version of Chapter 9 has previously appeared as “Leo Bersani’s Speculative Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 29.3 (May 2019) (https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/744680).

Abbreviations AI Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) BB Leo Bersani, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1970) BF

Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977)

C

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: BFI, 1999)

CR Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990) CS Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT P, 1998) DSM Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) FA Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1976) FoB Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004) FrB Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) FV Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1985) H

Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995)

I Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008) IRG Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010) MP Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1965) RB

Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2018)

TT

Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015)

x

Introduction

Marcel Proust’s narrator suggests that our existence, in its minutest details, is imbued with a persistent sameness, a fact that, rather than a psychopathology or an ethical failing, constitutes something like the condition of our beingin-the-world. In a famous passage—one that was nevertheless not presented to Proust’s first English-speaking readers—Marcel, exploring the work of art that is Venice, is struck by the way in which our lives seem wound around a few singular “chords”: Our slightest desire, though unique as a chord, nevertheless includes the fundamental notes [les notes fondamentales] on which the whole of our life is built. And sometimes, if we were to eliminate one of them, even one that we do not hear, that we are not aware of, one that has no connexion with the object of our quest, we would nevertheless see our whole desire for that object disappear. (Proust, À la recherche 4.206, qtd. in BB 224, Bersani’s translation; see also MP 103)1

It is particularly the work of Proust’s fictional artists—the composer Vinteuil and the painter Elstir—that comes to represent this resonant repetitiveness in Proustian onto-ethics/aesthetics. Listening to Vinteuil’s septet and sonata, Marcel discerns a web of unintended allusions and reiterations behind seemingly disparate compositions, repetitions that constitute the artist’s, and his artworks’, “essential nature” (Remembrance 2.655). Observing the artist, Marcel thinks of “that peculiar strain the monotony of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical in itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul” (2.656). He hears in Vinteuil’s work the chords that, unfolding in a series of countersubjects, constitute the fugue of his being. The artist cannot but reiterate these themes: “it was precisely when he was seeking vigorously to be something new that one recognised beneath The passage is not included in C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s translation: see Proust, Remembrance 2.962. It has been restored in the new translation by Peter Collier: Proust, Fugitive 591.

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

the apparent difference the profound similarities” (2.655). It is, thus, “a certain monotony” (TT 86) in Vinteuil’s music that announces the singularity of his art and his being. This study demonstrates that comparable continuities organize Leo Bersani’s work. Bersani echoes Proustian aesthetics when, in 1970, he points to a certain repetitiveness as distinctive of artistic oeuvres: “could it not be argued that, except for Shakespeare and perhaps Picasso, a certain kind of ‘variety-without-identity’ in art is the sign of an imagination which has never sounded its most intense, and intensely particularizing[,] interests?” (BB 306). Tracking his oeuvre, ongoing now for more than half a century, the chapters that follow listen for his work’s “fundamental notes,” explore the varied contexts in which the singular “monotony” of his thought comes through. I will focus particularly on the way in which Bersani, through an engagement with philosophical texts and works of art, becomes a thinker of ontology, ethics, and aesthetics. These emphases appear in an embryonic form in his earliest texts. Bersani begins his work in the 1960s as a critic of French modernist fiction.2 His first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965, 2nd ed. 2013), is a study of À la recherche du temps perdu. It not only constitutes something of a classic in Proust criticism but also introduces the reader to the themes that his subsequent work will persistently explore. Bersani returns to Proust’s tome because, across its several thousand pages, the novel offers us something of an onto-aesthetics, weaves for the reader a theory of being and/as art. Of particular importance for Bersani in this ontoaesthetics is the way in which Proust describes the human subject’s relation to the world, exemplified by Marcel’s anguished “search” for the truth of his self amidst the world’s various objects. Beginning with early memories of his mother’s absence from his bedside, Marcel feels cut off from the world, teased by the mysterious enjoyments to which others seem to have access. For Bersani, Marcel’s aggressively inquisitive relation to people and objects around him is characteristic of the way in which modern subjects have been trained to inhabit the world: we see, the argument goes, an unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and our others; in all the senses of the word, we want what those others have; this want is pursued by epistemological means, through the acquisition of knowledge (see MP 58–59). It is this ontological model of “wanting being” that Bersani explores, critiques, and seeks to displace throughout his oeuvre.

His first published work is a 1959 essay on Gustave Flaubert: see Bersani, “Narrator.”

2

Introduction

3

In ways that the chapters outline, the questions that emerge in Marcel Proust, including that of the subject-object relation, are reconfigured— fugued, as it were—in the contexts of varied theoretical and artistic texts in Bersani’s subsequent work. While, as Bersani puts it in the preface to Marcel Proust’s second edition, Proust is the writer to whose work he has “returned most frequently” (ix), impact does not always require frequency of reference. Bersani’s second book, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), contains a brief discussion of a thinker whose name all but disappears from his later texts but whose presence—as I will argue in Chapter 2—insistently shapes the Bersanian oeuvre. This thinker is the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (see BB 234–36). In part, Deleuze validates Bersani’s focus on the question of ontology (the thought of being) as a vital problematic. With the emphasis on thinking being, Deleuze, and then Bersani, swims against the main currents of contemporary Continental philosophy. The French psychoanalytic theorists Jean Laplanche has written that, although the question of “origins” constitutes “one of those problems for which our century has in general shown only scorn,” Freud pursued this issue “with splendid indifference” (Life 128). The same can be said about Deleuze’s and Bersani’s interest in the question of being. It is with “splendid indifference” that the two philosophers seek what Elizabeth Grosz has suggested is “the forgotten or elided element of contemporary philosophy”: ontology (Nick 17). The two are among the very few of contemporary thinkers who, from the 1960s onwards, allowed the question of being even to be raised. Among early queer theorists, Bersani is joined, as I have suggested elsewhere, only by Gloria Anzaldúa in this emphasis (Tuhkanen, “Mestiza”). If Deleuzean philosophy is instrumental in enabling ontology as a central question for Bersani, his subsequent reading of psychoanalysis highlights ethics as an equally crucial component for his thought. Like many other practitioners of the so-called French theory, he identifies ethics with the question of “otherness.” Here the fact that, in the initial encounter with psychoanalysis— in his third book, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976)—Bersani reads Freud with Laplanche’s help becomes important. One of the most influential poststructuralist commentators on psychoanalysis, Laplanche claims that Freud instigated a “Copernican revolution” in the ways in which Western thought had conceptualized the relationship between the subject and the object, the ipse and the other.3 He argues that, before Freud, our culture’s most influential philosophical discourses had privileged the entity variously called “the subject,” “cogito,” and “the transcendental ego”

Something of a summary of this argument is provided in Laplanche, “Unfinished.”

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as the starting point for describing the world. Because of this unquestioned priority—because of the failure to conceptualize otherness except as an extension or a reflection or a symptom of the subject—philosophy had in important ways functioned on an “idealist” model, which in its radical form postulates, in Proust’s words, “that the outer world does not exist, and that it is in ourselves that we develop our life” (Remembrance 2.912). For Laplanche, this tendency to think the self or the ego as the generator of the world is exemplified by the “delusional systems of the great idealists,” among whom he counts Berkeley, Fichte, and Hegel (“Seduction” 173). Analogously to the Copernican revolution in which the geocentric model of the universe is demolished, Freud overturns this egocentric conceptualization of human experience, but only to yield, in his later work, to a “biological idealism” (Laplanche, “Drive” 126). Rethinking the role of primary narcissism and constructing what is to become his second topography, Freud falls back on the conceptualization of “man [as] closed in on himself, a Ptolemaic system” (Laplanche, “Short” 109), thus betraying his own revolution. Seeking to revitalize the revolution, Laplanche suggests that Freud dismantled the classical subject-other model not by relinquishing but by radicalizing it, that is, by pushing “the other” even further from the subject, into the infinite distance of absolute unknowability—into the ipse itself. Like a number of other twentieth-century philosophers—Emmanuel Levinas being the most prominent example—Laplanche proposes that, to avoid the ethical liabilities typical to Western metaphysics, we must understand otherness as a realm of irresolvable, unfathomable difference. The challenge of this difference is such that the subject is paralyzed into something like ethical passivity in front of the world’s sovereign otherness, an otherness that, importantly, is constitutive of the subject him- or herself. For Laplanche, Freud stumbles onto this model when his early clinical observations prompt him to formulate the soon-aborted “seduction hypothesis.” As a young doctor in Vienna, Freud discovered that, almost without fail, his hysterical patients spoke of their seduction as young children by family members and caretakers. For Jeffrey Masson, his ultimate decision to discount the stories as fantasies constituted a betrayal of his female patients in favor of profitable patriarchal allegiances. While Laplanche, too, considers Freud’s decision to disregard the stories a mistake, he argues that the “seduction hypothesis” indicated not the prevalence of sexual violence in bourgeois families but an ontological truth of the human condition, one that Freud failed to give its proper place. What the patients’ tortured memories revealed was that the human subject emerges through the other’s “seductive” solicitation: the self becomes-human as the infant receives the gestures of caretaking as enigmatic messages and begins the endless work of translating these sexualizing communications—“enigmatic signifiers,” as

Introduction

5

Laplanche calls them—unwittingly conveyed by adult others. Hence, rather than, as Masson argues, revealing evidence of the striking frequency of sexual abuse in fin-de-siècle, middle-class Vienna, Freud, according to Laplanche, should have generalized his hypothesis, accorded seduction its proper place as “an exigency,” “a fundamental anthropological situation,” and “a basic human given” (Laplanche, “Exigency”; “Starting”; New 121). In this way, Freud’s early work overturned classical philosophy’s subordination of otherness to the self by suggesting that, because of the human subject’s premature birth and consequent need for an extended period of caretaking, the ipse is an entity called into being by the other. The self is but a response—and, hence, a mode of response-ability—to this constitutive solicitation. The messages that the other sends the subject are, in the end, radically unknowable: their translation can never be completed. The other’s unknowability, constitutive of the subject’s self-relation, is at the core of the Freudian revolution, a revolution that goes astray as Freud abandons the seduction hypothesis.4 Bersani’s issue with this model is that, even when the other’s enigma becomes irresolvable, as Laplanche argues it does in Freudian theory, we still assume a mode of being where, first, the subject and the object are constitutively divided, and, second, all efforts to bridge this division are carried out as projects of “understanding” the other, as epistemological ventures of “translating” the other’s messages. For Bersani, this means that, radicalizing but not reinventing the concept of the “other” that Western culture has embraced at least since the emergence of Enlightenment philosophy, Freud’s thought, like that of his philosophical predecessors, operates on an ontology of lack: desire is mobilized by “wants,” by the lure of unknowing in the form of the other’s enigmatic dispatches. “I am cut off,” as Bersani ventriloquizes the subject produced by this ontology (IRG 177). Commenting on Laplanche’s theory of seduction, John Fletcher writes that “we remain possessed by those messages we are unable to translate or metabolize” (“Seduction” 1266). Secrets tantalize the subject of the unconscious with the promise of a revealed truth about himself: it is the missing piece of the puzzle whose restoration would give us the big picture, render everything—the world and the subject—meaningful. For Bersani, we find this model of otherness operative not only in psychoanalytic theory but also in Proust, who, as he sometimes suggests, should be considered Freud’s primary literary heir (IRG 157; TT 4; “Rigorously” 283). Marcel “constantly reenacts the experience of a lack” (FA 83) insofar as he is captured (or, as I will frequently put it in what follows, Laplanche originally outlines his theory in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). The chapters in his Essays on Otherness, coupled with the interviews with Caruth and Stanton, provide a good introduction to Laplanchean psychoanalysis.

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fascinated) by objects that seem to taunt him with obfuscated knowledge, compel him by stubbornly resisting his interpretive gaze. Otherness in its psychoanalytic and Proustian forms thus entails a paranoid epistemology: even if what Laplanche calls the messages’ metabolization always remains incomplete, the other’s enigmatic address commands an enthralled concentration on that which is ostensibly inaccessible to the subject. Bersani’s ethics entails an effort to reinvent this model. His is in part a pedagogical project of finding ways not only to “deprogram” us of our extant mode of being (CS 94) but also to “train” us in “new relational modes.” With this phrase, Bersani gestures toward the work of Michel Foucault, who deploys it in a 1981 interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life.” The two thinkers were contemporaries and colleagues; it was on Bersani’s invitation, for example, that Foucault began teaching at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s.5 Even before this, the two had shared an intellectual environment as participants in the emergent scene of “French theory” in the 1960s and 1970s. Both developed an understanding of “the modern episteme” where subjects are constituted by the disciplinary operations of what Foucault calls “the apparatus” (dispositif), the constellation of practices, institutions, and discourses that organize modern life. Both lay increasing emphasis on their later, post-1970s work on ways in which the apparatus might be reorganized, the ways in which the self can be produced differently in its relation to the world. Foucault commented on ancient texts of self-management to forge a project of producing new modes of subjectivation. Bersani, on the other hand, turns mostly to works of art. For both, the project of reconfiguring the modern episteme centers on the question of aesthetics. Bersani suggests that what his colleague calls “new relational modes” “might be the result of an aesthetic subjectification” (IRG 69); modernity’s epistemophilial being should be displaced by “the aesthetic subject.” Foucault, in his final texts, similarly called for the invention of “an aesthetics of existence” (History 2.253).6 Bersani has over the decades continued the elaboration of the onto-ethic/aesthetic project that Foucault had time only to outline in the early 1980s. For Bersani, we must turn to aesthetics to ask (or experiment with) questions that psychoanalysis is constitutively unable to address. Indeed, “the aesthetic” may be the most important category in Bersanian thought. In Three Ecologies (1989), Félix Guattari asks, “are not the best cartographies of the psyche, or, if you like, the best psychoanalyses, those of Goethe,

See Eribon, Michel 311. For brief biographical commentary on Foucault, see Bersani, “Rigorously” 284. 6 See also Foucault, “On the Genealogy.” 5

Introduction

7

Proust, Joyce, Artaud and Beckett, rather than Freud, Jung and Lacan?” (25). While Bersani might agree with this statement, his consent would be only partial: he would resist Guattari’s hierarchization of literature over theory. Taking Freud as his example, he suggests that we can, and must, read theory aesthetically, as art; and, conversely, “the most detailed discussions of specific works [of art are] not formalistic exercises, but rather absolutely identical with philosophical reflection” (Bersani and Dutoit, “Response” n. pag.). In this, his early training in French poststructuralism proves instructive. As Avital Ronell writes, “‘French Theory,’ given its fades and returns, is a way of avoiding having to decide or tell between literature and philosophy” (282). The fact that Bersani’s primary texts are aesthetic ones (even when he reads theory, he reads it as “art”) suggests the aesthetic shape of his ontology. To follow the unfolding of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, our study proceeds in a loosely chronological order, its nine chapters organized into three sections. The chapters in the first section, “Wanting Being,” outline Bersani’s early influences, Proust and psychoanalysis (Chapter 1) and Deleuze’s philosophy (Chapter 2), and then, in Chapters 3 and 4, explore the context in which most readers are likely to have encountered his work: queer theory. While these chapters mostly seek contrasts to Bersani’s work in examples of modern thought, the ones in the second section, “The Correspondence Thesis,” locate contexts and oeuvres that harmonize with the premises of his philosophy. Among these contexts are theories of narcissism (Chapter 5), Georg Simmel’s account of sociability (Chapter 6), Christopher Bollas’s reinvention of the psychoanalytic accounts of infant development and the unconscious, the reconfiguration of Plato’s theory of anamnesis in Baudelaire and Proust, and the concept of “virtuality” in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics (Chapter 7). The two chapters in the third and concluding section, “… But Is It Art?,” continue to “move with” Bersanian thought by focusing on “the aesthetic” as its central concern. Chapter 1 explicates the reasons why, despite much disagreement and ambivalence, Proust and psychoanalytic theory have remained constant resources for Bersani. In his assessment of the modern episteme, Bersani returns to the psychoanalytic paradigm not only because of Freud’s cultural impact—the fact that, as Jacques Derrida writes, “we inhabit psychoanalysis, living with it, in it, around it, or beside it” (Post Card 262)—but also because of his conviction that, in ways that need to be teased out, psychoanalytic theory contains unexplored potential for rethinking contemporary modes of subjectivation. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Proust: while his work has the benefit of bodying forth the disciplinary strategies of our episteme, in its excessive detail—in its simultaneous perfection and annihilation of literary realism—À la recherche du temps perdu also contains

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moments that spill over, and thereby disrupt, the regimes of modern subjectconstitution. While Proust mostly functions as the foil in Bersani’s ethical project, Deleuze early on indicates to him a way to approach the world that Proust and psychoanalysis at once evoke and suppress. Two Deleuzean texts in particular become important for Bersani. As Chapter 2 shows, his emergent onto-ethics in A Future for Astyanax is framed through the problematic that Deleuze and Guattari set forth in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), their account of the promise and failure of psychoanalytic theory’s “desiringmachines.” Equally important for his subsequent work is his (re)turn, toward the end of A Future for Astyanax, to a moment in Deleuze’s Proust and Signs (1964) that he had noted already in Balzac to Beckett. This moment, in which Deleuze proposes a Proustian version of “individuality,” is often revisited by Bersani. If, as Foucault writes, it is sexuality that, in the modern dispositif, provides “the stamp of individuality” (History 1.146)—that is, produces the disciplinary subject—Bersani goes on to contrast this form of subjectivity (one that he often calls “personality”) with another mode of “individuality,” one that he gleans not only from Proust and Deleuze, but also from Charles Baudelaire, among other thinkers. The question of the individual is linked to what Proust calls a life’s “fundamental notes,” the chords that, as Bersani writes in his first book, “seem to indicate an elusive but permanent individuality” (MP 111). While Karl Marx and Max Weber are often credited for having revealed the ideologically or socially constructed nature of the modern “individual,” Bersani persists in thinking about “individuality” as a viable concept, beyond “the limited individuality traced by a psychologically defined subject” (IRG 148). Having outlined the emergence of this idea in the early texts Balzac to Beckett, A Future for Astyanax, and Baudelaire and Freud, Chapter 2 follows its unfolding in his subsequent work. Although in many ways Bersani is a queer thinker, he may not be a queer theorist, in the sense in which this moniker has been used since the early 1990s (see Bersani, “Rigorously” 279–80). Explicating this distinction, chapters 3 and 4 investigate his relation to queer theory, particularly the queer thought that has been elaborated with the concepts of “performativity” and “the antisocial thesis.” Bersani’s reputation as a contributor to queer theory rests mainly on two texts: the celebrated essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and the critical polemic Homos (1995). Jointly, they bookend queer theory’s formative period, particularly as its early momentum was driven by the influence of Judith Butler’s work. Bersani’s essay shares the date of its publication with Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), in which Butler establishes the theoretical synthesis that will yield, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), the concept of performativity. Yet the work of the two thinkers are marked

Introduction

9

by what I call “paradigmatic differences,” premised on largely incompatible onto-ethical investments. Chapter 3 details these differences—informed, in philosophical terms, by Butler’s Hegelianism and Bersani’s Deleuzeanism— as they are exemplified by Butler’s and Bersani’s divergent readings of Jean Genet and Michel Foucault. The history of queer theorizing after 1990 suggests that Foucault himself was overly confident when he declared in 1964 that the “homo dialecticus” “is already dying in us” (“Madness” 543).7 Lynne Huffer writes almost half a century later: “Performativity’s popularity … bears witness to the stubbornness of dialectical habits of thinking”; “Hegel … still lurks around every corner” (Mad 113, 234). Bersani’s indifference to such habits—at times, as in Homos, galvanized into polemical critiques—has guaranteed his oddball role in contemporary queer theory. More recently, Bersani’s work, particularly because of his Freudian argument about “an intrinsic indifference to others in human sexuality” (CR 45), has been considered a source for the so-called antisocial thesis in queer theory.8 Chapter 4 explores the reasons for and ramifications of

“Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre” constitutes an appendix to the 1972 republication of Foucault’s History of Madness; yet, as Jean Khalfa notes, the essay was originally published in 1964 (xxiii). 8 Instead of an exhaustive overview of scholarly engagements with Bersani’s work (most of them by queer theorists), we can briefly refer to commentators who have moved beyond the standard readings emphasizing the concepts of “shattering” and “antisociality”: see Dean (esp. “Antisocial”; but also Unlimited 210–11); ffrench; Glavey; Rehberg; and Roach. In this context, a particular note should be made of Kaja Silverman’s work. Proposing in her most recent texts that we must outline, and move toward actualizing, “another modernity,” Silverman develops an account of modern onto-ethics that agrees with Bersani’s. She briefly suggests that pivotal in the genealogy of this alternate mode of modernity is the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose Platonic theory of correspondences allows us to conceptualize our being-in-the-world in crucially different ways than Cartesian dualisms (Silverman, Flesh 2–3). Partially from Swedenborg, she draws out a theory of “analogy,” which she finds variously developed by such thinkers Charles Darwin, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gerhard Richter, James Coleman, Terrence Malick (Flesh), as well as practitioners and theorists of photography (Miracle). As I will point out in several of the chapters in this study, Bersani, too, traces a genealogy of “analogy”—or, as he most often calls it, “correspondences”—that runs from Plato to Swedenborg to Baudelaire to Proust to twentieth-century art and philosophy. Like Bersani, Silverman seeks an epistemic shift whose seeds are dormant in the history of Western culture: in her readings of art, she is “talking not only about what was but also about what might have been and could yet be” (Flesh 7). The resonance (involving “deep and abiding similarities,” if also “differences”) between the work of Silverman and Bersani—who were longtime colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s—is briefly addressed by Silverman in Flesh 245n7; see also her commentary in “Looking.” Bersani, on the other hand, makes two brief references to her work: first, to indicate the differences between their theorizations of sexuality and masochism (IRG 175); and, second, to point out one of the many moments of agreement between them (FoB 177–78). See also the interview that Silverman, with Tim Dean and Hal Foster, conducted with Bersani: IRG 171–86. 7

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

this claim, taking as its context Lee Edelman’s psychoanalytically oriented “queer ontology.” The chapter argues that seeing Bersani as a theorist of the antisocial is neither incorrect nor adequate; in his work, the claim for the human subject’s “antisocial” constitution is always supplemented by (what I propose we call) “the correspondence thesis.” Bersanian being is organized not primarily through the differences that, as Laplanche claims (and Edelman would agree), are radicalized in the psychoanalytic theory of otherness, but as a network of similitudes, a field of sameness where beings transversely meet and become. Discussing the Oedipus complex in Lacanian theory, Bersani speaks of “the heterosexual inability to think of desire other than as lack or loss” (IRG 54). “Hetero-sexuality” is the symptom par excellence of the ontoethical system of lack, the mode of desire produced by the assumption of originary, traumatizing privation and experienced as the subject’s compelling solicitation by radical differences. From this Bersanian perspective, Butler and Edelman, as thinkers of negativity, are queer theorists of heterosexuality, of “inconceivable” differences whose enigmas fuel (Butler) or stymie (Edelman) desire’s movement. Bersani, while perhaps not a queer theorist, is a homo-thinker in his prioritizing sameness over difference, correspondence over otherness. Bersani proposes that, instead of being fascinated by unfathomable otherness, we must, in Guattari’s words, “learn to think ‘transversally’” (29). One name that Bersani gives to the principle of transversality is correspondance. While he borrows the term “correspondence of forms”—the onto-ethical/aesthetic postulation behind “the correspondence thesis”— most immediately from Charles Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory, the idea is inflected in his work through Proust, Deleuze, Caravaggio, ancient Assyrian art, the psychoanalytic account of homosexual narcissism, and, most recently, contemporary cosmological theory. The ethical thrust behind thinking correspondances is the idea that we can be trained to approach the world, and our others, not through antagonism (and its benevolent counterpart, tolerance) but through a recognition of sameness and similitudes. This ontology must be thought in aesthetic terms; in thinking (and practicing) the onto-ethics of sameness, we are working toward “a homo-esthetic” (IRG 31). While he persists as a critic of Freudian texts, Bersani also argues that, in this context, psychoanalysis remains a field whose implications have not been exhausted. Chapter 5 demonstrates that it is particularly in Freud’s concept of narcissism that he locates psychoanalysis’s unexplored potential for actualizing our capacity for living homo-aesthetically. From the first substantial discussion of psychoanalytic theory in the final chapter of A Future for Astyanax—which characteristically takes the form of theory’s elaboration through literary texts—Bersani recurrently returns to the

Introduction

11

question of narcissism, seeking to unleash its potential by complicating its extant, “impoverished” model (IRG 92) into a concept with unexpected ethical valences. In elaborating the concept whose pathologizing version many of Freud’s followers have put into disciplinary uses, he suggests we reconfigure “specular” narcissism into (what the concluding chapter will call) “speculative” narcissism. Bersani suggests that, instead of thinking the subject’s becoming in the course of a Proustian “search” for self-knowledge—the assumption that the enigmatic object is hiding the secret truth about the desiring subject—we can reconceptualize our being-in-the-world as an experimentation with varied “styles.” As he notes in a 2003 interview, Every culture more or less deliberately promotes what we could call certain styles of movement in space. This is something fundamental in the education of the human subject: the way in which the individual is taught to go towards or to turn away from others. (“Secrets du Caravage” 59)

We need another aesthetic education, a deprogramming and reprogramming of our self-stylizations. These “‘lessons in mobility’” (59) should encourage us to shift from exploring subjective depths to mapping rhizomatic surfaces, from vertical to horizontal connections. Given the modes of subjectivation in the modern episteme, this move also entails a deprivileging of “sexuality.” Bersani proposes that we unlearn what we have been trained to think of as sexuality’s constitutive importance for our self-experience and, instead, begin “to imagine a nonsexual intimacy, one unspoiled by and invulnerable to the appropriative force of desire” (RB 62). He often calls the experience of “nonsexual intimacy” “sociability.” Chapter 6 follows his effort to forge, with the help of Samuel Beckett, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georg Simmel, Pedro Almodóvar, and others, a practice of aesthetic sociability as a “new relational mode,” one where we relinquish our “sexual seriousness” (IRG 75) in favor of less somber, less significant—frivolously “unsolemn” (FoB 120)—ways of meeting our others. Bersani thus calls for experimentations with “possibilities that encourage us not to be satisfied with a relationality grounded in the erotic secret and, more generally, with forms of intersubjective knowing that assumes a hidden unconscious” (CS 15). Chapter 7 continues to explicate this proposal by turning to the work of the psychoanalytic theorist Christopher Bollas. Bersani recognizes in Bollas’s account of the “nonrepressed unconscious” many of the ideas that he has been developing since his earliest texts. Rather than assuming, as Laplanche does, that the human subject emerges in conjunction

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

with Urverdrängung—the “primal repression” in which the unconscious is constituted of what remains untranslatable in the other’s enigmatic messages— Bollas proposes that we understand the subject’s worldly orientation in terms of the “syntax” or “grammar of being” into which the infant is habituated early on. Bersani anticipates Bollas’s argument about the aesthetics of human existence in A Future for Astyanax when he speaks of “certain styles of being” expressed in the rhythmic, “frictional” repetitions of life and death forces in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (FA 179); similarly, his argument that, in Henry James’s work, “human feelings,” as “the elaborations of surfaces,” are “implied … into existence” by “the geometry of human relations” (FA 148) will have been repeated, forty years later, in his paraphrases of Bollas. Most importantly, however, Bollas’s argument about the human subject’s “grammar of being” recalls, in ways that neither Bollas nor Bersani mentions, Plato’s theory of “anamnesis”: in our worldly encounters, we only ever meet that which is already familiar to us; our becoming is a movement of “re-finding,” as Freud writes of our astonishment that the love object we have sought is already familiar to us (Three 145). The task of Chapter 7 is to elucidate this philosophical genealogy from Plato to Freud to Bollas, a history whose manifestations Bersani encounters also in Baudelaire’s and Proust’s ontoaesthetic theories. The study’s final two chapters continue to explore the entity that Bersani calls “the aesthetic subject.” It is in aesthetics—in “homo-aesthetics,” an aesthetics of sameness—that he locates possibilities that have been disenabled both by the modern biopolitical concept of sexuality and by the prioritization of difference in our ethical imaginations. With the aesthetic, we move away, for example, from the anthropocentric framing of psychoanalytic theory; the sameness that organizes homo-aesthetics exceeds the human realm. If Laplanche argues that Freud breaks with Western metaphysics in his conceptualization of otherness, Bersani suggests that the psychoanalytically defined object remains a familiar one insofar as it persists as the human other. If the infant is called into language and becoming by the caretaker’s solicitation, the source of the summons is always another human being. Unlike Konrad Lorenz’s famous ducklings, whose filial imprinting can cross species boundaries, the Freudian-Laplanchean infant can follow only a human call. One of the most influential modern discourses modulating our becoming, psychoanalytic theory is persistently human-centered; as Deleuze and Guattari, too, observe, “psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision” (Thousand 38). Thus Bersani’s move from “the sexual” to “the aesthetic” constitutes a shift away from anthropocentrism. Chapter 8 investigates Bersani’s evocation of the concepts of “rhythm” and “fascination” in his effort to identify modes of being that exceed

Introduction

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the human. I draw out his (implicitly articulated) theory of “fascinating rhythm” with the help of a thinker who, while his near-contemporary, never appears in Bersani’s texts: Nicolas Abraham. Abraham’s psychoanalyticphenomenological account of “rhythmized consciousness”—which is also, importantly, a “fascinated consciousness” (Rhythms 23)—helps us to consider Bersani’s post-psychoanalytic theory of the human subject as a subject of impersonal rhythms and nonenigmatic (hence, nonparanoid) fascination. The moment of the subject’s awakening to the rhythmizing-aestheticizing consciousness (which Abraham likens to the Husserlian epokhē) shares a considerable deal with the subject’s becoming-sociable in Simmel’s theory, explored in Chapter 6. In sociability, we relinquish the fascination with the other’s enigmatic secrets—whose revelation requires the climactically oriented narratives typical to detective stories and sexual encounters—in order to access “a certain kind of rhythmical play” (IRG 46) informed by an indifference to our partners’ interior life, to what Proust calls their “secret sel[ves]” (Remembrance 1.986). Yet as much as we must distinguish between the rhythm of teleological narratives, which lure us with the promise of annihilative climaxes, and “the fundamental rhythm of sociability” (IRG 47), which offers nothing more than the pleasures of a momentarily shared passage, “fascination,” in Bersani’s work, splits into distinct modes in which subjects are captured—and constituted—by the world’s terrors and delights. To explore the “forms of fascination” that Bersani implicitly presents us, Chapter 8 closes with a preliminary outline of his theory of cinematic enthrallment, encapsulated in the opening and concluding chapters of his most recent book, Receptive Bodies (2018). The study concludes in Chapter 9 by suggesting that we consider Bersani a “speculative” thinker. By “speculativeness,” I mean to evoke the history of “speculative philosophy,” whose high point—at the same time, uncanny return, after Immanuel Kant’s presumably triumphant suppression of speculative metaphysics—can be found in Hegelian dialectics. While Bersani, beginning in the mid-1970s, frequently evokes the term “speculation” in his writing, it is only in his latest texts—most importantly, Thoughts and Things (2015)—that he explicitly turns to Hegel’s work. Chapter 9 suggests some of the sources from which the concept originally migrates to Bersani’s vocabulary (the commentaries on Hegel by his contemporaries Jacques Derrida and JeanLuc Nancy are important here), but also argues that, even before his explicit engagement with Hegelian philosophy, Bersani thought speculatively in the precise sense in which Hegel understands the term. Since in Chapter 3 I will have asserted the “paradigmatic differences” between Bersani’s (Deleuzeaninflected) thought and recent theorizing (most importantly, Butlerian performativity) informed by Hegelian dialectics, Chapter 9 will make further

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

distinctions in mapping the terrain of Hegelian philosophy. While Hegel’s system has frequently been considered “narcissistic,” Bersani embraces speculative thought despite of—indeed, I will claim, because of—such seemingly unpalatable aspects. When he finally reads Hegel, some forty years after he had initially begun to speak of (and practice) “speculative” thought, he particularly identifies with speculative idealism’s effort to undo the subjectobject dichotomy. For Hegel, it is Kant who exemplifies the persistence of this dualism in modern thought; Bersani’s most frequently mentioned culprits are Freud, Proust, and, in the last twenty-some years, Descartes. With a mere whiff of hyperbole, we can say that, given Hegel’s strict immanentism and rejection of dualisms, Bersani identifies in him a fellow homo-thinker, one who, in the terms I will have used in Chapter 5, positions himself against (Kant’s) heterosexual theorizing of difference and otherness. As the preceding outlines indicate, the chapters that follow frequently unfold by returning to, and reconfiguring, earlier moments in the study; they produce an account of Bersani’s work in which his “fundamental notes” are sounded in their repetition/elaboration in varied contexts. This follows Bersani’s own method of reading and thinking, one that he, as it were, catches in turn from his sources. The movement of “self-revising” (BB 204), which he early on finds characteristic not only of the Proustian “involuntary memory” but also of the structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, will be manifested— symptomized—in his own thought. As he observes in 1990, Proust’s novel unfolds in “concentric circles … in which each section is a mistaken yet illuminating replication and approfondissement of the preceding section” (CR 14). Citing Germaine Brée’s argument about Proust’s persistent returns to his narrative’s opening section across the remainder of the novel (Brée 137, 142, and 161–62), he continues in a 2014 interview: “Proust tries out Combray over and over again. That’s the kind of philosophical or speculative thinking that I’m interested in. If there’s something important there, why not try it again?” (“Rigorously” 294). One must “try again” because something persists beyond its actualized forms, a force is not yet spent in actuality. A thinker often linked to Proust’s work, Henri Bergson writes: “A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said” (112). Like Bergson and Proust, Bersani will return to few primary images—a single image, Bergson would suggest—in new contexts, addressing them with new interlocutors, situating them in incongruous connections, so as to “actually say” the image. He will call this the work of “recategorization”; it is also, as he suggests in the interview, a mode of “speculation” (Bergson’s name for it is “intuition”). When a thought is “recategorized,” it is rendered “a little more precise, or more expansive. It’s as if later versions of certain thoughts

Introduction

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keep spiraling out with new additions. It’s a strange relation of undoing but not quite undoing what you’ve thought” (“Rigorously” 294). In Marcel Proust, Bersani describes the Proustian imagination by observing that, for Marcel, “to have wide experience means to be in a position to realize the fundamental sameness in what appear to be the most diverse experiences” (MP 165). While such “fundamental sameness” may seem to constitutes a version of classical philosophy’s reduction of difference to the same, it offers Bersani an opening to think about otherness otherwise than in terms of the unfathomability which many twentieth-century thinkers have assumed to issue our first ethical call. Partially based on Proustian aesthetics, he develops an account of sameness, a homo-essentialism. Indeed, almost fifty years after his first book he repeats the exact phrase when, speaking of his own oeuvre, he describes the work of the critic: “our re-perusals will inevitably include modifications and accretions. We develop. And yet we develop within a fundamental sameness” (“Re-perusals” 280). Bersani’s own readerly method proceeds via difference and repetition: this is the method of “recategorization” or, in the term he adopts from Henry James, “re-perusal.”9 Like the Hegelian “speculative proposition,” concepts, such as we find recategorized in Bersani’s work, move with an internal force, coiling around themselves. In such “speculations,” “recategorizations,” and “re-perusals,” Bersani’s thinking, in its most distinctive moments, advances along correspondences rather than contrasts; it formulates propositions that cohere but also pull in different directions. In ways that Chapter 2 will explain, such coheringunraveling is characteristic of the process of “idealization” in Baudelairean aesthetics, what I will call its movement of “dis-membering” and “remembering.” This dynamic should similarly remind us of aspects of Deleuzean philosophy. Todd May writes that, rather than operating with “a number of distinct and unrelated philosophical concepts,” Deleuze’s thought consists of “a surface composed of different but related concepts” (“Difference” 43). Bersani, too, develops a set of overlapping concepts that at once define but also tug at, threatening to unravel, each other. Some such concepts—including “shattering,” “correspondences,” “narcissism,” “homoness,” “sociability,” “impersonal intimacy,” “the aesthetic subject”—are explicitly elaborated; but his oeuvre also includes a number of implicitly developed, and insistently repeated, ideas: among these are “availability,” “viability,” “individuality,” “intractability,” “incomparability,” “frivolity,” “rhythm,” “fascination,” “solidarity,” and “transversality.” While Bersani never directly addresses, for See James, “Golden” 1332. Bersani evokes the phrase for the first time in 1976 (FA 147); for later references, see DSM 22; Bersani and Dutoit, “Response” n. pag.; and Bersani, preface x.

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

example, the problematic of “fascination,” the term’s persistent appearance in his work suggests that it plays an important role in the thought’s articulation. I propose that these ideas constitute what Laplanche calls “crypto-concepts” in Bersani. By this phrase, Laplanche designates a concept that, “although it forms the object of no individual article or specific presentation, plays an important role in the structure of the system, even if this role is only a provisional one” (“So-Called” 458). Derrida famously points to the idea of supplément as a crypto-concept in Rousseau; Catherine Malabou has more recently argued that plasticité plays an analogous role in Hegel. As she writes, when we discern the organization of a text around such liminal concepts, “something essential” becomes “suddenly recognizable”; concepts like “supplementarity” and “plasticity” reveal to the reader “something accidental … that [brings her] to the essential” (185, 186). Much of what follows is organized around Bersani’s crypto-concepts; the chapters seek to locate implicit ideas that, in their continuous modification across some fifty years, will tell us something crucial about Bersanian thought. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction is itself a recategorization and a re-perusal, a work of fascination. Having written about Bersani before, I cannot but continue to move with his thought for a while longer, unwilling to resist its speculative pull. My earlier book-length endeavor, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018), focused to a large extent on the overlooked importance of the Leibnizian monad—the “homomonad”—in Bersani’s thinking; the present study seeks to unfold a number of other cryptoconcepts in the oeuvre. Such unfolding, I think, occurs only with the reader’s yielding to the text’s singularity. Because of this, what follows does not constitute a “critical introduction” to Bersani’s work; rather, it is, I hope, a “speculative” reading. In contrast to a “speculative” approach, a “critique” assumes that the reader has “understood”—and, consequently, finished with—the text, precisely the attitude of epistemological annihilation, typical to Western modernity, that Bersani seeks to displace.10 If, rather than a critique, the present study is, as I also say, a work of “fascination,” the hope is that the compulsion driving it is—to anticipate the penultimate chapter— Baudelairean rather than Proustian in its nature.

See also Jane Gallop’s ever-helpful meditation on “the ethics of close reading.”

10

Part One

Wanting Being

In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” We have to de-Proustify ourselves.

Leo Bersani, “Rigorously Speculating”

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1

The Psychoanalytic Subject

Freud is not the only psychoanalyst to have been fascinated by murder mysteries. He was an avid consumer of detective stories such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s;1 according to some reports, he also planned, at the end of his life, to write a “historical novel” revealing the hidden truth behind Moses’s death (which would turn out to be a murder, and subsequent cover-up, at the hands of the Jews) (see Badcock). His followers have often not only expressed their appreciation for but also tried their hand at writing detective fiction. In addition to her influential theoretical texts, Julia Kristeva, for example, has published such “fictions of detection” as The Old Man and The Wolves (1991), Possessions (1996), and Murder in Byzantium (2004) (see C. Davis; Trigo). The British analyst Frank Tallis is the author of a series of detective stories set in fin-de-siècle Vienna and featuring a protagonist who is also a disciple of Freud’s. And Bruce Fink, Jacques Lacan’s most recent translator and a Lacanian analyst, has written a trilogy of detective novellas, The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal (2010). Like the sleuth, the analyst, in his classic incarnation, is an expert reader: he reveals mysteries by interpreting the cryptic traces left behind by hidden processes, whether those of the unconscious or the criminal mind. As Tallis notes, the connection “was not lost on Freud” (467): both the detective and the analyst are after what Freud in the Introductory Lectures (1916–17) calls the “slight and obscure traces” found on the scene (52). They organize seemingly random and disconnected pieces of evidence into a legible narrative, interpreting, as Lacan writes, “the various clues, as the English say, the traces, the marks left on the trail” (Seminar XI 256); they seek the solution, Lösung, to the problems—the crime or the symptom—that ail the analysand or the community. “There was,” writes the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas,

One of Freud’s most famous patients, “the Wolf Man” recalls: “Once we happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively. The fact that circumstantial evidence is useful in psychoanalysis when reconstructing a childhood history may explain Freud’s interest in this type of literature” (146).

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

“a kind of sleuth-like sensibility about Freud” (Shadow 68); in developing what he hoped would be a new anthropological science, he conceptualized the psychoanalyst “as a detective sifting through the clues that lie on the surface” (Bollas, Cracking 105). Leo Bersani would add Marcel Proust’s work to psychoanalysis and detective stories as exemplary products of turn-of-the-century European zeitgeist.2 As he frequently notes, Proust’s masterwork should be read as the literary counterpart, the novelistic reimagining, of the Freudian text. As much as the traditionally conceptualized psychoanalyst tackles the mysteries that the analysand has hidden from himself and others, Proust’s narrator regards the people around him as riddles to be solved. “Proust … has given us the most complete representation of what we might call the psychoanalytic subject” (TT 4)3 because of the way in which the Freudian and Proustian texts have conceptualized their protagonists’—the analyst’s/analysand’s or Marcel’s— desire to know, to reveal the truth about, the object of their attentions. Already in 1970, Bersani notices “Marcel’s detective-like investigations into Albertine’s activities” (BB 215); in 1981, he notes that “the linear structure of A la recherche du temps perdu is that of an epistemological detective story” (DSM 41). Repeating the assignation of the novel as “an epistemological detective story,” he continues in The Culture of Redemption (1990) that the Proustian text “ha[s] little patience for structurally unassimilated material or false starts” (CR 114, 113). Proust repeats the tight, economical structure of detective stories, where even the misleading clues are finally integrated into the solution as the necessary red herrings. In this chapter, I outline Bersani’s encounter with two oeuvres that are never to relinquish their grip on him: Proust’s and Freud’s. From the very beginning of his engagement with these, Bersani discerns in Proust and Freud—the two are nearly interchangeable for him—authoritative and prescriptive accounts of how we move in the world and relate to otherness: their manifest text lays out, and participates in, the training we in Western modernity have had in desiring. What Bersani calls “the psychoanalytic subject” is the subject of modernity, whose beginning he, in his latest work, traces, first, to Cartesian philosophy and, second, to Cartesianism’s rearticulation in late-nineteenthcentury sexological discourses, most prominently psychoanalysis. But Bersani also observes from the very beginning that, even if these texts, and particularly psychoanalysis, want to pass as universalizeable accounts of Throughout this study, my commentary on Proust’s novel follows Bersani’s reading. For a recent, differently slanted account (one that contrasts itself with Bersani’s), see Hägglund, Dying ch. 1. 3 See also IRG 157; RB 43; “Rigorously” 283. 2

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desire’s ontology, there may be other ways in which we can become in our encounters with the world. One way to describe his oeuvre is to suggest that, with theoretical and aesthetic texts, he experiments with potential ways in which the self can variously come into being in its encounter with otherness. His is an onto-ethical project, one that, moreover, thinks such becoming in terms of an aesthetic. In what follows, I move from a brief outline of some salient aspects in Proust’s narrative to a discussion of Jean Laplanche’s reading of Freud, which becomes important for Bersani’s understanding of psychoanalysis. The third and final section synthesizes the discussion of Proust and Laplanche and points to the directions that remain, according to Bersani, not articulable in Proustian-Freudian/Laplanchean language. Even if, from the very beginning, Bersani is skeptical about the modes of being he sees illustrated in these oeuvres, he (and, consequently, we) will return to both as his own work (and this introduction) unfolds. Neither Proust nor psychoanalysis ever lets go; both compel repetitive returns to the scene of the crime.

Devouring Attention: The Proustian Subject As Bersani observes in his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965), Proust’s narrative unfolds as a series of investigations into the lives of the people—mostly, the women—his narrator meets. The narrator’s objects of interest have one thing in common: “Their life seems full of secrets to Marcel, essentially erotic secrets” (MP 58). Marcel’s project is to unravel the mysteries that he suspects the women keep from him—mysteries that constitute “that unknown life which permeates [them] and which we aspire to possess with [them]” (Proust, Remembrance 2.587). His is, as Bersani writes, “an essentially investigating attitude,” of “knowing and therefore possessing the other person” (MP 87, 45). His persistence in tracking down the women’s secret lives makes him a sleuth; as Walter Benjamin, too, writes, “There [is] something of the detective in Proust’s curiosity” (“On the Image” 243). It is not only in other humans but also in the inanimate world that Marcel detects a persistent sense of mystery. When he looks at the twin spires of Combray, he suspects that “something lay hidden beneath that nobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal” (Remembrance 1.183). But while Marcel “obsessi[vely]” (1.185) seeks to penetrate such mysteries, the narrative also constitutes “an extraordinarily dense exercise in introspection” (MP 4), something that we say, of course, of analysis too. Like traditional analysis, the Proustian method of detection aims at increased self-knowledge; Marcel is after others’ secrets in order to

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction

get to know himself. The narrator, as Bersani writes, “desire[s] to possess what is different from the self ” (MP 92), but only because such difference promises to fill in the void of the unknown that inheres in himself. The puzzle that Marcel wants to complete is, ultimately, that of his own being. The other, then, is in the end secondary to the subject’s investigative efforts: he or she— or it—is only there as an enigma to be cracked and subsequently discarded. We find, in other words, “the loved one’s irrelevance to the lover’s feelings” (MP 101). As in detective novels, the investigative subject is faced with riddles. “Marcel often sees other people,” Bersani writes, “as puzzles to be solved” (MP 60). The term solving here suggests not only the sleuth’s discernment but also the kind of undoing that takes place in digestion—(dis)solving. Proust often speaks of the narrator’s objects in terms of their appetitiveness; Marcel’s is a “fantasy of knowing by eating” (MP 37). His devouring desire is violent in its ambition to undo its objects by assimilation. But nothing will ultimately satiate the hunger of the subject, who must turn to the next appetitive object, persisting in his “uninhibited appetitive attack on the world” (BB 219). The various women in Marcel’s life “seem to contain the keys to enigmas of nature, art, and history” (MP 14), but, as Marcel discovers, such keys do not quite fit being’s lock. To discuss Proustian appetition, Bersani turns—and returns—to a famous scene in À la recherche du temps perdu where Marcel’s gaze is arrested by a field of buttercups by the side of the road: the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their gilded expanse, until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty. (Remembrance 1.172)4

The visual pleasure of the flowers immediately evokes consumable matter, egg yolks, which stimulates the narrator’s appetite. As Bersani notes in 1965, Marcel seeks in this tableau “the satisfaction, on a non-physical level, of a

For Bersani’s further discussions of this scene, see FA 87; CS 67–68 (where it appears in Bersani and Dutoit’s translation); and Bersani and Dutoit, “Critical” 124–25.

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desire to assimilate” (MP 36). The voracious gaze with which he contemplates the flowers is typical of his approach to other objects, too. Artworks constitute another example: Marcel’s compulsive need to possess something different from himself makes him consider the work of art almost as something to devour; when he has fully digested the truth it contains, the pleasure of assimilation and with it his esthetic pleasure disappear. (MP 203)

Bersani continues in 1976, again evoking the buttercup scene: “Marcel is tempted to see things and people as puzzles to be solved. He stares at flowers in order to force them to reveal a truth they seem to be both proposing and concealing” (FA 87, emphases added). The twofold gesture of “proposing and concealing,” of offering and withdrawing, solicits the desire of the Proustian subject. Marcel’s attention is captured by a series of enigmas that objects seem at once “to contain and to conceal” (Proust, Remembrance 1.183). Suggesting a secret, and then refusing access to the enigma, the object captures the subject, who now assumes that what is being withheld from him is nothing less than the truth about his being. Bersani describes this dynamic elsewhere as follows: In Proust, it is precisely at the moment when the loved one turns away from her lover—becomes most mysterious, most inaccessible—that she (or he) is rediscovered within the lover—as if that essential secret being pursued by the lover were the lover’s own secret, his own otherness. (“Death” 864)

Later, he and Ulysse Dutoit identify this production of enigmatic otherness with the experience of the “erotic.” In their study of Caravaggio’s art, they indicate that the twofold address we observe in Proust—“proposing and concealing,” “containing and concealing”—is also evident in the mode in which Caravaggio renders his models’ seductiveness: “the soliciting move toward the viewer, and the self-concealing move away from the viewer” constitute “a double movement” that should be “qualif[ied] as erotic … It is … the movement away that fascinates, indeed that eroticizes the body’s apparent (and deceptive) availability” (CS 3). Captured by the objects’ “fascination,” the subject/viewer wants to solve—or digest, (dis)solve—the other that embodies the enigma. Like Caravaggio’s models, the buttercups solicit—but, importantly, block—Marcel’s “most characteristic relation to the external world, which is a devouring one; his metaphors generally function as

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sublimated incorporations. They ‘solve’ the mystery of otherness by digesting it” (CS 68). The quotation marks around the verb “to solve” suggest that Bersani and Dutoit are citing Bersani’s own earlier discussion of the scene in Marcel Proust and A Future for Astyanax. It also indicates, as in the earlier books, the incorporation of objects by digestive dissolution, by (dis)solving.5 If Marcel observes the flowers with an appetitive desire, in his subsequent encounters with women we again witness “his devouring attention” (MP 78). He is, as Germaine Brée writes, “a fascinated spectator of life” (149). But who is being eaten? Bersani writes that the difference embodied in the women, the difference that Marcel seeks as the missing piece of his own puzzle, makes the world “dangerous and fascinating” for Marcel (MP 46). The other fascinates. We should consider this word closely, for it contains the paradox of Proustian (and, concomitantly, psychoanalytic) desire.6 As if under a spell, Marcel is drawn to the women whose mysteries compel him. The objects of our desire, as Bersani writes later, “fascinate our eyes … mak[ing] it impossible for us to turn our glutted vision away from the hypnotic scene” (FA 257). With his appetitive desire, Marcel seeks to undo, to (dis)solve, the objects of his fascination. Yet if he wants to assimilate the enthralling object, the evil magic under whose spell he has fallen—the witchcraft denoted by the Latin fascināre7—signals the threat of this process to his own integrity. The fascinated subject, after all, is a being captured by the devouring intentions of a malevolent other, like Mowgli, in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894), who has to negotiate “the python’s powers of fascination” (77). Fascination, as Proust writes in “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” leaves one “fe[eling] transfixed, as a small bird might do on catching a sight of a snake” (56); it immobilizes

On two occasions (CS 67–71; “Critical” 124–25), Bersani and Dutoit propose a different reading of the buttercup scene, sketching out a potentiality that they suggest remains undeveloped in Proust’s novel. They observe that, given his inability to eat the buttercups (as he would egg yolks), Marcel’s approach is transformed from appetitive assimilation to one of taking in the “unproductive” (inutile) beauty of the scene: “Visual pleasure here—unlike the pleasure of looking at egg yolks—is not simply the promise, the foretaste, of a gustatory pleasure” (CS 68); rather, “[t]he primitive project of destroying objects by way of an orality that seeks to transform the entire world into the devourer’s ‘system’ is superseded by a mode of exchange between subject and object, perhaps best conceptualized as an impregnation” (“Critical” 125). This moment is one of the occasions where Bersani identifies in À la recherche du temps perdu a “virtual” potential that motivates his continuing returns to the novel. 6 There is an emergent field—we might call it “Fascination Studies”—investigating the history of this concept. Recent, important texts in this field include Baumbach; Baumbach, Henningsen, and Oschema; Degen; Hahnemann and Weyand; Massey; Seeber; Thys; and Weingart, “Contact.” The recurrence of the word (and concept) in Bersani will require its own study; I will begin this work in Chapter 8 below. 7 See Beth; and the entry “Fascination” in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. 5

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one with “the strange and unexpected forms of an approaching death” (Remembrance 2.87). What gets devoured and (dis)solved in fascination is not only the fascinating object but also, and perhaps primarily, the fascinated subject. If Marcel is moved by an “extraordinary appetite” (MP 16), his hunger is ultimately matched by the world’s voraciousness. If fascination’s dynamics suggests that the being to be undone along desire’s trajectory is not primarily Marcel’s various objects but the desiring self, in psychoanalytic terms “fascination” suggests the dangerous slippage between desire and the drive. For Lacan, the drive names a force that comes into being at the emergence—a mythical moment—of the symbolic order. The drive is that which aims at the unnamable underside of the symbolic: the real, the inaccessible, monstrous, uncanny realm whose onto-ethical implications Lacanians have explored especially since the 1990s.8 Desire, on the other hand, names the drive’s domestication by symbolic logic: it provides stand-in objects that keep the subject from getting what he wants. Since the symbolic order and, consequently, the subject come into being at the moment of separation—the moment of the symbolic order’s and the real’s simultaneous production—the drive that succeeds in reaching its aim would undo both. “Fascination” suggests the intertwining of desire and drive in that sundry objects, whether we call them fetishes or, after Lacan, objets a (where the a designates autre, the other), glamor the subject with a hypnotic force; yet behind the desirable objects one finds the devouring, evil Other of the real. Getting what one wants amounts to self-destruction. What we find in psychoanalysis, then, is an ontological account, a theory of being. Drive theory reads as something like a creation story: how being emerges into life and how it is threatened with an apocalyptic undoing. Psychoanalysis, of course, is not the only discourse to articulate an apocalyptically oriented origin story; rather, one can argue that it merely repeats some of Western culture’s most prestigious narratives of selfunderstanding. Mowgli’s fascinating serpent points us in the right direction: the best-known tale of how difference and desire insinuate themselves into the world is that of the Fall. Describing the mode of desire he finds in À la recherche du temps perdu, Bersani, tellingly, cannot but speak in biblical tropes:

On the periodization of Lacan scholarship—and particularly the move from AngloAmerican criticism’s earlier focus on “the symbolic” to one on “the real”—see Mellard.

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Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction To be different, that is, to be individual, comes … to have connotations of sin for Marcel. Speaking of his unrealizable desire to possess Albertine’s whole existence, he remarks that the “original sin” of certain women is personality itself … This sin is what prevents the paradise of total identification; it is what makes both the self and the world dangerous and fascinating. And the individuality of the women he loves seems often to consist of their mysterious desires, or of their secret enjoyment of pleasure from which Marcel is excluded. (MP 46)

To gauge the theory of being that Bersani discerns in Proust, we might focus on three important points in the above passage. The first concerns Marcel’s incomprehension in the face of women’s “secret enjoyment of pleasure,” their “mysterious desires.” If there is in Proust an “original sin,” it is attached to each individuated object of Marcel’s desire: what is sinful is the objects’—most often, women’s—willful withholding of the secrets that would provide the right answer to Marcel’s desiring queries. This “mystery” concerns the women’s way of “enjoyment of pleasure.” Proust shares this description of “otherness” with psychoanalytic ontology. Lacan makes a great deal out of Freud’s pronouncement, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that the biblical decree to “love one’s neighbor” must be considered the most absurd commandment imaginable. This is because a “fundamental evil … dwells within this neighbor” (Seminar VII 186): our neighbor is radically other—and hence evil—because he or she seems to have access to a pleasure that we cannot comprehend. The other’s “sin” is his or her alien, inconceivable way of enjoying: what “poses a problem for me” is “my neighbor’s jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance” (187). Echoing Lacan, Tim Dean notes “our virtually limitless capacity to imagine other people enjoying. This imaginative capacity readily produces the conviction that others are enjoying themselves at our expense, and it is this conviction that sparks the desire to injure others” (“Homosexuality” 129).9 If we are called to love our neighbor, this “love” is lived in the mystified rage that the neighbor’s radical otherness, radical unreadability, elicits in us. In Laplanche’s terms, this otherness is a repetition of the impenetrable sexual(izing) messages that the subject receives from the primary other/caretaker. For Lacan, phenomena like racism and xenophobia are symptoms of the fact that we find the neighbor’s mode of enjoyment impenetrable.10 See also Bersani’s discussion: FoB 126; I 59–61; and IRG 64. In Lacanian scholarship, the argument that racism is founded on the subject’s apprehension of the other’s jouissance is often traced to Jacques-Alain Miller’s essay “Extimité” (esp. 79–80); see, for example, Žižek ch. 6. For an assessment of the argument, see Hook. Bersani alludes to this theory when he speaks of the “envy of the other’s different jouissance which nourishes homophobia and misogyny” (IRG 61).

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While observing women, Marcel is not invited to take part in “their secret enjoyment of pleasure,” as Bersani writes; in fact, he is constitutively incapable of such participation in the other’s way of being. We get an early example of this in the “overture” to Proust’s narrative, the description of Marcel as a child who waits in vain for his mother to leave a dinner party downstairs to give him a goodnight kiss. He imagines that the scene beyond his reach “conceal[ed] pleasures that were mischievous,” pleasures that caused in him “a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them [while he] was far away” (1.48). The child is kept awake by thoughts of the “inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste unknown pleasures” (1.49). This scene functions as a prototype for Marcel’s subsequent encounters not only with women but also with other objects, human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate. Such objects “appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover” (1.182). Unfathomable in the difference/jouissance they conceal, these objects are nevertheless intimate others, like the mother who has her own life, out of reach of the child. Bersani echoes here Freud and Lacan in suggesting the opacity of otherness; even though he had not encountered psychoanalytic theory when he was writing Marcel Proust,11 he is already speaking in psychoanalytic language. He also begins to approach what in his later work he designates as the profound ethical problem in Proustian-psychoanalytic ontologies: their conceptualization of otherness. The other can be met in Proust or in Freud only in terms of incomprehension, suspicion, and difference.12 As his work proceeds, Bersani seeks to extract other modes of desire—other modes of relating—from the philosophical and aesthetic texts he engages. The second point we should draw from the above passage concerns the ways in which what Bersani calls “the paradise of total identification” echoes our culture’s hegemonic ontological modes, that is, our ways of understanding being. We can compare his depiction to the French

Bersani does in his first book engage some psychoanalytic readings of Proust, but does not appear to have read any primary texts on psychoanalytic theory. For some commentary, see “Rigorously” 293–94. 12 Bersani often points to Freud’s argument, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” that the infant first encounters otherness in the form of hostile objects (“Instincts” 134). As he puts it in an interview, “Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has conceived of the object as essentially a bad object, a foreign body that I must struggle to appropriate or, ultimately, an object in which the subject runs the risk of finding its own waste” (“Secrets du Caravage” 59). See also CS 40–41; IRG 105; TT 1–2, 33; RB 35; Bersani and Dutoit, “Critical” 157. 11

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philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential account of the loss of our “natural” state and its replacement with civilizational ailments. For Rousseau, human “enlightenment” proves “fatal” to man (he speaks of “the fatal ingenuity of civilized man [des lumières funestes de l’homme civil]” [Discourse on the Origin 90–91; Discours 170]). The human being loses whatever is good and beneficial in life as he engages in the corruptive “arts” of culture and civilization. As Rousseau writes in his First Discourse: Before art had moulded our behaviour, and taught our passions to speak an artificial language, our morals were rude but natural; and the different ways in which we behaved proclaimed at first glance the difference of our dispositions. Human nature was not at bottom better then than now; but men found their security in the ease with which they could see through one another, and this advantage, of which we no longer feel the value, prevented their having many vices. (Discourse on the Arts 6, emphasis added)

For Rousseau, the irrecuperable state of nature is one in which subjects were (as Jean Starobinski puts it) “transparent” to themselves and each other, where they enjoyed what Bersani calls “total identification” (MP 46). As Bersani continues in his second book, Proust offers us “the fantasy of a tranquil, really deathlike coincidence of being between two people in which each one merely receives, is wholly contained within, and sends back the image of the other” (BB 216).13 But Rousseau’s delineation is marked by a complexity that may inhere in all origin stories. Rousseau often alludes to the impossibility of returning to the state of nature. He gives us a typically elusive conceptualization of nature and its corruption by culture when he writes the following: So the sweet voice of Nature is no longer an infallible guide for us, nor is the independence we have received from her a desirable state. Peace

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida discerns not only in Rousseau but also in Claude Lévi-Strauss “the image of a community immediately present to itself, without difference, a community of speech where all the members are within earshot” (136); Lévi-Strauss “is undoubtedly Rousseauistic” in describing human experience as “a situation of dispersion” (137). Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss thus exemplify what Derrida will call “the metaphysics of presence,” ontological conceptualizations where being is figured as having lost an originary completeness or presentness. While Bersani in many ways and on numerous occasions echoes Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics, his onto-ethics/aesthetics also diverges from the deconstructive agenda in ways that I will address particularly in chapters 2 and 9.

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and innocence escaped us for ever, even before we tasted their delights. Beyond the range of thought and feeling of the brutish men of the earliest times, and no longer within the grasp of the “enlightened” men of later periods, the happy life of the Golden Age could never really have existed for the human race. When men could have enjoyed it they were unaware of it; and when they could have understood it they had already lost it. (“General” 170–71)

We have become inured to the seductive voice with which nature would call us to our becoming. But on closer inspection, this calling may never have reached our ears: in our “brutish” natural state we did not have access to the appropriate frequency; and when we had become “enlightened” enough to appreciate nature’s pleasures, we had strayed far off the range of its voice. This paragraph illustrates what Jacques Derrida has famously pointed to as the “aporias” of Rousseauian—and, by extension, classical Western— thought. While the passage seems to delineate a narrative of loss (and, hence, possible recuperation and redemption), a Socratic inquirer, assiduously tracking the text’s logic, will only find an impossible knot on which the whole narrative founders. This is Derrida’s point in his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology (1967), a book with which Bersani became familiar early on:14 despite all appearances, there is no “simple origin” in Rousseau’s delineation of nature or languages, only the ever-ongoing process of “supplementation” (Of Grammatology 242–43). As I will suggest, what Derrida calls the logic of “supplementarity” also marks the mode of desire in Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory, which in mid-1970s emerges as a crucial resource for Bersani. Proust and Rousseau share an understanding of human ontology where being emerges as the result of a fall from wholeness. The extant world is marked by lack, the perennial absence of the being that would render the subject, as Rousseau writes, transparent. This is the third point to be made about the above paragraph, one that assumes an increasing, and increasingly paradigmatic, importance for Bersani: it evinces what he will later call “an oppressive psychology of desire as lack (a psychology that grounds sociality in trauma and castration)” (H 7). As Elizabeth Grosz, too, has pointed out, our culture’s most efficiently propagated ontological conceptualizations are premised on assumptions of lack (Volatile 222n1; Space 176). The Deleuzean critic Daniel W. Smith agrees: the ontology of lack “presents us with a ‘tragic’ vision of humanity: as humans, we are incomplete and riddled with

See the references to Derrida in BB 4, 331.

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deficiencies, and ontological desire is the sign of our incompleteness, our ‘lack of being’” (282). The mode of desire we find in Proust is inherently “tragic,” a term with which—as we will discover in Chapter 4—Bersani designates the subject’s movement toward objects of impenetrable otherness. The Proustian subject is possessed by a violent curiosity about his others. This violence entails the other’s undoing, its appetitive assimilation into the self. Yet because otherness comes into the world through a traumatizing lack, the search for the other’s secrets is a self-destructive project: it is the fascinated subject who will be undone—(dis)solved—if the object is finally reached in its otherness. In his subsequent work, Bersani seeks to escape the vicious cycle of this ontological frame and construct, by experimenting with a number of theoretical and aesthetic texts, another onto-ethics.

Being Shattered: The Laplanchean Subject While in Marcel Proust Bersani observes that for Marcel the “phenomenon of feminine sexuality” is “wholly mysterious” (MP 62), and that Proust’s narrator is arrested by “the mystery of [women’s] desires” (MP 58), he would have been more accurately Proustian had he here spoken of “enigmas.” The term crops up frequently in À la recherche du temps perdu: Marcel speaks of the “enigma” that attracts him in Albertine (2.356) and “‘the enigma of happiness’ [‘l’énigme de bonheur’]” (2.1147 / 4.446) that tantalizes him. Rachel similarly appears as “‘an enigma … a regular sphinx’ [‘une énigme, un véritable sphinx’]” for Saint-Loup (1.1092 / 2.578). The term becomes important for Bersani as he begins, in the mid-1970s, to read Proust in the context of psychoanalytic theory. Writing in 1998, he and Dutoit locate “the category of the enigma at the very point of emergence of what might be called the psychoanalytically constituted subject” (CS 39). When they write of the “enigma” as a Proustian and psychoanalytic category, they are alluding to the work of the French theorist Jean Laplanche. Laplanche plays a crucial role in Bersani’s thought, beginning with the study A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976). It is with Laplanche’s work, and most notably his reading of Freud in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970), that Bersani discovers psychoanalytic theory. For Laplanche, Freud is a revolutionary thinker of human subjectivity. Freud’s revolution, which remains constitutively “unfinished,” concerns the role of the other in the processes of becoming-human. Early on in his career, Freud made clinical observations that pushed him to flirt with an entirely novel theory of hominization and human ontology. Laplanche argues that, even though Freud never consciously draws the correct conclusions from

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his early investigations, they nevertheless inflect his subsequent thought. By closely reading Freud’s work, we can distill from it a revolutionary account of what makes a human being and what drives anthropogenesis or becoming-human. As my hyphenated construction indicates, for Laplanche anthropogenesis amounts to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call “minoritarian” becoming.15 In Laplanchean theory, hominization, beginning with a constitutive error, must be understood as undirected and nonteleological, as errancy whose potentialities will not have been exhausted. If “[m]inoritarian authors are those who are foreigners in their own tongue” (Conley 164), what we might call Laplanche’s enigmatics is the human being’s first tongue but also one in which she is perennially scrambling to find her bearings. This in turn, as Laplanche insists, has certain philosophical and ethical ramifications on how we are to understand the self and the other. Laplanche returns to the moment in Freud’s early work on hysteria when his female patients confront him with some uncomfortable implications about the lives of bourgeois Viennese families. Without fail, all his patients report having been sexually seduced by their parents or caretakers during their early life. Palpably disturbed, Freud writes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1897: “surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable” (Complete 264). Instead of taking the reports at face value, he soon comes to assume that, rather than actual events, such memories of seduction are but the patients’ Oedipal fantasies.16 For critics like Jeffrey Masson, Freud’s interpretation of his patients’ stories reveals his investment in patriarchal power. Because of his insecurity about his position in the medical establishment and the bourgeois society, he is more than willing to overlook his analysands’ testimony about their abuse. In Masson’s words, his abandonment of the seduction hypothesis amounts to “a personal failure of courage” (189). Laplanche similarly suggest that, in rejecting the early theory of seduction, Freud makes a crucial mistake. But for him the source of the mistake is different than it is for Masson.17 According to Laplanche, instead of rejecting the seduction hypothesis (as he did), or initiating an investigation into his patients’ actual lives (as Masson says he should have done), Freud should have generalized the hypothesis. It is not that the reports of sexual seduction revealed something nefarious about Viennese families; rather, Freud should See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka; and Thousand plateau 10. For a detailed reading of Freud’s early theory of seduction from a Laplanchean perspective, see Fletcher, Freud. 17 For Laplanche on seduction theory and Masson, see Laplanche, “Interview” [with Stanton] 9–10. 15 16

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have concluded that what his patients called their seduction is an unavoidable moment in the early development of the human subject. Rather than evincing, as Freud writes in the Three Essays, “accidental external contingencies” (108), the clinical observations, correctly interpreted, demonstrate that such seduction constitutes what Laplanche later calls an “exigency,” a “primal” moment, or “the fundamental anthropological situation” of hominization: we must see seduction as a “universal and originary situation” of “being human and becoming human” (“Psychoanalysis, Time” 175).18 As he writes in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, “there is indeed a form of seduction which practically no human being escapes, the seduction of maternal care. The first gestures of a mother towards her child are necessarily impregnated with sexuality” (33). Because of our early helplessness, our Hilflosigkeit, no human infant can avoid seduction, being sexually handled by the caretaker. The caretaker’s handling—with touch, gesture, voice, and so forth—cannot but stimulate the infant in ways that it cannot interpret. This is a moment at which, as the recipient of such enigmatic missives, the infant becomeshuman, strays off from the realm of need to that of desire and the drive. Laplanche uses the French term fourvoiement, “going-astray,” to designate what happens to the infant at the moment of its hominization (Laplanche, “Masochism” 197–99). There are three scenes that force the incipiently human being’s departure— going-astray—from the realm of need, of what Laplanche calls “the vital function.” What marks the human infant is, first, the failure of this function, that is, the infant’s inability to satisfy its needs; second, its lack of a defensive system that would protect it against incoming stimuli; and, third, the seduction it undergoes in the hands of its adult caretaker. All failures render the human being susceptible to sexualization, a term that psychoanalysis gives an idiosyncratic meaning. Sexualization for psychoanalysis is exclusively a human phenomenon. It is synonymous with hominization, with the process by which the infant becomes-human.

Freud’s mistake is that, rather than seeing seduction as “a basic human given,” he “fails to extend precocious seduction to sexuality in general, limits its effects to the arousal of sensations in the genitals, and fails to note that arousal also occurs at the level of the erogeneity of the whole body, and especially at the level of oral and anal erogeneity” (Laplanche, New 121). Sexuality undergoes an unprecedented broadening in the theory of psychoanalysis: “sexuality would seem to include not only the small sector of genital activity, not only perversions or neuroses, but all of human activity” (Life 25). See also Laplanche, “Exigency”; New 89; “Interpretation” 147; “Starting.”

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As we are often told, the human infant is dependent for an extended period on nursing and care; psychoanalysis calls this state the human’s “premature birth.” Laplanche writes: All that we know of the elementary vital mechanisms in the newborn infant, when compared with what happens in animals and even in small animals, demonstrates … the profoundly immature character of these vital functions in the human being; it is precisely by virtue of that factor that sexuality is introduced. (Life 47)

In Freudian theory, sexuality, as a phenomenon exclusive to the human, is that which takes over the infant’s failing instincts; sexuality emerges to make up for the failure of “the vital function.” “Sexuality,” as Laplanche continues, appears as a drive that can be isolated and observed only at the moment at which the nonsexual activity, the vital function, becomes detached from its natural object or loses it. For sexuality, it is the reflexive (selbst or auto-) moment that is constitutive: the moment of a turning back towards the self, an “autoerotism” in which the object has been replaced by a fantasy, by an object reflected within the subject. (Life 88)

“[S]exuality,” he adds, … is … entirely in the movement which dissociates it from the vital function … Henceforth, the object is abandoned, the aim and the source also take on autonomy in relation to the activity of feeding and the digestive system. (18)

But the status of “the vital function,” as “nonsexual activity,” is equivocal. What comes before the infant’s seduction into sexuality may be impossible to define: as Laplanche and Pontalis write in 1964, “we must accept the idea of an intrusion from without into an interior which perhaps did not exist as such before this intrusion” (“Fantasy” 5). In this way, “the vital function” has a status analogous to what Derrida will call “speech” or “presence”; “sexuality” becomes synonymous with “writing” or “the supplement.” As Derrida proposes in his analysis of Rousseau, as a supplementation of speech, writing “adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-placeof; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (Of Grammatology 145). As much as

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the vital function can be observed only in its perverted form—sexuality— the supplement creates that which is being supplemented: “there have never been anything but supplements … [T]he absolute presence, Nature … ha[s] always  already escaped, ha[s] never existed” (159). Always already there, sexuality is “that dangerous supplement.”19 If sexuality supplements the failing vital function, the infant is also sexualized-hominized as the result of a bombardment by stimuli against which it does not have the capacity to defend itself. The infant is overwhelmed with intensities that it fails to neutralize by either deflecting or, as Laplanche puts it, “translating” them. Reading Freud’s oddly muddled delineation of the sadomasochistic dialectic in the child’s development in such texts as “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915) and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), Laplanche argues that what Freud discovers in his clinic is that, contrary to his own initial assumptions, the earliest stage of child development is not that of nonsexual aggressiveness toward—an attempt at mastering—the outside world. Rather, he comes to speculate about the existence of a masochism prior to the stage of nonsexual attempts at mastery: “the masochistic moment is first” (Life 91). Here emerges what for Laplanche, and subsequently for Bersani, must be seen as anthropogenetic jouissance—a jouissance synonymous with the appearance of sexuality, which, as Bersani

Sharing the same intellectual milieu in the 1960s, Laplanche develops his theory of anthropogenesis contemporaneously to Derrida’s articulation of deconstruction. “The vital function,” like Derrida’s “origin,” can be imagined only in the inverted time of Nachträglichkeit, which Freud comes to assign to all structures of human subjectivity. Afterwardsness is a movement that, in Lacan’s words, “establishes the truth of what came earlier” (My Teaching 46). (Laplanche and Pontalis point out that Lacan is the first to draw attention to the importance of this temporal logic in Freud [Language 111; see also Laplanche, “Freud” 42, 44; “Notes” 260; “Time” 235]. Referring to the entry on “Deferred Action”—Strachey’s translation of Nachträglichkeit—in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, the characteristically modest Lacan notes in a 1967 lecture: “No one before me had ever noticed the importance of this nachträglich, even though it is there on every page of Freud” [My Teaching 47; see also “Position” 711; Seminar XI 216].) Borrowing the term, like Laplanche, from Freud (and subsequently locating it in Husserl), Derrida identifies Nachträglichkeit with the time of supplementarity. Supplementarity names, as Derrida writes in the 1990 preface to his 1953–54 dissertation on Husserl, “an inaugural divergence” (Problem xv) that is necessitated by an originary failure. “The supplementary difference,” he continues in “Speech and Phenomena” (1990), “vicariously stands in for presence due to its primordial self-deficiency” (88). If supplementarity constitutes a belated return to an origin that never was, it shares its movement with Laplanche’s going-astray, the divergence in which sexuality comes to fill in instinctual inadequacies in the prematurely individuated human organism. What Laplanche calls “sexuality” is, in Derrida’s terms, the “primordial supplementation” (Derrida, “Speech” 88) that points to the “aporia of genesis” (Problem xxviii). This “aporia” appears in Laplanche’s reading of Freud as the traumatic “intrusion” of sexuality that nachträglich constitutes the “interior,” the possibility of “the vita function,” forever lost.

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repeats in numerous texts, may function as a survival mechanism for the prematurely differentiated human organism.20 Laplanche speaks of “the priority of the masochistic moment in the genesis of sadomasochistic drive insofar as the latter is a sexual drive (and consequently a drive in the true sense of the Freudian Trieb)” (Life 86). Rather than destroying the subject, the disorganizing force of this jouissance allows the infant to experience the trauma of overwhelming stimuli as the self-enhancing pleasures of sexuality. This pleasure-in-pain, as Laplanche writes, “is a perturbation [ébranlement]” (Life 91 / Vie 154)—a term that Bersani, discovering it also in the Marquis de Sade’s depiction of masochistic sexuality’s effects, develops into a central concept for his theory.21 Thus, hominization begins with the masochistic moment of ébranlement, a point that Bersani comes to give more weight than Laplanche. Following Laplanche’s suggestion concerning “the privileged character of masochism in human sexuality” (Life 102), he frequently proposes that “sexuality may be a tautology for masochism” (CR 36).22 Like seduction, “shattering” is a universalizable human phenomenon: “the paradox of masochism … should be generalized, linked as it is to the essentially traumatic nature of human sexuality” (Laplanche, Life 105). What seem like marginal phenomena in clinical observations—seduction and masochism—are in fact fundamental aspects of human sexuality, as that term is understood by psychoanalysis. But there is another, and for Laplanche more important, way that the infant’s inadequate defenses are breached; this is the third characteristic that renders the infant vulnerable to sexualization-hominization. The most important of the intensities that shatter the infant are the messages it receives from its primary caretaker, usually the mother—messages that need not be vocal but can also include the haptic and the gestural, the way the infant is touched and handled.23 Laplanche argues that, as with other stimuli,

According to Laplanche, “self-preservation in man (his autonomous capacity to persist in being, what one might term his instinctual potentialities) is so precarious that it is sexuality which endlessly comes to make up for its deficiencies” (Unconscious 147). He continues later: “Sexuality … vicariously supports the human instinct for selfpreservation, and that instinct is to some extent lacking” (New 60). Bersani adopts this argument and considers sexuality’s jouissance an evolutionary conquest of the human being’s early Hilflosigkeit (see FrB 39; CR 40–41; IRG 24–25, 174; and I 121). 21 See Bersani and Dutoit, “Merde” 25 / RB 4; FV 39; and Bersani, “Representation” 3, 7–8. The term “shattering” occurs in its Laplanchean context for the first time in A Future for Astyanax’s last chapter: see FA 300, 302, 304, 306 (twice), 307, 332n2. 22 See also Bersani and Dutoit, “Merde” 25 / RB 5, as well as Bersani, “Representation” 7; FrB 39; IRG 24. 23 Seduction happens via “not only the mother’s articulate language, but also all her signifying and significant behavior” (Laplanche, Unconscious 107). 20

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the infant is incapable of translating and interpreting—neutralizing—the messages it receives from the caretaker. There remains an irreducible excess in the messages, an excess that, as it were, awakens the infant (“a being without speech”) into language, that is, into an endless investigation about the messages’ meaning. The infant is hominized, rendered a child, when it feels compelled to heed such calls, when it begins the work of translating the cryptic meanings that the caretaker’s missives seem to carry. The infant is shaken (ébranler) by the solicitation of what Laplanche calls the enigmatic signifier, “the implantation of an erotic message … which he or she does not understand” (Laplanche, “Interview” [with Stanton] 10). The child cannot eradicate the messages’ nonsignifying excess, cannot, as Laplanche often puts it, fully “metabolize” them. It is here that we find the moment of the constitution of the unconscious, the implantation of an “alien internal entity” in the child (Life 24). Laplanche argues that, in what Freud calls primal repression (Urverdrängung), the child represses the messages’ unmetabolizable “waste matter,” the leftovers that remain untranslated and untranslatable. The unconscious is made up of repressed remnants of such untranslatable messages: as Bersani writes, “The Laplanchean unconscious … is a mass of nonmetabolizable refuse, the waste of the enigmatic signifier” (IRG 177). Thus, for Freud, Laplanche suggests, the unconscious is not a realm of repressed memories or traumas that, with enough analytic attention, can be brought back to light. Rather, the unconscious is radically empty, made up of the nonsignifying waste that is left over in the process of translation. We might call it the “excremental unconscious.” A crucial aspect of Laplanche’s theory of seduction is the fact that the messages the infant receives are not purposefully conveyed by the other. Because the caretaker is nothing but another human subject, she is also a subject of the unconscious, a sexualized being. As such, she is not in control, or even aware, of the messages she sends to the infant, verbally or otherwise. “Clearly, the desire of the mother is shown in the way she takes care of the child, but it is not revealed there,” Laplanche writes. “It is at once conveyed and hidden, in the care, the handling, in what is given attention, in attitudes” (Unconscious 105, emphasis added). She does not seduce the child intentionally; rather, her messages echo her own alienness to herself. Bersani would have recognized in Laplanche’s description of hominizing desire an echo of the double address that he has identified in Proust (and will discern in Caravaggio): the movement of seduction, where meaning is “at once conveyed and hidden” in the mother’s desiring dispatches, constitutes the same kind of double address of “proposing and concealing” (FA 87), “solicit[ing] and resist[ing]” (CS 2). What makes us human is this early, unintentional, unavoidable, destabilizing initiation into sexuality.

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Thus, it is at the moment of the unconscious’s emergence, precipitated by premature birth, overwhelming stimuli, and the caretaker’s unwittingly relayed messages, that the infant becomes-human. Except in an “abstract” sense, for Laplanche the infant is not human before its seduction and shattering into sexuality, before its barely existent being is breached. Laplanche speaks of the intrusion into the universe of the child of certain meanings of the adult world which [are] conveyed by the most ordinary and innocent of acts. The whole of the primal intersubjective relation—between mother and child—is saturated with these meanings. Such, we maintain, is the most profound sense of the theory of seduction and, above all, the sense which Freud ultimately gave to the very notion of seduction. (Life 44)

As he continues, this “is so linked to the process of humanization that it is only through abstraction that we can suppose the existence of a small human ‘before’ that seduction” (46). In the Derridean terms we discussed above, the “human” of Laplanchean theory is a supplemental being. All three moments of sexualization are traumatic for the infant: “it is in the very nature of sexuality to have a traumatic effect” (Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy” 4); hominization begins in a traumatic breach. As traumas, such moments cannot be consciously experienced at the time of their occurrence; their having taken place can only be speculated about in retrospect. This retrospective aspect is peculiarly human, Freud postulates. As he writes in “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (1940), “we come upon the fact that the onset of sexual life is diphasic, that it occurs in two waves—something that is unknown except in man and evidently has an important bearing on hominization” (384). The traumatizing double movement of hominization means that the origin of becoming-human can be pointed to only in the time of Nachträglichkeit (Fr. après-coup), Freud’s term that Laplanche proposes we translate into English as “afterwardsness.”24 This retrospection/afterwardsness suggests that becoming-human is a groundless process; again, Laplanche’s theory of hominization can be read as an example of what Derrida has called supplementation, where the supplement is that which seems to have been added on something primary and originary but that, on closer inspection, is the only way to make the origin accessible. Supplementarity, as Derrida

See Laplanche, “Notes”; “Freud” 41–44; “Interview” [with Stanton] 15–17; and “Time” 234–36. James Strachey translates the term as “deferred action.”

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writes, reveals the aporetic nature of the origin. For Laplanche, humans, in their becoming, are always already lost, gone astray, in the sexuality that constitutes their evanescent being.

Desire and Its Discontents: The Psychoanalytic Subject For Laplanche, Freud’s theory, taken as a whole, provides an unprecedented account of the relation between the self and the other in philosophy. He argues that otherness has remained a persistent problem for Western thought. “Western philosophy,” he writes, “ … has always stumbled over the problem of the other.” This is because “the otherness of the external world has always appeared doubtful, problematic, having to be deduced solely from the evidence of subjectivity.” In Western thought, we find but the endless re-appearance of a way of posing problems, together with an account of origins, in which access to reality and to the recognition of the other is secondary, derivative in relation to a single, primary testimony—that of the ego. (“Theory” 653)

In a revolutionary way—but the way of a revolution that was to remain “unfinished”—Freud’s work decenters Western ontological categories: his early clinical experiences with hysterics revealed that the other precedes the subject; the subject is solicited into becoming by the world. Consequently, the “primacy of the other” (Laplanche, “Gender” 171) constitutes an essential proposition of Laplanchean psychoanalysis, in contradistinction to Western philosophy, where the world has “centrifugally” unfolded from the ipse.25 (The English-language collection of Laplanche’s 1990s texts is appropriately called Essays on Otherness.) Bersani adopts many of Laplanche’s propositions in the mid-1970s. There are several ways to explain his interest in Laplanche’s work. The first reason we might mention concerns the psychoanalytic rethinking of sexuality. The realm of biological need being constitutively barred, sexuality takes the place of dysfunctional need in the infant. Reading Freud’s texts, Laplanche speculates that the human being emerges at this very moment of fourvoiement that is the infant’s sexualization. Only humans have sexuality, On Laplanche’s use of the terms “centrifugal” and “centripetal,” see “Masochism” 211; “Seduction” 194–96; “Sublimation” 47; “Theory” 664–65; “Time” 247; and “Transference” 225–26. For Bersani’s use of the same terms, see Tuhkanen, Essentialist ch. 1.

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for sexuality names the process of becoming in which hominization happens as a divergence from the primordially lost natural realm. Understood in this way, sexuality constitutes the infant’s straying from the (inaccessible) vital order onto the tortuous road of desire. As Laplanche writes, the exception—i.e. perversion—ends up by taking the rule along with it … [The] exception ends up by undermining and destroying the very notion of a biological norm. The whole of sexuality, or at least the whole of infantile sexuality, ends up by becoming perversion. (Life 23)

The infant becomes-human at this moment when sexuality takes over as an unnatural, supplementary, queer force of pleasure. This account explains why psychoanalysis has held an ambivalent attraction for queer theorists: following Freud, Laplanche postulates that becoming-human is by its nature a queered and queering process, that human ontology is constitutively perverse, “unnatural.” Encountering Laplanche in the mid-1970s, Bersani becomes an early theorist of queer being. The second reason why Bersani latches onto Laplanche’s reading of Freud concerns the role of masochism in the latter’s theory of hominization. The self is constitutively undone in its encounter with the world, with otherness. Bersani detects the ethical ramifications of this theory: Laplanche’s reading of Freud suggests that we must conceptualize the devouring, imperial ego—such as we often find in Proust—as an untenable delusion. Shattering renders impossible the fantasies of “authoritative identities” or “identities as authority” (CR 3). The shattered subject cannot be the ravenous being after the other’s secret. Returning to our discussion above, we might say that enigmatic signifiers fascinate the subject: while they appear as the desirous objects of attention, they also precipitate the subject’s shattering. That which fascinates also undoes us. Finally, Laplanche’s theory of sexuality-as-masochism may appeal to Bersani because of its resonance with Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of sadism and masochism. Whether Bersani, at the time of his encounter with Freud and Laplanche, was familiar with Deleuze’s study “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), we can say that, given the shared premises of their thought—more of which in the following chapter—their readings of sadomasochism largely agree with one another. Like Laplanche and Bersani, Deleuze cites Freud’s postulation that erotic excitation is felt when stimuli, whatever their source, exceed certain limits. “Such a hypothesis,” he writes, “recognizes the existence of an irreducible masochistic basis” in the human subject’s experience of sexuality (“Coldness” 105). Yet Freud, characteristically for our critics, recoils from his

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own insights. He flees the ramifications of primary masochism, indicated by his reconceptualization of sexuality, by “maintain[ing] the primacy of sadism” (105); Laplanche, too, writes that, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud articulates “the genesis of sadomasochism” that is “quickly covered over” in his subsequent work (Life 86). Deleuze proposes that we must reconfigure the official psychoanalytic understanding of sadism. For him, as well as Laplanche and Bersani, masochism is not, as it is for Freud, a “counterpart” to sadism (Freud, “Economic” 418). Rather, sadism itself arises as projected masochism: sadistic excitations consist of the remembered jouissance of the subject’s originary, masochistic shattering.26 When we reject Freud’s “tendency to derive masochism from sadism” (Deleuze, “Coldness” 101), we realize that there is no such thing as sadomasochism, only the differential forces of masochism (which is primary) and sadism (secondary). What Bersani calls “the psychoanalytic subject” is a synthesis of the Proustian and the Freudian-Laplanchean conceptualizations of the subject. We find in Proust an interrogative subject, fascinated by otherness. This subject is bent on revealing the other’s secrets, (dis)solving its enigmas, and thereby finding the missing piece that would undo the traumatizing lack that precipitates the self. The Freudian-Laplanchean subject is similarly in thrall of the promise that full knowledge of the other would yield the subject ontological integrity. What Laplanche emphasizes, however, is the way in which the subject is shattered by that which it tries to master and that the subject, indeed, seeks this shattering. There is always a residuum that escapes the subject’s control; this residuum precipitates an endless movement that psychoanalysis calls either “desire” or “the drive.” In this reading, psychoanalysis gives us an account of the subject that is typical for twentieth-century thought, one where the subject becomes secondary to the other, that is, where the other both precedes and supplements the subject. In varying ways, this idea informs the work of Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Louis Althusser. As Laplanche argues, this constituted Freudian theory’s revolutionary insight: a new definition of sexuality as that which brings the human subject into being at the moment of his or her seduction by otherness. This has profound ethical ramifications in how we understand subjecthood and its relation to the outside world. Yet Bersani is never to lose what he in 1976 diagnoses as his “ambivalent attitude toward psychoanalytic thought” (FA 8). If Laplanche argues that Freud disallowed the conceptualization of the human subject in terms of

We will return to this point in Chapter 5. On the psychoanalytic concepts of sadism and masochism, see also Laplanche and Pontalis, Language 401–03.

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the imperial, independent subject whose names in Western philosophy had included those of “cogito” (Descartes) and “the transcendental ego” (Husserl), Bersani discerns in Freudian theory implications that Laplanche leaves unnoted. He suggests that, if the psychoanalytic subject is a subject of sexuality, it is important for us to give a full account of the history from which the Freudian concept of “sexuality” emerges. Such an account would highlight the way in which the psychoanalytic subject shares some of its defining traits with the modern subject, always a subject of knowledge, whose first articulation we arguably find in René Descartes’s work. It would, further, trace the onto-ethical implications of the modern, Cartesian subject’s radical separation from the world, as well as recognize this subject’s paradigmatic indebtedness to an ontology of lack, of privation. It is, in part, Michel Foucault’s work in the 1960s and 1970s that troubles Bersani’s relation to Freud and Laplanche. Bersani mentions Foucault already in Balzac to Beckett, acknowledging the importance of such texts as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (1966) (BB 4). In A Future for Astyanax, he, evidently having had access to the manuscript before its publication, mentions Foucault’s “forthcoming study of sexuality in Western civilization[, which] includes a persuasive consideration of both the epistemology and the therapeutic techniques of psychoanalysis as political strategies designed to reinforce social control of the individual’s desires” (FA  319n3). The following year, in 1977, he publishes a review of Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) (Bersani, “Subject”). He thus gleans the argument about the role of psychoanalysis in the disciplinary-biopolitical apparatus of sexuality partially from Foucault. Some quarter century after the review of Foucault’s books on prisons and sexology, he repeats the point about the ways in which the techniques embraced by psychoanalysis serve regimes of control: Authoritarian systems of government naturally profit from the confessional habits produced by the diffuse exercises of power analyzed by Foucault. Confession makes subjects visible, and their visibility (ideally, the visibility of desires which, they have been made to believe, constitute their essence) is a precondition of their political subjection. (IRG 157)

This argument about the disciplinary and biopolitical implications of psychoanalysis constitutes an important aspect of Bersani’s “ambivalence” about the onto-ethical orientation of Freudian thought. Bersani agrees with Foucault’s reading of modern subjectivity, according to which since the last quarter of the nineteenth century particularly

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medical and literary texts in the West have conceptualized—and taught us to conceptualize—the subject in terms that posit sexuality as the innermost core of a person’s being. According to Foucault, Freud’s work merely reinvents older modes of control: as he writes in the first volume to The History of Sexuality, Freud’s admirers have failed to observe how the good genius of Freud had placed [sexuality] at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the strategies of knowledge and power, how wonderfully effective he was—worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and directors of the classical period—in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to study sex and transform it into discourse. (1.159)27

In this conceptualization, psychoanalysis has been one of the major discourses in convincing us that the idiosyncrasies of sexuality reveal who we are: our personalities and modes of being. In an interview, Foucault suggests that our era is overseen by “the monarchy of sex” (“End”). While we assume ourselves to be “modern,” and often connect “modernity” to an idea of “freedom” (from premodern traditions, institutions, and superstitions), we in fact remain subjects of a regime of control, one that is all the more insidious for being less obvious than those of our previous rulers. Like the end of the ancien régime, an overthrow of this establishment would amount to a veritable revolution, an opening of a new episteme. Bersani agrees with Foucault’s argument about the central role that knowledge plays in the regime of sexuality: the Freudian science refined “the strategies of knowledge and power” that had been deployed in previous biopolitical efforts to control populations. Foucault posits “a constitutive relation between the will to govern and the will to know” (“Discussion” 108). If, for Foucault, Freudian thought comes to constitute “a nexus of governing techniques and knowledge procedures” (108), Bersani discerns “knowledge” as the organizing principle in Laplanchean onto-ethics, too. In its drive to know the other, to “translate” the other’s enigmatic messages, the Laplanchean subject is emblematic of modern society’s epistemophilic orientation. In As Didier Eribon paraphrases the argument: “Psychological (psychiatric) knowledge proceeds by digging through people’s childhoods in order to find there the origin of their ‘anomalies’ and in order, by means of some kind of interrogation, to discover their hidden truth. It creates their psychological truth at the same time that it creates them as individuals possessing a psychology that has its own truth, linked to the past, to the family, and to an axis of sexual and psychic normality on which all people find themselves situated, fixed, judged” (“Toward” 85).

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this society, we are told that, in order to have beneficial relationships with ourselves or with others, we need to know who we are and who the other is; this is the message of endless self-help books and twelve-step programs. Such injunctions echo Saint Augustine’s, who writes in The Trinity that “certainly something cannot be loved unless it is known” (293). Indeed, Foucault suggests that the epistemophilic regime has its beginning in Christian practices of confession. Early Christianity, as he notes in an interview, “re-oriented the [ancient] practices of the self in the direction of a hermeneutic of self and a deciphering of self as subject of desire” (“Concern” 458–59).28 This tendency becomes particularly pronounced after Descartes. In his later work, Bersani adopts from Foucault the term “Cartesian moment,” with which the latter designates the consolidation, in the seventeenth century, of the subject of knowledge.29 The Cartesian moment names a watershed in which Western onto-ethics definitively leaves behind the kinds of practices about which Foucault had read in Pierre Hadot’s work on ancient philosophy.30 As opposed to the ancient self, the Cartesian being “is defined entirely in terms of knowledge” (Foucault, “Ethics” 294). The project in Foucault’s later work— the so-called ethics texts—is to enable a shift whereby we are retrained in our relationship to ourselves and others such that knowledge loses its priority. This is one way to describe Bersani’s project, too: it seeks to precipitate the coming of an “antiepistemological episteme” (IRG 161). While I have here contextualized Bersani’s observations by comparing them to Foucault’s, we should note that it is not only, or even primarily, from him that Bersani draws his arguments about the onto-ethics of epistemophilia. Indeed, taking his early cues from literary texts, he often not only repeats but also anticipates many of Foucault’s arguments. Already in Balzac to Beckett—six years before the publication of La volonté de savoir— he observes that Proust posits a “connection between sexual desire and the essence of personality” (BB 215). He develops this very Foucauldian-sounding observation by reading passages in À la recherche du temps perdu where the Proustian lover is fascinated by the beloved’s “secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh” (Remembrance 1.986), drawn to everything that amounts For an elaboration of this argument, see Les aveux de la chair (2018), the recently published fourth volume to Foucault’s History of Sexuality. 29 For Foucault’s use of the term, see Hermeneutics 14–19; see also his description of the Descartes in “Ethics” 294. For Bersani’s discussion, see IRG 62, ch. 11; TT 38, 46, 62; and RB 121–22. 30 On Hadot and Foucault, see also Davidson, “Spiritual” esp. 480–82; and the editors’ notes in Foucault, “Subjectivity” 45n21. For Hadot’s own commentary, see his “Reflections.” Other classicists who influenced Foucault included Paul Veyne, Georges Dumézil, and Jean-Pierre Vernant (Davidson, “Ethics” 124). 28

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to the woman’s “substance” in the form of “the mystery of personality” (1.299). Having observed the dynamic in Proust, Bersani would recognize its articulation in Foucault’s theory about the ways in which sexuality and subjectivity are produced and maintained in modern disciplinary and biopolitical regimes. Similarly, Foucault is not the original source for Bersani’s observations about the epistemophilic orientation of contemporary onto-ethics. In his first book, Bersani identifies the centrality of the “problem of knowledge” (MP 32) to Proust. Exemplified in Marcel’s “unappeasable need to know” (MP 89), relatedness in À la recherche du temps perdu can be conceptualized only through, or as the result of, intimate knowledge of the self and the world. These examples remind us of the primacy of literary texts (and, later, of the visual arts), over philosophical and theoretical ones, in the unfolding of Bersani’s thought. Bersani finds it important to note that the Proustian-psychoanalytic subject is premised on an economy of desire where lack plays a crucial role. Marcel “constantly reenacts the experience of a lack” (FA 83); Proust’s novel offers a series of scenes in which we witness “a spectacular loss of being” (BB 209). We find a classic version of this myth articulated in Aristophanes’s tale in Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes suggests that our extant ontology is the result of divine punishment where original beings, consisting of two bodies wrapped up in one, were halved by Zeus (Symposium 189c–193e [353–58]). Consequently, like Aristophanes’s cleaved beings, we spend our injured lives trying to undo the primordial privation. In this model, the subject seeks in the other that which it has been deprived of, the self ’s lost piece that needs to be reassimilated. Marcel, for example, is convinced that the women he desires are hiding some information, some piece of knowledge, that would allow him to comprehend his own being. But, as we have noted, this desire is that of fascinated attraction. As psychoanalysis would say, such a project is synonymous with Todestrieb, the death drive. Regaining the lost piece would not only complete but also annihilate the self. This is because in this model individuation relies on separation, a coming-into-being that would be reversed at the moment of the self ’s completion. Proust and psychoanalysis, in other words, inherit modern culture’s notion of the subject. “The Proustian amorous pursuit is always more an epistemological than an erotic adventure,” Bersani writes in the preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust (2013). “The aim of desire is to know the presumed secrets of the loved one’s desires, secrets that the loved one is thought of as willfully withholding from the lover” (xvii–xviii). This is why many have compared the psychoanalytic method to the sleuthing process in detective novels: the analyst seeks to make the patient confess (to become conscious of) his hidden crimes, to draw out the truth of the subject

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from various clues. As Bersani and Dutoit write in 1985, “psychoanalytic treatment has been understood as the unfolding of a psychic detective story: one begins with a problem, works through resistances, and concludes with the saving discovery of a major secret” (FV 119). Like detective novels, clinical psychoanalysis often seeks to stabilize the subject by situating him in a network of (self-)knowledge. This characteristic is also why many critics have noted the profoundly conservative nature of detective novels: their narratives aim at restoring society’s equilibrium, which has been disrupted by crime. As in detective novels, revealing obfuscated knowledge of the world becomes of primary importance for psychoanalysis. In its traditional forms, psychoanalytic investigation, like that of the detective, aims to make the world fully readable or, as Rousseau might say, transparent. Whodunits, like psychoanalysis, illustrate what Bersani calls “[t]he redemptive role of knowledge” (CR 98). Ideally, we are redeemed from our injured, criminal modes of being into full transparency. Bersani’s oeuvre consists of experimentations with literary and theoretical texts to articulate alternative modes of being and becoming to those we find in Proust and psychoanalysis. Yet, as intensely and repeatedly as Bersani wrestles with Freud (and Proust), psychoanalysis’s role—like Proust’s— remains ambivalent in his work. On the one hand, the Freudian text is one of modernity’s most successfully coercive discourses in its attempt to articulate a findable and definable subject that is also a subject of control. Psychoanalysis is “the most pervasive, and the most prestigious modern form of a discursive technology of self-knowledge and self-creation” (FrB 30). Yet, on the other hand, Bersani’s continual returns to the Freudian and the Proustian text suggest that there remains an unspent potential in both. This has to do with their status as art. It is their artfulness that prevents their closure into purely disciplinary discourses. Bersani frequently finds in Proust passages and scenes with an undeveloped or virtual potential that can be actualized, elaborated further. Similarly, he often suggests that the Freudian text should be read as a work of art, that is, with the kind of close attention to paradoxes and aporias with which we attend literary texts. It is such productive contradictions that compel Bersani’s returns to the scenes of Freud’s and Proust’s crimes. In ways that the following chapter explores, his ambivalence regarding psychoanalytic theory is partially impelled by his early reading of Deleuze.

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2

What Is an Individual? (A Deleuzean Query)

We are used to positing a foundational link between Leo Bersani and psychoanalysis: he is frequently described as a “psychoanalytic thinker” (Copjec, Imagine 58), his work considered “a life-long quest to exfoliate the consequences of psychoanalytic thinking on being and relation” (Maulibec n. pag.). Yet, making such assessments, we must also note that his first discussion of psychoanalytic theory, in A Future for Astyanax: Desire and Character in Literature (1976), is preceded—indeed, framed—by his encounters with another theoretical model, one that will have a considerable impact on his subsequent work. I am referring to two moments in Bersani’s early work: first, his engagement, toward the end of his second book, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, more precisely Deleuze’s 1964 study Proust and Signs;1 and, second, his framing of his 1976 study by an appeal to another text by Deleuze: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, his 1972 collaboration with Félix Guattari. If Bersani comes to regard Marcel Proust’s work, like Freud’s, as something of a training manual for our extant ways of being, Deleuze’s reading of À la recherche du temps perdu (to which he returns, explicitly or implicitly, throughout his subsequent texts) suggests to him that something in Proust remains in excess of our epistemic regime’s exigencies. Similarly, his readings of Freud, Laplanche, Lacan, and Klein are inflected through the critique of psychoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari provide in their famous polemic (which, contrary to popular opinion, is not a dismissal of psychoanalysis, but an effort to activate its potential). Deleuze’s studies allow Bersani to discern in Proust and Freud energies that remain in excess of their exemplary description of the modern (disciplinary-biopolitical) subject. Bersani’s early engagements with Proust and Signs and Anti-Oedipus bear the seeds of what I propose is his Deleuzean orientation. Yet we must be

Writing Balzac to Beckett, Bersani would have had access to the first, 1964 edition of Proust and Signs, which includes “The Signs,” the first part of the “complete text.” The second part, “The Literary Machine,” was appended to the book in the second edition, in 1972, and subsequently divided into chapters in the third edition (1976). See Deleuze’s explanation of the book’s publication history in his 1976 preface (Proust ix).

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clear about the exact implications of this characterization. Bersani is not a “Deleuzean” in any of the usual senses: he does not take it upon himself to provide exegeses of Deleuze’s philosophy; he is not committed to “finding” Deleuzean insights illustrated in the artworks he reads; much less does he indulge in “Deleuzobabble,” the discourse, eminently available to parodies, that Deleuze developed to shed the habits of our philosophical thinking.2 Indeed, Deleuze’s name appears nowhere as frequently as Proust’s or Freud’s (or Beckett’s, Laplanche’s, Baudelaire’s, or Genet’s) in his work. Yet, as he has suggested in a recent interview, Deleuzean thought has informed his work over the decades: “Deleuze has undoubtedly had a profound effect on my thought—more exactly, on the choice of the questions that preoccupy me most deeply” (“Rigorously” 289; see also TT 87–88n). The influence, Bersani continues, has been “more virtual than actual” (“Rigorously” 289). Thus, rather than documenting an actualized relationship, our task in this chapter will be to tune into the frequencies of an accord—“intensity, resonance, musical harmony” (Deleuze, Negotiations 86)—between the two oeuvres. I point to “the individual” or “individuality” as one of the questions that Deleuzean philosophy has enabled in Bersani’s thinking since Balzac to Beckett and A Future for Astyanax. The question operates in his work with something of an untimely insistence. After Karl Marx and Max Weber, it has been difficult to hear in evocations of “individuality” anything but naïve ideological misrecognitions and predatory social constructions. For Marx, the “individual” of modern freedom is nothing but a fiction, much like the “monad” or the “Robinson Crusoe” that he identifies as the fantasyactors of Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s economic theories.3 As Weber continues in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920), what we have considered the modern subject of “inwardness”—of individuality and freedom, answerable to no one but the call of his conscience—is but an efficient vessel for the labor that was demanded by the emergent forms of merchant capitalism in the sixteenth century. The Lutheran subject’s “inner ascesis” (innerweltliche Askese) guaranteed the subject’s seamless adaptation to the marketplace as a consumer and a cog in the industrial machine. More recent Continental thinkers have elaborated on such insights, suggesting, for example, that the “core” of the subject we call “the individual” is but a specter retrospectively (nachträglich or après-coup) produced by the sedimentation of

The term “Deleuzobabble” is Kara Keeling’s, who describes it as “a hermetic system of terms and concepts with precise, if at times obscure or obtuse, meanings created by Deleuze in his attempts to challenge and/or break out of existing philosophical systems” (5, qtd. in N. Davis 258n12). 3 Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 162; Grundrisse 83. 2

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various performative acts, repetitions that conceal nothing like the essential self whose truth our culture urges us to discover. Yet “individuality” belongs to a series of concepts that Bersani proposes we have abandoned too hastily, without properly actualizing their potential. In order to precipitate this actualization—to get beyond “limiting definitions of individuality” (FA 211)—Bersani makes, with Deleuze’s help, some crucial distinctions in the concept. In what follows, I will trace the emergence of this concept in Bersani’s early work, and then suggest some of the occasions in which it is further unfolded in the subsequent texts. I begin with A Future for Astyanax; prompted by one of the many moments of self-citation— recategorization—in Bersani’s work, I trace the ideas in this book to the preceding study, Balzac to Beckett, and particularly Bersani’s encounter there with Deleuze. I subsequently turn to Baudelaire and Freud (1977), published a year after A Future for Astyanax. It is here, with the emergence of Charles Baudelaire as an important figure for Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, that we begin to witness the aesthetic mode in which Bersani wants to rethink the concept of “individuality.”

Psychoanalysis and the Realist Novel A Future for Astyanax confirms Bersani’s later insistence that we should understand him not as “a professional philosopher” or “a theoretician” but as a reader of aesthetic works (“Rigorously” 289). The study is organized around a series of analyses of literary texts; its argument is moved along through these readings, not through interventions into, or taking sides in, theoretical debates. Yet, as the genre of the scholarly study demands, Bersani does discuss a number of critical texts across the chapters. Among the names of contemporary scholars, two emerge most frequently: Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. While what others have since then claimed as an incompatibility between Derrida and Deleuze4 goes unnoted by Bersani, their philosophies exert an implicit pull on his formulations, bending the direction of his thought in ways that have consequences for—and can be better observed in—his subsequent work. Bersani announces the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus for his arguments in the opening pages of A Future for Astyanax.5

See Smith ch. 16; Grosz, Becoming 43–45, 91–95; and Patton and Protevi 4–9. Bersani mentions also Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (FA 325n1), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (FA 319n2), and Proust and Signs (FA 255–56, 329n6).

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In the introductory chapter, he writes of Deleuze and Guattari’s “impressive and intensely polemical” study that, while many may count it among other recent “philosophical pastorals of pre-Oedipal desire,” their rereading of psychoanalysis shows that “a new emphasis on the peripheries of our desiring attention would not only diversify desire but would also keep it mobile” (FA 7).6 Bersani reads Anti-Oedipus as a critique of the way in which psychoanalysis has taught us to “organize” or “centralize” our desires, to construct a world of stable “personalities” out of the disparate forces that psychoanalytic thinkers have nevertheless correctly identified. Psychoanalysis has been able to discern “revolutionary” forces available for everyday practices, to analyze the functioning of what Deleuze and Guattari call “desiring-machines.” Yet the same theoreticians—Freud, Lacan, and Klein are Deleuze and Guattari’s central targets—have also, in a double gesture, sought to blunt the forces of becoming they highlight, to frame them so that their territorialization by various frames (most notably, the Oedipal structure) has come to seem natural, inevitable, and desirable. Bersani will repeat this critique throughout his work, directing it mostly at Freud. Freud tunes into, renders his thought available to, the forces of becoming-human in an unprecedented way; but he also seeks to erect around his observations an institutional frame (the discipline of psychoanalytic practice) that would harness his insights into normative usefulness. As Bersani writes, Freudian theory serves the most constraining cultural enterprises in its statements about the history and nature of human desire, at the same time that it outlines the operations of desiring fantasy in ways which explode its own narrow views of the “natural” shapes and rhythms of desire. (FA xi)

It is Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the framing or territorializing or—to use the psychoanalytic term Bersani deploys—sublimation of desire’s forces that Bersani finds crucial in Anti-Oedipus.7 He continues the passage I cited above: Alluding to critics who consider Anti-Oedipus a “pastoral,” Bersani anticipates Judith Butler’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari in the final chapter of her Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987). I will consider the relationship between Bersani’s and Butler’s work in the next chapter. 7 Bersani’s theory of sublimation will require its own study, one that would map its divergence from the theory of sublimation that Lacanian theorists such as Joan Copjec (Imagine), Marc de Kesel (chs. 7–9), and Alenka Zupančič (Shortest 73–85) have outlined. For Copjec’s disagreement with Bersani, see her Imagine 54ff. 6

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Peripheral seductions would no longer be discarded because they can’t be related to a dominant interest; even our dominant interest—our “centers” of desire—would have merely a provisional, peripheral appeal. The desiring self might even disappear as we learn to multiply our discontinuous and partial selves. (FA 7)

The reference to “partial selves” (or, later, “partial impulses” [FA 29]) evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Melanie Klein. For Klein, infants do not connect to “persons” conceived as wholes (such as “mother”), but to what she calls “part-objects,” most importantly the breast. Deleuze and Guattari credit Klein for “the marvelous discovery of partial objects, that world of explosions, rotations, vibrations” (Anti-Oedipus 44). Yet in a territorializing gesture typical to psychoanalysis, she immediately subsumes such “partial” forces into a larger whole, “the global person,” which turns out to be either the impulses’ originary source or ultimate destination. In Klein, and psychoanalysis in general, the frame that organizes disparate impulses is the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that, rather than shackling partial objects in “the iron collar of Oedipus” (45), we must radicalize Klein’s notion: “There is no sort of evolution of drives,” they assert, “that would cause these drives and their objects to progress in the direction of an integrated whole, any more than there is an original totality from which they can be derived” (44). Drives and objects are not expressions of an originary wholeness toward which they would tend; for example, the child’s polymorphous perversity does not indicate a lack of development that would be mended by some internal evolutionary thrust that allows the cohering of adult sexuality. It is only the fiction of the Oedipus complex that forces this frame upon us. Bersani echoes this critique of the Oedipal hermeneutic in A Future for Astyanax and later. For example, he seems to hark back to his reading of Deleuze and Guattari when, in 2015, he declares the Oedipus complex “psychoanalysis’s major reductive explanatory tool” (TT 49). Yet as much as he is at once impressed by Laplanche’s reading of Freud and dubious about its onto-ethical ramifications, he not only lauds but also hesitates about embracing Anti-Oedipus. If Oedipus must be seen as a “reductive explanatory tool,” Deleuze and Guattari’s polemic similarly constitutes, as Bersani writes in 1977, an “immensely intelligent reductionist enterprise” (“Subject” 6).8 While such hesitations must be kept in mind—they indicate something In 1997, Bersani similarly deems “the ‘schizophrenic’ cultural politics about twenty years ago”—a reference if not to Anti-Oedipus, then to the work by other scholars precipitated by the book—“naïve and politically irresponsible” (IRG 172).

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important about his Deleuzeanism—throughout A Future for Astyanax Bersani follows Anti-Oedipus in highlighting the “discontinuous,” “partial” forces that operate outside any organizational frame. If Deleuze and Guattari direct their critique at psychoanalysis, Bersani identifies other discourses that have trained us in the centering, narrativizing, and territorializing of discontinuous desires. In the second chapter of the study (“Realism and the Fear of Desire”), he proposes that, much like psychoanalysis later on, nineteenth-century realist fiction at once evokes forces of becoming and frames—teaches the readers how to frame—such forces into stabilized, coherent forms. Realist fiction insists on “an ideology of the self as a fundamentally intelligible structure unaffected by a history of fragmented, discontinuous desires” (FA 56); it promotes the idea of “the readability of the human personality” (FA 69). As much as Deleuze and Guattari suggest that psychoanalytic theorists tap into desiring forces only to territorialize them in the Oedipal frame, realist novels describe a multitudinous world of desires but do this in order to confine it into meaningful, predictable, repeatable structures: “The [realist] novel welcomes the disparate, it generously gives space to a great variety of experience; but it is essentially an exercise in containing the looseness to which it often appears to be casually abandoning itself ” (FA 61). With their tightly organized narratives (their articulation of a problematic that provides the story its thrust, the complication of this problem, and its final resolution), realist novels evince “a commitment to a psychological integrity and intelligibility,” one that “has been a constant in Western culture” (FA 57). This commitment is driven by a political rationale: “Perhaps the surest guarantee of social order is psychological coherence” (FA 69). Realist fiction lubricates the disciplinary machinery by “providing it with strategies for containing (and repressing) its disorder within significantly structured stories about itself ” (FA 63). In a parallel way to what Deleuze and Guattari observe about psychoanalysis, realist novels make visible the forces that would destabilize extant formations of individuals and societies and push them to become something else; but by reading these forces as part of, or tending toward, “the coherent wholeness of personality” (FA 55), they also, first, educate us about the sublimation of such desires and, second, advertise the danger and futility of giving them free rein.9 Bersani returns to the topic of nineteenth-century literary realism in “Subject” 7–14; BF 117–21; FV 87–89; FrB 81–85; and “Rejoinder.” See also D. A. Miller’s Foucauldianinflected account, in The Novel and the Police (1988), of the “disciplinarity” of the Victorian novel as a site for the production of “the liberal subject.” Echoing Bersani’s argument in A Future for Astyanax and elsewhere, Miller suggests that realist novels are “profoundly concerned to train us … in the sensibility for inhabiting the new bureaucratic, administrative structures” that were emerging in the nineteenth century (89; see also 92–93). Miller refers to A Future for Astyanax in ibid. 27.

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Bersani discerns here a ruse of power central to modern Western culture: the production of structured, coherent, meaningful human subjects, whose figurations we often expect to meet in literature, constitutes a process of control. Realist fiction and psychoanalysis are discourses of control insofar as they advertise “the readability of the human personality” (FA 69): they find, and train us to find, meaningful structures amidst “discontinuous,” “partial” forces. We are taught to conceptualize history and the world—and the human subject as part of history and the world—in terms of causalities that predict the repetition of familiar outcomes. “Psychology” is one way that we have been trained to makes sense of the forces of becoming that inhere in human experience. Bersani returns to this argument throughout his subsequent work; much of his ethical program consists of developing modes of connectedness that differ from our cultural training of seeking the inner riches hidden in ourselves and others—the “fascination” with enigmatic otherness that Proust illustrates. For Bersani, when we are habituated to thinking of ourselves as explorers of such psychological dark continents— “all those unknown lives which we long to explore” (Proust, “Contre” 45), “whisper[ing] to [us] things about [ourselves] which [we do] not know” and which we find “irresistibly fascinating” (Conrad 57)—we inevitably orient ourselves toward each other violently: we seek to rescue the other from her enigmatic secrecy, to plunder the treasures that she, probably unknowingly, has withheld from the world. We have come to associate such arguments with Michel Foucault’s work. Indeed, when Bersani, in the introduction to A Future for Astyanax, speaks of the political uses to which psychology and psychoanalysis have been put, he appends to his text an endnote in which he points to a forthcoming study by Foucault (FA 319n3). This study is the introductory volume to The History of Sexuality, whose French original, La volonté de savoir, will be published the same year as A Future for Astyanax, in 1976. While Bersani had made a brief allusion to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (1966) in Balzac to Beckett (BB 4), this endnote indicates for the first time the importance that Foucault’s thought will have for him. In much of his subsequent work, he will adopt and elaborate Foucault’s work on the techniques of disciplinary control. Yet while Foucault regards psychoanalysis as part and parcel of modernity’s disciplinary dispositif, linking it not only to the late-nineteenth-century discourses of sexology but also to the rationalist moralism that begins with Descartes (see Huffer, Mad), Bersani will remain more ambivalent about the role of the Freudian text. There is an excess—an artfulness—in Freud that prevents the reduction of his work to a mere cog of sexuality’s

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apparatus.10 In an analogous way, even though Bersani, in “Realism and the Fear of Desire,” deems realist fiction part of a cultural training program of territorializing desire, aspects of this tradition—the work of Henry James being the most obvious example—remain inassimilable to such strategies of control. Despite themselves, Freud and James may be able to show us that “the human subject can be more than a psychological subject” (I 120).

Leaps of Being In A Future for Astyanax, Deleuze’s work as a theoretical framing competes with Derrida’s. The impact of deconstructive thought on Bersani is suggested by his allusion to Derrida’s work in the opening section of Chapter 7, “Desire and Metamorphosis,” the first of the five chapters in the study’s second part, “The Deconstructed Self.” Derrida’s name is evoked in a discussion of Les Chants de Maldoror (1868–69) by Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Duncan Ducasse). Bersani suggests that Lautréamont undoes the kinds of coherent characters we find in realist fiction—he desublimates desire—by pushing the literary device of metaphor into the realm of absurdity. Bersani recounts examples from Les Chants de Maldoror: a pelican is deemed “as beautiful as” an insect’s tentacles or “an eminently putrescible liquid”; a human being strikes the narrator “as handsome as” the claws of a bird of prey or a rat trap or the sight of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table (FA 196).11 In his free-associative lists of comparisons, Lautréamont is developing “strategies for leaps of being”; in his literary inventions, [t]he word “like” does not draw disparate aspects of our experience into a single structure; instead of being a technique of enclosure (as it is in part in Proust), metaphor in Maldoror is an invitation to metamorphosis. The second term of comparison doesn’t illuminate the first term; rather, it proposes that we forget it, that we almost literally jump away from it. (FA 196, emphasis added)

Foucault describes the “apparatus” (dispositif) and its “elements” in the following way: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term [‘apparatus’] is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (“Confession” 194). 11 For the original, see Lautréamont 193. 10

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The narrator looks at the world through comparisons that turn out to have zero epistemological value. We do not learn anything about what a human being is when we are told that it is “like” a collection of objects on a table; rather, we are merely invited to think such being otherwise, to “jump” or “leap” from a being to another, to construct connections without the kind of intelligibility on which psychoanalysis and realist fiction insist. We can hear Deleuze’s influence in Bersani’s discussion of Les Chants de Maldoror. In Proust, as Deleuze writes, “metaphor is essentially metamorphosis” (Proust 48). In “Desire and Metamorphosis,” Bersani attaches this idea not to Proust but to Lautréamont, indeed contradicting Deleuze’s assessment by contrasting the two writers: whereas metaphor in Proust constitutes “a technique of enclosure,” in Lautréamont it becomes “an invitation to metamorphosis.” He similarly seems to adapt the idea of “leaps of being” from Deleuze, who finds in Proust a momentum (one that he calls “the transversal”) “that cause[s] us to leap from one of Albertine’s profiles to the other, from one Albertine to another, from one world to another, from one word to another” (Proust 126). As Bersani indicates in the parenthetical remark in his discussion of Lautréamont’s “invitation to metamorphosis,” Les Chants de Maldoror is in fact a better illustration of “metamorphoses” and “leaping” than the famous analogies of À la recherche du temps perdu.12 Like Lautréamont’s, Proust’s metaphors bring two disparate things together; yet, unlike Lautréamont, who insists on their incomparability, Proust evokes incongruent objects in order to reveal their shared “essence.” When Marcel listens to unrelated works by the composer Vinteuil, he discovers that a septet and a sonata include “widely different phrases [that] were composed of the same elements”; the commonness reveals “the unknown colourings of an inestimable, unsuspected universe” (Proust, Remembrance 2.654). This is the work that art does in Proust: it unearths “essences” that remain hidden in ordinary experience; it lets us hear “the same prayer” in “fragments gathered here and there” (2.655, 654).13 Art (including Proust’s novel) dazzles us with the unexpected emergence of shared identities: in a moment of an uncanny déjà vu, we “remember,” or “see again,” an essence

On “leaps of being,” in Proust and elsewhere, see FA 196, 216, 218, 227, 240. As Proust writes in the early essay “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” art dislodges a generality, a “common essence” from its varied objects: “from those impressions and others like it something common to them is liberated, something whose superiority to our everyday realities, even the realities of thought, and passion, and sentiment, we shall never be able to account for. Yet this superiority is so positive that it is almost the only thing we can never doubt. And when we recognise this thing, this common essence of our impressions, we feel a pleasure like no other pleasure, and while it stays with us we know that death is negligible” (79).

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we have “forgotten” because it exists only in scattered fragments. If Deleuze proposes that Proustian “metaphors” produce “metamorphoses,” Bersani suggests that these metamorphoses obey the modern logic of epistemophilia: they offer us knowledge about the world. No revelatory knowledge hides in the connections Maldoror makes between things. In the disturbing and comical comparisons he offers his readers, Lautréamont relishes ontological disjointedness: “the epistemological function of metaphor” that pervades Proust (BB 210) is missing from Lautréamont. Calling Lautréamont’s text “one of literature’s most daring enterprises of decentralization” (FA 196), Bersani suggests that we find its philosophical counterpart in Derrida’s work. Les Chants de Maldoror bucks the hegemonies of Western thought whose critique and undoing Derrida has taken as his task: Lautréamont’s text, as Bersani writes, referring to Of Grammatology (1967), “is a major document among modern efforts to break away from what Jacques Derrida has been brilliantly anatomizing as the Western cultural habit of referring all experience to centers, or beginnings, or origins of truth and being” (FA 196).14 Derrida is largely silent on À la recherche du temps perdu, but Bersani’s description of Proust, in Marcel Proust, Balzac to Beckett, and now A Future for Astyanax, suggests that in his novel we find a prime example of the tradition that deconstruction targets. Indeed, Bersani frequently critiques Proust in terms that are recognizably Derridean. Proust’s imagination is typical insofar as in it the world outside representation—outside art—is deemed incomplete, lacking, or injured, its “essences” obfuscated, much like Platonic Forms are inadequately repeated in appearances. The role of art for Proust is to rescue life from this fallen state, to salvage the scattered pieces so that we may experience them in the context of their originary wholeness. Proustian analogies reveal shared essences hiding in disparate things, essences that are inaccessible to everyday experience. In allowing us to observe “beneath the apparent differences the profound similarities” (Remembrance 2.655), Proust becomes a practitioner of what Bersani will call our “culture of redemption.” He shows how lost sameness can be retrieved from scattered experience. The proto-surrealist Lautréamont, on the other hand, refuses the idea that the comparison of various objects might reveal a lost meaningfulness —a refusal that, Bersani suggests, anticipates Derrida’s deconstructive ethos. Bersani’s evocation of Derrida in his discussion of Lautréamont reads like a crucial moment in an unfolding intellectual trajectory, especially since it takes place in the opening chapter of a section called “The Deconstructed

See also Derrida’s discussion of Lautréamont: Dissemination 36–43.

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Self.” We might intuit here a crystallization, an embryonic moment, of a scholarly program and expect that, from here on out, the critic will go on to analyze further examples in the tradition that Derrida targets, either activating in these texts the dormant seeds of their self-deconstruction— exploring the famous “gaps” that riddle the self-assertive documents of Western thought—or, to supplement Lautréamont’s example of ontological “leaps,” searching for alternative traditions where being is figured otherwise than through the “centralizing” impulses we find in Proust. This expectation seems to be confirmed in the following chapter (“Rimbaud’s Simplicity”), where Bersani again evokes—without directly naming—Derrida’s philosophy, this time in the context of a discussion of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry. As in Lautréamont, he finds in Rimbaud (another nineteenth-century writer to influence surrealism) experimentations with radical “discontinuity.” As he did in the introductory chapter, he speaks of the possibility of retaining the “partial,” “disconnected” forces that literature and psychoanalysis, as components of modernity’s dispositif, “sublimate” into stable, legible “characters.” Rimbaud illustrates the forces of “component drives” (Freud) and “partial objects” (Klein) outside “the petrifying structures which the world would impose on the self ” (in psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex) (FA 240). In his poetic work, he seeks to “reduce or simplify himself to a series of discontinuous, fragmented scenes” (FA 260); such scenes would escape “the structured sublimations of art” (FA 252). While Derrida’s name does not appear in the chapter, Bersani’s language evokes his thought: in his analysis of Rimbaud’s “water” tropes, for example, Bersani speaks of the “deconstructed, flood-devastated world” we discover in Rimbaldian poetry (FA 244). Derrida’s presence is confirmed by the following chapter, on Antonin Artaud, where Bersani goes on to cite his essays on the playwright (FA 261–62, 266–67).15 Yet an important moment of discordance intervenes in the deconstructive reading of Rimbaud. Toward the end of the chapter, Bersani refers to Deleuze’s Proust and Signs in an endnote and then in the text. While he has contrasted Lautréamont’s comparisons to the analogies in À la recherche du temps perdu—and suggested the latter’s complicity with the metaphysics of presence—he now proposes a different take on Proust. This new approach is enabled by Rimbaud and Deleuze. Bersani writes that Rimbaud’s efforts to figure a self without history—like a flood-devastated world wiped clean of all traces of the past—can be described in the terms that Deleuze assigns

The texts by Derrida, which Bersani does not name, are “La parole soufflée” and “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.”

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to Proust: “the scenic self … is depersonalized: the scenes don’t ‘add up’ to a personality. No view of the self enjoys the ontological privilege of unifying the multiplying versions of being which desire incessantly produces” (FA 255). Rimbaud’s work offers alternatives to the coherence of psychological personality. Bersani diverges to an endnote on Proust and Signs, where he proposes that what Deleuze says about À la recherche du temps perdu is in fact “much more applicable to Rimbaud than to Proust; the latter never gives up the project of finding an invariable self which would ‘totalize’ and give sense to all the self ’s desires—even though Proust’s own work implicitly dismisses that project” (FA 329n6). Unlike the Rimbaldian self, Marcel always seeks to make sense of his variegated experiences, to totalize their multiplicity into a series of “essences”—an effort, as Bersani now continues, this very work cannot but “dismiss,” presumably because of its endlessness. Like Lautréamont before, Rimbaud is more “radical” than Proust in his efforts to evoke a movement of pure dissemination. The contrast between Rimbaud and Proust, however, evolves into something of a comparison. It turns out that Rimbaud is not as committed as Lautréamont to the dispersal of the essences that the late-nineteenthcentury discourses of psychology will render into “personalities.” With the illuminated, discontinuous scenes—as Bersani continues after a paragraph break—“the poet seems to be trying to escape from the sort of individuality which coincides exactly with a particular individual’s history” (FA 255, emphasis added). There is an effort in Rimbaud to decimate the history that allows the constitution of the coherent individual, like a flood wipes out a built environment. Yet we are now invited to pluralize the concept of “individuality”: there may exist other “sorts” of individualities, other “sorts” of essences, than the ones determined by “a particular individual’s history.” This hesitation—the cleaving of the concept of “individuality”—is caused by Deleuze’s appearance in the argumentation. Not only has Bersani alluded to Proust and Signs in the previous endnote; he now continues: Ideally, the most “characteristic” aspects of Rimbaud’s visions would be characteristic not so much of Rimbaud the individual as of a certain region of Being in which Rimbaud partially participates. This is the kind of individuality which Gilles Deleuze finds in Proust: the individuality of a point of view embodied in but not dependent on the existence of an individual person. (FA 255–56)

At this moment, Deleuze’s reading of Proust bends the trajectory of the argument that has been developing in “The Deconstructed Self.” Bersani has

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argued that psychoanalysis and realist fiction explore “discontinuous” forces of becoming only to bind them into intelligible, psychological “individuals” (also called “personalities” or “characters”). His interest, in the early chapters of A Future for Astyanax, has focused on literary texts that, intentionally or not, “subvert” such processes of cohering by experimenting with the further expansion and dissemination of such forces. Yet now, as he evokes Deleuze’s reading of Proust, he puts pressure on the concept of “the individual.” Do we in fact know what we speak of when we speak of “individuality”? Does our critique of the normative frames of psychoanalytic theory and realist fiction—the Oedipal complex and novelistic character development— exhaustively describe this concept? What if, in our rush to affirm the compelling formulations that we find in various critiques of the ideology of liberal “individualism,” we have ignored alternative ways of defining the concept? Bersani’s evocation of the “individuality of a point of view” that Deleuze finds in Proust (and that Bersani identifies in Rimbaud) suggests that this concept is not adequately accounted for by Marx’s and Weber’s ideology critiques, whose later versions one finds in the emergence, in the 1960s, of deconstructive and social-constructionist theories. In an analogous way, what Deleuze calls Proustian “essences” are misrecognized if they become targets of the “antiessentialist” critiques that, largely driven by Derrida’s influence, will become par for the course in post-1970s deployments of Continental philosophy in Anglo-American academia. Quoting Proust and Signs in his discussion of Rimbaud, Bersani’s thought is pulled in a Deleuzean direction, necessarily disrupting some of the assumptions that the earlier chapters have gleaned from Derrida. This is not the first time we witness such a shift in Bersani’s work; a comparable move takes place in his previous study, Balzac to Beckett, too. Indeed, the paraphrase of Deleuze’s argument in Proust and Signs with which Bersani describes Rimbaud is drawn verbatim from the earlier book. There it appears in a chapter where Bersani finds in Proust the culmination of what he calls nineteenth-century French literature’s “centrifugal” tradition (BB 192–239). The texts included in this tradition—Bersani offers chapters on Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, and Proust—evince “a centrifugal pull which opens up the novel by multiplying the rays of interest away from the center” (BB 19). Bersani speaks of the “centrifugal” momentum in terms that, at the time of his writing, are becoming recognizable as part of deconstruction’s idiom. It is not only that, in the book’s introductory chapter, he credits Of Grammatology as a study outlining the “habits of thought” whose instantiations he proposes to explore in French literature (BB 4); moreover, his final words in the introduction—his designation of art as a place for experimentation with “the pleasures of centrifugal play” (BB 23)—echo Derrida’s call, in

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Of Grammatology and “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), for a “play” enabled by the absence (not the loss) of “presence” or “center.”16 The “centrifugal play” that Bersani seeks in French fiction—and whose epitome he finds in Proust’s “techniques of self-expansion through an abundance of self-diffusing metaphors” (BB 11)—is a movement that would destroy any notion of the “center” as a site of reference in what Derrida calls “the play of supplementarity” (Of Grammatology 242, see also 244, 260, 298). Bersani describes this dynamic as follows: “the centrifugal movement … is most authentically liberating when it creates a discontinuity between its own satellites and a center to which the satellites seem no longer attracted. Each satellite, as it were, throws off other satellites further and further from the orbit of the original planet,” a movement that “subvert[s] the meaning at the center” (BB 19). Similarly, supplémentarité names for Derrida a dynamic in which instances of “writing” will “eclipse” “th[e] heliocentric concept of speech” (Of Grammatology 91–92). He notes that, wondering about the attention he gives to such “minor” texts as “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” critics are likely to find his deconstructive reading of Rousseau “exorbitant” (161). Deconstructive criticism leads us astray, away from the supposed “center” of an oeuvre or tradition, to its margins or minor moments. As “a wandering thought” (162), it loses the center (the originary “planet” or “star”) and, in an “ex-orbitary” veering, goes off the rails, but only to render visible the very logic of the oeuvre or tradition, to demonstrate how this center is produced in the first place. It obeys what Leslie Hill calls “the exorbitant logic of literature itself ” (889). There are two Prousts for Bersani: the Proust who, of all French modernists, follows the centrifugal tradition the furthest is complicated by the one who tends to draw scattered images back to signifying centers. Proust’s metaphors seem to suggest an experience that, through unexpected analogies, is inexhaustible in its rich meaningfulness: the novel becomes a creation of infinite prolixity without any possibility of closure. Proust’s “creative analogies” (BB 211) are such that the narrator, who seeks images of his self in

Derrida writes: “One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence” (Of Grammatology 50, see also 7, 42, 57–59, 71, 259–60, 266). In “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida, alluding to Nietzsche, similarly speaks of “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines a noncenter otherwise than as loss of center” (“Structure” 292). We should note, however, that “play” emerges as a concept for Bersani already in an early review essay published in 1966: see his discussion of Beckett, Proust, and James in “No Exit” 265–66.

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the world, loses all sense of stability as his self is created and recreated by what he finds in the world. Bersani speaks of the “psychologically disintegrating and therefore psychologically creative consequences” of Proustian analogies (BB 228). In assigning to Proust’s metaphors “the effect of drawing us away from any fixed center of the self from which all its images might proceed” (BB 228), he evokes his earlier trope, in the study’s introduction, of “satellites” in whose multiplication we lose sight of the “planet” their bodies are supposedly orbiting. Proust’s narrator similarly “tends to disappear as the visible and sharply defined source of th[e] patterns” woven by the language that he hopes will endow him with a stable self-image (BB 229). Proust’s narrative strategies obey what Derrida calls “the law of supplementary acceleration”: “The supplement itself ”—Bersani’s satellites—“is quite exorbitant, in every sense of the word” (Of Grammatology 201, 163).17 Yet, at the same time, À la recherche du temps perdu fails to become a purely centrifugal text, where all notions of centers would be definitively abandoned in, or dissipated by, decorative analogies. This is because Proust identifies in art the production of something he calls “essences.” Bringing seemingly unrelated things in proximity, he does not merely stage “leaps of being” with his analogies, like Lautréamont; rather, he isolates from comparisons a series of “peculiar, volatile essence[s]” (Remembrance 1.331), singular identities that become discernible through art’s ability to draw out connections that have been severed in experience. As Proust writes, the artist “fuses a quality common to two sensations, extracts their essence and in order to withdraw them from the contingencies of time, unites them in a metaphor, thus chaining them together with the indefinable bond of a verbal alliance” (2.1164). Because of this essentialism, Proust’s work, despite its potentially infinite proliferation of descriptions, is less suitable as a laboratory for experimentations with centrifugal-disseminative thinking than Lautréamont’s. Bersani writes that the Proustian “self ’s admirable talent for diversifying and multiplying its fictions” is inextricable from “the astonishing magnetism which draws the most diversified experience into an expanding but always recognizable individual psychology” (BB 239, 234). A contemporary reader is likely to recognize and complete the argument, not only in the context of Derrida’s work but also in that of Foucault’s: “individual psychology” must designate the product of the power-knowledge apparatuses whose instances Bersani, partially influenced by Foucault, will identify in realist fiction and Bersani seems to echo Derrida’s phrase when, in 1982, he writes of “a principle of accelerating supplementarity” in Mallarmé’s poetry (DSM 82; see also “Representation” 16; FrB 48).

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psychoanalysis;18 and Proust, in his relentless effort to locate a “fundamental sameness” (MP 165) in diversity, offers a novelistic affirmation of the Western “metaphysics of presence.” Yet the argument in Balzac to Beckett, rather than proceeding as one might expect, swerves into another direction. As Bersani continues in the following paragraph, when we speak of Proust, the phrase “individual psychology” may indicate “a kind of impersonality” (BB 234). The “essences” in which Marcel seeks his self are “impersonal” essences. A Proustian essence is not necessarily the grammatical subject of Aristotelian predication, the distinct, knowable being onto which predicates are subsequently attached. It is not the psychological self of inwardness whose emergence Weber locates in Martin Luther’s Reformation and that Foucault will find affirmed in Cartesian philosophy. Nor is it the recognizable, coherent “character” whose production and maintenance can be observed in realist fiction and the psychoanalytic clinic. Rather than tied to any particular person or occasion, a single “essence” can, for example, be variously embodied: Our loves are most deeply characterized by a “persistent, unconscious dream” which seeks to incarnate itself in various persons … The dream is a specific type of desire; it expresses an individuality more general than individuals. And that individuality is what the Proustian narrator calls an “essence.” (BB 234–35)

It is at this moment that, anticipating the turning point in A Future for Astyanax I have outlined above, Bersani turns to Proust and Signs, giving us the paraphrase that he will repeat in his discussion of Rimbaud: the “individual person” revealed in art “is not exactly equivalent to [the artist’s] personal existence. The individuality of a point of view embodied in but not dependent on the existence of an individual person: this is what the narrator comes to recognize as the source of the pleasure he experiences in front of great art”; in Proust, we find an “identification of the absolutely individual with a region of Being transcending individuals” (BB 235). This paraphrase marks a pivotal moment in both Balzac to Beckett, a turning that is repeated in A Future for Astyanax. In terms of scholarly influences, it designates the shift that Bersani’s thought makes from Derrida to Deleuze; and it necessitates

As Foucault puts it in 1982, power “categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes the law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects” (“Subject” 331).

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that Bersani persist with the thought of “individuality” beyond what we most immediately recognize as the subject of “individual psychology.”

Toward an Impersonal Individual What, then, is at stake in the wavering between Derrida and Deleuze that we witness in Bersani’s early studies? Daniel Smith writes that, notwithstanding Derrida’s own assertion, in his eulogy to Deleuze, concerning a “near total affinity” between their philosophies, the divergence in the two thinkers’ organizing assumptions arguably renders their thought ultimately “incompatible” (275).19 Smith structures his discussion of such differences around what he proposes we call, “at least in a preliminary manner,” their transcendent (Derrida) and immanent (Deleuze) orientations (271).20 Yet, as he also notes, implied here are the different attitudes the two take toward the question of the possibility of “metaphysics” and “ontology.” Derrida takes up (and seeks to complete) Heidegger’s project of the “destruction” or “overcoming” (for Derrida, the “deconstruction”) of metaphysics. In doing

Smith quotes from Derrida, “I’m Going” 192. Smith takes his cues from Giorgio Agamben’s schematization of twentieth-century philosophy as divided between “a line of transcendence” and “a line of immanence,” where the legacies of Kant and Husserl—the line of “transcendence”—are elaborated in Levinas and Derrida, while Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s “immanent” philosophies are worked out in Foucault and Deleuze (both lines pass through Heidegger) (Agamben 238–39; Smith 271–72). This is not an uncontroversial reading of Derrida, not least because of what Smith calls the “highly overdetermined” connotations of the concept of “transcendence” (271). It has been challenged most recently by Martin Hägglund, who argues that what Smith calls “lack” in Derrida (which presumably produces the structure of transcendence in his thought) is in fact “division”: Derrida does not ground his notion of desire on lack but on the always already split experience of the present moment (Hägglund, Radical 15–18). According to Hägglund, Smith errs in identifying the concepts that Derrida highlights in his deconstruction of metaphysics with the Kantian Idea (211n9). Yet the stark distinction between Deleuze and Derrida—which may turn out to be, as Smith writes, merely “preliminary” (271)—will be helpful for our purposes insofar as it highlights both what attracts Bersani in Deleuzean philosophy and troubles him in the tendencies of deconstructive thought. It is particularly in Derrida’s Anglo-American readers (most notably among them Judith Butler and, in turn, scholars influenced by her groundbreaking work) in whom Bersani will discern the representation of becoming as a force driven by lack. Deleuze, on the other hand, offers him an oeuvre that explicitly, and repeatedly, rejects all onto-ethics where want drives being. Furthermore, Agamben’s argument will enable us to situate Bersani’s work as part of an effort to think the impersonal, ahuman forces of what Deleuze calls “a life.” As Agamben writes, the question of “life,” articulated in Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thought of immanence, will constitute “the subject of the coming philosophy” (238); Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics should be regarded as a part of this genealogy.

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so—in proposing, for example, that “[n]o ontology can think [the] operation [of supplementarity]” (Of Grammatology 314)—he consolidates (indeed, becomes perhaps the most important representative of) the dominant tendency in contemporary Continental thought, which Todd May calls its “anti-ontological trend” (Gilles 16).21 Deleuze, on the other hand, finds in claims concerning “the death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy” nothing but “tiresome, idle chatter” (Deleuze and Guattari, What 9). In a late interview, he calls himself “a pure metaphysician,” pointing to Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead as his immediate predecessors (qtd. in Smith 274). He is, as Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “perhaps the most ontological of thinkers” (Becoming 41). The tension between the two philosophers’ paradigmatic orientations is also felt in Bersani’s early work. While the argument in A Future for Astyanax shuttles between the insights of the two—seemingly emphasizing Derrida’s texts in the latter half of the book before returning to Deleuze with Proust and Signs—it is Deleuze’s ontological orientation that proves more compelling in Bersani’s subsequent thinking. We can tell this not only by the almost complete disappearance of Derrida’s name from Bersani’s texts after A Future for Astyanax, an absence particularly striking given deconstruction’s rapidly increasing influence after the mid-1970s; it is also indicated by Bersani’s later opposition to theoretical and political conceptualizations that were heavily influenced by Derrida’s philosophy. The most notable case of this is his critique, in Homos (1995), of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, whose synthesis of Hegel, Foucault, and Derrida gains something of a hegemonic (because constitutive) place in the field of queer theory after the publication of her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Neither, of course, do Deleuze’s texts get considerably more play than Derrida’s in Bersani’s work after Balzac to Beckett and A Future for Astyanax. Yet, as Bersani puts it in a 2014 interview, Deleuze’s influence has been formative in terms of the kinds of questions that he goes on to ask (“Rigorously” 289). In the most general terms, the early encounter with Deleuzean thought, particularly in Proust and Signs and Anti-Oedipus, enables him to persist in thinking being during decades when ontology was mostly ruled out as a viable field of thought in much of Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, a turn most influentially executed in Derrida’s work. If Derrida seeks the deconstruction of metaphysics, Deleuze wants to insist on the tradition’s unactualized potential. According to Smith, he

For a Deleuzean-influenced argument for political theories’ reengagement with ontology, see Grosz, Nick; and Time.

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regarded “metaphysics itself as an open structure, which is far from having exhausted its ‘possibilities.’ … [T]here are virtualities in past metaphysics that are capable of being reactivated, as it were, and inserted into new contexts, and new problematics” (274–75). In this, we find an approach characteristic of Bersani’s thought, too. Bersani often proposes that we have precipitously rejected a series of concepts (such as “essence,” “narcissism,” “sameness,” “homosexual identity”) as false or exhausted problems; he suggests that, with further work, these concepts will in fact help us radically redirect our thinking about, and our being in, the world. One concept in need of such unfolding is “individuality.” Deleuze’s observations in Proust and Signs help Bersani identify, and insist on, its importance first in Proust and then in other texts. After his initial encounter with Deleuze’s study in Balzac to Beckett, and then in A Future for Astyanax, he never ceases to observe the concept’s unexplored potential. This potential may be difficult to discern, for the concept immediately evokes the mode of “individuality” that numerous commentators have identified as central to the mythos of Western modernity. In 2015, Bersani refers to “the ideology of individualism” as “grounded in the notion of a fundamental opposition, or difference in being, between the subject and the world” (TT 34). This is the individuality that, as he suggests, following Foucault, emerges with Descartes (and that Marx and Weber trace back to the Lutheran Reformation and the rise of merchant capitalism), an individuality that has been “a major value of Western psychology” (FA 20). Yet highlighting the questions of “essence” and “individuality” in À la recherche du temps perdu, Deleuze’s Proust and Signs prompts him to suggest the necessity of making further distinctions in the concept: most importantly, of “distinguishing between individuality and what we normally think of as subjectivity” (BB 235). Albeit with some inconsistencies, Bersani makes a terminological distinction between “individuality” and “subjectivity” (or “personality”). The latter terms refer to the entity constructed by modern apparatuses, the psychological self that Foucault will analyze in the 1970s. Bersani describes “personality” as “that coherent, unified, describable self which is a premise of most Western literature from medieval allegory to early twentieth-century fiction” (FA 214, see also 18). We have mistakenly collapsed “personality” and “individuality.” As Bersani writes in a discussion of D. H. Lawrence, “Personality is the trap in which the individual gets lost. It is the sign of the self ’s inability to remain alone, an alluring invitation to self-destroying fusions” (FA 174). Our task is to disentangle “personality” from “individuality,” and insist on the unfinished task of thinking—of living with—the latter concept. While Proust remains the primary example of the production of disciplinary “personalities” (what Bersani calls “characters” in the subtitle of

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A Future for Astyanax), Deleuze’s reading of À la recherche du temps perdu highlights aspects of the Proustian world that complicate— without disputing—his novel’s designation as an “element” of modernity’s apparatus. Deleuze regards the Proustian search as an “apprenticeship” in the interpretation—or explication/complication, in the neoplatonist idiom he suggests is relevant here (Proust 45)22—of such individualities. He finds these individualities in what Proust calls “essences.” Each essence is expressed in a “sign” that solicits Marcel’s attention and calls him to the work of interpretation/explication. A sign gives an “impression” that is always “twofold, half-sheathed in the object, prolonged in ourselves by another half which we alone can know” (Remembrance 2.1166, qtd. also in Deleuze, Proust 27). An essence requires an object that “emits” the sign and a subject that “explicates” it; yet its existence cannot be reduced to either. “It is the essence,” Deleuze writes, “that constitutes the sign insofar as it is irreducible to the object emitting it; it is the essence that constitutes the meaning insofar as it is irreducible to the subject apprehending it” (Proust 38). The Proustian world is neither one of realism nor one of idealism. An essence does not exist beyond the encounter of the emitting object and the explicating subject, but it is not exhausted by either of them (it is not in the subject’s “mind”). It remains “half-sheathed” in the object, reaching toward the observer. Deleuze continues: the sign is doubtless more profound than the object emitting it, but it is still attached to that object, it is still half sheathed in it. And the sign’s meaning is doubtless more profound than the subject interpreting it, but it is attached to this subject, half incarnated in a series of subjective associations. (36)

The essence is parasitic, unfolding in between the object (who emits the sign) and the subject (who explicates it). Bersani recognizes in Proust and Signs a brilliantly creative account of the dynamics of “desire” and “character” that he has analyzed in psychoanalytic theory and realist fiction. But rather than continue directly with Deleuze— rather than following A Future for Astyanax with a book called Deleuze and Freud, or even Proust and Freud—he swerves to another body of work, one where he finds the further complication of the onto-ethics/aesthetics he has been tracing now for a decade: Charles Baudelaire’s. Baudelaire’s presence has For Deleuze’s commentary on neoplatonism in other contexts, see “Zones”; and Expressionism 169–86.

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been hovering around Bersani’s scholarship. Somewhat surprisingly, Balzac to Beckett does not have a chapter on his work; only a brief discussion on Les Fleurs du mal is included in a chapter on Gustave Flaubert (BB 150–54). Even less is said of him in A Future for Astyanax. Yet when Bersani writes, in Balzac to Beckett, that Proust’s “metaphorical inventions … are, as it were, horizontally rather than vertically transcendent” (BB 237), he is evoking Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory, which famously reimagines Plato’s “vertical” idealities as “horizontal” correspondences. Baudelaire and Freud is an unfolding of this brief observation. There Bersani turns his attention to the quintessential French modernist, suggesting that we find Lautréamont’s comparisons and Proust’s analogies reconfigured in correspondances, and that the dynamic that Baudelaire calls “idealization” can be rethought as a synthesis of Deleuze’s reading of Proust and Laplanche’s insights into Freudian theory of subject-constitution.

The Baudelairean Moment In Balzac to Beckett, Bersani implicitly proposes a connection between Proust’s aesthetic essentialism and Baudelaire’s theory of “idealization” and “(horizontal) correspondences.”23 Reversing the chronology of influence— moving from Proust to Baudelaire, rather than the other way around—he, again implicitly, gives us a Proustian-Deleuzean reading of Baudelaire in Baudelaire and Freud. He may have been inspired to do this by observing the presence of (revised) Platonism in both Proust’s and Baudelaire’s onto-ethics/ aesthetics. “Proust,” as Deleuze writes, “treats the essences as Platonic Ideas” (Proust 42). If Plato suggests that earthly, embodied things are but shadowy, shimmering reflections of eternal, incorporeal Forms, Proustian “essences” are versions of these Platonic idealities. As Proust indicates in a famous passage, the artist obscurely recalls “an unknown homeland” (une patrie inconnue) in his work. Listening to Vinteuil’s sonata and a septet, Marcel observes “resemblances, concealed, involuntary, [breaking] out in different colours” in the pieces; such correspondences and analogies reveal “profound similarities” expressed in the divergent compositions (Remembrance 2.655).

He is not the first to link the two writers. Walter Benjamin suggests the connection in “On the Image of Proust” 244; and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 332–35. For other early critics to observe what Beryl Schlossman calls “the Baudelairean poetics of Proust’s novel” (“Benjamin’s” 550), see Mein 144n1. For a more recent discussion, see Schlossman, Orient 13–16, 146. For Proust’s own discussion of Baudelaire, see “Contre” 120–43; and “À propos.”

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The comparison of the sonata and the septet is an example of Proustian analogies, where a “common essence” is, as Proust writes, “extract[ed]” from disparate objects (2.1164). In calling forth such essences, “[e]ach artist seems … to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist”; artists can’t remember “the country of [their] heart[s] [la patrie intérieure],” but “each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs of his native land” (Remembrance 2.656 / À la recherche 3.761). But if the Proustian artist reminds one of the slave in Meno, who remembers arithmetical rules without ever having been taught them on this earth, or the lover in Phaedrus, whose memory of pre-embodiment existence is prompted by various earthly forms, Deleuze suggests that Proust thoroughly revises Platonism.24 Artistic memory does not point to a preexistent reality, a Platonic Form; Proustian essences are creative rather than re-creative. Deleuze suggests that an essence is better understood not as an “individual” but as “a principle of individuation.” What the Proustian artist recalls is no longer the stable essence, the seen ideality that unites the world into a whole and introduces the perfect mean into it [as it is in Plato or—we will come back to this—Swedenborg]. Essence, according to Proust … is not something seen but a kind of superior viewpoint, an irreducible viewpoint that signifies at once the birth of the world and the original character of the world … [T]he viewpoint remains superior to the person who assumes it or guarantees the identity of all those who attain it. It is not individual, but on the contrary a principle of individuation. (Proust 110)

Deleuze discerns in Proust’s description of the artist’s attunement to the world’s essences the mechanism that he elsewhere calls “actualization,” the process by which the virtual (a term he originally adopts from Proust and Bergson) enters phenomenality. As he continues, a Proustian essence designates not an “individual,” but the process of “re-individuat[ion]” (119), the subject’s unbinding and re-constitution as it responds to the world’s “signs.” As Proust writes of Vinteuil, the artist does this with a delirious joy (il délire de joie) that disorganizes or, we might anagrammatically propose, unravels On Deleuze and Proust’s Platonism, see also Bogue, Deleuze 46–47. On Deleuze and Plato more generally, see Smith ch. 1. I will return to the question of Platonism in Bersani in Chapter 7.

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(délier) his being. The constituted self—what Bersani calls “psychological personality”—is reconfigured as it responds to the call of its virtual essence. Deleuze suggests that this response constitutes an aesthetic or aestheticizing moment: individuation (which is always a re-individuation) takes places through an “aesthetic point of view” (110). Here we recognize one source for an argument that becomes more explicit in Bersani’s later work: that, in order to confound the apparatus (dispositif) of subjectivaction characteristic of our episteme, we move from the world’s epistemological mapping to thinking being in aesthetic terms. The process of desubjectivation—we will return to this concept in the next chapter—entails the self ’s aestheticization. As the section titles that organize the chapters in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (2010) indicate, we are to move from “the psychoanalytic subject” “toward an aesthetic subject.” To move beyond the “psychological characters” that discourses such as nineteenth-century literary realism and sexology have naturalized, we should think “individuality” and “individuation” in aesthetic terms. In proposing this, Bersani takes some of his cues from Proust and Signs. As Deleuze demonstrates, to engage Proust’s Platonism is to think individuation as a process of the aesthetic, of being’s aestheticization. We find a version of this aesthetic individuation also in Baudelaire, from whose work Proust partially gets his revised Platonism. Baudelaire’s famous term correspondances can be traced to Plato’s theory of Forms, via the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.25 In his theosophic cosmology, Swedenborg posits three hierarchically ordered worlds—the natural, the spiritual, and the celestial— where things “correspond” to their counterparts on different planes of existence. “Man is a kind of very minute heaven,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes Swedenborg, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, ever smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man. (“Swedenborg” 672–73)

On Baudelaire’s reconfigured Platonism, see Brix; and Eigeldinger. On Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences, see Wilkinson ch. 2 and esp. 91ff.; and Jonsson, who also discusses Plato’s influence on Swedenborg (127–29, 205–18; for an English summary of this Swedish-language study, see 394–417). On Swedenborg’s influence on Baudelaire, see Wilkinson ch. 5; and Leakey 174–79, 197–98, 233, 313–14. Baudelaire gets his Swedenborg mainly through Balzac (Wilkinson xii, ch. 5); on Balzac and Swedenborg, see also Jonsson 253.

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Like Plato, Swedenborg traces “vertical” lines between the worlds: as Baudelaire writes, in the Swedenborgian cosmos, “everything, forms, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as well as in the natural world, is significant, reciprocal, converse, corresponding” (“Reflections” 239). If Swedenborg’s correspondences link heaven and earth, Baudelaire suggests that an artistic mind, via intuitive (“naïve”) imagination, discerns “analogies” in nature: “The Imagination is an almost divine faculty which perceives at once, quite without resort to philosophic methods, the intimate and secret connections between things, correspondences and analogies” (“Further” 102–03).26 Yet he also—inconsistently, ambivalently—shifts from the “vertical” organization of the Platonic and Swedenborgian ontologies to an idea of a “horizontal” connectedness. Unlike in Plato and Swedenborg, correspondences in Baudelaire are not organized hierarchically: “the sounds, the scents, the colors” that the poet observes no longer seek their idealities in another world, but “co-respond” to each other (se répondent) (Baudelaire, “Correspondences” 15 / “Correspondances” 193). The poem “Correspondences,” as Jonathan Culler writes, “undermines the transcendental claims it cites and modifies” (129). In this way, Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory constitutes “a kind of secular Platonism” (Brix 12), a “secularization and aestheticization of Swedenborgianism” (Wilkinson 13). Bersani sees in Baudelaire’s theory a reconfiguration of the onto-aesthetic models he has previously identified in Lautréamont’s comparisons and Proust’s analogies. In A Future for Astyanax, he momentarily prioritizes Lautréamont over Proust: the comparisons in Les Chants de Maldoror—their absurdist “leaps of being”—seem to constitute experimentations with ways of being that escape the “meaningfulness” advocated by modern discourses, as opposed to the analogies in À la recherche du temps perdu, where the joining of incompatible objects always reveals their preexistent commonness. Lautréamont refuses the relentless significance, meaning-making, that we find in Proust. Yet Deleuze’s Proust and Signs troubles this assessment of Proust’s failure (or refusal) to think in the purely disseminative mode exemplified by Lautréamont. What if Proustian essences are not identifiable with the kinds of psychological individualities that nineteenth-century medical discourses and realist fiction have rendered commonsensical to us? Prompted by Deleuze, Bersani suggests that we read Proust as the continuation of both the modern apparatus of sexuality (whose earlier form he, echoing Foucault,

As Lynn Wilkinson writes, Baudelaire’s “Further Notes on Edgar Poe” (1857) contains “the earliest references in his prose to ‘correspondences’” (230).

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will subsequently trace to Descartes) and the onto-ethical/aesthetic experimentations that we find in Baudelaire’s revised Platonism. If Proust continues the work carried out by nineteenth-century psychiatry, sexology, and realist fiction—of inculcating us with the necessity of populating the world with legible, meaningful personalities—he also accelerates the disciplinary-biopolitical apparatus into perverse production, turning the dispositif into the kind of desiring-machine that Deleuze and Guattari want to find in psychoanalysis. Proustian essentialism must be read doubly, as the hybridization of two traditions: not only that of modern governmentality but also that of the onto-aesthetic speculations whose most immediate predecessor for Proust is Baudelaire. In Baudelaire and Freud, Bersani elaborates this tradition by turning to Baudelaire’s theory of “idealization,” in which we witness his reconceptualization of PlatonicSwedenborgian correspondences. “Idealization” designates the aesthetic movement that we witness in art.27 For Baudelaire, a painter, if he is an artist rather than a skillful copier, draws out from his “model” intimations of another aesthetic arrangement, that of a relinquished “ideal.” This ideal has had to be abandoned, or left unactualized, for a bounded figure of the model to come into existence. Baudelairean “aesthetics” refers to the effort to loosen the lines of actualized figures so as to precipitate the models’ metamorphoses, their idealizing movement. The work of the artist is to make the model resonant with its forgotten extensions. An artistic rendering queers the model: as they seek their correspondences, extant figures are decomposed or unraveled in their movement toward their shared, as-yet unactualized ideals. As such, Baudelaire’s theory of “correspondences” anticipates, and influences, Proustian “analogies,” the resonance of seemingly unrelated forms that, when rendered in relation, reveal a “common essence.” Baudelaire similarly writes that art draws into proximity forms that “agree together [jurent de figurer ensemble]”; as much as analogies reveal in Proust “essences,” this agreement, or correspondence, expresses individuals’ “proper natures [caractère]” (Baudelaire, “Salon of 1846” 84 / 456). It is in its nature, Baudelaire suggests, that “being can’t help but find itself elsewhere” (RB 48). In the first chapter of Baudelaire and Freud, Bersani discusses an example of idealizing correspondences from Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life.”28 Baudelaire describes an artist-friend’s childhood memory of watching his father dressing. The friend

The most relevant of Baudelaire’s texts for our discussion are “The Painter of Modern Life” and “The Salon of 1846.” 28 Bersani returns to this scene from Baudelaire in CR 71ff. 27

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In this scene of an artist’s awakening, we witness the movement of “idealization.” The disintegration of the father’s body, as if in an extreme close-up, into a mobile aesthetic constellation (the blues and yellows and pinks of skin and veins) anticipates the dissolution of the model toward the ideal that the artist the child will have become accomplishes in his work. It is as if the child’s extreme concentrating on the image—his being “obsessed and possessed” by it—disfigures the father. In this, his fixed gaze anticipates the practice of the future artist. Like the child, the artist is in thrall of the model, but only to the extent that his intensive concentration distracts him from its actualized form. The object, as it were, comes apart under the artist’s excessive attention. “The artist or the writer,” as Michel Brix writes, “has to be able … to turn away from his model at the moment of creation and place his trust in the work of synthesis, combination, and transformation realized through memory” (14). Yet the artist “turns away” from the model by paying too close attention to it, locating something in the figure that the model’s extant form cannot accommodate. The artist seeks in his models aspects that have been forgotten or repressed for figures’ sharp outlines to be drawn. He re-calls in, or out of, his models their dormant potentialities.29 Idealization is the work of memory. Some—if not most—correspondences have had to be suppressed, or forgotten, for a bounded figure to stabilize itself. Idealization activates these correspondences. We might say that the work of idealization is one where the artist, first, dis-members and, then, re-members his This work of artistic “queering” shares a considerable deal with Gloria Anzaldúa’s speculative ontology. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa suggests that bodies of various scales cohere by abjecting their “queer” constituents, a process that results in a radically separatist ontology, since it is such queer bodies that, as she writes, “interface” separable entities (Anzaldúa, “Haciendo”). In her onto-ethics, she seeks to conceptualize becoming differently from this process of violent abjection, which she deems hegemonic in Western modernity. What I have elsewhere called her “hemophilial” ethics outlines a becoming where we “bleed together,” dangerously crossing bodily, geographical, and temporal boundaries; “the new mestiza” is an entity of such bleeding, one that does not rely on the abjection of queer bodies for its constitution (see Tuhkanen, “Mestiza”). When Anzaldúa writes that “the ground of our being is a common ground” (“Bridge” 217), she is identifying queer bodies as a commonness that resides in between actualized bodies. As I will briefly suggest at the end of this chapter, this ambition—seeking the common (koinon)—is characteristic of Bersani’s project too.

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models. As Baudelaire writes, imagination “decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of newness” (“Salon of 1859” 234–35). Under the artist’s eye, the model begins to vibrate or tremble: the sharp outlines of the figure have to be blurred, or rendered mobile, and the model pulled apart for correspondences to become accessible. The father’s body dissipates into “color gradations” (“les dégradations de couleurs”); or, to play with the French phrase, it is “de-graded” in an aesthetic movement, undone, rendered less than it is in its actualized richness. In the terms that Bersani borrows from Beckett, the form is “impoverished”; the child’s fixed gaze witnesses—or precipitates—the father’s “leastening.”30 Yet, as the sharply drawn figure comes undone, the model is returned to its worldly context, given back its capacity to communicate with the outside. Through this resonance, it is rendered more than it was. The movement of idealization, in the model’s de-figuration, is one of re-potentializing: in painting or sculpture, the possibilities that had to be forgotten for an individual model to cohere are reactivated as the model loses its distinct qualities and outlines. The dis- and re-membering of the model becomes a process of membering, of re-calling—or actualizing—an ideality for the first time. Beauty is the experience, in idealization, of witnessing a model’s unraveling in its movement across a network of correspondences. Baudelaire calls painting a “mnemotechny of the beautiful” (“Salon of 1846” 83). The artist re-calls (“members”) that which has been suppressed in extant figures: a model is “reconstructed and restored by brush or chisel to the dazzling truth of its native harmony” (“Salon of 1846” 84). In his example of Marcel’s reaction to Vinteuil’s music, Proust elaborates this idea. He reconfigures this “native harmony” in the “unknown homeland” that Marcel detects in the comparison of different musical pieces. As much as painting for Baudelaire is “a mnemotechny,” Proust suggests that art is a mode of recalling (rappeller) a forgotten patrie where the artist once dwelled (Remembrance 2.656 / À la recherche 3.761). Bersani writes in a later discussion of this scene from Proust that the memory inscribed in art constitutes a “call” or “summons” (TT 87, 92). Yet, as the work of “membering,” aesthetics re-calls constellations into existence for the first time. As Marcel notes, his involuntary “mnemonic resurrections … did not contain an earlier experience but a new truth” (Remembrance 2.1155). Art actualizes an ideality, an essence, that has not been available before. This newness is what Bersani, drawing from Baudelaire, Proust, and Deleuze, calls “individuality.” If Bersani elaborates the onto-ethics/aesthetics of correspondances with Proust, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, and Deleuze in his 1970s texts, the concept Beckett describes his work as that of “impoverishment” (qtd. in Tóibín xiv); the term “leastening” comes from Worstward 106.

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reemerges in his later work in a number of guises. In their discussion of the supplementation of the Marquis de Sade’s narratives and Assyrian palace reliefs’ climactically oriented stories by the distractive pleasures of repeating forms—drawn out by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his retelling of The 120 Days of Sodom in Salò (1975), and by certain self-reflexive moves made by the Assyrian artists themselves—he and Dutoit reformulate the idea of shared forms, of an aesthetic “solidarity,” that first emerges in Balzac to Beckett, A Future for Astyanax, and Baudelaire and Freud.31 Similarly, the ontological mode of “homoness,” which Bersani develops in Homos, is a recategorization of the early work in the context of 1990s queer theory. His commentaries on Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema in Thoughts and Things (2015) (TT 64–66) and the essay “The Will to Know” (IRG 154–67) push further the work begun in the first books, some half a century earlier.32 According to Bersani, Godard experiments with an “unusual connective logic”: he “radically revises the notion of alikeness itself ” by giving us “incongruous couplings” (TT 81). Such “couplings” are versions of Lautréamont’s leaps of being, Proust’s analogies, and Baudelaire’s correspondences. Bersani argues that Godard’s cinema pushes further the dynamics that one witnesses in Proustian “essentialism.” While Proust’s analogies join entities that may initially seem incongruous, their coming together most often constitutes a synthesis where art enhances our knowledge of the world, revealing “essences” hidden from our everyday perception. While Godard, too, “thinks” in correspondences, there are no such synthetic moments in his films. The couplings he stages do not articulate any knowledge that would help us better observe and negotiate the extant world. They reveal no preexistent secrets about being; rather, their coming together creates what we might call zones of becoming: We think of analogies as epistemologically clarifying; they help us to know the world and ourselves better by bringing together distinct units of perception and awareness in networks of similarity. Godard engages in this unifying activity, but without any epistemological gain. If we know, it is not knowledge about anything; rather, we know now (if that word can still be used) a propensity of the mind to produce epistemologically useless connections. It is as if we were at the moment of similitudes just emerging—unfinished, unrealized. (TT 81)

Godard strips analogies of their epistemo-orientation. With objects of “incongruous symmetry” (IRG 165), he takes on a task that Bersani deems I will return to Sade, Pasolini, and Assyrian art in Chapter 6 below. See also Bersani’s discussion of Godard in FoB ch. 1; and “Rigorously” 281.

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imperative already in The Culture of Redemption (1990): to “invent a motive for reading unsustained by a promise of epistemological gain” (CR 15). Godard’s “incongruous” correspondences promise no revelatory knowledge about the world, but merely more of the world. If the aim of Proust’s analogies is to help the subject to know the world better, in Godard we find illustrated the activity of a mind that does not discover but creates, and creates not for reasons of epistemological mastery but for the pleasure of making connections. “Incongruity,” as Bersani continues, “institutes virtualities that have no intrinsic reason to be realized” (TT 82). There are no urgent messages—like those conveyed by the return of the repressed—pressing to be uncovered in “the virtual.”33 Incongruous correspondences’ actualization takes place according to a different temporality, one where becoming does not obey the telos of lost or repressed meaning.

An Individuality More General than Individuals In Baudelaire and Freud, Bersani continues to develop a theory of “individuality” by exploring the resonance between “idealization” in Baudelairean aesthetics and the process of “individuation” that Deleuze locates in Proust. Both Baudelaire and Proust propose that, in art, “essences” are drawn out between figures and temporalities. In Baudelaire, idealization, as the process of becoming-individual, takes place between models whose sharp outlines the artist’s eye sets trembling, discoheres. For Proust, involuntary memory is artistic insofar as it solicits “something which[,] being common to the past and the present, is more essential than both” (Remembrance 2.1151). Vinteuil’s compositions make Marcel realize that, “notwithstanding the conclusions to which science seems to point, the individual did really exist” (2.655). At stake in the emergence of essences from analogies is the creation of “individualities.” The artist’s work of “membering” the model takes place between actualized, now unraveling, figures. A figure (or model) is rendered vulnerable to its outside, but an outside that is its “essence.” In this sense, “essence” is, as I have suggested, parasitic: it needs to attach to an actualized figure in order to materialize. As Deleuze writes of Proust, the essence does not exist without the object and the subject, yet it cannot be equated with either; to succeed in our search, we must avoid both “the trap of the object” and “the snare of subjectivity” (Proust 38). We must, instead, observe what happens in between the two: a becoming that is dependent on the object and the subject but reducible to The question of “the virtual” in Bersani will be considered in Chapter 7 below.

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neither. The essence as the individual—or, better, “a principle of individuation” (110)—must be conceptualized, in other words, as a para-site: it is located “beside” or “next to” or “alongside of ” (para-, παρά-) the figure/model. The “in-between” is the space where the entities Bersani calls “individualities” are constituted, re-called into becoming. As he writes in a later text, Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences implies that “an individual, or an individual trait, always tends to be in the space between its own material presence and those other material presences which it both remembers and toward which it projects correspondences” (CR 68). The artist’s model becomes an individual, develops its caractère, as its correspondences are recovered in the world. As much as Proustian essences emerge between emitting objects and explicating subjects, Baudelairean idealization occurs in between realized models. The argument that becoming (or individuation) is a process of the in-between constitutes one of the many moments where Bersani’s work synchronizes with Deleuze’s. Bersani sometimes describes individuation as a “transversal” movement. He uses this term for the first time in A Future for Astyanax as he notes the way in which the disconnected scenes of a flood-devastated world in Rimbaud’s poetry are illuminated by “[a] kind of crooked transversal light” (FA 256). Importantly, he evokes it immediately after the brief discussion of Deleuze’s Proust and Signs. In the second, 1972 edition of the Proust study, Deleuze highlights the concept of “transversality” as he draws our attention to the moment in Time Regained where Marcel realizes that his childhood routes, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way, seemingly so distinct, are linked by “[t]ransversal roads” (Remembrance 2.1270). Citing this scene, Deleuze develops the phrase into a central concept in Proustian onto-ethics/aesthetics.34 For him, “transversality” names the mode of becoming in which the present is Deleuze refers to the scene in Time Regained in Proust 168–69; on “transversality,” see also ibid. 123–30, 136, 140–43, 168–69, 174–75. The appearance of the term “transversal” in A Future for Astyanax, rather than in Balzac to Beckett, is explained by the publication, in 1972, of Anti-Oedipus and the second edition of Proust and Signs. The year 1972 marks an important moment in the development of the idea of transversality in Deleuze not only because of the concept’s emergence in the expanded edition of the Proust study but also the crosspollination, in Anti-Oedipus, of Deleuze’s philosophy with Guattari’s efforts to reconfigure psychiatric practice as “schizoanalysis.” While the term in AntiOedipus is often linked to Proust (see, for example, 43, 69, 319), the usage is inflected by the concept’s development in Guattari’s critique of clinical psychoanalysis (particularly of the concept of “transference”) (see 37, 38, 179, 280, 287, 309, 349). In Anti-Oedipus, “transversality” itself thus constitutes a transversal link between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work: it is a “road” that connects Deleuze’s philosophy and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. The concept also allows us to hear the resonance between Deleuze and Bersani. As this chapter has shown, Proust and Signs and Anti-Oedipus are of grounding importance for Bersani’s thinking. Never fully articulated, the concept of “transversality” emerges repeatedly in his subsequent work, at times explicitly referred to as such, sometimes as “betweenness” or the “in-between”; its role there warrants a study that we must leave for another occasion.

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dissolved by the intrusion of the past in involuntary memory; it also designates the work of artists such as the painter Elstir and the composer Vinteuil, where one witnesses the production of shared “essences” amidst seemingly unrelated phenomena. He and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: “A line of becoming has only a middle”; it moves “transversally” (293). Beginning in A Future for Astyanax, and then in Baudelaire and Freud, Bersani develops the same idea: he subsequently calls the mode of becoming that he synthesizes from Baudelaire, Proust, and Deleuze “the transindividual,” by which he means “a general typology of being beyond, or perhaps before, psychological individuality” (IRG 163). The work of “idealization” in Baudelaire consists of the generation of a network of (transversal) correspondences where models’ unactualized potential is drawn out in between their previously arrested figures: Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory is an account of the transindividual. Across the studies that we have explored in this chapter—most importantly, Balzac to Beckett, A Future for Astyanax, and Baudelaire and Freud—Bersani begins to develop a theory of aesthetic individuation. He does this by attuning to the resonance between Proust’s revised Platonism, which Deleuze explores in Proust and Signs, and Baudelaire’s account of aesthetics, itself drawn, via Swedenborg, from Plato. In these early texts, Bersani’s concept of the individual coheres in between Plato, Baudelaire, Proust, and Deleuze: their philosophies are, as it were, the “models” that get reconfigured, or queered, as they gravitate toward each other in Bersani’s work. Doing so, the movement of Bersani’s reading repeats the process of “individuation” that he describes. In replicating the logic of that which it theorizes, his analysis gives us an example of what Jean Laplanche calls “theoretico-genesis.” The idea of aesthetic individuation is recategorized in Bersani’s later texts. In a brief encyclopedia article from 1989, Bersani again quotes his own paraphrase of Deleuze’s reading of Proustian essence/individuality (this time without acknowledging the reference to Proust and Signs): an essence, he writes, “expresses an individuality more general than that traced by the particular history of an individual subject”; such an essence is “an unidentifiable, perhaps unfindable particularity” (“Death” 863). Similarly, his and Dutoit’s suggestion, in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), that the soldiers in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line “are individuated not as personalities but as perspectives on the world” (FoB 146) implicitly returns us to his early adoption, in Balzac to Beckett and A Future for Astyanax, of Deleuze’s view of the Proustian essence as an individuating perspective incompletely expressed in the subject. We must, as Bersani and Dutoit continue, distinguish between “individuation and psychic individuality” (FoB 146). The former names a singularity that “is individualized not in the way that personalities are, to our modern psychological understanding, individualized. Rather, it has what might be

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thought of as a general, universal, individuation” (I 82). Glossing the terms again in Thoughts and Things, Bersani returns to his engagement with Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, begun in Balzac to Beckett: in Deleuze’s terms, the individual is a being whose virtual potential is only partially actualized in the psychocorporeal form of the individual. Bersanian individual names “a singular universal property distinct from the multiple particular individuals that embody it” (TT 88; see also Bersani, preface xiv). Many of Bersani’s contemporaries in the 1970s and 1980s were engaged in critiquing the notion of “the individual.” This concept was deemed a seductive fetish deployed by capitalist ideology, the product of disciplinarybiopolitical apparatuses, or a smokescreen obfuscating the liberal political order’s inequities. Taking their cues from Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Lévi-Strauss, and others, various deconstructionists and social constructivists sought to disenchant us of this illusion. Bersani, on the other hand, proposes that such critiques have overlooked, and failed to develop, the forces that may yet inhere in this badly posited concept. We have collapsed the principle of individuation, whose potential Deleuze identifies in Proust, with the bourgeois ego-monad that Marx—and, following him, Derrida and Laplanche, among others—finds organizing Western thought. In order to precipitate what Deleuze would call the “deterritorialization” of the concept of “the individual”—to unravel the forces stymied by its misidentification— Bersani develops, in his 1970s studies, a series of readings of Baudelaire, Proust, Deleuze, followed by their elaboration, in his subsequent texts, in a variety of contexts. In these analyses, he suggests that we have been in the habit of collapsing “metaphysical” and “psychological” individuals, unable to see that the former is a “more general” form of individuality than the latter, a “generality” unfolding in between actualized individuals (or, as Baudelaire calls them, models). Yet this “generality” is, at the same time, a mode of “singularity,” an unrepeatability in which Marx’s and Weber’s followers have identified but the liberal notion of the individual. Yet—further—while “generality” is “singularity,” Proust proposes that in this singularity we must also locate the question of “commonness,” the “common essence[s]” that shimmer in art (Proust, “Contre” 79; Remembrance 2.1164). An important context in which we must consider the conjoined questions of “the general,” “the singular,” and “the common” is the tradition of Western political thought that begins with Aristotle’s elaboration, in Politica (III.6–7 [1184–86]), of the possibility of “the common good,” to koinon agathon. What is it that we share? The preliminary answer from Bersani goes: we share our parasitic essences. Although the Aristotelian term never appears in his texts, much of Bersani’s work can be read as a sustained effort to reorient our thinking around the question of to koinon agathon, to think jointly the seemingly irreconcilable concepts of singularity and commonness.

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Performativity and Speculative Politics

Queer theory can be said to have begun with the work of Sigmund Freud or Michel Foucault or Guy Hocquenghem or Mario Mieli or Gloria Anzaldúa, but it coalesced into a recognizable field of scholarship only in the early 1990s. Much of that historical moment’s energies were precipitated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Teresa de Lauretis’s Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (1987), Diana Fuss’s collection inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (1991), and the special issue “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” (1991) of the feminist journal differences, edited by de Lauretis. A particularly galvanizing event was the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). In her work, Butler builds on Hegelian, Foucauldian, and Derridean philosophies to develop a concept that she calls “performativity.” Reconfiguring accounts of “social constructionism” in the language of “high theory,” and rendering the complex philosophical models useful for conceptualizing subcultural practices (for example, drag performances), Butler’s work enabled a remarkable efflorescence in the rethinking of gender and sexuality in the 1990s. Published in a special 1987 issue of the journal October on responses to the AIDS crisis, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” made Leo Bersani recognizable as an early queer theorist. The collection of essays edited by Douglas Crimp— reprinted as a book in the following year—came out the same year as Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, based on her dissertation. In her study of Hegel’s influence in twentiethcentury French philosophy from Jean-Paul Sartre and Alexander Kojève to Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Foucault, Butler lays the groundwork that in Gender Trouble would produce the theory of performativity. Beginning with Hegel, and influenced particularly by deconstruction, Butler’s work starts from premises that are radically—paradigmatically—different from those that, as I proposed in the previous chapters, ground Bersani’s thought. In terms of queer theory, 1987 gives us a double birth: in addition to the more

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recognizable mode of queer thought that is Butlerian performativity, we also see the explicit queering of Bersanian onto-ethics/aesthetics.1 Bersani explicitly addresses queer theory for the first time in Homos (1995).2 His argument, much of it a critique of Butler’s influential thought, draws from his earlier work on Proust, Beckett, Freud, Deleuze, and others. This background allows him to move toward a queer thought that has very little to do with—that paradigmatically diverges from—queer theory’s extant articulations. In this chapter, I explore the significance of such differences by outlining Bersani’s critique of (Butlerian) queer theory, as this critique takes place in Homos. I emphasize particularly the philosophical differences that determine Butler’s and Bersani’s ethico-political disagreements. From their earliest texts, Butler and Bersani frame their arguments through incompatible genealogies of thought. The core of their disagreement concerns their differing accounts of “subjection.”3 Contemporary theory often registers in this term a telling ambivalence: “subjection” names at once the subject’s constitution and her subjugation, perhaps enslavement, to an authority. Commentators who make this point frequently take their cues from Foucault, who in the introductory volume to The History of Sexuality (1976) speaks of the “immense labor to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce … men’s subjection [l’assujettissement des hommes]: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word,” that is, as agents of and subordinates to power (1.60 / 1.81).4 In fact, 1987 gives us a triple birth for queer theory, for it is the year in which Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is published. For an investigation on the specificity of Anzaldúan queer theory, see Tuhkanen, “Mestiza.” 2 For Bersani’s commentary on queer theory, see also IRG 36–44, 65–68, 70, 137, 181–82; “Rigorously” 279–80; and “Secrets du Caravage” 59–60. 3 Another, related way to observe Butler’s and Bersani’s paradigmatic differences would be to return to Giorgio Agamben’s delineation, discussed in the previous chapter, of contemporary philosophy into “transcendent” and “immanent” genealogies of thought (Agamben 238–39). The preceding chapter’s analysis of the early influence of Deleuzean philosophy on Bersani suggests that we should situate his work on the “line of immanence,” whose major twentieth-century thinkers for Agamben are Foucault and Deleuze. Deconstruction’s constitutive importance for Butler, on the other hand, suggests that her work continues the tradition that Agamben identifies with Levinas and Derrida. Were we to follow this argument, we would also have to reconfigure Agamben’s schema insofar as Hegel (whom Agamben does not mention) would replace, or double, Heidegger as the pivot in the divergence of the lines that lead to Butler and Bersani. While in this chapter I highlight the Hegelian influences in Butler’s work, the concluding chapter’s reconsideration of Hegel’s “speculative idealism”—relentlessly critiqued by both Derrida and Butler, while implicitly embraced by Bersani—will necessitate that we split the name “Hegel” into deviating strains that lead to Butler and Bersani. 4 While I will be using the terms “subjection” and “subjectivation” interchangeably in this chapter, one should note the complication of subjectivation, sujétion, and assujettissement in Foucault’s work: see Kelly 87–88. 1

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Butler and Bersani adopt Foucault’s description of the modern subject’s production; but, partially because they focus on varied periods in his work, they prioritize different responses to regimes of subjection. This incompatibility becomes evident in the lessons they draw from Jean Genet. In a little-discussed moment in her early work, Butler’s theory of performativity emerges in an embryonic form in her embrace of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of abjected subjecthood in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952). In important ways, Sartre’s existentialist reading anticipates the theory of the performative subject that Butler develops with Hegel’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s help in her most famous texts. Bersani, on the other hand, considers Saint Genet a fatally limited reading of Genet. When he refutes Sartre’s Hegelian framing, he simultaneously rejects the queer theory that has drawn its political lessons from Butler’s work. He sees performativity—the method that for many becomes the name par excellence for the possibility of queer political practice—as the production of what Friedrich Nietzsche would call “slavishness,” an attitude in thrall of the power that has constituted the subject by naming her. Our queer task, he suggests, must be the betrayal of, the turning away from, such power—not, as Butler’s frame demands, its negation. Something of the impact of Butler’s work is suggested by the fact that in 2015 Pope Francis felt compelled to address the “fallacies” of “gender theory,” which he juxtaposed to the unmovable truths of the “Order of Creation” (McElwee; St. John), a denunciation that was repeated in 2019, in the Vatican-issued document “Male and Female He Created Them” (“New Vatican”). Butler is undoubtedly the best-known academic representative of the discourses that have appalled the Vatican.5 Arguments about the performative nature of gender have become enough of a commonplace in the field of women’s and gender studies for us to regard Butler’s early work as the kind of “opening” that, as Foucault writes in 1969, “establishe[s] an endless possibility of discourse” (“What” 217); Gender Trouble enabled what Annamarie Jagose calls “queer’s extraordinary discursive emergence” (“Trouble” 26) in the 1990s. Even more impressive is the fact that an institution like the Catholic Church has considered it necessary to comment on cultural beliefs and practices inspired to an important extent by such texts as Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993). Bersani’s thought, on the other hand, has had a more tenuous relation to, and less of an impact on, so-called political praxis. While “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Homos, his best-known contributions to queer theory, contain

Butler has offered a response to the Catholic Church’s commentary: see Butler, “Judith.”

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some of his most explicitly political rhetoric, their “lessons” remain more elusive than those offered in Butler’s early work. Yet we can glean some of such lessons when we note that the trajectory of his thinking runs parallel to Foucault’s. As much as Bersani insists on the mode of “impoverishment” or “withdrawal” or “betrayal” that Foucault calls “desubjectivation,” this proposition is not the final stage in his onto-ethics/aesthetics. Rather, desubjectivation takes place as a preliminary moment, one that, as in Foucault, is followed by “something else.” Bersani calls this “something else” variously “correspondence of forms,” “homoness,” “sociability,” “solidarity,” and “the aesthetic,” phrases that indicate a movement beyond the modern regimes of subjectivation. In this, his thinking not only proceeds out of step with the theory of performativity but also extends beyond the work of the Lacanians who advocate “subjective destitution” and that of the queer theorists who speak for—and only for—the “antisocial” moment. What comes after desubjectivation in Bersani will be the topic of the chapters that comprise this study’s second section.

Performativity and Parody Butler’s theory of gender, and gender performativity, begins by her radicalization of what Gayle Rubin, in her 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” calls the “sex/gender system.”6 While Rubin differentiates between the two components, designating “sex” as “the biological raw material” that is subsequently “shaped by human, social intervention” into gender (165), Butler challenges the commonsense of the sexed body (“Sex is sex,” Rubin asserts [165]). This challenge proceeds by her appeal to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thought. For Butler, “gender” functions as what Derrida calls the “supplement,” that is, an entity that common sense deems a secondary phenomenon to, or an expression of, originary being, but that, on closer inspection, comes to trouble all assumed originariness. As much as the supplement inheres in an “undecidable” relation to origin—Derrida’s earliest examples concern evocations of “speech” and “writing” in Western philosophy—for Butler, “gender” is the supplement to “sex” that reveals the latter’s aporetic groundlessness. While gender (or writing in, say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought, or predicates in grammar) seems the belated, contingent, cultural epiphenomenon of sex (or speech, or the grammatical subject), the latter becomes accessible

For a longer-view outline of the theory of performativity, see Loxley.

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to thought only through supplementation. Sex as such can be said not to exist except as the phantom conjured up by gender, as much as Rousseauian nature becomes at once thinkable and unreachable from the vantage point of pedagogy, of culture. Kantians might call sex as it appears in Butler’s system “the noumenal.” Contrary to what earlier feminist social theory had assumed, then, what is called biological sex is in fact accessible only through its repeated supplementation by gender. “Performativity” is Butler’s name for this work of supplementation, the ways in which human subjects are called to constitute their (always gendered) identities in repeated, ideally normative/ normativizing performances. While gender is actualized in performative acts that purport to be mere representations of their alleged ground (sex), the gender supplement relies on nothing solid except its own repetitions. Gender performatives are not repeated out of the subject’s free will—and hence one cannot merely choose to repeat them “otherwise”—because at stake is the subject’s very constitution.7 To misperform gender is to become what Butler calls an “abject” subject, that is, a subject who does not register—or “matter,” in all the senses of the word—in the symbolic system of the society. This is a subject whom we might also call “socially dead.”8 In her early work, Butler’s primary examples of abject subjects are gender-nonconforming gay men and lesbians; in her later texts, the transgender subject and what she calls the “unmournable” subject take priority.9 Performativity’s political potential resides in the temporal logic of repetition: if gender needs to be repeatedly performed, the time lag between discrete performative acts renders this repetition vulnerable to variation, to

Butler stresses that at stake are not gender performances—if by this term we assume a self-possessed subject or agent behind the acts—but performativity, where the subject herself is constructed by way of the performative act. She addresses the simplistic readings of her theory in Bodies that Matter (see also the condensed commentary in the interview “The Body You Want”); and goes on to explore the implications of the subject’s performative constitution in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997). 8 This term, with which Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death (1982) characterizes the enslaved subject, is briefly evoked by Butler in Antigone’s Claim (2000) (55, 73–74). The concept becomes important for Lacanian scholarship particularly with the work of Slavoj Žižek, who in numerous texts explores the revolutionary potential of the subject’s embrace of her social death, her “subjective destitution.” A particularly informative study in this tradition is Abdul JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005), which outlines the implications of the concept of “social death” not only in Patterson but also in Lacan and African American literature (particularly the work of Richard Wright). 9 For earlier work, see Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter, and The Psychic Life of Power. Butler discusses transgender subjects in Undoing Gender and “unmournable” subjects in Precarious Life. 7

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miscitation. “Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure,” as Butler writes in Bodies that Matter (108). It is in this temporal break, this décalage, that we find the possibility for cultural and political agency: the break allows the subject to intervene, in however small a way and without any guarantees, in “the gendered corporealization of time” (Butler, Gender 141), the production of legible identities. It is in this way that, as Butler puts it, “the abjected come to make their claim through and against the discourses that have sought their repudiation” (Bodies 224). If the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house, this is because one never owns but merely leases the means of her self-making. Performativity frequently relies on parody as its vehicle for such politically salient supplementarity (although Butler also suggests, following Fredric Jameson, that a more appropriate name for such performative acts would be “pastiche” [Gender 138–39, 157n56; see Jameson, Postmodernism 16–19]). Butler finds in drag and lesbian butch-femme cultures examples of normative gender’s “parodic repetition” or “parodic reappropriation” (Gender 31, 122). Unlike some earlier lesbian-feminist commentators, she does not see in butchfemme cultures the slavish repetition of heteronormative family structures; rather, such gender performatives constitute parodies “of the very notion of an original” (138).10 As Bersani puts it in an interview in 1998, “Butler … was thinking of parody as having a possible, real, politically subversive function, because it exposes things in the model [i.e., the object of parody] that are then weaker as a result of the parodistic confrontation” (IRG 198). But it is also at the question of parody that we find the earliest divergence between Butler and Bersani. For Bersani, the parodistic mode, as advocated by Butler, is of questionable political utility. For him, parody does not have the kind of deconstructive impact on its object—or, rather, its deconstructive impact does not have the kind of political efficacy—that Butler assumes. He continues in the interview: “the model [targeted by parody] can also be unaffected, or even strengthened, by the ‘affirmative’ side of parody, by a complicity between it and its object … There is … a great deal of complicity in parody”; “it really is paying tribute to what is being parodied” (IRG 198). As an example of such worshipful “complicity,” Bersani alludes to Paris is Burning (1990), Jennie Livingston’s documentary film in whose depiction of black and Latino ball culture Butler discerned a performative critique of mainstream gender arrangements.11

On the lesbian-feminist critique of butch-femme cultures, see Roof, “1970s.” See Butler, “Gender is Burning.” Bersani discusses the documentary in H 49–51.

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Bersani’s critique of parody predates his encounter with Butler. Already in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” published three years before Gender Trouble, Bersani argues that gay and lesbian theorists—his main example is the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks—have posited too much political weight on parody: It has been frequently suggested in recent years that such things as the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian couple, and gay and lesbian sadomasochism, far from expressing unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity, or with the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity, or, finally, with fascism, are in fact subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviors they apparently ape. Such claims, which have been the subject of lively and often intelligent debate, are, it seems to me, totally aberrant, even though, in terms probably unacceptable to their defenders, they can also—indeed, must also—be supported. (IRG 12)

Speaking of gay men’s performance of straight masculinity (“gay macho”),12 Bersani argues that these performances do not have the critical relation to their objects that Weeks assumes. While Weeks claims that gay men’s macho culture “gnaws at the root of a male heterosexual identity” (191, qtd. in IRG 13), Bersani refuses such claims to “radicalness.” For him, Weeks and others not only overstate the effects of what he calls “worshipful tribute[s]” to straight masculinity (IRG 13), but also obfuscate homosexual men’s affective investment in its norms. Gay men are libidinally attached to the models of their gender parody: for gay men, these performances are meant to act as sexual come-ons. As far as the scripts of masculinity are sexualized by gay men, parody cannot be the intention of such performances: “Parody is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this,” Bersani writes (IRG 14). Even if these parodies have “problematically subversive effects,” behind them we find “wholly nonsubversive intentions” (IRG 13). This is why, for Bersani, celebrations of gay styles such as Weeks’s are “totally aberrant”: they evince a misunderstanding—more, an intentional whitewashing—of the function of macho performances. He insists, furthermore, that hegemonic orders’ functioning is not disrupted in any significant ways when these orders are denaturalized, especially when the work of their denaturalization (in loving repetition) can be understood as eroticizing worship.

For a classic sociological treatment of the phenomenon, see Levine.

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Yet, as Bersani continues in the above paragraph’s final clause, the contentions regarding parody “can” and “must” be taken seriously, but only as part of an argument that Weeks does not make, indeed may find “unacceptable.” That is, what Weeks misrecognizes as parodies may “subvert” (the word is important) hegemonic masculinities, but not in the way he thinks. What is critical, for Bersani, in gay men’s apparent performance of masculine styles is not that gender standards are thereby revealed as “cultural constructions” and the parodic gay men as combatants in “a semiotic guerrilla warfare” (Weeks 191, qtd. in IRG 13). Rather, the explosive truth of the matter is spoken not in queer folks’ claims for subversiveness but in homophobic fantasies according to which gay men, like women, seek sex with “an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (IRG 18)—the androcentric fantasies, familiar from nineteenth-century debates about prostitution and syphilis, that have been activated by the AIDS crisis.13 The “destruction” Bersani speaks of is the annihilative moment of ébranlement, a repetition of the infant’s shattering into sexuality—which is also the hominizing moment—a concept he gleans from Jean Laplanche. Gay macho styles “advertise” the male ideal as the subject of such shattering. If there exists, Bersani continues, a “very real potential” for politically salubrious disruption in gay machismo, this potential has to do not with the modifications these styles may cause in straight masculinity, but with the fact that what gay men make visible, and what straight spectators find so fascinating, is the undoing of subjecthood itself, subjecthood that functions as the object and anchor for exercises of power. Bersani admits that the argument he puts forward is “a highly speculative one” (IRG 16). His evidence comes from homophobic fantasies of receptive sex, which identify gay men’s sexuality with women’s. But he claims a transhistorical and crosscultural relevance for his observations: he suggests that Michel Foucault’s and John Boswell’s studies of ancient Greek and early Christian societies reveal a persistent anxiety about the threat to subjecthood in a person’s passivization in sexuality, passivization that in patriarchal cultures has been identified with women. At stake for him are not only historically specific representations; he claims that at stake is human ontology, the way in which the human subject emerges at the moment of its ébranlement. The argument is premised on psychoanalytic theory about the subject’s compulsive repetition of its originary undoing in jouissance. It is “speculative” in the same sense that classical philosophy

Part of this history is provided by the analysis of early-twentieth-century representations of syphilis in Wald ch. 1.

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can be “speculative”: it makes claims about being—of nature, cosmos, divinity, the human—that exceed what is strictly verifiable in experience. As Bersani writes, his suggestions are “based primarily on the exclusion of the evidence that supports [them]” (IRG 16). Such speculative argumentation is frequently characteristic of Bersanian thought. It will yield what I will call his “speculative politics” and, in our concluding chapter, “speculative aesthetics.”

Paradigmatic Differences Having formulated this critique of gay parodies of straight masculinity, Bersani turns to Butler’s work with similar skepticism. He writes in Homos, now expressly addressing the theory of performativity: resignification cannot destroy; it merely presents to the dominant culture spectacles of politically impotent disrespect … It is … extremely doubtful that resignification, or redeployment, or hyperbolic miming, will ever overthrow anything. These mimetic activities are too closely imbricated in the norms they continue. As long as the cues for subversion are provided by the objects to be subverted, reappropriation may be delayed but is inevitable: reappropriation, and reidealization. (H 51, emphasis added)

Bersani thus rejects theories of parody, including the Butlerian variant. There are a number of ways in which we can explain this divergence. I would here like to pay attention to the way in which this rejection stems from the paradigmatic differences between the two thinkers, that is, the ways in which Butler and Bersani have framed their work, beginning with their earliest texts. One way to describe Butler as a theorist is to say that, from her early work onward, she remains a Hegelian thinker. Her first book, Subjects of Desire, investigates twentieth-century French thinkers’ (among them Sartre, Hyppolite, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault) mobilization of Hegel. She is interested in the ways in which a number of these philosophers have turned to the Hegelian postulation of the dialectical movement of becoming (Werden). The Hegelian dialectic has become important for twentieth-century thinkers in part because it provides an immanent model of becoming: nothing intervenes in the dialectic from the outside; its movement is precipitated entirely by being’s (or Spirit’s) internal contradictions. Instead of resorting to the interventions of transcendent otherness, we realize that “what seems to happen outside of [substance], to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing” (Hegel,

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Phenomenology §37 [21]). For Hegel, these contradictions are finally resolved in what he calls the Absolute (and what subsequent commentators have called “synthesis”). Hegel’s has been an immensely influential model in the history of Western thought. Apart from the twentieth-century philosophers whom Butler discusses, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels turned to Hegel to develop their theory of class antagonism’s procession by “de-idealizing” the dialectic. In classical Marxism, the class-based contradictions in society are finally resolved in the successful proletarian revolution. At this moment of synthesis, history is supposed to reach its closure. One can easily see how Hegel’s model of becoming, aiming at the telos of the Absolute, can accommodate totalitarian politics: the predetermined end of freedom will justify coercive means in the present. For Butler, the crucial shift that twentieth-century thinkers effect in the Hegelian model, and its potential despotism, is what she, in another early text, calls the dialectic’s “decapitation” (“Geist” 67). According to her, these thinkers retain the Hegelian premises, but they strip the dialectic’s movement of its teleological orientation by denying the validity of the Absolute, of inevitable synthesis, at which every dialectical stage presumably aims. By removing the Absolute from the dialectic’s trajectory, twentieth-century thinkers have moved us to the “post-teleological age” (67).14 Here Foucault emerges as the most important philosopher for Butler: the narrative of Subjects of Desire, itself following a dialectical logic, culminates in her discussion of Foucauldian theory of power, a theory that offer[s] a normative framework which entails a subversive struggle with existing prohibitions, a thoroughly cultural program which disavows any appeal to a desire that has a natural or metaphysical structure said to exist either prior or posterior to linguistic or cultural laws. (215)

Butler claims Foucault as an important twentieth-century French Hegelian: what he presumed as his break from Hegel ends up being “only partial”

The dialectic’s decapitation is a significant move since, as Derrida writes, Aufhebung must be considered “the ultimate mainspring of all dialecticity” (Dissemination 248n53). In Dissemination, he speaks in similar ways about the rejection in contemporary thought of the structure that organizes Hegelian thought and that is exemplified by Hegel’s prefaces: “If the preface appears inadmissible today, it is … because no possible heading can any longer enable anticipation and recapitulation to meet and to merge with one another. To lose one’s head, no longer to know where one’s head it, such is perhaps the effect of dissemination” (20). Both Butler and Derrida (the former obviously following the latter) call for the dialectic’s decapitation as a productively “disseminative” move.

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(230);15 she later writes that “the Foucaultian account of subjection, despite its significant moves beyond dialectical logic, remains unwittingly tethered to the Hegelian formulation” (Psychic 34). Butler pronounces this not as a critique; it is Foucault’s Hegelianism that, for her, enables his political utility.16 When Butler writes, in Subjects of Desire, of what she considers the Hegelian shape of Foucault’s work, she is also laying down the foundation for her own philosophy. Subsequently, in Gender Trouble, the theory of performativity emerges from these premises insofar as performative acts constitute dialectical repetitions, more or less faithful “antitheses” to the “theses” of gender norms (themselves “groundless”). Repeating the logic of dialectics, performativity is enabled by the internal contradictions of what Butler calls “the heterosexual matrix.” Like the thought of the philosophers she studies in Subjects of Desire, her theory is premised on a Hegelian becoming that “[a]rrest[s the dialectic] prior to its resolution into Spirit” (Psychic 34). This shift enables the ongoing movement of performative repetitions and sustains an open future, “constrained by no teleological necessity” (15). Butler is never to relinquish these premises; as she puts it in the preface to the second edition of Subjects of Desire (1999), “In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions” (xiv). Performativity’s movement is dialectical, and in this it participates in the genealogy of thought that Butler traces in her first book, based on her dissertation.17 In philosophical terms, it is Butler’s Hegelianism that forces the divergence between her and Bersani’s work. Although Bersanian “speculations” most frequently take place via his readings of aesthetic texts, his work also has its philosophical specificity. One can argue that what we find in his critique of Butler are traces of the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s texts had on his early Foucault announces his move beyond Hegel in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Exploring the consequences of Butler’s Hegelianization of Foucault, Tom Roach writes in Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (2012): “Foucault’s final turn away from Hegelian conceptions of being engenders new conceptions of community and politics that hold the capacity to revitalize queer studies” (10). See especially his discussion of Butler’s and David Halperin’s reading of Foucault in ch. 3. According to Roach, Butler’s and Halperin’s “understanding of Foucault as a Hegelian-dialectical thinker at best distorts his political vision and at worst neutralizes his philosophical and political radicality” (81). 17 We can add Laplanche’s name to Butler’s genealogy of twentieth-century French Hegelians. Comparing Freud’s and Georg Groddeck’s work, Laplanche suggest that, whatever their differences, both postulate—as he puts it in a subsection title—“a dialectic without synthesis.” In such process, he writes, “[t]here is no synthesis, no progress, but rather a movement of return coming after a procession, a determination which—as must be the case—is a ‘negation’” (Unconscious 151). It is this model that Laplanche elaborates in his work: the enigmatic solicitation precipitates a process—a dialectic— whose enigmas can never be sublated. 15 16

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work, which we explored in the previous chapter. From the NietzscheanDeleuzean perspective, nothing genuinely new emerges in the dialectic— everything that becomes is already prefigured in the contradictions of the dialectic’s earlier stages. As Rodolphe Gasché writes in another context, “in its Hegelian conception, negation … [does not] allow[] a place for the unforeseeable” (Of Minimal 330).18 Influenced by Nietzsche, Deleuze instead wants to think differences in terms of the kinds of singularities that, according to this argument, the dialectic is unable to conceptualize, but singularities that are also different from those that classical metaphysics assigns to the concepts of the “essence” and the “subject.” This is a theme that runs through his oeuvre. Notably, the one non-Hegelian whose work Butler briefly addresses— and dismisses—in Subjects of Desire is, precisely, Deleuze, whom, apart from three minor moments, she never again engages in her subsequent work.19 The disappearance of Deleuze’s philosophy from Butler’s texts is symptomatic: it suggests the foundational incompatibility between the two thinkers.20 This can be contrasted to his place in Bersani’s oeuvre. As Bersani notes in an interview, Deleuze’s influence on his work has been submerged but nevertheless crucial (“Rigorously” 289–90; see also TT 87–88n). This philosophical context allows us to think the differences between Butler’s and Bersani’s projects; we can gauge such differences by comparing their readings of Jean Genet.

Butler’s Genet, Bersani’s Genet One of the earliest moments where the theory of performativity emerges— not yet named as such—is in Butler’s discussion, in Subjects of Desire, of JeanPaul Sartre’s biographical study of Genet (Subjects 156–74). It is also here that we can discern the paradigmatic shape of Butler’s emerging philosophy.

Elsewhere, Gasché addresses Butler’s work directly: “by repeating differently the cultural performances in order to subvert the binarism of the gender norms enforced through cultural performance, does one in fact escape what one seeks to revoke? Does one not remain tributary to the performative (at least insofar as it is conceived as fabricating binarism)? Finally, does one thus not even run the risk of neutralizing the performative altogether?” (Honor 377n1). His critique echoes in important ways Bersani’s. 19 The exceptions are Butler’s reference to Deleuze in conjunction with Monique Wittig’s work in Gender Trouble (118, 166–67n39), an endnote in The Psychic Life of Power (208n22), and the rearticulated, and very brief, criticism of his philosophy in Undoing Gender (192–93, 198). 20 On this, see also Tuhkanen, “Performativity.” 18

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Sartre’s Hegelianism is evident in the very structure of Saint Genet: Sartre writes his account of Genet as a narrative where we move, via negation, from one stage to another, from what he calls the in-itself to the for-itself to the for-others, a progression that he had laid out in Being and Nothingness (1943), his major philosophical work. The narrative of Genet’s life, as he repeatedly notes, proceeds by a “dialectical movement” or “dialectical progression” (Saint 146, 147); in this way, it echoes the propositions of “Hegel’s phenomenology” (125).21 As Butler observes in Subjects of Desire, Sartre is one of the twentieth century’s French Hegelians, and Saint Genet is his “most Hegelian work” (160). As Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness, the subject’s travails begin when, imagining himself as a consciousness observing a scene and thinking himself not seen, he suddenly becomes aware that he has been surprised in his voyeurism by an Other: in his famous anecdote, a disembodied Other, evident only in the sound of “branches crackling [craquer les branches]”—not, we might note, of “rustling leaves [un bruit de feuilles],” as Lacan paraphrases (Seminar XI 84 / Séminaire XI 98)—catches the subject peering through a “keyhole” (Sartre, Being 259 / L’Être 316). This produces in the subject the “shame” that, according to Sartre, the adolescent Genet experiences as he is caught stealing. From there on, the Sartrean subject— Genet the thief—is trapped in his negotiations with “the mythical Other” (Saint 89). Moving from the nonconsciousness of the in-itself to the consciousness of the for-itself, the subject, as Sartre writes in Saint Genet, “is, in the depths of his soul, a man who is being watched”: he “hear[s] furious voices whispering threats in his ears” and “tr[ies] to see himself through the gaze of Others” (138). In the idiom of another tradition, Genet becomes a “double-conscious” subject, “always looking at [his] self through the eyes of others … measuring [his] soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 11). Genet’s life, as Sartre tells it, consists of different forms of address to the Other who has abjected him. Hearing the Other’s compelling voice in his head and choreographing his movements with the Other in mind, Sartre’s Genet is a profoundly paranoid subject. He is marked by a “fascination in the presence of the Other [fascination devant l’Autre]” (Saint 148 / 170). Caught in a specular relation of identification and terror, the subject, moving through the various stages of the Sartrean dialectic, is “fascinated [fasciner] Sartre explicitly identifies Genet’s narratives with Hegel’s: “A work like Genet’s, like Hegel’s phenomenology, is a consciousness which sinks into appearances, discovers itself in the depths of alienation, saves itself and relegates things to the rank of its objects” (Saint 125).

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by [the Other], as is a bird by a reptile” (Saint 85 / 102), trapped in a masterslave situation where “the master fascinates [fascine] the creatures by values which they have not found in themselves” (117 / 136). A term we discussed in Chapter 1, “fascination” suggests, again, an annihilative desire that immobilizes the subject by the promise of its own completion/destruction. Genet’s “project” is one of “inversion,” and his world is an “inverted world”: “The same movement which makes of Genet a martyr who has been crushed by the world launches an inverse movement at the end of which Genet will find himself as a constituent consciousness” (Sartre, Saint 90, 144, 120). Butler picks up Sartre’s term “inversion” to describe the work of resignification that in Gender Trouble she will call performativity. She writes that Genet’s “tools are wrought from the weapons originally turned against him; he becomes a master of inversion, sensing and exposing the dialectical possibilities of the social opposition between himself and others” (Subjects 160). In this way, the subject “effects an inversion of the power dynamics constituted by the original situation” (160). The term anticipates the queer turn that Butler’s work will take: while she picks it up from Sartre, it also evokes the nineteenthcentury medico-scientific idiom for homosexuality. Genet’s “inversion”—his homosexuality as much as his thievery—abjects him, but simultaneously names a strategy under which this abjection can be dialectically negotiated. Butler writes: The original and constituting project of the self is thus primarily a relation to others, and the development of the self over time is the reenactment of these earlier relations … The earliest dramas of desire establish the reigning motifs of a given life and circumscribe the domain of possible choices. Early childhood does not unilaterally produce adult life; its causality is less mechanical than dialectical. Childhood maintains its power in adult experience to the extent that its themes are appropriated and reinterpreted in contemporary terms. (Subjects 161, 163, emphases added)

Earlier in Subjects of Desire, Butler evokes the term as she depicts the subject of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: the Hegelian subject’s sojourn constitutes “the systematic pursuit and misidentification of the Absolute, a constant process of inversion which never reaches ultimate closure” (Subjects 23). Similarly, in the dialectic of the master and the bondsman, we discover “the gradual inversion of their initial roles [that] offers lessons in the general structure and meaning of desire” (Subjects 56). The term’s recurrence in Subjects of Desire indicates not only that Butler’s reading of Genet is at once Sartrean and Hegelian but also that it is at the center of her

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emerging philosophy. For her, Genet’s negotiations with his “shame” consist of the “appropriation and reinterpretation”22 of constitutive, imposed terms, a movement in which duration—the forced labor that happens “over time”— allows the transformation of the unyielding compulsion of “mechanism” into the presumed unforeseeability of the “dialectic” (unforeseeable because “decapitated”). If here is enabled “[t]he possibility of a dialectical inversion of the power relations” (160), this possibility is identical to what Butler will subsequently call performative iterability. Although his work does not figure in her later texts, Genet becomes her first example of a performative subject, one who, as she writes in Bodies that Matter, accomplishes “a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it”; his transgressions result in “a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law” (122). Like the subject of performativity, the Sartrean subject is not a being but a doing. Sartre argues that Genet’s biography gives us an account of the author’s “fundamental” or “original project.” Sartre’s ontology posits the human subject as a being-for-itself, lived as its “project.” As Hazel Barnes writes, “the fundamental project is the for-itself ’s chosen orientation toward being, its way of making itself be, its nonreflective creation and pursuit of values, the process whereby it chooses to make itself ” (32). No human essence exists beyond the project: “we are projects,” Sartre asserts elsewhere. “ … And we are not so out of cowardice or to flee from anxiety: we are projects from the first” (“New Mystic” 285). In the words of another would-be existentialist, “Freedom’s what you choose to do with what’s been done to you” (Madonna). If we take Butler’s early commentary on Saint Genet as our point of reference, we can see that the theory of performativity can be understood as a radicalized version of the existentialism that Sartre, eliminating the ground that Edmund Husserl calls “the transcendental ego,” develops as a version of phenomenology. Like the for-itself of the “fundamental project,” the performative subject is a groundless being, a constellation of acts or significations that create the illusion of an agent after the fact (in the time of Nachträglichkeit, après-coup, afterwardsness). The sticking point for Butlerians in Barnes’s and Madonna’s assertions would be their use of the word “choice”: that being-for-itself “chooses to make itself ” in its orientation toward objects, that “freedom” consists of the “choice” to revisit past injuries. Deconstructive-performative theory would Butler repeats the terms, writing of Sartrean subject’s “subtle process of appropriation and reinterpretation, a daily task of reproducing a complex historical situation in one’s own terms, reworking this history, fashioning it anew” (157–58).

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insist that if we track the logic that posits the possibility of “choice,” we will encounter an aporetic point where the concept unravels. Because the subject comes into being as the tenuous and fragile entity that is both the subject of and subjected to performative acts, one cannot in any uncomplicated way posit that the subject “chooses” her projects; as Bersani, too, writes, “existentialist philosophy encourages the illusion of the self ’s autonomy” (BF 112n). Yet even with such caveats, Butler, in Subjects of Desire, finds nothing to quibble with in Sartre’s existentialist reading of Genet. Instead, she embraces his notion of the “inversion” through which the thief and the homosexual renders his condemnation by the world into conditions of livability. This is in marked contrast to Bersani, who, briefly addressing Saint Genet in Homos, evinces little affection for Sartre’s study. He argues that it “blunt[s] the originality of [Genet’s] work to claim, as Sartre does, that his embrace of criminality is designed to transform a stigmatizing essence imposed on him by others into a freely chosen destiny” (H 152). For him, Genet “is basically uninterested in any redeployment or resignification of dominant terms that would address the dominant culture” (H 152). Rather, his “use of his culture’s dominant terms … are designed not to rework or to subvert those terms, but to exploit their potential for erasing cultural relationality itself (that is, the very preconditions for subversive repositionings and defiant repetitions)” (H 153). We do not know if Bersani was aware of Butler’s early engagement with Saint Genet in Subjects of Desire. Yet he links Sartre to her theory of performativity, suggesting that in Genet’s texts one finds “a perversely alien perspective” in the context of queer-theoretical discussions elicited by Butler’s work (H 152). What, then, does Bersani identify in Genet that remains in excess of Sartre’s and Butler’s Hegelianism? His articulation of an alternative to power’s dialectics involves some literary speculations based on a reading of Genet’s novel Funeral Rites (1953) and play The Maids (1947). There are two Genets for Bersani. One is the Genet of what he calls “transgressive spectacles” or “spectacular transgression[s]” (H 161, 162). This Genet gives us lovingly detailed descriptions of rimming and feces-eating, sexual practices of transgressive chic; yet, precisely in transgressing morality, such acts (or their descriptions) remain in a dialogic—spec(tac)ular—relation to the law they flout. This Genet does not disentangle himself from the dialectic; the queasy spectacles of scat sex and cannibalism aim to disrupt the symbolic order by embodying and activating the monstrous practices that have been phobically projected onto the homosexual. As such, they are perfectly articulable in dialectical terms.

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To counter the kind of “subversion”23 that Butler highlights with performativity—the subject, having been produced by abjecting (non)recognition, appropriates the norm to bend the law—Bersani finds a second Genet, one who “imagin[es] a form of revolt that has no relation whatsoever to the laws, categories, and values it would contest and, ideally, destroy” (H 152). This constitutes what he calls a “nonrelational betrayal” (H 162). Bersani speculates about the possibility of an “escape” from extant relations to which the subject is bound. In Genet, this escape has to do with “solitude.” The point of all the betrayals in Funeral Rites seems to be for Jean to reach a “moral solitude,” an aloneness “where [the subject] would never be joined” (Genet 170, qtd. in H 162). In becoming a traitor, Jean—as Genet Bersani’s increasing impatience with the rhetoric of “subversion” in Anglo-American cultural studies and queer theory is symptomatic of his quarrel with these fields’ assumptions. As suggested by the Latin sub-vertere—to (over)turn from “below”— “subversives” are infiltrators who work against the social order from the inside, protected by their ability to pass as normative subjects. During the Cold War in the United States, the communist and the homosexual became the primary embodiments of this invisible, insidious presence, as much as the counterrevolutionary traitor presented an internal threat to the communist state. Beginning in the 1960s, this concept was appropriated by the representatives of the Birmingham-based Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in their theorization of cultural production. The work of “cultural studies” consisted of measuring the calculus of “subversion and containment,” that is, assessing and deploying whatever remained in excess of hegemonic discourses’ ability to absorb and neutralize new, and supposedly disruptive, statements inhering in the constellation. Beginning in the 1980s, this insight was mobilized in the emergent field of gay and lesbian studies, where scholars argued that “ideological” constructions such as gender and sexuality were open to subversion by, say, gay men’s parodies of masculinity; the dynamic of appropriation-and-subversion came similarly to organize Butler’s theorization in Gender Trouble (a book in whose subtitle, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, the term figures prominently). We can track Bersani’s progressively explicit disagreement with this genealogy of scholarship by noting the tonal shifts in his deployment of the key term. While his early uses align with the convention evident in Weeks and Butler (let us be pedantic: BB 19; FA 20, 32, 55, 58, and passim; BF 18; DSM 45; and FrB 11–12, 16, 53, 64, and passim)—and even though the habit persists intermittently (CR 40, 45, 140, 184, and 193; CS 46–47; Bersani, “Secrets du Caravage” 59)—after “Is the Rectum a Grave?” he begins to be noticeably irritated by the celebratory tones that often accompany various discussions of subcultural challenges to norms. After his critique of performative subversions in 1995’s Homos, he notes in 1997 that he has “come to distrust [the word ‘subversion’], since it doesn’t seem to mean much more than engaging in naughty parodies” (IRG 41; on the limits of “subversions” and “transgressions,” see also TT 22–25). At stake in his critique of “subversion” is his paradigmatic divergence from the genealogy of cultural theory that can be traced to the Birmingham School. While Cultural Studies scholars, and then Weeks and Butler, highlight the dialectical movement in which a discourse’s internal contradictions eat away at a structure until they negate its extant form, Bersani finds this dynamic limited in its imagination and efficacy. His disagreement with the cultural theory that can be traced, via twentiethcentury philosophy and Marxist theory, to Hegelian dialectics is informed by his having been influenced by an alternate philosophical genealogy, one whose important contemporary representative is Deleuze.

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continues—“cut[s] the bonds that held [him] to the world of customary morality”: At times I undid the knots methodically. I monstrously departed from you, your world, your towns, your institutions. After being subjected to your legal banishment, your prisons, your interdicts I discovered more forsaken regions where my pride felt more at ease. (171)

Performativity’s advocates would likely hear in pronouncements such as these the fantasy of an impossible escape from power relations and, hence, an early, “immature” stage in the dialectic. The subject of the dialectic would subsequently find out that the law he has assumed to have left behind is entangled with his conditions of being in more intricate, insidious ways than he has presumed; his escape has been a fantasy provided by the law itself. Bersani, however, affirms the possibility that the “evil” gestures of betrayal operate beyond naïve “transgression”: rather than “crime[s] against socially defined good,” these gestures enable “a turning away from the entire theater of the good, that is, a kind of meta-transgressive dépassement of the field of transgressive possibility itself ” (H 163). Bersani, in other words, suggests the possibility of “leaving behind” or “going beyond” or “overcoming” (dépasser)24 the constitutive outside, that is, the terms against which one’s struggle is defined. As he writes, “Funeral Rites seeks to detach evil from its oppositional relation to good, from its dependence on a transgressive mode of address” (H 168), to make evil not a dialectical stage but, as Nietzsche and, after him, Deleuze would put it, an active force. Genet wants to push us into a revaluation of values, move us beyond good and evil.25 Without an undoing of extant societal arrangements, Bersani proclaims, “social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions that provoked

The term is also used as the French translation for Hegel’s aufheben: see the glossary to Hyppolite 608. 25 Bersani’s ethics of betrayal should remind us of Nietzsche’s similarly unyielding dictums in, for example, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878); although Bersani’s only substantial discussion of Nietzsche takes mere fifteen pages (CR 86–101), his work echoes that of the German philosopher. If the subtitle of Nietzsche’s book of aphorisms evokes “free spirits,” such freedom—a term that the “paranoid imperative” of contemporary theory has rendered all but unusable, or characteristic of right-wing discourses (see Sedgwick, “Paranoid”)—can be achieved only by heeding an ethical call to unravel all forms of belongingness: “we must become traitors,” Nietzsche writes, “act unfaithfully, forsake our ideals again and again” (§629 [261]); if there is to be a future, it belongs to “noble traitors to all things that can ever be betrayed” (§637 [266]). Bersani similarly discerns in Genet the necessity of an unforgiving betrayal. 24

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the revolt” (H 171). For Bersani, Genet’s The Maids constitutes an experimentation of annihilating such “oppressive conditions.” In the play, the two domestics’ rebellion ends in the poisoning death of not Madame but Claire, one of the sisters. Bersani argues that, with the literal demise of the oppressed subject, Genet fantasizes about the possibility of a successful eradication of victimhood, of what Nietzsche would consider the reactiveness of this position: “The maids’ revolt (and the revolt of all the oppressed?) will be effective only if their subjectivity can no longer be related to as an oppressed subjectivity” (H 176–77). As he continues elsewhere, taking on the agency of the victim “plays into the hands of [one’s] oppressors by making [the subject] eminently identifiable, imprisoning us within a persecuted identity” (C 80). Yet Bersani’s affirmation of queer betrayals should not be read as a (dialectical) response to the formulations of emergent queer theory in the early 1990s. As is often the case with him, a line of argument—here, his juxtaposition of Genet’s eradication of relationality to what he considers the performative subject’s slavish repetitions of the law—turns out to be an elaboration of an earlier moment in his work. The radical but unguaranteed opening onto “the future” whose promise Bersani finds in Genet’s queer solitaries (H 169, 171) is anticipated by his reading of the early modern French playwright Jean Racine’s theater in the first chapter of A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976). Bersani titles his 1976 study after Racine’s Andromache (1667). Astyanax is a child whose life his mother, Andromache, tries to persuade Pyrrhus to save. His father, Hector, has been killed on the battlefield by Achilles; Pyrrhus is blackmailing Andromache for sexual favors by suspending his decision regarding the Greeks’ demand that he hand over the child so that a possible future enemy can be eliminated. What interests Bersani in the drama are the different ways in which Racine imagines the possibility of breaking with the past. As he suggests in the study’s introduction, Racine can be read as an experimenter in the modes of “discontinuity” that psychoanalysis and realist fiction, as components in the modern power-knowledge apparatus, do their best to eliminate: his plays frequently narrate the overturning of an old order and the institution of a new society, upheavals in which life’s “continuity is broken,” in which “something abruptly ends and something else abruptly begins” (FA 4). Yet such “traumatic break[s]” (FA 4) most often take place as the result of passionate responses to existing intrigues and wrongs: a family lineage is deracinated by the force of a love converted into murderous hate; an avenging passion replaces an established paternity with a new order. The past is a cauldron that boils over and reconfigures the present, but this reconfiguration turns out to be the staging of the past’s unfinished business. Such belated settling of accounts is typical of Racine’s drama: Louise Horowitz writes that “the concept of

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antériorité … structures and controls Racinian theater” (23); as Roland Barthes continues, the idea that “what has been is” constitutes “the code of Racinian time” (On Racine 38). Thus, what Bersani suggests are “traumatic breaks” in Racine’s world are but extensions of “Racinian fidelity” to the past: the hero remains “ensnared” by “his own anteriority as in a possessive mass that smothers him” (47). The traumatic events that repeatedly redirect action on the stage—events precipitated by “[t]he Racinian hero’s betrayal of the past” (FA 48)—do nothing to break the spell of a violent history. Although Bersani uses the same term, “betrayal,” in A Future for Astyanax and Homos, the acts that this term names in Racine and Genet are crucially different. Unlike Jean’s incomprehensible betrayal of all social ties in Funeral Rites, “betrayals of the past” in Racine are precipitated by passions entirely understandable—psychologically legible—in the context of the disloyalty. This differs from the disinterested relinquishing of attachments that, in Bersani’s reading, Funeral Rites illustrates. Yet Bersani also finds that, apart from the typically passionate Racinian betrayal, something else takes place in Andromache. In the play, we find “Racine’s purest image of a liberating betrayal of the past.” This is because the play refuses us any knowledge of what comes after the final moment of discontinuity: “the play brings us only to the threshold of a new order for which no content is imagined” (FA 49).26 Neither Pyrrhus nor Andromache is the precipitant of such blank newness: they “have both participated too fully in the Racinian world of desperate passion to represent, in their own persons, a radically new mode of desire” (FA 49). It is the child Astyanax, never seen on stage, who, according to Bersani, is the potential agent of a nontransgressive “betrayal.” Astyanax may reside beyond, institute a break with, the “obsessive attachment[s]” that structure the Racinian stage (FA 49). In his absence, he represents “a kind of ontological and moral ‘leap’” that saves a subject from repeating familial desires (FA 48). He may, that is, precipitate one of the “leaps of being” whose experiments, as we saw in the previous chapter, Bersani, in later chapters of A Future for Astyanax, finds in Comte de Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud. Unlike the repetitions of violent passions typical to Racine, the absent Astyanax figures a future that has left behind the cycle of tragic love and revenge. He betrays his lineage (Andromache and Hector), but this is—Bersani’s words from Homos

Barthes, too, sees in Astyanax the possibility of a space outside tragedy’s dead time: he suggests that Pyrrhus sees in Astyanax “the construction of an open, new future as opposed to the vendetta law represented by the Erinys Hermione” (On Racine 51). For Barthes, “the true Racinian heroes” are characterized “by the refusal to inherit,” to take on their patrimony (48), among whom Barthes counts Pyrrhus. For Bersani, however, it is only Astyanax who, in his complete absence from the drama, can execute a true betrayal.

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can be transposed here—“not a betrayal defined by any opposition to loyalty,” but, rather, a “betrayal of that opposition, a betrayal opposed to nothing because it consists merely in a movement out of everything” (H 168–69). The unseen child joins the Genetian subject in “his fundamental project of declining to participate in any sociality at all” (H 168). It is in Astyanax that we find the earliest figure of the antisocial queer in Bersani’s work. Racine’s queer child, absent from representation, betrays all parental desires in a way that Bersani will deem unavailable to the performative subject; yet, unlike the queer subject that says no to the future—the subject of Lee Edelman’s influential work—he remains a figure of becoming.

Butler’s Foucault, Bersani’s Foucault As much as Butler’s and Bersani’s divergent readings of Genet suggest their contrasting intellectual investments, such paradigmatic differences are also—and in an analogous way—evident in their deployment of Foucault’s work. To put it somewhat schematically, Butler’s theoretical background renders Foucault’s 1970s work—texts of the so-called genealogical period— most important for her, while Bersani gravitates toward the later, 1980s work, where Foucault, having scrapped his original project for a sixvolume study on the history of sexuality, made an unexpected turn toward questions of ethics in his studies of ancient modes of self-management. In the genealogical texts—and particularly Discipline and Punish (1975) and the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality (La volonté de savoir)— Foucault investigates the ways in which subjects are produced and managed by what he calls the modern “apparatuses” of power-knowledge. Like a number of other influential queer theorists, Butler finds here a productive way to construct an account of political agency while avoiding essentializing notions of the self (the ideological illusion of “the individual” that, as I noted in the previous chapter, Karl Marx and Max Weber had exploded in their analyses of capitalist modernity). While Bersani, too, frequently refers to the 1970s texts, he is one of the few scholars identified with early queer theory for whom the work Foucault produced after La volonté de savoir is more compelling than the studies of the genealogical period.27 In the same way that his and Butler’s differing assessments of Sartre’s Saint Genet evince their constitutive disagreements, their respective readings of Foucault help us Queer theorists, including Butler and Bersani, have had little to say about Foucault’s early, “archaeological” texts. For an argument about the importance of the archaeological Foucault, and particularly History of Madness, for queer theory, see Huffer, Mad.

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outline the paradigmatic differences that not only inform their philosophies, but also cleave the wider field of queer theory. Foucault’s idea of “‘reverse’ discourse” (“un discours ‘en retour’”), appearing in La volonté de savoir, is particularly central for Butler’s theory of performativity. The concept names the opportunities afforded by what Foucault calls “the incitement to discourse,” characteristic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary and biopolitical apparatuses. In La volonté de savoir, he uses this term to describe the unexpected consequences of the emergence of “homosexuality” as an identity category of deviance at the end of the nineteenth century. While medical and juridical discourses sought to pathologize those thus named, “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy and ‘naturality’ be acknowledged” by using the terms invented by these discourses (History 1.101). Repeating the terms of the law that has abjected him, the homosexual(ized) subject could change the moral valuation attached to the description; the idiom of pathology rendered available a language in which the “deviants” were able to seek legal recognition. Foucault describes this dynamic elsewhere: taking such discourses literally, and thereby even turning them around, we see responses appearing in the form of defiance: “All right, we are what you say we are, whether by nature or sickness or perversion, as you wish. And so if we are, let it be, and if you want to know what we are, we can tell you better than you can.” An entire literature of homosexuality, very different from libertine narratives, appeared at the end of the 19th century: think of Oscar Wilde and Gide … Always the same movement: take off from this sexuality in which movements can be colonized, go beyond them in order to reach other affirmations. (“End” 218)

In adopting medical categories as rallying points to be used in appeals for self-determination and dignity, the invert (that is, the modern homosexual) “inverts,” as Sartre and Butler write of Genet, the medical discourse that has created and condemned him. Whether Foucault is correct on historical facts,28 the resonance between “reverse discourse” and Butler’s theory of George Chauncey suggests that scholars tracing the history of homosexuality have made erroneous assumptions about the formative role of medical discourses in the emergence of the “modern homosexual.” Influenced by Foucault, these accounts frequently “attribute inordinate power to ideology as an autonomous social force; they oversimplify the complex dialectic between social conditions, ideology, and consciousness which produced gay identities[;] and they belie the evidence of preexisting subcultures and identities contained in the literature itself ” (115).

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performativity is immediately obvious. As much as Foucault suggests that disciplinary discourses can be mobilized in unforeseeable ways, Butler writes in the final chapter to Subjects of Desire that “domination engenders creative and unexpected response” (231): The law that we expect to repress some set of desires which could be said to exist prior to the law succeeds, rather, in naming, delimiting and, thereby, giving social meaning and possibility to precise those desires it intended to eradicate. (218)

Butler consistently emphasizes in her work the unforeseeability of the effects of performative or reverse-discourse acts. Bersani, on the other hand, persists in his suggestion that queer theorists have disastrously overestimated the “subversive” potential of such strategies. Twenty years after Homos, he rehearses—with some important modifications—his opposition to the politics of “subversive parody” in Thoughts and Things (2015) (TT 26). He returns to Saint Genet, admitting that Sartre is not incorrect in observing “Genet’s transgressive adherence to the terms that excluded and condemned him” (TT 26). Yet, as he did in Homos, he also argues that Sartre’s (and, subsequently, Butler’s) delineation does not fully describe Genet’s work, indeed highlights what are perhaps the least interesting aspects of the oeuvre. He finds a counterpart to the “subversive” Genet in contemporary queer-theoretical arguments that see in strategies aiming at “marriage equality” the potential for guerrilla tactics that would explode the institution from the inside by appropriating—and perverting—its terms. Like the Sartrean-Butlerian version of Genet, such strategies are of limited interest and usefulness: “The transgression of boundaries is, it seems to me, merely a rearrangement (and not even a provisional erasure) of the social map” (TT 22). With it, we remain, “however transgressively, within the discourse that has disqualified us” (TT 25). To describe what he takes to be queer theory’s “subversive” impulses, he evokes the concept of “reverse discourse” (TT 25–26). For him, this mode of contestation, identical with performativity, constitutes a strategic miscalculation: we are caught in a dialectical trap when we seek to transgress a discourse by its “reversal” or “resignification.” To think beyond what has arguably become the commonsense of performative politics in queer theory, Bersani turns to two works of art: Todd Haynes’s film Safe (1995) and, again, Genet. What he finds in both Safe and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) are examples of what he now calls the subject’s “becom[ing] unnamable” (TT 20). “Unnaming” suggests the subject’s self-eradication from socio-symbolic recognizability.

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It would constitute a disappearance from all visibility, from the range of the voices from whom the subject will have learned the names that performativity suggests she reinvent by its “subversive” repetition. Carol, the protagonist of Haynes’s film, exemplifies such self-silencing. Suffering from increasingly debilitating allergic attacks that are in some way linked to environmental causes, she withdraws from the world into everincreasing isolation. Bersani proposes that, in “her startling, inarticulate passivity” (TT 34), she becomes a subject who disappears from the social radar. Her withdrawal from the world aims at self-loss, the forgetting of the calling through which she has come into being. “Social legitimization by way of naming—conferring an identity—turns out to be the most dangerous toxin,” Bersani proposes. “The most serious environmental illness is environmental identity” (TT 35).29 When he writes that Carol’s is “a refusal to belong, to be named,” a “radical aloneness” (TT 35), we are reminded of the evil criminality with which Jean in Funeral Rites seeks to isolate himself in an equally unyielding solipsism—the criminality that can disengage the subject from extant modes of sociality. We are also prompted to think back to Bersani’s reading of Andromache in A Future for Astyanax: the absent Astyanax figures in the play the kind of invisibility into which Carol withdraws; her “unnaming” is anticipated by what Bersani calls Racine’s effort to “free [his] characters from the constraints of their named identities” (FA 29). With Racine, Genet, and Haynes, Bersani wants to imagine an end to the “nominalist enslavement” (TT 16) that Samuel Beckett’s unnamable narrator mourns: “they’ll have said who I am, and I’ll have heard” (Unnamable 383). “We can, and should, will ourselves to be less than what we are,” Bersani writes in a later chapter in Thoughts and Things; “an expansive diminishing of being is the activity of a psychic utopia” (TT 69). Carol’s disappearance is such an “expansive diminishing of being,” a work of “lessness,” which, as Bersani claims, “is the condition of allness” (IRG 70; FoB 165). The “betrayal,” “withdrawal,” and “unnaming” that Bersani finds figured in Carol, Jean, and Astyanax illustrate “desubjectivation,” the dynamic that, as Lynne Huffer has brilliantly shown, occupies Foucault’s thought from his earliest texts onward (Huffer, Mad), but that becomes recognizable to most of his Anglo-American readers in the form of the break that occurs in his late 1970s and early 1980s work. Notably, while many early queer theorists found his insight concerning discourses’ appropriability useful, Foucault

See also Bersani’s brief discussion of Safe in “Rigorously” 280.

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himself was not content to expound upon his thesis about the subversive potential of “reverse discourse.” Almost as soon as he had noted, in La volonté de savoir, the ways in which the nineteenth-century “incitement to discourse” was taken up by subjects recently designated as “homosexual,” he swerved off from the project thus indicated and begun to move toward other modes of contestation with disciplinary-biopolitical apparatuses. In an interview conducted in 1978—two years after the publication of La volonté de savoir—he applies the term “desubjectivation” to what he describes as the “wrenching [of] the subject from itself … its annihilation or dissolution” (“Interview” 241). Rather than one’s baroque (self-)complication through discursive proliferation, desubjectivation suggests the subject’s desiccation; rather than the (inconstant) repetition of the names by which the subject has been called into the world, desubjectivation designates her self-silencing, her refusal to respond to the appellations that have rendered her recognizable. Discussing modes of political activism, Foucault observes five years later, in 1982: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” The aim is not to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries. (“Subject” 336)

Bersani is thinking of such moments in Foucault’s later work—the latter’s advocacy of “refusing” one’s extant being—when he writes of the “refusal to belong, to be named” that Carol exemplifies (TT 35); such “unnamability can operate as a form of resistance to networks of repressive power” (TT 16). This refusal, a “desubjectivation,” is as characteristically a Bersanian gesture as the call for the performative play of “reverse discourse” is Butlerian.

A Viable Somehow The divergence between Butler and Bersani—their contrasting approaches of “reverse discourse” and “desubjectivation”—recapitulates a wider schism in contemporary theory. Butler, from her earliest work onward, remains a thinker of “reverse discourse”; Lacanian scholars, with whom she has often sparred, frequently use the term “subjective destitution” to evoke the

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subject’s (self-)eradication from the symbolic field.30 While the best-known representative of such “new Lacanians”31 is Slavoj Žižek, a recent, instructive example of this work is Abdul JanMohamed’s groundbreaking reading of the African American author Richard Wright’s work in The Death-BoundSubject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005). Noting the parallels in Orlando Patterson’s theory of slavery as “social death” and Lacan’s model of subject-constitution—parallels explained by Patterson’s and Lacan’s use of Hegel—JanMohamed develops a theory of black subjectivity in Jim Crow United States as determined by this subject position’s constitutive relationship to death. He suggests that Wright works toward a mode of resistance (if the word still applies) where the subject would disidentify with its place in the racialized symbolic order. Because the subject has been constituted as such in this place, this disidentification must occur as the subject’s self-annihilative embrace of its status as a “socially dead” subject. The choice of death that JanMohamed identifies as the most radical move in Wright’s lifelong negotiation with varied modes of racist subjection shares a considerable deal with what Bersani deems is the move toward “betrayal” and “unnaming” in Genet and Haynes. Rather than, say, developing injurious words into terms of affection and communal coherence—rather than turning the white child’s “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon, Black 91) into the “nigga” of mutual recognition— we must “impoverish” our being, “leasten” our language. The theoretical investments that differentiate Butler from Bersani, and Butler from “the new Lacanians,” are evident also in other aspects of queer theory. The requisite of “desubjectivation” operates in Lee Edelman’s work in ways that render his recent efforts to develop a queer ontology to an extent incompatible with Butler’s Hegelian theory. At stake are the different ways in which the two mobilize the dialectical concept of “negativity” or “negation.” While Butler sees in negation the present moment’s opening, through an elaboration of its inner contradictions, to new possibilities of being, Edelman insists on “tarrying” indefinitely with the negative. He refuses the promise of the future that Butler since the late 1980s has developed with the acephalic mode of the dialectic that she calls performativity. Instead, he finds in negativity, which he identifies with queerness, a more radical and disruptive promise than what he deems the “assimilationist” logic of Butler’s deployment of the dialectic.32 For the most important debates between Butler and Lacanian scholars, see Copjec, Read ch. 8; Dean, Beyond ch. 5; and the exchanges between Butler and Žižek in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek. For an overview of “subjective destitution” in Lacanian scholarship, see Ruti, Singularity. 31 The term “new Lacanians” is James Mellard’s. 32 Apart from No Future, Edelman develops his account of queer negativity in Berlant and Edelman; “Learning”; and “Ethics.” I will return to Butler’s and Edelman’s work in the next chapter. 30

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In her analysis of queer theory’s failure to live up to Foucault’s challenge to modern subjectivation, Lynne Huffer points to positivizable negativity as a limitation of Butlerian theory from the Foucauldian perspective. “Performativity,” she suggests, “… remains invested in the philosophical act of negation and, consequently, undoes gender but not the subject itself ” (Mad 112). As she continues, alluding to the influence of Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy on Foucault, if desubjectivation means to “move the subject away from himself (or his dialectical negation) toward the place of anonymity that is the promise of the subject’s undoing” (117), performativity, premised on dialectical becoming, remains attached to the notion of the subject whose presumed indispensability for political theorizing Foucault sought to contest by historicizing it as a modern construct to untangle ourselves from. However impressive the ungrounding of the subject into an agent not of essence but of iterability, performativity stands at odds with the Nietzschean critique of the rationalist moralism that, beginning with History of Madness (1961), Foucault has identified with Cartesianism and the Age of Reason. Already in his early work—work whose importance has been eclipsed by the vagaries of translation and queer theory’s overreliance on La volonté de savoir—Foucault insists that “the goal of moral critique should not be the expansion of moral norms to include a greater diversity of marginalized subject”—as is the case in Butler’s project—but the undoing of those norms … [T]he promise lies in forms of selftransformation we might imagine not as expansions of the self but as self-unravelings. That unraveling opens a space for the invention of new desubjectivations we cannot now imagine. (115)33

Bersani has consistently sided with the dynamics of “desubjectivation.” Already in 1977, he pronounces, paraphrasing Foucault’s arguments in Surveiller et punir and La volonté de savoir: “the only absolute escape from power is to escape from relations themselves” (“Subject” 12). Almost forty years later, he echoes the sentiment: Huffer writes: “rather than submitting morality itself to the Nietzschean historical critique it requires, performativity replaces ‘bad’ family values with ‘good’ queer ones, thereby engaging in a process of remoralization” (Mad 114). Already in History of Madness, Foucault, on the other hand, “suggests that the goal of moral critique should not be the expansion of moral norms to include a greater diversity of subject. Rather, a Nietzschean critique of moral interiority ultimately renegotiates subjectivity itself ” (115). Or, as Huffer continues elsewhere, “simply negating moral norms will not prevent the rebounding force of new queer moralities precisely at the site where morality has been contested” (“Lipwork” 101). As Jagose (“Trouble” 36–42), too, shows, Butler in Gender Trouble creatively misreads La volonté de savoir to render it helpful for her project based on the politics of recognition. See also Huffer’s commentary on queer theory in Are the Lips ch. 1.

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The Law that names us, that legitimizes or delegitimizes the identities it names, is not an agency that can be negotiated with, and to reject its authority may necessitate a potentially irreversible negativizing not only of the world but also of the subject him- or herself. (TT 25)

Yet Huffer extends her critique of performativity to Bersani, too. For her, Bersani and Edelman are aligned with Butler’s method insofar all three, according to her, rely on dialectical reversal as the way of challenging normativity. If Butler seeks the reversal of norms to include the abjected in the field of recognition, in “the psyche-driven ‘antisocial’ thesis,” such as we find in Bersani and Edelman, “queer subjectivity performatively turns morality inside out by embracing and sublimating the psyche’s ‘death drive’ as shame” (Huffer, Mad 115). Thus, antisocial performativity would appear to do away with the subject altogether. But what it takes away with one hand it gives back with the other, as it continues to assume the existence of a psyche as container of the subject’s death. Precisely because queer performativity cannot let go of the “psyche” or “soul” which constitutes the rationalist modern subject, the moral violence of the swamp remains—even, and especially, in morality’s dialectical negation as a resistance to sociality or a queer death drive … In dialectical terms, negation alone does not undo the “I.” (115–16)

In its yielding to the seductions of psychoanalytic language to offer “thick” descriptions of erotic life, queer theory has been unable to imagine “otherthan-subjective forms of life,” ways of being that would escape modernity’s Cartesian moralism (138). While her framing of queer theory from the perspective of History of Madness is persuasive—indeed, groundbreaking—Huffer, in a move that is not atypical in commentaries on his work, also offers a partial, slanted reading of Bersani. This is because, to recruit his work among the ranks of contemporary queer theory, she turns to the predictable sources: “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and, to a lesser extent, Homos. These texts, and particularly the 1987 essay, are responsible for his reputation as a queer theorist. Yet almost inevitably, readers who approach his work through—and, most of the time, only through—them end up giving limited accounts of his philosophy. As I will point out in Chapter 6, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” downplays his hesitancy concerning the psychoanalytically oriented account of the subject, a hesitancy that is on display elsewhere in his oeuvre. Furthermore, it is only

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from the perspective of the influential essay that one can miss Bersani’s effort in Homos—analogous to Foucault’s in History of Madness and elsewhere— to think modes of being and relatedness beyond modern forms of sexual subjectivation.34 What for Huffer is the “move toward anonymity,” that is, “the disappearance of the subject” (Mad 117), is what Bersani, in Thoughts and Things, calls “unnaming,” exemplified in Haynes’s Carol. The effort to think this dynamic, as I have proposed, similarly informs Homos: Genet’s nonrelational betrayal is a version of the subject’s undoing that, as Huffer demonstrates, has organized Foucault’s work from its incipience.35

Huffer reads Bersani, along with Butler and Edelman, as a crypto-thinker of interiority, of the very “subject of reason” whose birth Foucault traces to Descartes in History of Madness. It is particularly queer theory’s framing through psychoanalysis—queer theorists’ persistent presumption that Freud’s work offers a radical rupture of modern conceptualizations of subjectivity—that destroys the project that such thinkers assume to have inherited from Foucault. For Huffer, this profound misunderstanding is symptomized in theorists’ understanding of “the unconscious” as a site of resistance to and disruption of sexual normativity, rather than a concept that is fully the product— indeed, the apotheosis—of Cartesian modernity (Mad ch. 3, esp. 129–34, 159–60). Yet with Bersani we may have to pluralize the concept of “the unconscious,” disentangle it from the psychoanalytic commonsense. As I will note in Chapter 7, in his thinking “the unconscious” functions on the model of virtuality, partially gleaned from Deleuze’s philosophy, and thus on a logic entirely different from the Cartesian conceptualizations that Huffer identifies in queer theorizing. 35 While Elizabeth Freeman’s recent effort, in Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century (2019), to reconfigure queer theory’s investments operates on a slightly expanded canon of Bersani’s texts, it nevertheless offers a similarly partial reading of his onto-ethics/aesthetics. Freeman does note that “Bersani actually has a very lush social imagination” (“he posits new relationships based on aesthetics, even on design”), yet also identifies the limitation of his work in his failure to consider “affect.” His onto-ethics operates on “spatial and effectively visual formulation[s],” while Freeman seeks a “sociability felt and manifested along axes and wavelengths beyond the discursive and the visual” (14). Yet in Bersani’s work “the aesthetic” is not a mode of being exclusive of affect; it does not designate either the disinterestedness of (Kantian) aesthetic judgment or the tradition of the arch aesthetics in whose tongue a gay male imagination has spoken at least since Oscar Wilde, and has, as we are often told, bequeathed queer theory its limited (“white male”) archives. (I think I hear in Freeman’s commentary echoes of Jack Halberstam’s critique of the white-malequeer-theoretical canon’s refusal to plunge into “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, overinvestment, incivility, and brutal honesty” [“Politics” 824].) As much as one finds, according to Huffer, in Foucault’s early work—as opposed to the more influential La volonté de savoir—thick descriptions of the eros that was pushed beyond the livable with the rise of modern reason, “aesthetics” in Bersani names an effort to think attachment beyond the frame of the modern subjectivation that Foucault seeks to open to its limit. Bersani’s project, in other words, extends beyond what we routinely call “the aesthetic” in the same way that Foucault’s philosophical practice “is not only about thinking but also about affect, sensation, sentiment, and feeling” (Huffer, Mad 273). To see this, we must distinguish Bersani’s work from those of his queertheoretical colleagues with which it has been stubbornly identified. Indeed, like Huffer, 34

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Given queer theory’s claims to political relevance, we must query about the strategic viability of desubjectivation in the form in which Foucault begins to sketch it in his early work. Commenting on History of Madness, Huffer speaks of the terrifying disintegration of the face in madness … [I]t is one thing to celebrate, as we are wont to do, our own undoing by the ethical other. It is quite another to confront the lived experience of subjective undoing that madness names. To lose oneself completely in an absolute exile from one’s culture and one’s means of communication  … is neither freeing nor politically subversive. And yet, Foucault insists, we must confront it. (Mad 118–19)

If desubjectivation is “[a] horrifying proposition for most of us” in its connotation of the mind’s psychotic unraveling (123), how is it that this “disappearing subject opens a space for politics” (Huffer, “Lipwork” 96)? Huffer acknowledges the question’s irresolvability, its status as an unsurpassable limit; in this, desubjectivation designates precisely the limit of reason that Foucault proposes we push toward to undo the exclusion of unreason, of madness, since Descartes (Mad 123–24). Other critics have not been as sanguine when confronted with the question of desubjectivation’s political conundrums. For example, while Dale Peck calls Homos “a profound piece of imaginative literature,” the impracticality of what Bersani has to offer renders the 1995 book “reactionary, … a work of rather profound nihilism” (24, 21). This is because Bersani “never succeeds in creating a viable method of asociality or arelationality or apoliticality that [he] sees in various fictional universes” (21, emphasis added). While Bersani compellingly argues for the urgency of reconfiguring relationality, when it is time for him to come up Freeman associates the antisocial thesis—attached, again, to Bersani and Edelman—with performativity (65–66; Freeman indicates her agreement with Huffer’s argument: see 13, 171), the eminently discourse-dependent (because Derridean-inflected) theorization of power and subjectivity.    While Bersani is a central thinker for neither Huffer nor Freeman—their insights are not substantially diminished because of their limited readings of his work—what I think is their projects’ actual synchrony with his onto-ethics/aesthetics may be worth elaborating. Foucault’s project, whose missed potential for queering modernity Huffer wants to actualize, finds a consistent but also creatively divergent ally in Bersani; the effects of Bersani’s insistent framing of his thinking via psychoanalysis should be carefully worked out rather than assumed. Similarly, if Freeman’s ambition is to nudge us from theories of performativity and the antisocial toward imagining queer “styles of affiliation” (Freeman 14), which she often describes in terms of “rhythms,” her effort may be productively linked to Bersani’s enduring interest in thinking—as I will put it in Chapter 8 below—“fascinating rhythms.”

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with alternatives, he turns to artworks. For Peck, what he has to offer are literary readings of admirable creativity, but of little real-life usefulness.36 Yet, like Huffer, Peck neglects to observe that Bersani’s theorization of power and subjectivity does not terminate with the movement of shattering; ébranlement is only a preliminary move in Bersani’s proscriptive account of our untangling from modern regimes of subjectivation (see Dean, “Antisocial” 827). This is to say that, apart from being disinterested, like Foucault, in elaborating the dynamics of “reverse discourse,” Bersani remains in synchrony with his colleague’s subsequent move beyond the theory of desubjectivation. As swiftly as Foucault was to dismiss the emancipatory potential of “reverse discourse,” his thinking did not conclude with the proposition of desubjectivation’s necessity. Rather, in the same breath that he speaks of the subject’s “destruction,” “decomposition,” and “explosion,” he also evokes “its conversion into something else” (Foucault, “Interview” 247). Not coincidentally, Bersani, too, speaks of a “something-else” that must come after the kind of desubjectivation whose potential is evoked by Racine and Genet. Such betrayals, as he writes about Andromache in 1976, prepares us for a moment when “something else … begins” (FA 4); they must be understood, as he repeats in a 2014 interview, as “a precondition for something else” (“Rigorously” 282). Foucault sketches what this “something else” might indicate in different ways throughout his career. In volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, he turns to the practice of epimeleia heautou, the care of the self, in ancient Greece and Rome. While he seeks, as Tom Roach writes, “a turning away from the identities dispensed by various biopolitical institutions, a turning away from established relational norms” (69), this movement—amounting to “an overcoming of the known self, the given self ”—is potentially followed by “the creation of a new self ” (73). Roach cites commentators who criticize Foucault’s later work for lacking a vision of what might come after the undoing of contemporary forms of life, after the unraveling of the modern subject; deploying a Deleuzeanism, Huffer insists that the critical movement extends beyond the destruction of the subject of rationalist moralism, for Foucault has organized his Nietzschean critique around a “becoming-other conception of desubjectivation” (Mad 178). Unlike in Edelman, there is a becoming, a becoming-other, in

This criticism is echoed in two other reviews of Homos: see Halperin, “More or Less”; and Knadler. On whether poststructuralist psychoanalysis is at all amenable to political theorizing, see the exchange between John Brenkman (“Queer”; “Politics”) and Edelman (“Post-Partum”). For antisocial theory’s dubious implications from the perspective of queer-of-color critique, see José Esteban Muñoz’s brief commentary (“Thinking” 825; Cruising 11, 91–95) and Edelman’s equally brief response (“Learning” 166–67n1).

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the undoing that Foucault seeks. Roach points to Foucault’s discussion—left unfinished because of his untimely death—of friendship as an example of a mode in which such becoming might coalesce. With his notion of friendship, Roach writes, Foucault imagines a “queer becoming” (75).37 In his critique, Peck pinpoints a crucial concern, for the question of— and the term—“viability” recurs in Bersani’s writing. Observing Carol’s “shedding of identities” in Safe, Bersani finds in her “a model of a nonviable yet somehow also necessary self-negativizing. Much less active than Sartre’s Genet (who freely chooses the deviant identity imposed on him), Carol doesn’t subversively parody the identity assigned to her; rather, she simply disappears from it” (TT 35, emphases added). The three terms that I have highlighted—“nonviable,” “somehow,” and “simply”—carry a considerable but somewhat unmeasured weight in Bersani’s argument. They are his counterparts to the Butlerian keyword “subversion” (which, too, appears in the passage). The first two terms mark a hesitation in Bersani’s thought; the third indicates that, rather than belonging to the genre of political theory, his project is one of speculative onto-ethics/aesthetics. Each of these terms returns in Bersani’s other texts. Written for a symposium on his work, the short piece “Broken Connections” (2010), for example, addresses the seeming self-contradictoriness of some of his pronouncements over the years. Speaking of his tendency of “promiscuously forg[etting]” his earlier theoretical statements, he writes: I refer, most notably, to my apparent betrayal—a virtue extolled in the Genet section of Homos—of the Laplanchian notion of ébranlement, of sexual shattering, by my more recent modulation of masochism into another, less dramatic, this time socially viable version of ego disidentification. I mean by the latter the milder sensual pleasure of discovering our inaccurate self-replications in the world, the aesthetically pleasing correspondences between the world and multiple aspects of our subjecthood. (“Broken” 414–15, last emphasis added)

While in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Homos Bersani had insisted on the necessity of a radical disengagement, the kind of desubjectifying “betrayal” of all relations (and relationality itself) imagined by Genet in The Maids and Funeral Rites, he now suggests that such efforts constitute, or turn into, “nonviable” strategies. “Broken Connections” is not the first occasion where Apart from Roach’s, Timothy O’Leary’s study of later Foucault is similarly instructive; for more condensed but nevertheless helpful commentary, see Davidson (“Ethics”); and Oksala (157–207).

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Bersani complicates his models in this way. In 2000, he anticipates this shift as he concludes that masochistic shattering is “not a viable alternative to mastery, either practically or theoretically” (IRG 110); in Thoughts and Things, he repeats that ébranlement is not a “viable alternative” (TT 5) for an ethics that seeks to rethink the subject’s relation to otherness; and in Receptive Bodies (2018), he again posits that, rather than the repeated pleasures of shattering, “[t]he viability of our being-in-the-world depends on a certain continuity in our exchanges with an otherness never wholly differentiated from ourselves” (RB 49). In these later texts, he thus seems to have come to share Peck’s assessment of the pronouncements we find in “The Gay Outlaw.” The mode of desubjectivation embodied by the fictionalized Papin sisters and, fifteen years later, by Carol gives us an unlivable—nonviable—way of undoing one’s constitutive oppression. In a 2014 interview, Bersani proposes that the examples we find in literature such as Genet’s are “not to be taken—obviously—in the literal sense, but as an effort to think about the possibility of breaking all familiar connections” (“Rigorously” 280). Recalling a recent talk, he remembers an audience member query about the possible political relevance one might attribute to “Carol’s self-disappearance” in Haynes’s film, a question echoing Peck’s critique of Homos. “It occurred to me then,” he says, “that the point for me in the aesthetics of these extreme cases—a category in which I put Genet, Beckett, and a film like Safe—is that these examples don’t come with any obvious or direct political messages” (280). Before we see in this gesture the author’s backtracking from his previous assertions, perhaps as a response to critics such as Peck, we should note that Bersani expresses similar hesitations already in Homos. “This,” as he puts it bluntly in his commentary on Funeral Rites, “is not a political program … [Genet’s queer characters] are positioned for a reinventing of the social without any indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it might have.” Instead, Genet—and Bersani’s reading of Genet—“does nothing more—but I think it’s a great deal—than propose the fantasmatic conditions of possibility for such a proceeding.” What we find in Funeral Rites is “a mythic metaphor for a revolutionary destructiveness” (H 171), “an admittedly utopic form of revolt” (IRG 103). Genet’s novel exemplifies what Bersani, twenty years after Homos, calls “the inherently nonviable sense of art” (TT 93). The tentativeness of Bersani’s suggestions brings us to the second term I highlighted in his discussion of Safe in Thoughts and Things: while Carol’s withdrawal from the world clearly fails as a political model, it is nevertheless “somehow … necessary” to bet on the nonviable. Like “(non)viability,” “somehow” recurs across Bersani’s texts. We find it, for example, at the end of the analysis of Funeral Rites in “The Gay Outlaw.” There Bersani focuses on a

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scene in Genet’s novel that finds Erik and Riton, the Nazi and the collaborator, fucking on a Paris rooftop. Standing upright, each man, rather than facing the other, looks to the city that spreads out beneath him.38 Bersani writes: “The future that Riton and Erik appear to be looking at must somehow emerge from the radical homo-ness of their homosexual adventure, from their refusal, or inability, to love anything other than themselves” (H 171, emphasis added). This is precisely the “somehow” that Bersani identifies as the potentiality in Carol’s withdrawal from the world. It is also the “somehow” that he and Ulysse Dutoit resort to in their attempt to describe Beckett’s silence (the “impoverishment” sought by his narrative consciousnesses) as “a kind of failure that is somehow compatible with the failure to fall silent and even with the diversification of expressive moments” (AI 17). This “somehow” also registers their discomfort in speculating, in their discussion of the function of “narrative” from ancient art to psychoanalysis, that “the mode of mental activity which Freud labeled the primary process is somehow relevant to the specificity of artistic invention”—a “‘somehow’” that, as they continue, “is immensely problematic” (FV 110). As the inexactitude and tentativeness of his formulations—the future “must somehow emerge”—suggest, we have entered the realm of what Bersani calls “speculations” (H 150). I will investigate the importance of this term for Bersani—it is one of his “crypto-concepts”—in the concluding chapter. For now, we might say that he moves from the political to the speculatively political, to speculative politics. This phrase designates a mode of engagement that riskily affirms the relinquishing of immediate political utility in an unguaranteed effort to reformulate “the political” beyond recognition. In the economic sense, “speculations” refer to investments whose risks are borne not only by the speculator but also other, more levelheaded agents, who are often more precariously positioned in the market than the risk-taker. Philosophically speaking, “speculativeness” names a thinker’s tendency to make propositions that cannot be corroborated by experience; as John Dewey writes, the term implies a “form of theorizing which goes beyond verifiable observation and reflection, characterized by loose and

Genet writes in Funeral Rites:

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Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them in a kind of oval that excluded all light, but the bodies in the figurehead which they formed looked into the darkness, as one looks into the future, the weak sheltered by the stronger, the four eyes staring in front of them. They were projecting the frightful ray of their love to infinity … Erik and Riton were not loving one in the other, they were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a gesture of victory. (249) See also Bersani’s discussion of this scene in IRG 33.

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venturesome hypotheses” (568). Marx famously located Hegel’s error in his idealist-speculative bent, his tendency to produce theories “out of the ether of [his] brain and not out of the material world” (Marx and Engels, Holy 59); for him, Hegel was one of the many “German philosophers who refused to draw practical inferences from their theories, and instead preferred to do nothing but speculate about questions of metaphysics” (O’Brien 436). In his commentary on Bersani’s queer-theoretical work, particularly in Homos, Peck echoes this critique of a thinker’s indulgent disinterestedness in his theories’ real-life utility. Bersani’s work, he might say, is merely speculative; his naïveté reveals his privileged position (his “viability” not immediately threatened, he can assume the luxury of speculations). Bersani, as we saw above, would say nothing else: his observations about art do not amount to a “political program.” But he would also insist that indulging in nonpolitical experimentation is indispensable, indeed an ethical imperative. Writing about the genocidal imperialism of the second Bush administration, he claims that “no immediately recognizable political solution … would address the relational aberrations that make such atrocities [as the Bush wars] perhaps not only possible but inevitable” (I 124).39 Our political thinking is premised on ontological assumptions about the relationship of the self to the other that render the devastating violence of expansionist wars inevitable. For us to reconfigure these premises, we have to relinquish, at least preliminarily, “the political” as we know it. Only by withdrawing from the constituted world can we radically reimagine the political. Bersani often suggests that abandoning the political, we enter the aesthetic. Art’s experimentations, as he puts it elsewhere, must be “speculatively flirted with” (IRG 51). What bothers Bersani in dialectical accounts of “subversion” and “resistance”—the kind of recognizably political work we find in Butler and Sartre’s readings of Genet—is their tendency to reinstate, after the work of negation, the original structure, with its abject positions now otherwise occupied. When the dialectic is “decapitated,” we beneficially lose the teleology that marks Hegel’s account; but Bersani argues that we are also left with a systematic account of unavoidable hierarchies, a musical-chairs game of abjection. We retain the oppressive system, even if given embodiments of the negative are redeemed from their abjected state. As Bersani puts it, “Revolt allows for new agents to fill the slots of master and slave, but it

Later in the same text, he writes: “There is no solution easily recognizable as ‘political’ to the political horrors [of genocide, war, and so forth] because no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system” (I 76). As our concluding chapter will suggest, this “mutation” will be the becoming-speculative of our worldly relations.

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does not necessarily include a new imagining of how to structure human relations. Structures of oppression outlive agents of oppression”—a fate that has fallen to “more than one revolutionary movement” (H 174). As he indicates, the critique is relevant beyond queer theory. We can apply it, for example, to the decolonization process, whose “pitfalls” or “trials and tribulations” (mésaventures) Frantz Fanon outlines in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). As another commentator on postcoloniality notes, the promises of an independence/decolonizing movement often give way to postcolonial disappointment because the practices and structures instituted by the earlier regime have been insufficiently exorcized: “‘We do not serve ourselves,’” pronounces an anonymous observer of life in postcolonial Ghana in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), “‘if we remain like insects fascinated by the white people’s power’” (86). Rather than discovering the new world promised by national independence, the presumably decolonized subject has remained in thrall of the colonizer’s power, paralyzed by an “evil eye,” unable to save himself from the approaching mortal threat. As Sylvia Wynter, too, writes, too often the struggle for postcolonial identity has remained “imitative—the mere negation of ‘white power,’ the claim to have this power to take on a black face. The status quo of privilege and injustice is not to be changed; only the masters” (“Creole” 13).40 In its effort to overturn structures of oppression, decolonization has constituted not a process of unlearning and reinvention but of continuing enthrallment with the modes by which one has been, and remains, subjected. The Sartrean-Butlerian answer to the dilemma of subjection is to produce counter-incantations by “inaccurately repeating” the magic formulas of one’s becoming. Bersani’s solution, on the other hand, is to fall silent, to ignore the solicitations that have produced one as a worldly being. This brings us to the third highlighted word in our passage above: “simply.” In Safe, Carol, Bersani writes, “simply disappears” from her assigned identity. He is alluding to the dynamic that he elsewhere calls, after Beckett, the self ’s “impoverishment” or “leastening.” But what does it mean to say that one can “simply” withdraw from the social landscape where one’s place—one’s self—has been circumscribed by the insidious forces of subjectivation/subjection, disciplinary-biopolitical cultivation? Bersani’s

In her novel, The Hills of Hebron (1962), Wynter illustrates this “imitative” postcoloniality in her depiction of an educated elite’s hunger for the very power that has kept them in subjugation: “For them politics was a game with a set of rules codified by their adversaries. They would play the game brilliantly without ever questioning the rules” (257).

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attachment to the term is evident, again, in its repetition. It is anticipated in his brief discussion of Safe in the preface to Thoughts and Things: “By the end of the film, [Carol] has almost become no one. Through what appears to be an involuntary but unqualified negativity, she has simply disappeared from any psychic or social identity” (TT xi). Later in the book, Bersani writes that, rather than assimilating ourselves to heterosexual marriage— or undoing the institution by transgressively parodying its rituals—we should think of it as “a fortress that might simply be deserted” (TT 23).41 The term emerges also in the book’s first chapter, which concludes with a characteristically Bersanian move. Bersani suggests that, rather than “subverting” or “contesting” more familiar conceptualizations of the world, we can cultivate an indifference to extant models. If the Freudian subject’s fate is tangled up with Oedipal enigmas, such traps may be neutralized by “stand[ing] up and simply leav[ing] the family tragedy by which Western culture has been oppressed at least since Oedipus’s parricide” (TT 13). It is such indifference, where negation is replaced by a “simple” disappearance, that frequently marks Bersani’s relationship to thought whose limits he seeks to exceed. As Peck correctly observes, Bersani “wants to dismantle rather than subvert dominant social orders” (16). His desubjectifying agent does not tarry with the negative, does not embrace his social death in order to turn over the system of serfdom. Instead, the speculative subject is supposed to “simply” walk off the plantation, execute the kind of “leap of being” whose experimenters, as I noted in the previous chapter, Bersani identifies in Lautréamont and Rimbaud. In 1998, Bersani speaks of the necessity of our dwelling in “a kind of speculative, rather non-immediately-politically-viable stage of reflection” (IRG 200). If we risk the nonviably speculative, we may be able to radically reconfigure the relational field—a reconfiguration that remains “our most urgent ethical project” (IRG 102, see also 172)—in a way that “the political” cannot. The claim here is that the political fails in this rootwork because of its reliance on subjects as they have been constituted by the law that requires abolishing. Echoing the title of Butler’s first book, Bersani writes: “The laws of desire will collapse with the disappearance of the subjects of desire” (IRG 76; see also FoB 100). If Butler, beginning in Subjects of Desire, outlines politics as a system of dialectical contestation among “desiring” subjects, Bersani is after such subjects’ disappearance. While he seeks desubjectivation—but also

For commentary on this phrase, see also McGlazer 149ff.

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the “something else” that comes after this—Butler prioritizes the possibilities that emerge in desiring subjects’ elaboration in performative repetitions. Her theory of performativity relies on the process of making sense, rendering recognizable, that which emerges in the dialectical process. Bersani, on the other hand, looks to art for models that might more thoroughly disorient us. The speculations he finds in aesthetic texts share the appeal of what Samuel Beckett’s Molloy calls “the best presentiments”: “that you can make no sense of them” (82).

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Negation and negativity constitute concepts of crucial importance in Hegelian philosophy. Negation powers the dialectic; it is the engine that drives becoming toward freedom and reason, toward the Absolute. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies “the moving principle [of the dialectic] as the negative” (§37 [21]); Karl Marx follows him by pointing to negativity (Negativität) as “the moving and generating principle” in Hegelian theory (“Critique” 332 / “Kritik” 574). Consequently, as Judith Butler writes, the negative, by annihilating that which is, affirms the future: “The negative is … human freedom, human desire, the possibility to create anew … The negative show[s] itself in Hegelian terms not merely as death, but as a sustained possibility of becoming” (Subjects 62). In this, the Phenomenology gives us “the via negativa of philosophical truth” (22). If Butler’s theory, because of its Hegelian premises, thrives on negation, more recently the “negative” has emerged as an important, and contested, concept elsewhere in queer theory. Robyn Wiegman identifies in negativity “queer theory’s most important contemporary idiom, if not its defining sensorium” (221). “Negativity” is evoked when discussion turns to “the antisocial thesis,” a topic that, as Wiegman writes, has repeatedly solicited impassioned performances of queer theory’s internal antagonisms (220–21). Leo Bersani’s work is frequently cited as an important source for this concept.1 The reading of Bersani as the daddy of antisocial queer theory rests on his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and the book-length polemic Homos (1995). Drawing from his earlier work on psychoanalytic theory in the 1987 essay, Bersani finds the name for negativity, being’s internal contradiction, even aporia, in “sex.” Sex is a force that elicits in the subject the experience of its originary undoing, the moment, as Jean Laplanche’s theory puts it, when the infant becomes-human in ébranlement. As Bersani writes, “sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge

On Bersani’s influence on queer theories of the antisocial, see Caserio et al. 819; Huffer, Are the Lips 15–16, 43; Muñoz, Cruising 11; Roach 125–26; Ruti, “Why” 113; Wiegman 220.

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them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart” (IRG 30; see also CR 4).2 Sex is antisocial because it shatters “the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others” (IRG 24); here we find “the antisocial drive toward sexual pleasure” (IRG 93). Issuing from Laplanchean theory of the human subject’s constitution-by-undoing, the concept of ébranlement is anchored in negativity insofar as the subject comes into being by its own pleasurable annihilation: in ways that Chapter 1 explored, sex names the subject’s aporetic grounding in its primordial shattering by the world’s intensities. This annihilation takes place in the unbearable encounter with otherness. True otherness can never be met except as a radical excess under whose assault the subject shatters; hence the sexual subject’s “solipsism,” its antisocial character. Since the publication of his No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee Edelman has become perhaps the most frequently cited queer thinker to be identified with “the antisocial thesis”; indeed, it is only in his work that its postulations are consistently developed and rigorously applied.3 Yet if ébranlement informs, in Edelman and elsewhere, the thought of the antisocial, we should immediately note—as we did in the previous chapter— that Bersani’s work extends beyond the concept. Tim Dean observes that “shattering” constitutes only one part of Bersani’s critique of sociality; its destructiveness is followed by the postulation of what Bersani, in and after Homos, calls “homoness”: “the shattering of the civilized ego betokens not the end of sociality but rather its inception,” Dean writes. … The movement of coming together only to be plunged into an experience of the nonrelational represents but the first step in Bersani’s account of relationality. The second, correlative step is to trace new A year before “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani gives a psychoanalytic account of the antisocial force of sex in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986). He anticipates the essay in writing that the “psychic shattering” psychoanalytic theory associates with sex “plunges the human subject into the irremediable privacy of a masochistic jouissance” (FrB 114). In this way, “Freud subverts views of pleasure as inherently social by suggesting that even the most sublimated forms of pleasure are ontologically grounded in a jouissance at once solipsistic and masochistic, a jouissance which isolates the human subject in a socially and epistemologically ‘useless,’ but infinitely seductive, repetition” (FrB 90). 3 The thinkers associated with antisocial arguments do not constitute anything like a coherent field, much less a school. Even though, in the PMLA special section on the antisocial thesis (Caserio et al.), Edelman interpellates Jack Halberstam as his “compatriot in negativity” (“Antagonism” 821), his own commentary suggests the distance between the two scholars’ work. See also Halberstam on Edelman (Queer 106–10), as well as Robyn Wiegman (esp. 220–21) and Tim Dean (“No Sex” esp. 619) on the convolutions of the overall debate. 2

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forms of sociability, new ways of being together, that are not grounded in imaginary identity or the struggle for intersubjective recognition. (“Antisocial” 827)

The theory of shattering, as E. L. McCallum echoes, posits “a self destroyed and refound elsewhere” (192). In an interview, Bersani observes in Edelman’s work an attitude that is “more uncompromising about negativity” than his own. If “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is one of the Ur-texts of queer theory’s negativity, by the 1995 book Bersani had complicated his postulations. As he continues in the interview, “Already in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is, trying to adapt the idea of ‘correspondence of forms’ to psychic correspondences” (“Rigorously” 280). As much as we find negativity in the concept of shattering, this is merely, he continues, “a precondition for something else” (282). What the previous chapter called “desubjectivation”— or what Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit suggest is our “deprogramm[ing]” (CS 94)—is not the concluding moment in Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. The present chapter continues the work of the previous one in exploring Bersani’s engagement with, and constitutive differences from, the forms of queer theory that were popularized in the early 1990s. This chapter extends our comparison-and-contrast between Bersani and Butler by turning to Edelman, another early representative in queer studies of what has sometimes been called “high theory.” By distinguishing between the confluences and differences between Butler, Edelman, and Bersani, I seek to illustrate some of the less noted points of Bersani’s oeuvre. As Dean indicates, many of such aspects are rendered invisible when his work is positioned— not incorrectly—as the source of “the antisocial thesis.” Having outlined Edelman’s queer onto-ethics, I address his disagreement with Butler’s dialectical theory of politics and becoming. While it seems that, particularly in comparison to her account of performativity, Bersani’s thought finds an ally in Edelman’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of radical negativity, Butler’s and Edelman’s postulations begin to appear more approximate— paradigmatically confluent—when we observe the shift of emphasis that Bersani, in the interview quoted above, indicates to have taken place in his thinking about sexuality and sociality by the time he writes Homos. Yet he is alluding to a defining condition that has characterized his thought from its very beginning—his resistance to, and effort to think beyond, “the prejudicial view of lack as constitutive of desire (and our relation to the world)” (IRG 138). Speaking of negativity and shattering as “a precondition for something else,” Bersani notes that one way he has sought to approach the unactualized realm beyond “lack”—“Is lack necessary to desire?” he asks (IRG 111)—is

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by turning to Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “correspondence of forms.” Appearing early on in his work, correspondances—the theory of which we outlined in Chapter 2—becomes an increasingly important concept in Bersani’s later thinking. Indeed, although the two concepts are inextricable, always present as each other’s potentiality, the movement of his oeuvre can be described as a slow but perceptible shift from his emphasis on ébranlement to one on correspondances. (Notably, Edelman’s work is similarly influenced, via his dependence on Paul de Man’s theory of language’s rhetoricity, by Baudelairean aesthetics; yet de Man’s Baudelaire differs crucially from Bersani’s.) While we must postpone the detailed exploration of the work that Baudelaire’s concept does for Bersani for the chapters that comprise this study’s second section, this chapter seeks to prepare for this move in outlining the complex position that his work occupies as the alleged source for “the antisocial thesis” in queer theory.

Negativities: Butler and Edelman In No Future, Edelman polemicizes that our only available form of futurity is one predetermined by a symbolic order whose coherence depends on the abjection of “queerness,” that is, a futurity that is radically exclusionary: its foundation depends on the negation of something that is at once alien to, or disruptive of, the symbolic, and internal to, or produced by, its circuits. Edelman’s psychoanalytically informed reading assigns a name for this negated intimate exteriority: the death drive. The death drive aims at the nonbeing that symbolic reality, in order to be constructed as such, has to disavow; and that haunts the symbolic as that which would wrench its body out of joint. As Edelman writes, As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the logic of the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability. (9, emphasis added)

However successfully liberal politics convinces us that the LGBTQ+’s are assimilable, and willing to assimilate, to society’s norms, queerness continues “to figure … the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (4, emphasis added). What are the possibilities, Edelman asks, in “the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract,

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in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16, emphasis added)? The idiom in the above paragraph suggests two sources of influence for Edelman. First, he mobilizes Lacanian theory of symbolization and subjectconstitution for his queer thought. Edelman “queers” Lacan by suggesting that the unthinkable, intimate externality (what Lacan calls “extimacy”) of the Lacanian real is “queerness.”4 Queers (as he recurrently puts it) “figure” “law’s foundational act, its self-constituting negation” (5). As such, queerness is antithetical to any notion of futurity; and, conversely, futurity can be symbolized only on the principle of “reproductive futurism.” In the symbolic order that concerns Edelman, “every political vision [functions] as a vision of futurity” (13). Yet such futurity is an exclusionary one, for it relies on a primal negation of lost nonbeing around whose void every symbolic circulates. Edelman suggests that, rather than going along with liberal discourses of assimilationism—however necessary, even lifesaving, such discourses remain—we “consider accepting or even embracing” “this ascription of negativity to the queer” (4). Second, a trace of Edelman’s earlier influences persists in the above passages’ repetition of the term “figure.” The most important theoretical source for his earlier texts, collected in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), is Paul de Man, in whose thought, particularly as it concerns language’s figurality, Edelman finds a suitable structure with which to outline “the tropologies of sexuality” (Homographesis xiv), to describe the role of the homosexual in the heteronormative imaginary. For de Man, language’s tropological (figural) character prevents a text from ever achieving a single interpretation; instead, its figurality “implies the persistent threat of misreading” (de Man, “Literature” 285). Language’s figural dimension also guarantees that no reader is in control of its meaning; rather, language, and particularly literary language, is constitutively indeterminate. If homosexuality can be identified with figurality, as Edelman suggests, it disrupts the symbolic “text” as much as figures undo the stability of all narratives for de Man. Synthesizing de Man and Lacan, Edelman proposes that figurality and homosexuality (or queerness) are not language’s (or the symbolic order’s) “mistakes”; rather, they constitute its ineradicable character. He follows de Man, who writes that “the trope is not a derived, marginal, or aberrant form of language but the linguistic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode among others but it

On “extimacy,” see J.-A. Miller, “Extimité.” For an approach to Lacan’s queerness different from Edelman’s, see Dean, Beyond; and “Lacan.”

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characterizes language as such” (“Rhetoric” 105). In No Future, figurality is identified with negativity: both are constitutive of, and constitutively destabilize, the “text.” As much as Butler in her early work considers the gender-nonconforming gay man and lesbian embodiments of the symbolic order’s abjected, in Lacanian terms queerness is negativity’s name for Edelman. The queer is the remnant or trace of the symbolic order’s foundational self-contradictoriness.5 While both Butler’s and Edelman’s onto-ethics and conceptualizations of politics rely on the negative, the differences in their work are considerable. As the book’s title suggests, in No Future Edelman rejects any notion futurity around which the symbolic is oriented, because such concepts cannot but abject queers, who remain identified with the death drive’s negativity. As such, there is no way to formulate a mode of becoming that is not always already a heteronormative one, a mode of “reproductive futurism.” For Butler, on the other hand, no necessity binds any particular being to abjection. Consequently, the abjected can be redeemed into legibility: in negativity lies the possibility of giving life to the present social order’s exclusions, that is, the emergence, as an “antithesis,” of a more just order where the excluded would be recognized. But what Butler embraces as “negative generativity” (Subjects 39)—the hope of newness in the dialectical movement—constitutes the core of heteronormative ideology for Edelman. As he writes, addressing her interpretation of Sophocles’ tragedy in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000), Butlerian politics of futurity “seems all too familiarly liberal and her engagement with psychoanalysis all too ‘American,’ as Lacan might say, in its promise to provide the excluded with access to a livable social form” (No 103–04). Unlike Butler’s, Edelman’s negativity does not— cannot—promise a future where the death drive would be either neutralized or differently embodied. Rather, the negative/figural remains stubbornly identified with what he calls queerness. Yet, despite such differences, Butler’s and Edelman’s theories are, in the terms I deployed in the previous chapter, paradigmatically confluent. This can be seen when we consider the modes that both thinkers regard as central to language’s rhetoricity. If the speech act that Butler in Gender Trouble evokes as an instantiation of performativity is parody (or, more precisely, in Fredric This becomes a point of critique against Butler and Edelman articulated by Dean. In Beyond Sexuality (ch. 5), Dean argues that Butler misreads Lacan by positivizing the real, by assuming that the real can be embodied in the fag or the dyke, however abjected they are deemed to be. He similarly suggests that it is in his considering the ethico-political possibility of “embracing” the death drive (another misguided gesture of embodiment) that Edelman departs from Lacanian theory (“Impossible”). Elsewhere Dean extends a parallel critique to Slavoj Žižek’s influential Hegelo-Lacanian work (“Art”).

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Jameson’s terms, pastiche),6 for Edelman the symbolic order’s negativity is evident in the rhetorical mode of irony, which he gleans from de Man’s work. As Edelman writes, likening the Lacanian death drive to de Manian irony, “The corrosive force of irony … carries a charge for de Man quite similar to that of the death drive as understood by Lacan” (No 23). Edelman calls irony “that queerest of rhetorical devices” (23) because it is central to the destabilizing of narrative form, as much as the death drive, for Lacan, at once mobilizes and imperils symbolic practices. If normative gender is sustained by performativity’s necessary repetitions, there is a compulsion to work toward “narrative” whose coherence irony, as the symptom par excellence of language’s figurality, always disfigures: “irony is precisely what makes it impossible ever to achieve a theory of narrative that would be consistent,” de Man writes. “Which doesn’t mean that we don’t have to keep working on it, because that’s all we can do, but it will always be interrupted, always be disrupted, always be undone by the ironic dimension which it will necessarily contain” (“Concept” 179).7 The “interruption” of language’s narrativity by irony is in Butlerian terms the temporal break or décalage—the inescapable time difference, décalage horaire—that renders gender norms vulnerable to performative miscitations, to parody. We can go further in thinking the paradigmatic confluence between Butler and Edelman by exploring de Man’s sources. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man turns to “The Essence of Laughter,” Charles Baudelaire’s essay on the comic, to illustrate the function of irony. Baudelaire’s primary example of the comic is a man tripping and falling on the street. An observer’s burst of laughter is a characteristically human response for Baudelaire because it issues from his sense of superiority and, consequently, reveals the “satanic” character of humanity: “Laughter is satanic and, therefore, profoundly human,” Baudelaire writes (“Essence” 117). A more interesting case is the man who can laugh at his own fall. Baudelaire notes that such a man, usually a

See Butler, Gender 138–39, 157n56; and Jameson, Postmodernism 16–19. In its destabilizing force of irony, Edelman’s “queerness” approximates what Hegel calls the corruptive force of Weiblichkeit in communal togetherness. In his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously regards “womankind” as “the everlasting irony … of the community [die ewige Ironie des Gemeinwesens]” (§475 [288] / 352). In its doubleness (its essential role in Gemeinwesen, which it nevertheless disrupts), womanliness becomes “an internal enemy” (§475 [288]) that evermore undoes togetherness as the community’s “ironic” ghost. The precise ways in which “the radical threat posed by irony” (Edelman, No 24) plays an analogous role in Edelman’s psychoanalytic theory should be explored by triangulating Hegel’s “womanliness” and Edelman’s “queerness” with Lacan’s notion of “the feminine,” particularly as it is formulated in the texts, beginning with his reading of Antigone in Seminar VII, that turn from discussions of the symbolic dimension to explorations of the real.

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“philosopher,” has “a rare gift”: “he has acquired the power rapidly to become two persons at one and the same time, and can bring to bear on what happens to himself the disinterested curiosity of a spectator” (118). If such “laughter is the revelation of a double, not to say a self-contradictory, sentiment” (120), it is one that de Man identifies with irony. Irony is a phenomenon of dédoublement, the self ’s doubling, “the existence in the human being of a permanent duality, of the power to be at one and the same time, himself and somebody else” (130). The man who can laugh at himself has an “ironic, twofold self ” (de Man, “Rhetoric” 214): he can take his erring self as the object of his gaze. Language is the name for this doubleness, as de Man writes: irony “belongs specifically to those who, like artists or philosophers, deal in language” (213). The fall that Baudelaire speaks of—which makes the being of language laugh—concerns the realization of what Edelman calls “nonsovereignty” in his subsequent work: “irony,” he writes, “expresses the nonsovereignty we encounter in our status as subjects of language” (Berlant and Edelman 70). If irony is the mode in which nonsovereignty stammers itself into expression, de Man suggests that the representational history of this nonsovereignty stretches to one of our most familiar myths: the traumatic cut introduced by our fall/Fall into language’s duplicity and opaqueness. He argues that we must read the man’s fall in Baudelaire’s essay “in the literal as well as the theological sense” (“Rhetoric” 214); “laughter,” Baudelaire writes, “is intimately connected with the accident of an original fall, of a degradation both of the body and the mind” (“Essence” 112). Laughter, in other words, is “satanic” not only because it expresses the laughing being’s sense of superiority but also because only a fallen being can experience the dédoublement from which laughter issues: “the Incarnate Word was never known to laugh. For Him who knows all things, whose powers are infinite, the comic does not exist … Neither laughter nor tears are to be seen in the paradise of all delights” (112, 113). In this moment of primordial negation, absence or lack enters the world as the result of human fall-ibility. The falling man of Baudelairean comedy is the Fallen man of wounded, lacking being; Edelman’s psychoanalytic ontology of negativity similarly entails an economy of “lack.” Edelman writes in Sex, or the Unbearable (2014) that the object of desire … “positivize[s]” this lack … [T]he object is always … a fantasmatic placeholder (always exchangeable for others), an illusory binding of contradictory pressures, possibilities, and investments to defend the subject against the lack with which it can have no relation. (Berlant and Edelman 107)

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He assumes here the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive. The drive seeks to return to the subject that which he lacks, that which has been primordially lost at the moment of the subject’s constitution. Yet the drive can attain its aim, and the subject can get what it wants (everyday language is instructive here), only at the cost of self-annihilation. This is because, according to this formulation, the subject himself is the product of primordial separation and privation, whose undoing would also destroy the subject. Based on this, Lacan argues that all drives are death drives: they seek the subject’s annihilation by giving him what he wants. Desire, on the other hand, constitutes the drive’s domestication: it is “a defense against the drive (where the drive enacts the structure that desire, through the lure of its objects, conceals)” (Berlant and Edelman 94). Desire posits objects that take the place of that which the drive aims for. Objects of desire are fetishes onto which the subject has transferred his deadly attachment and with which he shields himself from an encounter with the unbearable negativity of lack. If, in Freud’s theory, the fetish is most immediately an object with which the subject has disavowed his realization of the mother’s lack (her castration), more generally, as in Edelman’s theory, the object is a fetish insofar as the subject seeks it in order to defend himself against a “real” encounter, that is, an encounter with the lack, death, and negativity that produce and inhabit symbolic circuits. If we accept that Subjects of Desire provides the groundwork for Butler’s thought, her queer theory is similarly preoccupied with an ontology of lack, “the ‘lack’ from which human projects emerge,” as she writes in her discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre (Subjects 165). In subsequent texts, she adds her own name to the list of important twentieth-century Hegelians, for whom the ontology of privation “characteriz[es] human existence”: “Although this lack is never overcome, human beings remain preoccupied with its thematization, the discovery and recapitulation of the determinate absences, deprivations, separations, and losses which make human personalities what they are” (171, emphasis added). She adopts Hegelian dialectics as her model of political contestation, but a dialectics that has been, as she observes already in 1985, “decapitat[ed]” (“Geist” 67). The removed head is Aufhebung, which Butler translates in the previous quotation from Subjects of Desire as “overcoming.” De Man, too, evokes this Hegelian concept in his description of the groundless and unsynthesizeable processes of irony: The act of irony … reveals the existence of a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that it relates to its source only in terms of a distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality. Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future

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that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world. (“Rhetoric” 222, emphases added)

Much like that of Butler’s “performativity,” the dialectic of de Man’s “irony” differs from classical Hegelian conceptualizations in that it can achieve “no end” and “no totality.” Not part of an “organic” process, it refuses the telos of Aufhebung: “overcoming” or “sublation.” Edelman writes: irony undermines every affirmative presentation of self and guarantees only the persistence, in its multitude of forms, of the negativity, the unresolved question, that drives us to pick at the scab of selfhood that aims to suture the wound of being. (Berlant and Edelman 109)

Irony expresses the chronic itch at the site of the “wound” that at once enables individuation and marks the individual’s incompleteness. Edelman’s reliance on de Man’s theory of rhetoricity, and his identification of negativity in Lacan with de Man’s concept of irony, suggest that his account of queer futurelessness meets Butler’s theory of performativity in their joint embrace of the onto-ethics of lacking being. Thus, despite the differences Edelman points to between his and Butler’s understanding of politics and becoming—differences that are encapsulated in their divergent readings of Lacanian theory—from a larger vantage point their onto-ethics are nevertheless aligned. Even if Edelman in No Future insists on the impossibility of negating the stage for which queerness functions rhetorically as irony, his theory operates on the same premises as Butler’s insofar as it relies on lack as its motor. We miss this alignment if we assume that the Hegelian frame, in which both Butler and Edelman operate, is the only available site of experimentation for queer onto-ethics.8 Arguably, it is because of this confluence that, in his recent work, Edelman moves toward an understanding of negativity that reminds us of more familiar models of becoming in political theory. He asserts in Sex, or the Unbearable: “The prospect of movement, in politics or in theory, derives from … unbearable encounters that break down the structuring fantasy of the subject. What follows from this is not living on but the prospect instead of living—where living means … living with negativity, experiencing a movement within contradiction, an identification with the force that would break down the barriers to the lack that breaks us down” (108). In contrast to what he asserts in No

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Hetero-Tragedies Staging Bersani’s first encounter with psychoanalysis—most importantly, with Laplanche’s theory of the human subject’s fourvoiement, going-astray, as the enigmatic signifier “shakes” (ébranler) him into desiring wakefulness— A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976) is an important early document that outlines his analysis of desire grounded in lack. In the study’s introductory chapter, “Murderous Lovers,” Bersani argues that a desire moved by lack entails the production of the uncanny alterity that the subject, as psychoanalysis indicates, cannot but face with ambivalence, paranoia, and aggression. Proust remains his go-to example of this mode of desiring. Throughout À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel relives the tortured jealousy whose early example is given in the novel’s “Overture”: his mother’s absence from his bedside as she attends a dinner party downstairs. The child thinks of the pleasures from which he has been cut off; the search for the other’s enjoyment becomes a pattern in his subsequent life. We should recognize in this scenario Lacan’s way of conceptualizing the subject’s relation to the world as his incomprehension and envy at the thought of the other’s jouissance. The other’s unimaginable enjoyment evokes in the subject an experience of incompletion. The thought of the other’s pleasure occupies the subject, indeed, gives the desiring subject his being, orienting him in the world. This model sets up relationality as a project where the subject must have the other confess her secret desire—must have mamma reveal what Future, there does now exist a “prospect of movement”; Edelman posits its possibility in, precisely, “contradiction,” that which, through negation, drives the dialectic. On the level of subjectivity, this movement of negativity consists of the “break[ing] down [of] the structuring fantasy of the subject”; it is identical to what Lacan calls “the traversing of the fundamental fantasy.” (On Lacan’s notion of fantasy and its traversal, see Chiesa ch. 5; Fink 88–89, 93–95; and Zupančič, Ethics 232–33.) The possibility of politics similarly relies on negativity. Edelman seeks to articulate “the negativity that is the political: the division within community as well as the division from community; the division that leaves community, like the self, an always unresolved question” (109). Here Edelman suggests that negativity does not constitute stasis; rather, it is the very engine of political movement or, simply, “living.” At such moments, his thought begins to approximate the theory of “radical democracy,” where the notion of futurity is grounded in antagonism and the dialectical movement it precipitates. The most notable of such theorists, Ernesto Laclau turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis in his later writings to rearticulate his earlier political theory. Like the French thinkers Butler describes in Subjects of Desire, Laclau radicalizes Hegelian theory, particularly its classical Marxist deployment, by insisting on the ongoingness, the unsynthesizeability, of antagonism. (For an account of Laclau that frames his work in Lacanian theory, see Stavrakakis.) His is, to quote Edelman, “a structural antagonism that undoes the totalization of meaning to which [politics] seems to aspire” (Berlant and Edelman 70). Despite all his pronounced differences from Butler, Edelman’s theory, in approaching that of radical democracy, comes to share its paradigmatic framing with Butlerian performativity.

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she has experienced “downstairs”—so that the subject can finally go to sleep. The other becomes an object of passionate investigations, one whose radical difference leaves the envious subject no rest. Bersani suggests that the ontology of lack produces a tragic mode of relatedness. He will return to this concept repeatedly in his later work; it emerges for the first time in A Future for Astyanax. He draws the concept of “tragic ontology” from the two literary texts with which he opens and concludes the study: Jean Racine’s Andromache (1667) and Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954). In the first chapter, he focuses on Racine’s classic drama, citing Roland Barthes’s career-making structuralist interpretation of the French playwright’s oeuvre in On Racine (1960). Although his commentary is marked by his disagreement with certain aspects of Barthes’s reading, Bersani adopts two of his major arguments: that Racinian drama is characterized by repetitive action, carried out by a series of characters lacking the capacity to reconfigure their fate; and that the repetitiveness of the action is informed by divergent characteristics assigned to the two sexes. In an argument that will soon be recognized as groundbreakingly “structuralist,” Barthes notes that Racine’s characters and their actions are determined by the plays’ dramatic “constellation.” We cannot speak of these characters as “individuals”; we must see them in terms of “functions.” “The tragic unit,” as Barthes writes, “is … not the individual but the figure, or, better still, the function which defines that figure” (9). We commit something like an ideological misrecognition if we miss the way in which “characters” are but expressions of the dramatic “situation”: “There are no characters in the Racinian theatre … there are only situations, in the almost formal sense of the word: everything derives its being from its place in the general constellation of strengths and weaknesses” (13). It is particularly through the “forces” of sexual difference that a character’s “function” is determined. Echoing Lacan’s argument that modes of “sexuation” are not fixed according to biological sex, Barthes writes: The division of the Racinian world into strong and weak, into tyrants and captives, covers in a sense the division of the sexes: it is their situation in the relation of force that orchestrates some characters as virile and others as feminine, without concern for their biological sex. (13)9

When Barthes writes this in 1960, Lacan is giving his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone in this seminar marks the beginning point of his formalization of sexual difference in the figures of Antigone and Creon. Albeit in passing, Barthes similarly points to Antigone and Creon as paradigmatic of the kind of tragic conflict he finds in Racine (On Racine 24n1).

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Exemplified by Racine, tragedies take place in worlds split between incommensurable differences, most often between sexes, but also between families; their action is determined by breaches across which characters can receive only part of their interlocutors’ messages, where they are reduced to paranoid interpretation of the other’s intentions—interpretations that inevitably lead to bloodshed. The time of tragedy is the time of repetition: an unfinished, and often forgotten, past is reenacted by characters who remain blind to the way in which their actions are overdetermined by history. As much as Barthes argues that “division is the fundamental structure of the tragic universe” (On Racine 36), and that this division is most forcefully figured in sexual difference, Bersani finds versions of this tragic ontology in other texts, most notably in Proust and psychoanalysis. He posits that the onto-ethics that psychoanalysis affirms “divide[s] the world into two hostile camps and condemn[s] each sex to a panicky wish to annihilate the irreducible difference of the other sex” (FA 9). Similarly, the “spectacularly mysterious assertion of otherness” typical of Proust is often given in the women that Marcel desires (BB 225). “Sex,” as Barthes writes in On Racine, “is a tragic privilege” (14). In the final chapter to A Future for Astyanax, Bersani turns to Réage’s Story of O, a narrative whose mise-en-scène is radically informed by sexual difference: its scenes of sexual torture are expressions of an unbridgeable gap between the men and women involved in the sadomasochistic play. Bersani identifies “the tragic separation between man and woman” as “the major subject” of Réage’s work (FA 301). In this, Story of O echoes the world we find not only in Proust but also, tellingly, in the Marquis de Sade, an acknowledged source for Réage (see Ciuraru n. pag.; Deforges 21–22). I will return to the important role of Réage’s novel in Bersani’s early work in the next chapter; for now, we can note that Bersani reads Racine, Réage, and Proust as thinkers of a heterosexual mode of being, a mode that is constitutively tragic. I propose we hyphenate the term “hetero-sexual” to indicate that, for Bersani, at stake is not so much a sexual orientation as an ontological structure—although the two are not separable. We can think of this as an analogue to Lacan’s reconceptualization of sexual difference as a split between the differentiated modes of being and desiring. Scholars have suggested that Lacan’s sexuation graphs do not presume to designate how embodied subjects desire; rather, they describe the ways in which subjects, regardless of their anatomy, orient themselves to and in the world.10 Feminine jouissance is available to—indeed, Lacan suggests, can be Dean writes: “the two sides of the graph cannot be legitimately gendered, but instead should be understood as diagramming differential modalities that inform every subject” (“Homosexuality” 141n19). See also Penney 25–26; Ragland, “Lacan” 1104–05.

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“chosen” by—a male subject;11 an anatomical woman can seek in her others the objet a, the missing piece with which she, as a barred subject, hopes to plug the hole in being.12 Exemplified in Marcel, a desire driven after “an irreducibly unknowable otherness” (Bersani, “Death” 865) is, by definition, a heterosexual desire, regardless of the lovers’ and beloveds’ embodied sexes. Heterosexuality names a mode of desire premised on “the trauma of separation” (864), which produces the love object as an unknowable other. If heterosexuality is not determined by one’s anatomical sex, a “homoorientation” need not happen exclusively between persons of the same sex; and, by the same token, what we have since the late nineteenth century called a “homosexual” can orient him- or herself in the world heterosexually. Bersani suggests this by coining, in his later work, the term “homoness,” which for him is linked, but not reducible, to the “homosexual” orientation. We can begin to unpack this concept by noting that one of the earliest figures in Bersani’s work to escape the Proustian mode of desiring heterosexually is Astyanax, the child at the center of Racine’s Andromache. While the action of the play revolves around his fate, the child himself is never seen on stage. This absence imbues him with a potential missing from the realized characters: his is the “future” that Bersani names in the title of the study. “Astyanax, whom we never hear and never see,” he writes, “is the escape from tragedy” (FA 50). While Andromache’s other characters are caught in passionate negotiations with each other, their actions repeating the past through love and revenge, Bersani finds in the figure of Astyanax a futurity undetermined by the “tragic time” of history’s continuation into the present, “a present whose essential characteristic is the recreation, the duplication of the past” (Horowitz 24).13 He suggests that, while our interests have been colonized by the compelling dramas of Pyrrhus and Andromache, or Marcel and Albertine, we can also seek aspects that, while inserted into, perhaps produced by, the existing narratives, nevertheless suggest modes of being that exceed tragedy’s tightly wound formulations. In Racine, this potential is carried by the child who, precisely in his absence, can “betray” the transgenerational passions that determine the action on the stage. Unlike “the Child” that embodies the coercive designs of reproductive futurism for Edelman, the unseen Astyanax represents an escape from, and a betrayal of, heterosexual tragedies for

Lacan proposes that “one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of ∀χ Φχ [the masculine side]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole” (Seminar XX 76). 12 See Lacan’s sexuation graph in Seminar XX 78. Helpful exegeses can be found in Ragland, Logic 96–97; and Shepherdson 75–83. 13 On “tragic time” in Racine, see also Hammond. 11

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Bersani. In his absence, Astyanax is a queer child. Bersani concludes his discussion of Racine: the founding of something new is at least left, after Pyrrhus’s death, as a possibility for Astyanax … [W]e have never seen Astyanax; he is the child, the future, the blank page of the play, the invisible character who finally replaces Hector as the absent dominant force of the other characters’ lives. Astyanax is nothing less and nothing more than the value of pure possibility. (FA 49–50)

This ability to “betray” existing relations makes Astyanax a precursor to the homosexual criminals in Jean Genet’s texts, whose treachery, as Bersani implies in Homos, offers a release from the dialectical repetitions that have confined us to the shifting positions of master and slave. In this way, Astyanax prefigures what Bersani will call the “psychoanalytically defined homosexual,” who, as he writes in the essay “Sociability and Cruising” (2002), is “a stranger to [the] murderous passions” of heterosexuality (IRG 55)—the phrase “murderous passions” recalling here the title of A Future for Astyanax’s introductory chapter, “Murderous Lovers.” We will return to this “homonarcissistic” figure, “unintentionally” outlined by psychoanalytic theory, in the next chapter. For now, we can note that, apart from Astyanax, he is anticipated by another character whom Bersani discusses in A Future for Astyanax. If the book’s first chapter identifies nontragic desire with Racine’s absent child, in its concluding chapter Bersani suggests that we witness an escape from the dialectic of “murderous lovers” or “murderous passions” in René, the male protagonist of Réage’s novel. Despite the world’s organization around radical sexual difference in Story of O, René, amidst his capture by the brutal pleasures of heterosadism, also cultivates a homo-orientation that tempts him with a less intensive, aesthetic enjoyment. From his earliest texts onward, Bersani produces a series of figures (Astyanax, René, Genet’s homosexuals) with whom he illustrates a possible escape from a desiring ontology based on “tragic” forms of being, that is, on lack and difference. Reading the early chapter on Racine from the perspective of Bersani’s response, twenty years later, to queer theory, we must, in other words, affirm David Kurnick’s intuition about the child’s queerness: “couldn’t Astyanax be—how could he not be—a homo?” (56). Bersani’s argument about Genet’s protagonists in Homos constitutes an elaboration of the account of historical “discontinuity” promised by the unseen Astyanax. For Bersani, the Proustian world recurrently exemplifies “tragic” desire, premised on lack and radical difference. In a 1989 encyclopedia article, he

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writes that, in Proust, “[b]oth self-pursuit and intersubjective relations—but they are in fact the same—are initiated by the trauma of separation.” This mobilizing trauma produces the “sexual jealousy” that organizes Marcel’s relationship to the women he loves (“Death” 864). Marcel’s search is entirely driven by the absence of his self from the world: objects enthrall him with the promise of a truth that he takes to be that of his being. Bersani suggests that, because of the mode of desire Proust’s novel illustrates, his characters cannot but be heterosexual, their worlds organized around radical difference: “ontologically, [Proustian desire] is always heterosexual” (H 142). He writes in Homos: “In Proust, the tragedies of love—and the biological sex of the actors is irrelevant—are heterosexual, that is, tragedies is inconceivable desire” (H 143).14 The stories of such radical difference unfailingly become tragedies, whether the drama plays out between a man and a woman or two men or two women.15 Bersani borrows the term “inconceivable” from Proust, who uses it to describe Marcel’s tortured jealousy about Albertine’s lesbian pleasures:

On the constitutive heterosexuality of the Proustian world, see also IRG 58. For commentary, see McCallum 220n17. 15 While Bersani takes Catherine Millot’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001) to exemplify the fact that “homoness” can be lived in heterosexual relations (IRG 70), Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) demonstrates that homosexual relationships can be organized according to the “tragic” hetero-model of enigmatic otherness. The traumatized, mysterious protagonist Jude functions in the text as an alluring mystery, which each of the novel’s other four protagonists tries to solve in turn. While the four friends are “frustrated by … [Jude’s] unwillingness to reveal [his secrets],” this frustration “never impair[s their] ability to love him” (Yanagihara 708). Indeed, it is the fact of his “remain[ing] unknowable and inaccessible” that sustains this compulsive attraction, associated particularly with Willem, who, three decades into their friendship-cum-loveaffair, “was still fascinated by what he saw” (708). In his paralytic obsession—precisely, fascination—Willem embodies the heterosexual relation to otherness that Bersani assigns to Marcel and others (a fact fully evident in Willem’s hilariously earnest, nonqueer sexuality). The novel’s success tells us that the secrecy and trauma that enthralls Willem also fascinates the reader. The narrative is structured as a series of tantalizing glimpses into Jude’s past, bits and pieces of which are given in flashbacks: as one reviewer puts it, the story “obtains narrative traction by withholding information” (Anshaw n. pag.). Bersani’s delineation of tragic heterosexuality explains Jude’s, and the novel’s, forceful glamor in two ways. First, punctuated by these revelations, one more terrible than the previous, A Little Life sustains the reader’s attention (like Jude sustains Willem’s) by “showing and hiding, exposure and concealment” (RB 112), the rhythm of seduction that, as we noted in Chapter 1, Bersani discerns in the objects whose enigmas attract Marcel and the teasingly sexy boys painted by Caravaggio (whose Bacchino Malato should be understood as a portrait of Jude). Second, Jude’s gradually revealed tortures enthrall his friends, as much as the novel’s readers, with the force of what Bersani calls “derived sadism,” the intensive pleasure human subjects take in witnessing suffering because in it we recall our earliest enjoyment, the jouissance of hominization. I will return to Bersani’s theory of derived sadism, drawn from Laplanche’s reading of Freud, in the next chapter. 14

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when the narrator realizes that he cannot “conceive what those pleasures might be,” he inevitably recalls his childhood wakefulness as he contemplates the “inconceivable pleasures” that his mother must be enjoying at the dinner party that he is forbidden to join (Remembrance 2.439, 440). For Bersani, Marcel’s jealous obsessiveness about the other’s “inconceivable” jouissance gives us a heterosexual mode of desire and a heterosexual way of thinking otherness.16 The other is thought to hold the subject’s self hostage: “What Marcel calls the ‘inconceivable truth’ of Albertine’s desires is a projection of the inconceivability of Marcel’s desires” (TT 4, 45; see also CR 24; H 143; and preface xviii–xix). In this model, as Bersani continues elsewhere, “[a]ll love is, in a sense, homoerotic” (IRG 118). For Bersani, À la recherche du temps perdu is typical of a wider cultural tendency of conceptualizing onto-ethics. It is a significant example of what he calls our “culture of redemption.” In The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), he and Dutoit deploy the term “tragedy” to characterize what, according to them, has become the most widespread approach to modern art and literature, one that promote[s] the myth of modern art as a “crisis,” as a response to massive cultural dislocations which have, perhaps permanently, and tragically, unsettled the moral and esthetic orders of Western humanism. From this perspective, even the most sympathetic response to modern painting or literature is indistinguishable from a sense of loss: modern men and women have been cut off, alienated from possibilities of cultural harmony and wholeness. (FV vii–viii, emphasis added)

The “tragedy” that commentators observe in modern artworks is not only the one of people’s felt estrangement from a state of “harmony and wholeness” (often figured as lost ties to premodern, agrarian societies or, in diasporic theories, to the homeland); the story of this alienation reflects the ontological tragedy of the human separation from, and consequent lacking of, beingas-presence. Some thirty years later, in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), Bersani and Dutoit again echo this characterization of hegemonic conceptualizations of onto-ethics: “Lack is judged to be omnipresent: what desire lacks is also missing from the world, not as something lost but, more tragically, as something that was never, that never

Lacanians would insist that we must designate the affect that “inconceivable” otherness produces in Marcel as one of envy, not jealousy: see Copjec, Imagine ch. 6.

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could be, in the world” (FoB 115, emphasis added; see also IRG 79). The hidden actor behind the passive voice—the one who deems lack a universal feature of our being—is here Lacan, whose understanding of a desire driven by a constitutive privation is illustrated in the “fascination” (FoB 114; IRG 79) that compels us in Tennessee Williams’s theater and classic Hollywood cinema. There is, Bersani suggests, a paradigmatic specificity to the desire subtending such melodramatic narratives as A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve: they are stories of glamorously—fascinatingly—impossible desires where one remains in thrall of that which has been irretrievably lost.17 Butler and Edelman differ in their conceptualization of negativity and negation; but both take as given the dialectical frame in which negation’s labor allows becoming. In this model of desiring, “lack” is paradigmatic. From early on, Bersani identifies this model with Marcel’s desire, his conceptualization of the world as an unbearable enigma that whispers his name just out of his earshot. Organized around “the Proustian equation of desire with lack” (H 133), À la recherche du temps perdu is typical of twentieth-century conceptualizations of ethics, where the other becomes unknowable, resistant to all efforts to assimilate it to the self (like Marcel’s efforts to devour the objects he desires). As in Levinas and Laplanche, otherness becomes radical and irresolvable: it (rather than the subject) is the starting point; its enigmas cannot be dissolved but always recede from the subject’s grasp, his frenzied efforts at breaking the code that would also show him the truth of his own self.18 Edelman continues this onto-ethical tradition when he identifies the “unbearable” “lack” with “irreducible otherness” (Berlant and Edelman 108). The book, coauthored with Lauren Berlant, where Edelman writes the above is called Sex, or the Unbearable. “Sex” names the constitutive inundation with overwhelming stimuli that, according to Laplanche’s reading, Freud describes as the human subject’s first consciousness of itself, an ébranlement that the subject survives only by turning the experience into

To deploy the term we used in previous chapters, Astyanax moves beyond tragic “fascination.” In “constantly reproduc[ing] the original scene that has formed it,” “the Racinian Eros,” writes Barthes, is “a pure ordeal of fascination” (On Racine 12). Because “Eros is a retrospective force,” the tragic hero “is petrified in his past: … the image is repeated, never transcended” (24). Thus staging “a perpetual fascination” (12), Racine gives us what Bersani elsewhere identifies as a typically modern depiction of the present moment’s enthrallment by a past that cannot be remembered but that lives on as an unprocessed trauma. This, Bersani suggests, is how we have been trained to read modern being: something unfinished in the past, an unatoned, catastrophic crime, determines our lives; in mourning or passion, we gaze in paralytic wonder at what remains of our forgotten history. In these term, modern life is tragic like Racine’s theater. 18 On Levinas’s and Laplanche’s shared onto-ethical investments, see Zupančič, “Sex” 200–01; and Why 21–40. 17

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one of masochistic jouissance. The queer theory that sees in sex an experience of “the unbearable” draws its arguments from such texts as The Freudian Body and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” “Sex” is the unbearable enigma that seduces the infant into becoming-human, the shattering that we subsequently seek, and studiously avoid, in various experiences and representations. Conceptualized psychoanalytically, “the sexual always involves a turning away from the other” (CR 40). Yet, while “the antisocial thesis in queer theory,” represented by Edelman, should be traced to Bersani’s psychoanalytic postulations, this remains a partial genealogy if we fail to note what queer thought à la “the antisocialists” does not receive from Bersani. This queer thought adopts the Freudian-Laplanchean arguments that recur in Bersani’s work; but it fails to notice the profound ambivalence that from the very beginning inflects his discussions of psychoanalysis’s onto-ethics, particularly the way in which “otherness” is figured in Freud and Laplanche. Like Proust’s, Freud’s most explicit pronouncements of human onto-ethics outline a tragic mode of desire, a tragic mode of moving in the world. Implicitly acknowledging Bersani’s influence on his work, Edelman describes his effort to think “a nonredemptive negativity” (“Ethics” 116). Rather than finding newness in the dialectic’s movement, he wants us to “tarry,” as Hegel puts it (Phenomenology §32 [19]), with negativity indefinitely, stubbornly, without any attempt to resolve the contradiction onto a new stage in spirit’s becoming. He suggests that Butler’s embrace of the dialectic, acephalic or not, reveals her investment in normative, “liberal” ideals of inclusiveness and assimilability. Yet from a Bersanian perspective, he himself remains in the same camp as Butler insofar as both organize their ontoethics around radical otherness: the relationship between the subject and the world is marked by “unbearable encounters” where the other embodies lack (Berlant and Edelman 108). For Bersani, such conceptualizations adhere to the model of tragic heterosexuality: theories of desire that embrace the paradigm of lack fail in queerness; while they may be queer theories, they also continue to reproduce an onto-ethical system that is constitutively heterosexual. Like Bersani, Edelman is a thinker of desubjectivation; but, in ways that the next chapter demonstrates, in Bersani the antisocial moment is always already accompanied by another onto-ethical orientation, one that he finds exemplified in the account of narcissism that he extracts from varied theoretical and literary sources. His theory of “homo-narcissism” outlines the ways in which—as E. L. McCallum puts it—“the self is lost, dissolved, but yet still able to be, queerly, regained” (192). Bersani suggests that, if we are to think—and, perhaps, begin to be—queerly, we must supplement “the antisocial thesis” with “the correspondence thesis.”

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But consider that the Narcissus of the story does not stand in front of an artificial mirror but the mirror of nature: perhaps he did not catch sight of just himself in the water, but himself as still a part of everything—otherwise would he, rather than lingering, not have fled? Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Narzißmus als Doppelrichtung” … the human subject can be more than a psychological subject. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies

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In a 1997 interview, Leo Bersani speaks of “what [he] think[s] is our most urgent project now: redefining modes of relationality and community, the very notion of sociality” (IRG 172). Writing three years later, he attributes the same phrase—“our most urgent ethical project” (IRG 102)—to Michel Foucault’s discussion, in “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1981), of relationality’s new possibilities. Indeed, he often cites Foucault’s call, in the 1981 interview, to experiment with and bring into existence “new relational modes.”1 According to Foucault, homosexuality, as it is lived in the final quarter of the twentieth century, may have a privileged place among possible sites of such experimentation and becoming. “Homosexuality,” he writes, is a historical occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. (“Friendship” 138)

Nothing inherent in homosexuality—no transhistorical mode of desiring or being—explains this privilege; rather, homosexuality can be activated in the task of reinventing relationality because of its immanent position in modern identity regimes. For reasons that Foucault leaves unspecified—for reasons he did not have the time to explore—homosexuality may be a weak point in the armor of such historically specific constellations. While fully agreeing with Foucault’s admonition to rethink relationality, Bersani also diverges from his colleague on the question of homosexuality. This divergence can to a large extent be attributed to the differing ways in

See H 77–83; IRG ix–x, 50, 59, 69, 102, 134–35, 137–38, 161; TT 12, 93; RB 25, 33, 34, 35, 97.

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which the two thinkers position themselves vis-à-vis psychoanalytic theory. As Lynne Huffer has demonstrated, Foucault considers psychoanalysis not only part and parcel of fin-de-siècle sexological discourses (and, as such, an important element in the rise of the constellation of biopolitics),2 but also the apotheosis of the Cartesian Age of Reason, with its despotic expulsion of unreason—and, as Huffer argues, queer ethics—beyond the livable.3 For Bersani, on the other hand, psychoanalytic theory has a specificity that renders it not so easily dismissed. He presents two reasons for his ongoing attachment to psychoanalytic theorizing. First, Freud’s influence has been such that in his ideas we can observe our extant ways of desiring, being, and relating; psychoanalysis has given us some of our culture’s most efficiently disseminated lessons on how to be. Yet—this is the second reason why Bersani cannot quite let go of Freud—the muddled formulations of psychoanalytic theory may also contain an unexplored potential that, like the virtualities Foucault speaks of, can help us imagine other modes of relatedness, whether to one’s self or to others. Above all, psychoanalysis constitutes an exceptional effort among Western discourses to theorize anthropogenesis insofar as it remains remarkably faithful to—one might say, is infected by—the object of its study: like the process it attempts to describe, it is marked by a recurrent failure to get its story straight. In The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1985), Bersani calls this a “theoretical collapse” in Freud’s thought, a collapse that he suggests is the most central, and the most original, feature of Freud’s work. It is central and original because it evinces the theory’s necessary repetition of the dynamic that is being described. Bersani makes a considerable deal of Jean Laplanche’s suggestion that one witnesses in Freud’s writing something like the process that Ernst Haeckel calls “recapitulation”: the way in which individual development (ontogeny) constitutes a miniature version of species development (phylogeny). As an extension of Haeckel’s law of “ontogenesis,” we have Laplanche’s law of “theoretico-genesis,” according to which a theory “recapitulates” the dynamics of its object. For the Freudian text, this means that theorizing anthropogenesis necessarily becomes as groundless and confused and queer an effort as the process of becoming-human itself. If

Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Campbell and Sitze, provides a helpful introduction to the field. See Huffer, Mad. Apart from Huffer, Didier Eribon (Insult 272–73, 281–82, 399n1) has insisted on Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis most forcefully. For Foucauldianinfluenced efforts to steer queer theory beyond psychoanalysis, see also Halperin, How to Be Gay; and What Do Gay Men Want? Joan Copjec’s work offers a counterpoint to the historicist-Foucauldian dismissal of psychoanalysis; for some recent commentary, see Copjec, “Insistence” 337–39.

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Laplanche suggests that hominization begins at the aporetic point of originary masochism, that is, the subject’s constitution at the moment of shattering, Freud’s theory repeats this emergence-in-undoing. For Bersani, the Freudian text circles around a point of unknowability, evident in the repeated moments of “collapse” of its argumentation. As he writes, in Freud’s work, “arguments are at once elaborated and disformulated” (CR 3; see also CR 44), “at once elaborated and subverted” (FrB 64). This time of suddenness—“at once”—marks the theory with the temporality of becoming-human, where the emergent “I” “explodes the boundaries of a self at the instant of defining them” (AI 68). This is the time of ébranlement, the missed catastrophe of (human) origination.4 As we have seen, the theory of “shattering” occupies a central place in Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. It provides a complexly ethical account of the human being and its relatedness to the world, insofar as this being’s constitutive moment, one that he seeks to repeat, is one of passive enjoyment in the experience of its own undoing. A failed animal, the human comes into being at a moment when the ego emerges as an experience of its shattering by overwhelming stimuli. According to the speculative theory that Bersani draws from Freud via Laplanche—we will return to the specificity of such “speculativeness” in our final chapter—the incipiently human being turns this moment into a masochistic ecstasy in order to survive the annihilation. It is in art and sex that we consequently seek repetitions of this originary ecstasy. As Bersani proposes in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), behind homophobia is people’s terror and revulsion at the avidity with which (some) gay men submit to this jouissance, the deadly loss of control—la petite mort—that seduces us as a reminder of our aporetic origins. Through the decades of his work, Bersani seeks psychoanalytic concepts whose potential may not have been exhausted, concepts that, much like same-sex friendships for Foucault, have been “produced” by dominant discourses but can also disrupt some of their most familiar assumptions. The psychoanalytic postulation of narcissism emerges as one of the most important of such concepts for Bersani. This is because Freud unwittingly suggests in narcissism a mode of desiring that does not assume difference as its logic. “Differences,” Bersani writes, “traumatize and fascinate us” (IRG 60). Differences, as we noted in the previous chapter, produce tragic scenarios of

On the law of “theoretico-genesis,” see Laplanche, Life 2, 9, 87; “Unfinished” 81–82; New 167n22. Karl Heinz Bohrer’s Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance (1981) suggests that the time of the “at once” is not exclusive to psychoanalytic theory of hominization but organizes numerous theories of “appearing” in the Western tradition. On the “at once” in Bersani, see Tuhkanen, Essentialist ch. 4.

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desire. Narcissism, on the other hand, can scramble the way in which our culture has routinely hierarchized sameness and difference in its ontologies of privation; a narcissistic orientation may be able to help us unlearn our taste for annihilation. Yet “[d]espite its interest in narcissism,” writes Tim Dean, “psychoanalysis has not been especially helpful in rationalizing this attraction [of sameness], primarily because it pictures de-differentiation as almost exclusively terrifying and traumatic” (“Sameness” 38). As Dean indicates, psychoanalysis’s explicit theory of narcissism relies, as do so many other psychoanalytic concepts, on the notion of trauma, that is, the kind of ontology of lack that Judith Butler’s and Lee Edelman’s queer theories affirm. Castration, as Bersani puts it, is the psychoanalytic version of “a fall from Being,” “an ontological cut”; Lacanian theory, he avers, “promot[es] … castration from an Oedipal fantasy to the meta-genital status of a lost plenitude of being” (IRG 54). In the context of originary trauma, a return to the same signals the approach to the zero-degree tension of death (in Freud’s drive theory) or the proximity of the real (in Lacan). The pathology of Narcissus is his lethal attachment to nonbeing. Beginning with some of his earliest texts, Bersani seeks to rethink narcissism, to unfold the potential that psychoanalysis invests with, and then carefully leaves unexplored in, the concept. To follow the alternative shape Bersani gives to the theory of narcissism, this chapter, first, turns to the “primal scene” of the concept’s appearance in his work and, second, follows the theory’s ramifications in his later texts. By “primal scene,” I am thinking of his encounter with psychoanalysis in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976), and particularly its final chapter, “Persons in Pieces.” This is the earliest text in which Bersani addresses the question of homosexual desire from the vantage point of psychoanalytic theory; it is already here that we detect the idiosyncratic meaning that he gives the concept of narcissism. The idea’s reappearance and elaboration in his later work, which this chapter will follow, clarify what Bersani means when he writes in 1997 that “in gay sexuality … erotic desire for the same might affect, even revolutionize, our understanding of how the human subject is, or might be, socially implicated” (IRG 43). It is in the theory of narcissism that Bersani sees outlined what he calls the “psychoanalytically defined homosexual” (IRG 55). If he identifies in psychoanalysis a training ground for our culture’s extant way of approaching otherness, the concept of narcissism, one of psychoanalytic theory’s centerpieces—one that nevertheless remains oddly undeveloped by Freud—may also allow a retraining in desire and difference. As much as Freud’s is an important and influential rethinking of the myth of Narcissus, Bersani’s own work amounts to a further elaboration of the psychoanalytic account. Bersani fully accepts the Freudian proposition of

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homosexual narcissism, a proposition that many a gay-affirming thinker has for very good reasons condemned as one of our culture’s prejudicial, phobic fantasies about same-sex desire. Rather than a desire for the different that, in this normative schema, characterizes heterosexuality—a desire that is often considered the condition for an ethical regard for the other, a healthy tolerance of variety—in traditional psychoanalytic theory the homosexual object choice, markedly narcissistic, is thought to reflect the subject’s stubborn refusal to face up to the world’s diversity beyond the familiarity of the self. Instead of the other, the homo seeks the same. Yet Bersani suggests that, rather than rejecting narcissism as a homophobic category par excellence, we discern in its convolutions the potential for a rethinking of sameness and difference. We might, as he writes, “discover, at the very origin of psychoanalysis, the outline of a conceptualising of queer desire as somehow exempt from the destructive sociality of straight desire” (IRG 50). Rather than spending our energies repudiating Freud’s and (particularly) his followers’ homophobic fantasies, we might develop an account of the homosubject’s “narcissistic pleasure of finding itself in the world” (IRG 96). Bersani offers us, to put it simply, “a positive form of narcissism” (Dean and Lane 24), one where the postulation of homosexual sameness is transformed “from an ethical weakness to an ethical strength” (Dean, “Homosexuality” 134). With concepts such as “impersonal narcissism,” “homoness,” and “impersonal intimacy,” Bersani wants to “reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself ” (I 76). Suggesting “an expansive rather than a self-enclosing narcissism” (C 80), he devises modes of relatedness that might help us reorient ourselves to the outside world in less violent, less appropriative, less sadistic ways. After tracing the first articulation of the theory of homo-narcissism in “Persons in Pieces,” I follow the concept’s subsequent elaboration over some four decades. While Bersani explicitly discusses narcissism on numerous occasions—including the first chapter of The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), the second chapter of The Culture of Redemption (1990), the queertheoretical polemic Homos (1995), and the essays “Against Monogamy” (1998) (IRG 85–101) and “Sociability and Cruising” (2002) (IRG 45–62)—I am more interested in tracking the concept’s appearance in less obvious contexts, such as his discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory (in Baudelaire and Freud [1977] and the third chapter of The Culture of Redemption), Jean Genet’s fiction (Homos) and Caravaggio’s art (Caravaggio’s Secrets [1998]). Across these texts, Bersani not only suggests that we reconfigure the ethics of difference by reconsidering the maligned concept of sameness, but also proposes that, in theorizing narcissism, we distinguish between two modes of homo-attraction, which I propose we call those of “shattering narcissism” and “narcissism of correspondences.”

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Encountering Narcissism Bersani begins A Future for Astyanax by repeating the familiar theory where human desire is marked by an originary lack: we seek redemption from our injured being into fullness, a redemption that, at the same time, would precipitate the world’s undoing into nondifferentiation. Bersani identifies this mode of thinking with the psychoanalytic paradigm, but it can also be attributed to the proper name of Plato (or Aristophanes). This model of desire is not exactly replaced but complicated in the study’s final chapter. It is “complicated” because, in the chapter “Persons in Pieces,” Bersani outlines a different mode of desiring not by abandoning psychoanalysis but, instead, by inflecting Laplanche’s reading of Freud through commentary on two mid-1950s French erotic novels: Pauline Réage’s (i.e. Anne Desclos) Story of O (1954) and Jean de Berg’s (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) The Image (1956). In a move typical to his oeuvre, with these literary texts Bersani draws out from philosophy (Laplanche and Freud) aspects that would have otherwise remained only partially actualized. Réage’s novel tells the story of a woman who receives “training” in becoming a sexual slave by the secret society to which her lover, René, introduces her. He stipulates that she submit particularly to his older stepbrother Sir Stephen, before she is sent to join a society of women to get further instruction in masochistic compliance. While the novel’s depiction of sadomasochistic sex precipitated something of a literary scandal in 1954, with calls for censorship and legal action,5 Bersani notes the oddly “asexual” atmosphere of Story of O’s tableaux of torture. The scenes of sadism, he writes, appear to be informed by “a nonerotic imagination” (FA 300). It seems that the executors of punishment remain unperturbed by the excitements of sadistic violence: the men approach the erotic scenes with “a certain attitude of detachment” (Réage 80). For Bersani, this detachment indicates the “theatricalization” of desire in the novel: the men have become voyeurs to the scenes of punishment; they survey the mise-en-scène with what Réage in an interview calls “the cold look of the true libertine” (Deforges 21). Echoing the Marquis de Sade’s imagination, Story of O, as Bersani writes, illustrates “the cool and murderous reduction of otherness in a (mad) heterosexual theatricalization of desire” (FA 299).6

Réage describes the case in Deforges 3–12. See also the discussion of the forms of “coldness” characteristic of the masochistic and the sadist positions by Gilles Deleuze, whose importance for Bersani our previous chapters have explored: Deleuze, “Coldness” 51–52, 117–19.

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Bersani suggests that we find in Réage an illustration of Freud’s theory of subject-constitution, whose complications Laplanche outlines in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). Réage’s detached masters seem to exemplify what Freud in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915) indicates is the child’s initial, “nonsexual” relation to the world. Freud proposes that the emergence of the subject is characterized by an effort at mastering his environment, expressed in the child’s sadistic control of objects around him. But, as Laplanche points out, this theory of the relationship between the subject and the world is complicated by a different account in some of Freud’s other texts. Freud appears to posit two forms of sadism: apart from the “‘original,’ nonsexual sadism which seeks to master the world,” there seems to exist, as Bersani writes in his subsequent book Baudelaire and Freud, “a derived, sexual sadism which is actually a pleasurable fantasy-identification with the intense (sexualized) pain of the victim” (BF 79). Yet, according to Laplanche, this chronology is further scrambled: in texts such as “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’” (1919) and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), Freud speculates that, rather than the experience of mastery (nonsexual sadism), the subject’s earliest moments of consciousness come in the form of a masochistic pleasure, an “ébranlement,” “shattering.” As we saw in Chapter 1, Laplanche comes to the conclusion that it is the latter mode of sadism that must be considered primary: “the masochistic moment is first,” he writes. “The masochistic fantasy is fundamental, whereas the sadistic fantasy implies an identification with the suffering object; it is within the suffering position that the enjoyment lies” (Life 91). The subject enjoys sadistically because the victim’s trembling in pain reminds him of his originary shattering. Apart from Freudian theory, Bersani turns to Proust to describe the modes of desire he finds in Story of O. He proposes that the encounters of Réage’s sadists with the world echo the Proustian “search” for the subject’s self (or his “images”) in objects: like Marcel’s, René’s relationship to Jacqueline is motivated by “his anguished effort to reach her ‘raison d’être,’ her ‘truth’” (FA 300). The enigma of otherness propels him onto a process of violent investigation: Réage’s narrator describes René’s persistent attempts “to understand the raison d’être, the truth which must have been lurking somewhere inside Jacqueline, under that golden skin, like the mechanism inside a crying doll” (Réage 182). Similar scenes abound in the Proustian world, Bersani’s privileged example of a literary imagination enthralled by enigmatic otherness. Curiosity about the other impels the subject to take apart the object of his desire as a child would dismantle a mechanized toy in an effort to understand its principle of operation. As Bersani writes in The Culture of Redemption, Proust gives us “a desire that exuberantly dismembers its objects” (CR 22). Marcel’s enthusiasm is not dissimilar to what a recent

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historical novel calls Jack the Ripper’s “zeal to discover how [his victim] was put together inside” (Palma 63). In a later text, Bersani points to Dennis Cooper’s fiction as a radicalized version of this “cool” investigation of otherness: Cooper’s violent spectacles hyperbolize what Proust’s and even Réage’s scenes merely suggests, the “cold and brutal ripping open of bodies as a means of knowing the other” (IRG 34). The lover of difference—Marcel, René, Jack the Ripper—is captured by the promise of a truth hidden behind appearances, the truth whose discovery will necessitate the irreversible undoing of the object. Réage’s men are occasionally moved by the remembered excitements of masochistic intensities. On such occasions, they come to embody the mode of derived sadism or projected masochism that Bersani, following Laplanche, claims is the result of hominization’s constitutive entanglement with masochistic jouissance. Sir Stephen’s attachment to O, for example, “seems to include an identification with O’s pain” (FA 300). He illustrates the Freudian account of subject-constitution, where “the wish to dominate others is also sexualized”: “we will sadistically enjoy their pain. We are erotically stimulated by someone else’s pain because we identify with it, having already experienced pain as pleasure: that is, sadism is projected masochism” (FA 301). Bersani turns to The Image to better illustrate the experience of ébranlement. He suggests that, more so than Réage’s, Berg’s novel describes “derived sadism”: the sadist’s visceral identification with masochistic jouissance, an identification that reenacts the shattering mobilization of primary masochism. In The Image’s scenes of punishment we find “both the sadist and the masochist experiencing excitement as a direct result of physical pain”: “the sadist responds as if his body were being stimulated erotically, but what stimulates him (or her) are someone else’s sensations” (FA 303). Like The Image’s male narrator, the sadist is drawn into the spectacle of punishment by the scene’s infectious jouissance; the novel thus exemplifies “the Freudian suggestion that sadism is projected masochism. We can be excited by the pain of others because we have ourselves already experienced pain as sexually exciting” (FA 303). More so than in Réage, Bersani locates in Berg an illustration of Laplanche’s argument according to which “the sadist himself finds masochistic enjoyment in the pain he provokes in others through an identification with the suffering object” (Laplanche, “Masochism” 204). In Berg, sexuality becomes a force of otherness in its destabilization of the enjoying subject. What we find in Bersani’s depiction of The Image, and to a lesser extent Story of O, are early examples of his “signature concept,” ébranlement. Already in A Future for Astyanax Bersani seeks, as he puts it in the 1997 interview, “to move to a different relation to

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otherness, not one based in paranoid fascination but one that might use the masochistic element in the confrontation productively” (IRG 177). Yet having illustrated the distinction between nonsexual and derived sadism with Story of O and The Image respectively, Bersani makes a move that will have extensive ramifications for his later work. Complicating the comparison, he proposes that the “cool” sadism illustrated in Story of O bears within it two forms of disengagement. There are, first, O’s heterosexual men, captured by her irresolvable difference, the dark continent of femininity. René, in particular, is unmoved by women’s suffering, distancing himself from the scenes of their cruel tutelage. The obvious (and obviously ethical) counterpoint to René’s coldness is the shattered and shattering mobility of Berg’s sadists. The latter are shaken by their own ébranlement before they can annihilate the other. While this provides us an ethical model, the logic of the argument in “Persons in Pieces” moves along a more involutive path, one on which Bersani is to continue in later decades: he implicitly contrasts the response of O’s heterosexual men to another form of immobilized witnessing, one that emerges in scenes of (male and female) homosexuality. He identifies it in René’s “nonsexual idolatry” of Sir Stephen (FA 293), calling O’s lover’s “fascinated worship” of the older man “‘homosexuality’”—although, importantly, he renders the diagnosis in quotation marks (FA 295). Bersani’s tentativeness is elicited by the narrator’s explicit disassociation of the men’s relationship from an “amorous” attachment. “Everything would probably have been much simpler if Sir Stephen had liked boys,” we read in Story of O, “and O did not doubt that René, who was not so inclined, still would have readily granted to Sir Stephen both the slightest and the most demanding of his requests. But Sir Stephen only liked women.” In this way, “through the medium of her body, shared between them, they attained something more mysterious and perhaps more acute, more intense than an amorous communion” (Réage 102). Réage suggests to Bersani a connectedness through sameness whose “intensity” is something else than that of what we usually call “sexuality.” Given these aspects of Réage’s narrative, we can read Story of O as an example of the “homosocial” fiction that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analyzes in her groundbreaking LGBT/queer studies work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). Taking her theoretical cues from Claude Lévi-Strauss (kinship systems’ reproduction through the exchange of women), René Girard (erotic triangles), and Gayle Rubin (male traffic in women), Sedgwick argues that “male homosocial desire,” as “the spectrum of male bonds that includes but is not limited to the ‘homosexual’” (85), constitutes something like the thermal exhaust port of patriarchy’s Death Star: “through the medium of [the woman’s] body” (as Réage puts

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it) men share homosocial intensities that, while supporting phallocentric societal arrangements, cannot be cleanly distinguished from the threat of homosexual desire. In her subsequent book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick notes the considerable cultural energies that are spent in exorcizing the ghost of homosexuality from scenes of normative male homosociality. In his reading of Story of O, Bersani anticipates Sedgwick in emphasizing the two men’s absolute obedience to, and success in following, the protocols of heteronormative masculinity. Even with his “homosexuality,” René perfectly fits into what Bersani identifies, in the larger structure of the novel, as “a kind of fantasy-blueprint of pure heterosexual desire, a mad dream of the ‘ideal’ resolution (especially by men) of Oedipal conflicts” (FA 293). The “purity” of heterosexuality comes from its having rendered (sexual) difference absolute: the other can be desired only as a constitutive lack on this side of difference, and consequently the object to be annihilated. Yet this model entails not only the ossification of sexual difference into two incompatible realms but also the transparency of one’s “own” sex to oneself, its readiness for narcissistic recognition. As Bersani writes, “the post-Oedipal heterosexual male may no longer find any mystery of sexual identity in himself or in other men” (FA 293). As a paradigm of difference, heterosexuality may enable a desire not driven by what it can understand as difference. Because René, O’s successfully Oedipalized male subject, cannot conceive of any real difference between himself and other men (nor within himself), his “worship” of Sir Stephen must, to the system of hetero-desire, register as desire for the same and, hence, not as a form of desire at all. For Bersani, René’s worship of the older man escapes the annihilative drive that marks what I called, in the previous chapter, the tragedies of (heterosexual) difference because it tempts the subject with nothing that he does not already, in some form, have. The subject of what we can call homo-narcissistic desire is drawn not by the other’s enigma but by the repetition, perhaps enhancement, of a familiar form. The homo-narcissist’s relation to his or her object of desire is not prompted by the kind of enigmatic, “inconceivable” otherness that we find in Proust. Rather, Sir Stephen is “worshiped without curiosity”: “René, unlike a Proustian lover, isn’t trying to penetrate the secret of someone else’s mysteriously different ‘formula’ for sexual excitement” (FA  294). As opposed to Marcel’s fascination with enigmatic difference, René’s desire is for nonenigmatic sameness. Already in this early text, which marks his first encounter with Freud and Laplanche, Bersani suggests a move that will become increasingly important in his later work: at the very moment when he accepts the account of “masochistic shattering” from Laplanche’s reading of Freud, he also suggests ways in which we can extend the concept beyond its articulated forms. He

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accomplishes this move by turning to literary texts: here, Réage’s and Berg’s novels. With their help, he proposes that the masochistic-turned-sadist encounter with otherness can also produce a different relationship to the world, one exemplified by René’s homo-narcissistic adoration of Sir Stephen. This connective mode offers the participants, as Réage puts it, something “more intense than an amorous communion.” In his later work, Bersani will allude to this connective principle by various terms, including “sameness,” “homoness,” “correspondences,” “sociability,” and “solidarity.” Taking place at the very moment of Bersani’s encounter with psychoanalytic theory, the shift from shattering to homo-narcissism is important enough that, in my reading of “Persons in Pieces,” I have taken the liberty of inverting the chronology of the chapter’s theoretical narrative. Bersani moves from noting René’s attraction to Sir Stephen in Story of O to a consideration of Réage’s male subjects’ torturing of their female victims to accentuating the “shattering” involved in the derived sadism of The Image. This ordering of the account suggests Bersani’s prioritization of what he finds in The Image as the tentative solution to the ethical dilemma of otherness’s annihilation in desire. Whereas Bersani ends his narrative with the ethical importance of ébranlement, I have scrambled this line of argumentation, moving from the sadism of O’s heterosexual men to the shattering effect of derived sadism/projected masochism in The Image and, finally, to the “worship” of sameness that we find in René’s “homosexuality”—his “nonsexual adoration” of Sir Stephen. I do this to anticipate the shift that Bersani undertakes in his subsequent work, one by which ébranlement is deprioritized in order to investigate the ramifications of the sameness—the homo-attraction—an example of which we find between René and the older man. Thus reordered, A Future for Astyanax’s final chapter prefigures Bersani’s move from ébranlement to correspondances, or, to put it differently, from the psychoanalytic (or sexual) subject to the aesthetic subject.

The Psychoanalytically Defined Homosexual One of Bersani’s central arguments in Homos concerns the disappearance of “homosexual” specificity from queer theorizing of the early 1990s. He calls this queer theory’s “de-gaying” of gayness or homosexuality. Recent theoretical approaches to identity and sexuality had sought to denaturalize what was meant by these concepts. Most notably, Foucault’s famous argument, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), that homosexuality as an identity category, so seemingly incontestable and affectively natural

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to us, had emerged only in the late nineteenth century had allowed the de-essentialization of not only the homosexual but all identity categories. If homosexuality is of a relatively recent emergence, we must contextualize it in nothing like “natural” desire or psychic structures, but amidst discourses, practices, and institutions—the “apparatus” (dispositif) of sexuality.7 By rendering it a historically contingent category, queer theory hoped to debunk the homophobic logic that had assumed homosexuality a transhistorical, and transhistorically opprobriated, identity. Bersani insists that neither the question of “homosexuality” nor that of “identity” can be fully answered by queer theory’s historicizing, deessentializing imperatives. His arguments are not reducible to a contrarian position; he is not (merely) taking pleasure in opposing the swiftly congealing queer-theoretical pieties. When he observes that “the way in which the Foucauldian suspicion of sexual essences has been picked up by queer theorists has made me almost nostalgic for those very essences” (IRG 39), he is thinking back to his own work on modern formations of the subject, predating the emergence of queer theory as a nameable field in the early 1990s. Drawing from his earlier observations, he proposes that, by letting go of the question of “homosexual identity,” we lose an ethically and politically salient potential. It may be that, even if homosexuality is a cultural construct, we have not yet fully explored what might be called homosexuality’s forces (IRG 41). As Bersani writes in the prologue to Homos, Gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their sophisticated awareness of how they have been constructed as gay men and lesbians. The discrediting of a specific gay identity (and the correlative distrust of etiological investigations into homosexuality) has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal. We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us. The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. If many gays now reject a homosexual identity as it has been elaborated for gays by others, the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges

For a helpful exploration of similar issues that takes its cues from Foucault, see Halperin, “Is.” On Foucault’s concept dispositif, see Deleuze, “What.”

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of dominance. Suspicious of our own enforced identity, we are reduced to playing subversively with normative identities—attempting, for example, to “resignify” the family for communities that defy the usual assumptions about what constitutes a family. (H 4–5)

Bersani’s target in the above passage should be clear: his evocation of “subversive play” and “resignifying” constitutes a reference to Judith Butler’s deconstructive theory of performativity, the art of what Butler herself calls “subversive repetition” and “resignification” (Butler, Gender 32, 33). By the time Bersani writes this in 1995, performativity had become a widely deployed concept whose utility was felt in gay/lesbian/queer studies, its impact boosted, in a different field, by Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory, also influenced, like Butler’s work, by the deconstructive account of iterability.8 Yet Bersani argues that such strategies “reduce” our capacity not only to challenge “hegemonic regimes of the normal” but also to conceptualize newness in ways that do not remain beholden to extant regimes. What one discerns here are echoes of the philosophical genealogy that—as I noted in Chapter 2—inflects Bersani’s work from his earliest texts onward. From this perspective, performativity fails because its acts remain in an indelible—dialectical—relation to that which they supposedly “subvert.” Three further questions raised by the above paragraph are worth emphasizing. The first point to highlight is Bersani’s parenthetical suggestion that the “correlative” to queer theory’s, as well as gay and lesbian studies’, cultural constructionism has been the rendering inadmissible of certain questions about homosexuality, among them the issue of homosexuality’s etiology. If this is an aspect of queer theorizing that Bersani laments, the nonconformity of his position in the field of queer thought circa 1995 cannot be overemphasized. He sets himself against not only such contemporary thinkers as Sedgwick, John D’Emilio, and David Halperin but also one of queer theory’s great progenitors, Saint Foucault. As Halperin reminds us in a book of that name, Foucault pointedly refused any investigation into the etiology—the causes and mechanisms, psychic and otherwise—of homosexuality. For him, such questions were misplaced: they amounted to distractions, inadequate ways of framing the pressing problematic of (homo)sexuality; in Valerie Rohy’s more recent phrase, all

See Bhabha. For an early study that utilizes the confluence of Butler’s and Bhabha’s theories, see Jagose, Lesbian ch. 6.

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etiological queries are but “lost causes.”9 In a counterintuitive move, Bersani posits himself against all this: he suggests that etiological investigations into homosexuality may yet be productive for queer thought.10 Second, what exactly does Bersani mean by “homosexuality” or “gay” “identity”? The question is of some importance, since for him “specific gay identity” constitutes nothing less than “the indispensable grounds for resistance to … hegemonic regimes of the normal.” With Foucault’s work and the critique of the humanist tradition in ethical and political thought, the phrase “homosexual identity” had become something of an anachronism, even anathema, for early 1990s queer theory: it evoked the idea either of a naïve subject who, lacking any historical consciousness, had been seamlessly interpellated by contemporary identitarian regimes or of a subject fully at home in (neo)liberal, disciplinary culture. Bersani, on the other hand, wants to insist that we rethink homosexuality by rescuing it from its eradication by historicism and social constructionism. This rescue mission is politically imperative, for “[i]t is not possible to be gayaffirmative, or politically effective as gays, if gayness has no specificity” (H 61). What is this “homosexuality” or “gayness” for Bersani, and what is its relation to the category for which Bersani coins the term “homoness”? Finally, what does Bersani take to be “regimes of the normal”? To answer this question, we must heed the paradigmatic shape of his work. Even if he is best known as—even if he insists on calling himself—neither a “theoretician” nor a “philosopher” but a reader of aesthetic texts (literature, cinema, painting, theater) (“Rigorously” 289), his work, as I have suggested in earlier chapters, unfolds within the frame of a specific philosophical paradigm. However we name this paradigm, important for Bersani is the way in which it allows him to postulate the categories of difference and sameness. His implicit—and, once we discern it, uncontroversial—suggestion in Homos is that much of queer-theoretical work has cast its lot with another paradigm, one whose most famous representative in early queer thought is Butler. He also claims that, however resisting or subversive early 1990s queer theory is, it remains limited in its efficacy and, above all, imagination by its indebtedness to hegemonic

See Halperin, Saint 4; Rohy. Foucault’s pronouncement—that regarding the question whether homosexuality constitutes an inborn characteristic or is the result of nurture he “ha[s] absolutely nothing to say”—comes from an early-1980s interview: see “Sexual” 142. Writing in 1985, Sedgwick registers similar doubts when she calls the ways in which Freud’s investigations into the etiology of homosexuality have been taken up by contemporary science “questionable” (Between 22–23; see also Sedgwick, Epistemology 40–41); D’Emilio echoes such doubts in his essay “Born Gay?,” originally delivered as a lecture in 1993. For Bersani’s commentary on the utility of etiology, see also IRG 40. 10 For a differently slanted re-opening of the question of etiology for queer theory and histories of (homo)sexuality, see Kahan. 9

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models of sameness and difference, of selfhood and otherness. Based on his earlier work, stretching back to the 1960s, Bersani argues that the thought of difference, so enabling for politically oriented theories since the 1970s, may in fact have come to participate in the games of (hetero)normativity. We find our three queries—about homosexuality’s psychic causes, about homosexual specificity, about the relational arrangements of the normal— preliminarily answered in “Persons in Pieces.” When Bersani in Homos admonishes us not to overlook, with our historicizing, constructivist discourses, the “etiology” of homosexuality, he is thinking about the speculative genealogy in his work that begins with the engagement with psychoanalysis in A Future for Astyanax. The psychic causality in question involves the subject’s identification, in the regime of Oedipalized heterosexuality, with that which is available as sameness. As the traditional narrative goes, out of insecurity about the coherence and boundedness of his or her self, the homosexual subject seeks in an other of the same sex a stabilizing image of this self: “lesbianism (and homosexuality in general),” as Bersani writes, “would be an attempt to possess a fixed image of the self.” In this account, given in “conventional psychoanalytic terms,” we find the homosexual version of the interrogative sadism that he identifies in Story of O and The Image: like the heterosexual subject who watches the other’s suffering, “the homosexual would find himself … only in his or her possession of another man or woman” (FA 306). Yet, as Bersani continues, “even if this represents an accurate (if partial) etiology of homosexuality, the consequences of homosexual desire may subvert”—here Bersani uses the term with which he subsequently, after its proliferation in cultural studies and queer theory, grows impatient—“its presumed purpose” (FA 306). What are these consequences? The Oedipal system produces two modes of homo-narcissism, one of ébranlement, the other of “homosexual” identification. Bersani illustrates shattering homonarcissism with the lesbian relationship, in Berg’s The Image, of Claire and Anne, where the former executes elaborate punishments on the latter’s flesh. Yet, at the same time, Claire the mistress masochistically identifies with Anne’s suffering and is shaken out of her secure subjective position: the “icy, merciless ways” in which she has dealt with male suitors morph into the “less cold, visibly troubled” demeanor as she doles out Anne’s punishments (Berg 20, 52). With her homosexual desire, in other words, she shatters: “Narcissism in homosexuality,” Bersani speculates, “may be, more than one usually suspects, of the self-shattering type,” because the identification necessary for derived sadism with one’s own sex proceeds more fluently (FA 306). We have already discussed the other form of homo-narcissism, insofar as it is illustrated by René’s “calm” attraction to Sir Stephen. We should again

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note the ways in which Bersani’s early work anticipates his later formulations. The relationship between, on the one hand, Claire and Anne (shattering) and, on the other, the two men (nonsexual adoration) will reemerge in the distinction that Bersani subsequently makes between the psychoanalytic subject of ébranlement and the aesthetic subject of correspondances. The latter form of homo-narcissism (we can call it “narcissism of correspondences”) diverges from the paradigm of desire whose most influential twentiethcentury articulation Bersani, beginning with A Future for Astyanax, finds in psychoanalysis. The desire depicted most prominently not only in Réage and Berg but also in the psychoanalytic theories of Laplanche and Lacan constitutes a mode of wanting where desiring mobility is sped on by radical difference. “Wanting,” as I have proposed, designates the subject’s efforts to find and incorporate that which is primordially lost from his own being. In Bersani’s language, this is a redemptive mode of desire: it assumes a damaged being, cut in pieces, whose very raison d’être—however impossible or fantasmatic—is its, and the world’s, deliverance from such injured difference into originary wholeness. In this arrangement, moreover, difference is “radical” because the phenomenal world comes into being through the primordial differentiation of the self and the other. If it sounds self-evident to say that the relation of the self to the other must be marked by difference—and, moreover, that allowing for such difference constitutes an ethical accomplishment—this obviousness suggests how hegemonic such a conceptualization of alterity is, or has become, for us. From early on, Bersani attempts to think other modes of desire, ones not premised on radical wants. He finds one in the homo-narcissistic ability to love the transparent other without the kind of tragic passion that characterizes hetero-attractions. This theory, emerging in “Persons in Pieces,” provides the ground for what Bersani in Homos alludes to as homosexual “specificity.” René is an instantiation of the “psychoanalytically defined homosexual” (IRG 55). What Bersani calls “the regimes of the normal” (H 4) are organized around, and fueled by, assumptions about primordial differentiation. In his reading of Réage, Bersani becomes intrigued by the way in which the homosexuality embodied in René’s same-sex attraction to Sir Stephen emerges as a byproduct of sorts of the regime in which (sexual) difference is absolutized. It is not that René has a rare capacity to transgress, to desire otherwise than compelled by, the system of wants that constitutes heterosexuality; rather, his homosexual attraction to the older man arises out of Oedipal heterosexuality’s exigencies. Were he psychoanalytically inclined, Foucault might say that the psychological system that institutes hetero-desire as the wanting of unthinkable difference also enables samesex—homosexual—friendships where the relation of the self to the other

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takes on an entirely different cast than in hetero-desire. In a relational system of wants, desire for the same gives us a mode in which the object offers no riddles to be solved, nothing that would attract the subject because of its enigmatic qualities. Same-sex desire is marked by its transparency: it does not require a mysterious other as its driving force. As Bersani writes, René looks at Sir Stephen “without curiosity” (FA 294). René, that is, does not reach for the other man across the ontological divide that distances Réage’s and Berg’s hetero-desiring subjects from the objects of their fascinated contemplation. He is neither a detached torturer nor a shattered subject. His admiration is unmoved by the epistemophilic pressure of knowing the other, for in the system of sexual difference there is nothing to know in a subject of one’s own sex. René’s is nevertheless a desiring gaze. Bersani suggests in “Persons in Pieces” that in a regime characterized by the wants of (hetero)sexual difference, homosexuality posits the subject in a peculiar—Foucault, echoing Gilles Deleuze, would say virtual11—relation to sameness and difference, a relation whose larger ethical ramifications bear unfolding. This constitutes Bersani’s speculative etiology of homosexuality, whose virtual potential early queer theory, according to him, had abandoned. The schema that emerges, for the first time, in A Future for Astyanax necessitates that we not dismiss etiological inquiries into homosexuality: these may help us configure novel modes of our being-in-the-world.

Baudelairean Narcissism Bersani’s account of homo-narcissism obviously differs from such psychoanalytic reformulations of narcissism as the one Lacan provides in his theory of the mirror stage. The gratification in René’s contemplative gaze has nothing to do with the subject’s “jubilant” “miscognition” of its gestalt in the mirror (Lacan, “Mirror” 76). In the specular narcissism that Lacan theorizes, fascination with one’s doppelgänger will yield to paranoia and aggression. While the Lacanian subject is driven by the love and hate of its constitutive others, Bersani sketches a different version of narcissism, one that emerges when we look at psychoanalytic theory “slantwise,” as Foucault writes of the potential of same-sex friendships that hides in plain sight in the most (hetero) normative of communities. As Bersani understands it, the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism contains “virtualities” that can be actualized in thought As Tom Roach notes, Foucault’s language in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” with references to “virtualities” and “becomings,” echoes Deleuze’s (65).

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and practice. Much of his work since “Persons in Pieces” can be considered an effort, proceeding from numerous angles, at such actualization. The first step in the trajectory of “recategorizing” the suggestions in “Persons in Pieces” occurs in the book that immediately follows A Future for Astyanax. In Baudelaire and Freud, Bersani implicitly affirms the reorientation from the sexual jouissance of mimetic shattering (exemplified by Claire in The Image and, to a lesser extent, the male characters of Story of O) to the narcissistic contemplation of sameness (which he fleetingly notes in René). It is here that, with the help of Baudelairean aesthetics, he elaborates a theory of homo-narcissism. Bersani discerns in Baudelaire’s theory of “correspondences” an account of narcissistic desire. While he makes this connection mostly implicitly, it can be drawn out when we situate the book not only as a supplement of sorts to A Future for Astyanax, and particularly its concluding chapter, but also as a text that anticipates the more explicit linkage between psychoanalytic theory and Baudelairean aesthetics provided thirteen years later, in the third chapter of The Culture of Redemption. Bersani opens the study’s first chapter by turning to Baudelaire’s anecdote, in “The Painter of Modern Life,” of an artist’s childhood memory of witnessing his father dressing. In this scene, whose importance for Bersani I discussed in Chapter 2, the artist recalls his capture by the sight, which he took in with a gaze that telescoped to the details of the father’s body, the man’s skin, muscle, and veins. Becoming “obsessed and possessed by the contemplation of form,” the child anticipates the attitude of the artist, who looks at the world with “the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze [l’œil fixe et animalement extatique] of a child confronted by what is new” (Baudelaire, “Painter” 28 / “Peintre” 690). The child exemplifies what Baudelaire elsewhere calls the artist’s “immoderate taste for beautiful forms” (“Further” 108). Baudelaire suggests that this “immoderation” does not come to the adult as readily as it does to the child. “For the child everything is new,” he writes; “he is always drunk [ivre]” (“Painter” 27, trans. modified / “Peintre” 690). In his deadly alcoholism, Edgar Allan Poe embodied the difficulties of retaining such openness to intoxication: “Poe’s drunkenness [l’ivrognerie] was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature” (“Edgar” 89 / 315). It is as if the jaded adult must supplement his senses with hallucinogens to attain “the marvelous or terrifying visions” (89) that the child can more immediately access. Bersani identifies the child-artist’s “animal ecstasy” with “shattering,” the term he has borrowed from Laplanche in “Persons in Pieces”: “‘To go outside oneself,’” he writes, “is equivalent to allowing the self to be penetrated,12 The French original in Baudelaire is “le pénétrait”; the English translation loses this.

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to having it invaded, congested, and shattered by the objects of its attention” (BF 10). He further identifies in “the shattering of the artist’s integrity” (BF 11) a “narcissistic” enjoyment: with his “fixed” gaze, the child detects in the father’s bodily form an image of what he is becoming. Like the infant in front of the mirror in Lacan’s account of subject-constitution, he is arrested by the pleasure offered by recognizing an image of his self. Yet the source of the pleasure in Baudelaire differs from the one Lacan theorizes. If the “AhaErlebnis” of the child surprised by his mirror image is marked by his delight at what he takes to be the bodily coherence that will have been his (Lacan, “Mirror” 75–76), what the child in Baudelaire’s anecdote, facing a paternal mirror, observes is exactly the opposite: he is enthralled by something like the disintegration of his future self into the multihued network of flesh, blood, and muscle. The father’s image impresses him not because of its coherence but its exemplification of the human form’s unraveling into an aesthetic assemblage. His narcissistic pleasure is not one of observing a coherent gestalt that is promised to him, but this figure’s availability for de- and re-arrangement, for dis- and re-figuration. In his work, the artist goes on to re-experience “the joy of a child absorbing form and color,” to remember his early observation of, and participation in, the instability of the world’s aesthetic arrangements (Baudelaire, “Painter” 27). As we noted in Chapter 2, Baudelaire’s anecdote of the artist’s childhood recollection illustrates his theory of idealization. The artist’s gaze “idealizes” insofar as, discerning in the world’s actualized beings (his “models”) suggestions of an unfinished movement between related (“corresponding”) forms, it unravels extant figures, much in the same way that the coherence of the father’s body dissipates under the child’s attentive stare. With his gaze, and then with his work, the Baudelairean artist precipitates his models’ movement toward their “ideals.” Importantly, such “idealities” designate not the otherworldly perfection of Platonic Forms, but the immanent potential that exists in the transversal space between related figures: the movement of becoming is not “vertical” but “horizontal.” Emphasizing the “ecstasy” of the child’s rapt attention, the anecdote in “The Painter of Modern Life” suggests that, observing the similitudes that the child sees in the details of the father’s body, the artist himself becomes subject to the idealizing movement. It is not only that the child-artist observes the world’s becoming in a network of correspondences; this vision induces in him an “ecstasy” in which he leaves his actualized self in order to “communicate” with the world. He becomes the prototype of “the artist being shattered by otherness” (BF 11). Because the segments of the world which the artist-child “ecstatically” re-cognizes correspond to his form, Baudelairean idealization should be understood as a “narcissistic” mode of movement. It is a movement where

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corresponding forms are drawn together. As Bersani continues, the child’s and the artist’s “openness to the world corresponds … to a narcissistic appropriation of the world. The self is ‘lost’ only to be relocated everywhere” (BF 10–11). Yet this is a peculiar mode of narcissistic enjoyment: what captures the attention of the Baudelairean narcissist is not the self ’s reflected image but something like a sliver of a virtuality that can be actualized by blurring the sharp outlines of existing forms. This is a mode of narcissism that, as Bersani often writes, requires a “self-effacement.” As much as idealization designates the model’s disintegration in its gravitation toward an unactualized ideal, narcissism pulls apart the desiring subject. Bersani thus takes Baudelaire’s aesthetics as a description of becoming that, like the psychoanalytic theory of hominization-in-shattering, describes a movement of desire in terms of the pleasures of the self ’s undoing. “In aspiring to a state of completeness,” he writes in a later discussion of Baudelaire, “creatures … reach toward the ultimate difference-from-themselves that is self-effacement” (CR 70). Moving toward their likenesses, things’ current forms are “effaced”: because the model becomes something else in idealization, its figure is unraveled. Idealization is a mode of narcissistic becoming that, rather than bolstering an existing selfidentity, dissolves that which is currently realized, the “face” that gives an entity its unique identity. It is a narcissistic movement because in it figures are oriented toward their unactualized likenesses—correspondences—in other figures. Already in A Future for Astyanax, Bersani finds in narcissism “a kind of self-effacement in the name of the self ” (FA 295); he returns to this idea in Homos, where he speaks of “homoness” as an ontological mode of “a self-effacing narcissism” (H 150).13 In this model, the narcissistic individual reaches toward itself, its partial recurrence, elsewhere, thereby undoing its coherence and, simultaneously, becoming its self. Narcissistic worship reaches for the “individuality” that, as we noted in Chapter 2, Bersani suggests resides in the virtualities connecting actualized “individuals.” There are two ways in which this self-effacement takes place, and they parallel the two forms of narcissism—shattering and corresponding—that If the reaching toward the self in the other that Baudelaire calls “idealization” and Bersani “impersonal narcissism” “effaces” the self, the network of allusions that constitutes James Joyce’s Ulysses works differently. Rather than the text’s dissipation amidst the world’s likenesses, the novel’s famous allusiveness effects a cannibalistic, appropriative construction of the self ’s mastery over the other. Bersani uses the keyword in his discussion of Joyce’s novel in The Culture of Redemption: “Ulysses indulges massively in quotation—quotation of individual characters, social groups, myths, other writers—but quoting in Joyce is the opposite of self-effacement. It is an act of appropriation” (CR 170). In this, we recognize the mode in which, according to Bersani, Marcel, too, reaches for the world: not to undo his self in the web of horizontal correspondences, but to restore the self that has been criminally appropriated by the world.

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Bersani identifies in “Persons in Pieces.” In Baudelaire and Freud, we largely remain in the realm of the former. Bersani suggests that the child and the artist, in their “ecstatic” contemplation of the world, experience a “shattering” (BF 10, 11, 15, and passim). With this phrase, he gestures to Laplanche’s theory of subject-constitution, which he had discussed for the first time in “Persons in Pieces” and to which he will return later in the 1977 study (see BF 41 and passim after that). When he assigns the Baudelairean artist “an ecstatic passivity … a passivity which in itself transforms the poet into a woman” (BF 15), we should similarly recognize the ethics of self-shattering that he will attribute some ten years later to gay men’s sexual experimentations in the essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The repeated use of the term “shattering” shows that the major line of argument in “Persons in Pieces”—the ethics of ébranlement—dominates Bersani’s reading of Baudelaire’s aesthetics. Like Claire, who, in The Image, identifies with Anne’s masochistic pleasure-pain, the Baudelairean poet is “shattered” by the intensive experiences of sex and art: “the lover and the artist go outside themselves,” “lose themselves in others” (BF 9). But this “going outside oneself ”—this ecstasy—can take a different form than the self ’s shattering whose theorization Bersani finds in Laplanche. This other reading emerges when we connect Baudelaire’s aesthete not to the devastated lovers of otherness in The Image but to René. When aligned with René’s homo-narcissistic contemplation of his stepbrother, the childartist’s experience of gazing at his father—like Sir Stephen, an older man— can be read not as his sudden undoing by otherness, but as a “calm” and “sensual” recognition of the way in which pieces of his person already inhabit the world. This narcissistic recognition, again, has nothing to do with the pleasure of identifying in the external world an omnipotent version of one’s gestalt; rather, the “animal ecstasy” concerns the realization that, out there, the world’s aesthetic forms, some associated with nonhuman beings, are already anticipating my arrival. In theorizing narcissism, Bersani will continue to toggle between these two readings: his subsequent texts will develop his account of homo-narcissism as an experience of both shattering and corresponding. In the third chapter of The Culture of Redemption, for example, he once again connects Baudelaire’s anecdote to the Freudian account, drawn out by Laplanche, where “selfshattering” becomes identical to “self-constitution” (CR 72). Yet returning to the theory of narcissism in Arts of Impoverishment (1993), his emphasis will be on the way in which “what might be called our extensive identity in the world” (AI 207) can only be theorized once we go beyond psychoanalytic accounts of narcissism. It is in works of art—in the study co-written with Ulysse Dutoit, those of Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Alain Resnais—

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that we find experimentations with narcissistic pleasures that remain only partially describable in the psychoanalytic vocabulary of Freud or Laplanche. While this move from a narcissism of ébranlement to one of correspondances indicates an overall shift in emphasis in Bersani’s work from shattering to forms of connectedness, these two modes of “self-effacement” will always appear jointly, ready to shift into one another like the conjoined forms in Wittgenstein’s duckrabbit. The antisocial thesis is inextricable from—but, perhaps, cannot be observed simultaneously to—the correspondence thesis.

Homosexuality without Sexuality The observation about René’s homo-narcissistic attraction to Sir Stephen constitutes a minor point in “Persons in Pieces”: Bersani briefly notes it before going on to outline what will be the major argument of the chapter, the distinction between the modes of sadistic and masochistic modes of enjoyment illustrated by Story of O and The Image. Yet, as I suggested by rearranging the chapter’s theoretical narrative, in retrospect we can see that this seemingly negligible moment contains in an embryonic form many of the onto-ethical/aesthetic lessons that Bersani will go on to elaborate with various sources. They will be expanded upon in subsequent discussions of André Gide, Caravaggio, Assyrian sculpture, Éric Rohmer, George Segal, Pedro Almodóvar, and public sex cultures. If Bersani places quotation marks around the diagnosis of “homosexuality” when he notes René’s attraction to Sir Stephen, twenty years later, in Homos, he speaks of Gide’s work in terms that echo his description of René’s “untroubled nonsexual adoration” of the older man (FA 295). “Gidean homosexuality is strangely undemanding,” he writes of Michel, the protagonist of Gide’s The Immoralist (1902). “… It is, so to speak, homosexuality without sexuality, desire that is satisfied just by the proximity of the other” (H 121). He suggests that the objects of Michel’s homosexual desire are not “persons” in the sense in which Western modernity has brought this entity into being. “His eroticism,” he claims, “is uncontaminated by a psychology of desire, by which I mean that it is unaccompanied by an essentially doomed and generally anguished interrogation of the other’s desire” (H 123)—such as we find in accounts of tragic hetero-sexuality, including Proust’s. When we accord the other a “personality,” we are constructing him or her in the image of the kind of fascinating secrecy that attracts Marcel in various objects. In Proust, as Bersani writes elsewhere, “the other is reconstituted as a personality,” “a psychological individual”; consequently, “what would appear to be a humanizing of the other … is actually a tactic of intended mastery over

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the other” (CR 23). Conversely, what seems, from the perspective of extant subjectivation regimes, like the object’s debasement by dehumanization may paradoxically be the beginning of an ethical, nonsadistic relation to the other. As Bersani argues, Michel’s “homosexuality is a matter of positioning rather than intimacy. Untroubled and unconcerned by difference, he seeks, in those beautifully healthy Arab boys, nothing more than to touch inaccurate replications of himself, extensions of himself ” (H 124–25). The provocation of his reading consists of the fact that the objects of Michel’s (impersonal) desire are “racial others,” Arab youths whom he meets in North Africa. Attracted to more or less anonymous brown bodies, Michel (and, by extension, Gide) has seemed to many scholars like the subject of colonial exploitation par excellence.14 Yet Bersani counterintuitively suggests that it is precisely their impersonality that renders the encounters different from colonial relations. Colonialism, he proposes, is enabled by a weltanschauung where the other is seen in terms not only of alterity, difference, and distance but also of the kind of interiority that, in Western modernity, marks psychological personality. Our efforts to “humanize” our others are strategies of control. The political lesson of Michel’s relation to the Arab youths is that, were his expansively impersonal attitude generalized, the interrogative-exoticizingdemonizing logic that we witness, for example, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)—and colonial relations in general—would be neutralized. As Bersani writes, “By abandoning himself to the appearances of sexual colonialism Gide was able to free himself from the European version of relationships that supported the colonialism” (H 122–23). What seems like sexual tourism—cruising that does not give the object the dignity of personhood—offers in fact an important lesson in how to disrupt dominant modes of relations. The structure of the argument here repeats the one we find in “Persons in Pieces”: the normative order (colonialism, the Oedipus complex) produces phenomena (depersonalizing desire, homo-narcissism) that enable other modes of relationality. Unlike what Bersani claims of the child-artist in Baudelaire and Freud, Michel is not “shattered” in his encounter with the Arab boys. His is, like René’s, a narcissism of correspondences, not of shattering sexuality. In “Persons in Pieces,” Homos, and elsewhere, Bersani seeks to extricate “sexuality” from homo-attractions because, for him, like for Foucault, sexuality is contaminated by its role in the constitution of the modern subject. As Foucault puts is, ours is a system in which “sexuality has been considered the privileged place where

On debates around the alleged imbrication of Gide’s desire in French colonialism, see Dollimore 336–39.

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our deepest ‘truth’ is read and expressed” (“End” 214); “the creation of sexuality and of sex,” Bersani echoes, “is, in a sense, nothing more than the strategic implementation of a more fundamental effort to control the definition of the human itself ” (FrB 29–30). Foucault turns to same-sex friendship to think relations as they might be lived after—as they might hasten—the collapse of “the monarchy of sex.” For the same reason, Bersani, beginning with “Persons in Pieces,” evokes the question of homosexual narcissism, one that I have called the “narcissism of correspondences.” Homo-narcissistic relations are at once products of and undetermined by the forms of modern sexuality, its biopolitical exigencies. As a mode of relatedness that arises, as it were, in the shadow of modern sexuality—precipitated but also neglected by its regimes— homo-narcissism constitutes, in however unactualized a form, one of the “new relational modes” that Foucault thought he was witnessing in the gay scene of San Francisco.15 We should, he suggests, try out new modes of desiring relatedness: “it’s a matter [not] of rediscovering, but rather of fabricating other forms of pleasure, of relationships, coexistences, attachments, loves, intensities” (“End” 218). The homosexual being of Bersanian theory—the “psychoanalytically defined homosexual”—is a narcissistic subject, but one whose self-relation is not determined by what we moderns understand as sexuality. In this context, it is important to note that, in Story of O, the older man is “worshiped without curiosity”: René’s desire is not marked by the epistemophilia whose most prominent example Bersani locates in the Proustian world. It is not determined by what Bersani later calls, following Foucault, “the Cartesian moment” in our history, an episteme that we are currently living.16 He suggests that both Proust and psychoanalysis ventriloquize typically Enlightenment conceptualizations of what marks us as human: “the Cartesian moment” indicates the historical turn that for Foucault consolidated the epistemophilial being in Enlightenment modernity. By this he means the shift from the practices of epimeleia heautou, the care of the self, to a regime where subjectivity was defined in its relation to knowledge. The Cartesian moment designates “the moment when knowledge and knowledge alone—in detriment of spirituality [e.g., the care of the self]— became the subject’s path to truth” (IRG 154). Instead of such a “relational system limited by an obsession with knowledge” (CS 73), in homo-narcissism “there is nothing ‘to know’” (CS 72).

Foucault was invited to teach at UC Berkeley by Bersani in the late 1970s (Eribon, Michel 311). For an account of Foucault’s years in California, see Wade; and Bersani’s brief commentary in “Rigorously” 264. 16 For sources on “the Cartesian moment” in Foucault and Bersani, see note 29 in Chapter 1. 15

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These last quotations come from Caravaggio’s Secrets. In ways that may not be immediately recognizable, the Dutoit collaboration continues the elaboration of the mode of narcissistic relationality that Bersani outlines in “Persons in Pieces.” Bersani and Dutoit propose that two distinct movements, soliciting desire, characterize Caravaggio’s work, particularly the early paintings. Early Caravaggio is at great pains to render in inviting detail his models’ sex appeal: their attraction, Bersani and Dutoit suggest, depends on a “double movement” in which the models, first, open their bodies in a “seductively inviting” gesture to the viewer only to have their desire represented as impenetrable secrecy (CS 2). Caravaggio seduces us with the kinds of enigmas that leave Story of O’s hetero-desiring men immobile in their tracks. As we noted in Chapter 1, this movement of opening-concealing is also emblematic of the seductive force of enigmatic otherness we find in Proust. Marcel is solicited by objects that seem to at once “contain” and “conceal” the enigmas that he is called to unravel (Proust, Remembrance 1.183). As in À la recherche du temps perdu, in Caravaggio’s paintings “the erotic invitation is qualified by a partially self-concealing movement of retreat” (CS 3). His models perform a “provocation” and a “withdrawal,” a movement that seduces by “solicit[ing] and frustrat[ing]” our will to interpret (CS 3, 5). Like Marcel, the spectator “strains to penetrate the secret being simultaneously offered and withheld” (CS 66). Yet Bersani and Dutoit also suggest that, particularly in his later work, Caravaggio increasingly betrays the models’ fascinating eroticism; he does this by directing the spectator’s attention to the “nonerotic sensuality” (CS 79) of repeating arrangements that extend the models’ bodies onto other forms and surfaces. As opposed to the highlighting of the boy’s genitals and buttocks in Victorious Cupid, such later paintings as St. John Baptist with a Ram deemphasize the model’s sexual attractiveness and, instead, invite the viewer’s gaze to follow “a series of fanlike structures opening outward, away from the youth’s body” (CS 81). In his art, Caravaggio solicits the recognition of the ways in which our partial selves—we are “persons in pieces”—already inhabit the world. The consequent mode of desire constitutes not our moving after the enigmatic other of primordial lack, but our seeking partial repetitions of our selves in the world. As Bersani notes in the 1997 interview, Caravaggio shifts “from the teasingly enigmatic eroticism of the portraits of boys to the nonsexual sensuality of physical contacts, extensions, and correspondences” (IRG 177, emphasis added).17 This is a version of the “nonerotic imagination”

I will return to consider Bersani’s observation about the “two kinds of concealment” in Caravaggio (CS 39) in the concluding section to Chapter 7.

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(FA 300) that informs René’s “nonsexual adoration” of Sir Stephen (FA 295) in Story of O. Recontextualizing his later proposal about the shift in his work from the thought of shattering to that of correspondences, we can say that, already in depicting René in “Persons in Pieces,” Bersani thinks of the ways in which homo-narcissism yields “the milder sensual pleasure of discovering our inaccurate self-replications in the world, the aesthetically pleasing correspondences between the world and multiple partial aspects of our subjecthood” (“Broken” 415). René, or Gide’s Michel, or the later Caravaggio—but also Ishmael, Queequeg, and Almodóvar’s homosexuals18— illustrates a mode of desiring different from the one that we moderns understand as sexuality, a dispositif or apparatus that, as Foucault and Bersani repeatedly tell us, plays a central role in the modern biopolitics. In 1995, Bersani coins a term for this sameness-orientation: he calls it “homoness.” As he says in an interview, Homos, and particularly the book’s concluding chapter, “The Gay Outlaw,” comprised of his effort “to adapt the idea of ‘correspondence of forms’ to psychic correspondences”; he “was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness” (“Rigorously” 280). “Homoness” is an extension of the theory of homonarcissism that Bersani, in a brief aside, observes in “Persons in Pieces” and then, in his subsequent texts, goes on to develop into a central conceptual frame for his thinking by finding its elaboration in Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory. The theory of homo-narcissism demands that we relinquish the ontological paradigm that, as I noted in previous chapters, Bersani proposes to have organized nearly all our efforts to think being and difference. “Lack,” as he writes in Homos, “… may not be inherent in desire; desire in homo-ness is to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same” (H 149). We must move from an ontology of difference and lack—of wanting being—to one of sameness and plenitude. The theory of nonspecular narcissism is one aspect of Bersani’s efforts to shift toward this new paradigm; in homo-narcissism we discover “a sign of the natural extensibility of all being” (IRG 100). With his theory of homoness, Bersani seeks to re-define homosexuality: no longer (merely) a particular sexual orientation, it can be seen as the sexuality most appropriate to a perceived solidarity of being in the universe. Identities are never

In his discussion of Moby-Dick in The Culture of Redemption, Bersani finds “no suggestion of homosexual desire” in Ishmael and Queequeg’s same-sex affection (“Melville’s characters have no sexual subjectivity at all”; his is “a nonpsychological homosexuality”) (CR 145, 146, 147); Almodóvar’s cinema offers further examples of the “desexualizing and depsychologizing of homosexuality” (IRG 82) that we find in Réage and Gide.

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individual; homosexual desire is a reaching out toward an other sameness. Homosexuality expresses a homoness that vastly exceeds it but that it none the less has the privilege, and the responsibility, of making visible. (C 79–80; see also FoB 120)

For Bersani, the narcissistic subject identifies not with the (imaginary) wholeness of his being but with parts of the world in which he recognizes fragments of his form. “Homoness” designates a desire for sameness that is not only homosexual but, more ambitiously, reflects an ontology—a world where the subject finds itself inaccurately mirrored elsewhere, always already outside itself. It allows us to think what Bersani, in his latest work, calls “the constitutive homoness of desire, the homo-truth of our desiring movement toward others” (RB 70). Bersani finds versions of the nonspecular Narcissus not only in psychoanalysis, Réage, and Baudelaire but also in Plato’s Phaedrus (I 77–87), Proust’s narrative (TT 86–89), and contemporary cosmological theories (TT ch. 5).19 These and other texts demonstrate that Bersani’s work, queer and otherwise, is marked by a profound suspicion of difference. Because our extant onto-political regime has demanded our orientation toward difference as that which is good, desirable, and ethical, the concept of “sameness” remains largely unthought. To take on this task is of some urgency, for, as Bersani writes, “It seems that the only way we can love the other or the external world is to find ourselves somehow in it. Only then might there be a nonviolent relation to the world that doesn’t seek to exterminate difference” (IRG 43). The ethical imperative in his career-long thinking of sameness and difference concerns the violence that, as psychoanalysis posits, inevitably accompanies our relation to otherness. Thinking of the two modes of subject-constitution postulated by Freud—nonsexual sadism and originary masochism (relived in derived sadism)—Bersani recurrently wonders whether we can even imagine what “a nonsadistic type of movement,” “a nonsadistic relation to external reality” might look like (AI 147; CS 69; see also AI 6; CS 69; TT 1). An incipient answer is proposed already in “Persons in Pieces”: “homosexuality,” imagined as an expression of ontological homoness, is where we can begin to think alternatives to the sadism that both the egoism of nonsexual aggression and the egolessness of sexual shattering produce.

For a discussion of these aspects of Bersani’s onto-ethics of narcissism, see Tuhkanen, “Passion.” For a differently slanted account of homo-narcissism, see Bruhm.

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As Bersani continues, in his typically speculative mode: “The homosexual, perhaps even the homosexual as a category (what I have called ‘homoness’) rather than as a person … might be the model for correspondences of being that are by no mean limited to relations among persons” (IRG 43). This is because homoness—both as a psychological and ontological mode—gives us a nonlacking onto-ethics/aesthetics, what Bersani hopes is an alternative theory and practice of being.

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If there circulates an appellation for Leo Bersani as a thinker, he is known as a (queer) theorist of sexuality—the sexuality that shatters the subject, confining it to the chic solipsism of “the antisocial.” Yet from early on, and increasingly in his later work, he tends to relinquish “sexuality” in favor of another mode of leaving the self and dissolving the social, one that he variously calls “sociability,” “solidarity,” “corresponding,” “homoness,” and “the aesthetic.” The move beyond the sexual is inspired by two considerations. First, Bersani agrees with Michel Foucault’s argument that, in modernity, sexuality constitutes a part of an apparatus (dispositif) that colonizes, and by colonizing fabricates, the subject by assuming a secret interiority that determines her intelligibility. Sexuality may be a concept hopelessly corrupted by its deployment in the modern biopolitical regimes; hence, it is imperative to deprivilege it as a category through which we make sense of our being in the world, an operation that legitimizes our circulation in the social field. Second, exploring his sources—mostly, works of art of various genres—Bersani begins to suspect that, while the self ’s undoing in ébranlement may constitute, as he puts it toward the end of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), “our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence” (IRG 30), it is often sought in scenes where the subject would witness the suffering of others. The radical passivity into which the sexual “plunges” us, rendering us “antisocial” (IRG 30, 93), is achieved at the cost of the world’s repeated annihilation. Consequently, we must cultivate other ways of meeting the world, train ourselves to “move from the erotic … to another mode of connectedness between bodies” (CS 79). The modified emphasis is announced, for example, in the section names under which the texts collected in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (2010) are organized. As the collective titles suggest, we witness across the essays a shift from “the sexual subject” “toward an aesthetic subject.” While the move from the sexual to the aesthetic becomes more pronounced in Bersani’s post-1980s texts, it always already inflects his thinking. Indeed, its first occasion is strictly coincident with the very articulation of the theory

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of ébranlement. This takes place in Bersani’s encounter with psychoanalytic theory, and more precisely Jean Laplanche’s reading of Freud, in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976). Already this primal scene is marked by his self-professed “ambivalen[ce]” (FA 8) about the aspects of the Freudian description of subject-constitution that Laplanche explicates in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). These hesitations issue partially from the lessons Bersani gleans from Foucault’s emergent account of modern biopolitics in such texts as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1976) and La volonté de savoir (1977).1 Yet, as I have suggested in previous chapters, parallel to Foucault’s more famous account, Bersani develops his own description of modern subjectivity through his reading of aesthetic texts. Taking his cues particularly from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, he observes the modes in which the self is made in its encounters with the world and begins to outline the ethical ramifications of the ways in which we have been trained to meet otherness. This chapter traces the emergence and elaboration of “the aesthetic subject” in the Bersanian oeuvre, particularly in the mode of what Bersani comes to call “sociability.” “Sociability” names a manner of our being-in-the-world that supplements “sexuality.” As Foucault, too, proposes, the modern episteme is sustained by an ongoing disciplinary-biopolitical program, an apparatus that seeks to confirm our extant modes of being, our ways of making our selves with our others. But alternate modes inhere in the apparatus. Foucault suggests that same-sex friendships, particularly as they are enabled by the most normative of environments, may precipitate the creation or actualization of “affective and relational virtualities” that escape the logic of the institutions that made them possible (“Friendship” 138).2 Bersani similarly suggests in a series of texts that modern modes of subjectivation, brought to something like their logical conclusion in the fascist social bond, can be dissolved by pleasures where the self ’s becoming does not demand the world’s devastation. Such reorientation requires an artful ascesis: we must be “deprogrammed” of our habitual ways of approaching the world (CS 94), a project that would counter “the massive training” we have received in being and desiring (Bersani and Dutoit, “Merde” 27 / RB 7). It will be, as Bersani often puts it, echoing Gilles Deleuze’s description of Marcel’s “search” in Proust and Signs (1964), an “apprenticeship” (see FA 314; DSM 3; H 6; CS 69; IRG 44, 69).

Bersani provides an early introduction of Foucault to Anglo-American audiences in “The Subject of Power” (1977), his review essay of Surveiller et punir and La volonté de savoir. 2 For a sustained discussion of this aspect of Foucault’s work, one that also engages Bersani, see Roach. 1

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I here follow the elaboration of this program by Bersani, observing what can be called the “structural affinities” in his description of the interplay of sexuality and sociability in such texts as A Future for Astyanax, “Merde Alors” (1980), The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), and “Sociability and Cruising” (2002).3 In these texts, Bersani suggests that works of art model for us the disentangling of our being from pleasures in which we are perhaps ontologically implicated—pleasures that psychoanalysis designates as “the sexual.” In Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1977), his cinematic rethinking of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, for example, experiments with the possibility of “an easy and radically frivolous turning away” from the intensive delectations of “torture and murder” that Sade suggests keep us enthralled (“Merde” 29 / RB 11). Pasolini does not “redeem” us from our implication in Proustian-sadistic pleasures; he does not stage in Salò a pastoral alternative to the noxious hell of Sadean Sodom. Instead, he faithfully retells Sade’s stories so as to draw out occasions for enjoyments that have inhered, unactualized, in the original narratives. By offering us such distractive pleasures, he appeals to our “radical frivolity,” the way in which we are by nature—“at the root”—easily sidetracked from main storylines to marginal points, readily slip from the significant to the merely enjoyable. Our “radical frivolity” may yet save us from our fascination with suffering. Another laboratory for trying out this thesis is ancient Assyrian art. The Assyrian reliefs that Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit analyze in The Forms of Violence demonstrate how we can be seduced onto “interstitial” pathways crisscrossing the thematically centered narratives, which enthrall us with their depictions of devastating violence. I propose that we compare the ontoethical promise of Pasolini’s and Assyrians’ art to the untimely potential of what modern evolutionary theory has called “spandrels.” Bersani’s readings of art (supplemented by observations drawn from Georg Simmel’s sociology and gay men’s sexual subcultures) provide elaborations of sorts of the suggestions Foucault made, toward the end of his life, concerning modes of being that function at the limit of our contemporary episteme. Bersani’s experimentations with philosophy and art parallel Foucault’s emergent, and unfinished, program to “create ourselves as a work of art,”

Originally published in Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious (2002), “Sociability and Cruising” is reprinted in IRG 45–62. Co-written with Ulysse Dutoit, “Merde Alors” appeared originally in the journal October (13 [Summer 1980]: 22–35) and was reprinted two years later in Stanford Italian Review (2.2 [Fall 1982]: 82–95). It has recently appeared in Bersani’s Receptive Bodies (2018). Page references will be given both to the original publication and Receptive Bodies.

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a program in which it is “oneself, one’s life, one’s existence” to which “one must apply aesthetic values” (Foucault, “On the Genealogy” 262, 271). Both thinkers locate a pressure point of our extant episteme in homosexuality, but a homosexuality that is yet to be invented: as Foucault puts it, rather than proudly recognize our gayness, we must work toward “becoming homosexual” (“Friendship” 136). His own description, in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” evokes the role of aesthetics in this process: he speaks of the “multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing forms” (137) to which the work of becoming-homosexual should attune us, an aesthetic orientation that has been particularly pronounced in Bersani’s work.

Fascist Pleasures As we observed in the previous chapter, Bersani’s engagement with psychoanalysis begins in A Future for Astyanax, and particularly its final chapter, “Persons in Pieces.” There Bersani, first, adopts the groundbreaking analysis of Freudian theory that Laplanche provides in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis and, second, puts the Freudian-Laplanchean account in dialogue with Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954) and Jean de Berg’s The Image (1956). For Bersani, Réage’s and Berg’s texts illustrate the two theories of the human subject’s emergence between which Freud anxiously toggled throughout his career. On the one hand, we have what Freud calls “nonsexual sadism,” the postures of aggressive control that allow the child to parry with, and hopefully deflect, the world’s assault on his incipient being. This position coincides with that of Réage’s heterosexual protagonists, who, in torturing their partners, remain detached from the S&M tableaux staged for them. But Laplanche argues that, in positing “nonsexual sadism” as the human subject’s originary mode of encountering otherness, Freud betrayed his own paradigmshifting insight about sexuality’s foundational role in becoming-human. For Laplanche, once we assent to the properly psychoanalytic understanding of human ontology, we cannot speak of anything “nonsexual,” for sexuality is the name for the wayward process—the going-astray (fourvoiement)—of hominization (Life 90). In contrast to the cool-headed torturers of Story of O, Berg’s masters and mistresses are profoundly shaken by the sight of the bottoms’ agony. Bersani identifies their painful-pleasurable trembling with the infectious jouissance that Laplanche, in his commentary on Freud, calls the incipient subject’s “ébranlement” in primary masochism (Vie 154 / Life 91). As they witness and identify with the scenes of pain, these subjects recall their own originary undoing in the experience that psychoanalysis suggests is “sexuality.” Conceptualized in this way, the subject seeks or stages scenes of

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violence in order to access, through identification, the intensive suffering that constituted his or her first experiences of consciousness. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani invokes this model to explain the gleeful, sadistic fascination with which people witnessed, and celebrated, the dying of young men during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. It was not merely that a puritanical society deemed the catastrophe a suitable punishment for perverts; linked in the cultural imagination to the experience of boundless sexuality, the suffering evoked in its witnesses the unbearable pleasures of their originary jouissance. With the publication of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” the argument about the self ’s undoing in ébranlement—and the potential of this experience to be cultivated into “our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence” (IRG 30)— emerged as one of the tools for early queer theory to formulate questions of sex and politics. What remained unnoted were Bersani’s consistent prevarications concerning the onto-ethical implications of “projected masochism.” This ambivalence had been strikingly articulated some years before, in the 1980 essay “Merde Alors.” Bersani and Dutoit’s meditation on sexuality, sadism, and fascism in Sade and Pasolini not only explicates these hesitations—largely absent from the 1987 essay—with remarkable clarity, but also exhibits a move that becomes more pronounced in Bersani’s later work: a shift whereby sexuality’s ébranlement is abandoned, or at least deemphasized, in an effort to think an alternative mode of connectedness, one that Bersani comes to designate with such terms as “sociability” and “the aesthetic.” As much as Bersani elaborated on the Freudian theory of hominization by engaging Réage’s and Berg’s novels in “Persons in Pieces,” in “Merde Alors” he and Dutoit draw out the implications of psychoanalytic thought through a discussion of other aesthetic texts. They propose that the human condition that Freud outlines in such texts as “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” (1919), and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) is illustrated in the depictions, in The 120 Days of Sodom, of the pleasures of torture to which Sade gave his name. The excitement of Sade’s executioners at the sight of their victims anticipates Freud’s argument according to which the pain inflicted on the victim can be “enjoyed masochistically by the [sadist] through his identification of himself with the suffering object” (Freud, “Instincts” 126, qtd. in “Merde Alors” 24 / RB 3–4). In his close-readerly commentary, Laplanche suggests that, while Freud thinks he is addressing a peculiarity of sexual life, he is in fact sketching human ontology: sexuality names the ways in which the subject accesses pleasure by identifying with the agony he witnesses. On this account, sexuality becomes “a tautology for masochism” (“Merde” 25 / RB 5), an idea whose importance for Bersani is indicated by the frequent repetition of the phrase in his subsequent texts (see “Representation” 7; FrB 39, 89; CR 36; IRG 24).

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While this formulation is familiar from queer-theoretical discussions— where it has figured as the ground for what we might call “the ethics of sexual shattering”—the relative neglect of texts like “Merde Alors” has guaranteed that the implications of this model, which Bersani and Dutoit immediately point to, have not entered queer theory’s varied debates around “the antisocial thesis.” As Bersani and Dutoit observe, if sexuality, as the name for primary masochism, is vicariously enjoyed through identification with an other’s pain, the repetition of its pleasures is dependent on the continuing witnessing of such torture. If this is so, we would logically seek to precipitate scenes through which we can relive our originary trembling. “If erotic stimulation depends on the perceived or fantasized commotion of others,” Bersani and Dutoit write, “it becomes reasonable to put others into a state of maximal commotion” (“Merde” 24 / RB 3). What they note about the consequences of such identificatory ethics echoes observations made by commentators in other scholarly fields. For example, critics of nineteenthcentury sentimental fiction have not only noted the ethical problem of the exclusionary mechanisms of identification on which such texts’ reception depends—the politics of sentimentalism work only on behalf of those whose sorrows the readers can assume as their own—but also argued that the tragedies on which their narratives pivot may capture the audience with the same voyeuristic pleasures with which scenes of violence often enthrall spectators. On this reading, “sympathy” and “empathy” are in fact modes of enjoyment, of relishing the other’s suffering.4 A similar intuition prompts Susan Sontag’s doubts about representations of the Holocaust in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975). Sontag suggests that our motivations in

As Bersani writes in 1981 about the ethics and politics of “sympathy”:

4

The value of our capacity to identify sympathetically with the pain or suffering of others has of course generally been taken for granted. It has been assumed that this capacity is central both to our responses to art and to our capacity for moral behavior. But a reading of Laplanche’s reading of Freud may suggest to us that “sympathy” always includes a trace of sexual pleasure, and that this pleasure is inescapably masochistic. If this is the case, there is a certain risk in all sympathetic projections: the pleasure which accompanies them promotes a secret attachment to scenes of suffering. The very operation of sympathy partially undermines the moral solidarity which we like to think of as its primary effect. (“Representation” 9; see also FV 38) Thus, as he continues, “the psychic mechanism which allows for what is rightly called humane or morally liberal responses to scenes of suffering or violence is, intrinsically, somewhat dysfunctional” (“Representation” 9). For considerations of sympathy along these lines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Marshall; and Jaffe. On representation, violence, and otherness, see also Hartman; Palumbo-Liu; and Rice.

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recalling the Nazi atrocities should be subjected to an assiduous examination, lest we are swept up by what she calls the “sexual lure of fascism” (101). In his fiction and essays on the uncanny malaise that permeates life in postwar Europe, W. G. Sebald similarly seeks to imagine ways of addressing the twentieth-century catastrophe of modernity in a way that would avoid the erotic fascination with its spectacles of suffering. Bersani and Dutoit’s psychoanalytic model suggests that our tortured involvement in tableaux of violence bespeaks not what we usually mean by “empathy,” but a voyeuristic enjoyment. Yet it is not only that scenes of brutality appeal to the spectator with the erotic thrill of the other’s suffering. If this was the extent of the charge, we might, with some consciousness raising, be trained toward a different world of desire, one where our sexuality— psychoanalytically speaking, our being—would be, to use the Bersanian idiom, “redeemed” from its implication in violence, from its degradation as a modern perversion. Much like scholars admonishing us to divest our political imagination of the indulgences of sentimentalism, we would be asked to bring to an end the sadistic cultural practices in which we have unknowingly participated. This is an argument that Bersani, in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” goes on to identify in Catharine MacKinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s radical-feminist projects. What he appreciates about their antipornography polemics is the way in which MacKinnon and Dworkin flaunt the courage of their convictions: indicating that “so-called normal sexuality is already pornographic” (IRG 20)—that what is euphemized as loving sexual contact between men and women is inherently hierarchical and demeaning—they propose that before we can ever have sex again, our bodies’ ways of accessing pleasure must be reconfigured. Before such reinvention, heterosexual sex must in its entirety, and always, be identified with the violence of rape.5 Having adopted from Laplanche the Freudian account of subjectconstitution as originally masochistic—a primal pleasure that is subsequently repeated in the sadist’s identification with the masochist’s pain—Bersani recognizes, and agrees with, MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s argument concerning sexuality’s radical implication in suffering. He calls this later “the human fascination with the spectacle of violence” (CS 94). Yet he departs from their company in his refusal to go along with the suggestion that sex is redeemable. This is a proposal that, according to him, organizes much of LGBT studies’ theorization of sexuality. Indeed, the value of MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work is in their radicalization of arguments whose more palatable versions were offered by many better-assimilated contributors to the theories

On MacKinnon and Dworkin, see IRG 19–22.

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of sexuality that began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Foucault, for example, arguably proposes an idea similar to MacKinnon’s when, at the end of the introductory volume to The History of Sexuality, he calls for a move toward “a different economy of bodies and pleasures,” one not beholden to “the ruses of sexuality” (History 1.159), as a potential way of bringing to an end “the monarchy of sex” (“End”). In Bersani’s terms, Foucault, like MacKinnon and Dworkin, is imagining “the redemptive reinvention of sex” (IRG 22). As such, he becomes, along with a number of other theorists of sexuality, a contributor to what Bersani will call, in the title of his 1990 book, our “culture of redemption.”6 Bersani’s psychoanalytic ontology may remind us of another influential twentieth-century account of catastrophic modernity. While Bersani never mentions the text, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947) makes an argument about Western Enlightenment whose logic, if not all implications, coincides with the one that organizes the reading that Bersani develops from Laplanche and Freud. Writing their account as the full scope of Nazi terrors were becoming clear, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that what took place in 1930s and 1940s Europe was not a catastrophic aberration of the Enlightenment project; rather, the “perfectibility” that Rousseau and Hegel had identified in the humankind of Enlightenment modernity had found its telos in Auschwitz. Thus, as much as we must understand MacKinnon’s “indictment against pornography … [as] an indictment against sex itself ” (IRG 21), Horkheimer and Adorno assert that, rather than an unforeseen monstrosity, the Third Reich constitutes the Enlightenment project’s logical culmination. Marked by a rageful energy that recalls Bersani’s tone as he writes, in 1987, about the revelatory nature of the response to AIDS, their indictment against fascism constitutes an indictment against Enlightenment itself. Horkheimer and Adorno’s work emerges as an important context particularly for “Merde Alors,” where at stake, as in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is the uncanniness—the familiar strangeness—of fascism. As Bersani and Dutoit argue, in resituating Sade’s fantasies of torture in the context of fascist Italy, Pasolini’s Salò “suggests that modern fascism is the (belated) form of political organization most congenial to Sade’s theory of sexuality” (“Merde” 25–26 / RB 5). This argument follows Bersani and Dutoit’s claim that The 120 Days of Sodom provides an exceptionally clear affirmation of the human ontology that Freud will describe in his productively untidy account of subject-constitution. If Sade’s exaggerations seem preposterous to us, they are so only to the same

On queer theory’s “pastoral imaginations,” see also Bersani, “Rigorously” 282.

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extent that, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the Nazi regime has been deemed an obscene aberration in the triumphal unfolding of the Enlightenment project. Despite our self-protective efforts at denial, we must see in Sade the truth of human ontology, as much as we must consider the Third Reich the homeland of Western modernity. In this way, Pasolini’s project in Salò is analogous to Horkheimer and Adorno’s mission to reveal our intolerable implication in terror. By depriving Sade’s novel of its most grotesque, and hence alienating, aspects, Pasolini forces us to face our onto-ethical involvement in what we eagerly condemn as the unrecognizable, unrepeatable error of fascism. In relocating Sade to Mussolini’s Italy, he suggests that “if sexuality is intrinsically masochistic, it requires a Fascist state” (“Merde” 26 / RB 5–6).7 If, for Horkheimer and Adorno, Enlightenment modernity is not perverted by but accurately expressed in fascism, Bersani and Dutoit propose that a fascist society is the perfect, perhaps inevitable, expression of sexuality. But the modernity whose culmination Horkheimer and Adorno find in fascism constitutes what Foucault would call an “episteme,” not an unmovable truth. Bersani and Dutoit propose that to rethink the pleasurable eradication— what Bersani also calls, suggestively for our context, the “exterminat[ion]” (IRG 43; see also IRG 183)—of otherness that motivates fascist annihilation, we need “a convincing theory of nonmimetic sexuality  … a theory which could account for sexual excitement in terms no longer monopolized by the fantasy-representations of the excitement of others” (“Merde” 26 / RB 7). It would behoove us to develop a practicable program where our pleasure is not dependent on the kind of fascination with the other’s suffering that scholars have identified in the empathy evoked by sentimental fiction and that Sontag condemns as the sexiness in representations of fascism. As Bersani and Dutoit immediately note, the problem in this project may concern the enormity of the task. Given “the massive training which we receive in the art of mimetic stimulation, a training which surely provides the cultural ‘ground’ for psychoanalytic theories of fantasy as a sexualizing replication of the world,” our efforts at purifying our pleasures of violence would face overwhelming odds (“Merde” 27 / RB 7). Later, speaking of the unspent potential in Proust’s descriptions of his protagonist’s orientation in the world, they similarly point to “what is undoubtedly a long, difficult and perhaps rarely successful apprenticeship in a nonsadistic relation to external reality” (CS 69); if an infant is called into the world by an other on whom she depends for her life, “the paranoid aggression that is [the] consequence [of this solicitation] cannot be wholly erased” (CS 94).

In Receptive Bodies, “requires” is de-italicized and “Fascist” de-capitalized.

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It is Bersani’s psychoanalytic bent that alerts him to the normatively utopian resonances of all gestures toward “a radically revised imagination of the body’s capacity for pleasure” (IRG 22). Laplanche never entertains the thought that “primary masochism” might constitute a recuperable error—that with enough collective will and pedagogical ingenuity (say, in reorganizing infant care) we might disentangle ourselves from our constitutive jouissance. Similarly, while Bersani agrees with MacKinnon and Dworkin that pornographic obscenities must be identified with what passes for normal heterosexual sex in patriarchal societies, he refuses their argument’s redemptive double. Rather, for him, violence inheres in “normal” sexuality: in spite of what our deeply entrenched “pastoral impulse” (IRG 22) would have us believe, it is not possible to return from such fallen practices to any prelapsarian modes of sexual congress. Yet, unlike Laplanche, Bersani does suggest that, while we will remain ontologically embedded in masochistic sexuality, we can, and must, invent modes of being that supplement our death-driven pleasure. His discussion of Story of O in the final chapter of A Future for Astyanax offers an early example of such supplementation. In ways that we saw in the previous chapter, Bersani locates an ethical counterpart to the cool, detached torturers of Réage’s novel in the shattered beings of Berg’s The Image, but he also notes that in Story of O the intensive relations determined by sexual difference—the unbridgeable gulf between men and women—allow an alternative mode of desiring: the worshipful relationship that develops between René and Sir Stephen. As he points out, René contemplates the older man with a pleasure—a “nonsexual idolatry” (FA 293)—entirely different from the torture that organizes the novel’s scenes of heterosexual jouissance. He argues that René’s attraction to Sir Stephen is enabled by the regime of (hetero)sexuality that produces scenes of sadomasochistic torture. It is not that René’s homo-desire emerges in opposition to the violent hetero-sexual desires that drive other characters. Rather, Bersani proposes, it is this organization of desire toward unfathomable (sexual) difference that unintentionally frames the space in which René’s samesex attraction can operate without sexuality’s sadomasochistic intensities. “I’m intrigued by nonsexual intimacy,” Bersani says in a recent interview. “… We should try to think of forms of intimacy that are nonsexual forms of connectedness, that may be sensual without being sexual” (“Rigorously” 284). The fleeting observation he makes of René’s “nonsexual idolatry” of the older man constitutes an early example of this orientation, which complicates, already in A Future for Astyanax, his account of sexual ébranlement. Even before Bersani posits the problematic with the help of Sade, Pasolini, and Assyrian art, Réage’s protagonist offers a tentatively affirmative answer to his question whether we can even imagine a “nonsadistic type of movement”

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(AI 6, 147; CS 49, 69; TT 1). If we can get beyond our devastation by the pleasures of projective masochism, it is in the “slantwise” movement that cuts across narratives, bringing out what has remained “virtual” in representation. As much as this movement is exemplified by René’s homo-narcissistic contemplation of the older man, Foucault finds it incipiently actualized in same-sex friendships enabled by homosocial institutions. Bersani locates further examples in the “other eroticism,” “other forms of contact” illustrated by the female friendships in Éric Rohmer’s cinema (Bersani and Dutoit, “Rohmer’s” 29, 33). Observing these orientations, in Rohmer and elsewhere, Bersani seeks “the formulation of radically other sexual regimes and radically other moves of consciousness” (FrB 92), that is, the invention of “new relational modes,” which, as he writes in a brief text from 2005, “has been at the heart” of his oeuvre (Bersani and Dutoit, “Response” n. pag.).

To the Side of Objects If “Merde Alors” documents Bersani’s ethical prevarications concerning psychoanalysis and particularly the theory of ébranlement, the essay challenges some of the early queer theorists’ appropriations of this shattered being as an ethical model. Most of such theorists have gleaned their lessons from “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” the essay that accomplished an explicit queering of the onto-ethics Bersani had developed since the 1960s. While in the 1987 essay Bersani emphasizes the ethical potential in shattering, the reading of Sade and Pasolini suggests a darker underside to this dynamic: the ego’s undoing is sought in scenes of the world’s suffering. Indeed, the reading of Salò in “Merde Alors” suggests that the futureless “antisocial” being of recent queer thought shares its “socially dysfunctional” enjoyments with Pasolini’s fascists. Framed in this way, the antisocial homosexual is, to put it bluntly, a proto-Nazi. There is, moreover, no way for us to definitively turn away from fascism’s fascinations. As much as Bersani rejects the redemptive resonances of MacKinnon’s pornographization of heterosexuality, he suggests that we cannot undo our implication in the totalitarianism whose relevance to twentieth-century Europe Pasolini recognizes in Sade. This is the lesson in Bersani’s recurring discussions of fascism’s persistent specter in modern thought and art: our pious efforts to distance ourselves from totalitarian seductions only entangle us more thoroughly in their horrors.8

Apart from “Merde Alors,” Bersani and Dutoit discuss (artworks’ responses to) fascism in FV 3–6, 81–86; AI 181–96; and “George Segal.”

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Yet a distancing of sorts is nevertheless achieved by Pasolini. Sade’s narratives, tightly organized so as to deliver the maximum punch at their climactic moments, are supplemented by Pasolini with a series of distractive features. Amidst the stories of relentless cruelty that are narrated in the film, Salò solicits us with the “lateral divertissements of dance, music, and painting” (“Merde” 29 / RB 10). Bersani and Dutoit point to moments where the viewer can relinquish her gaze (and ear) from the story to observe a certain repetition of aesthetic forms across the diegetic space: the same music in the soundtrack accompanies two different scenes; a shape of an object is replicated in the screen’s framing at another moment; terpsichorean movements are performed by several characters and then the camera itself on various occasions (30 / RB 12–13). These repetitions constitute “imperfectly symmetrical” moments: “One event evokes the other, but with a disquieting difference” (31 / RB 13). Devoid of psychological meaning, these replicative movements seduce us with the pleasure of another way of looking and desiring. This pleasure is not a utopian alternative to the Sadean torture; it does not negate the violence celebrated in Pasolini’s source material. Rather, the pleasures Bersani and Dutoit evoke are produced by the Sadean mise-en-scène: they emerge as something like the unintentional byproducts of the original narrative arcs. Thus, rather than pretending to refuse our sadomasochistic ontology, “Pasolini’s most original strategy in Salò is to distance himself from his Sadean protagonists by going along with them” (“Merde” 30 / RB 12). If our seduction by the teleological organization of Sade’s narratives indicates that—as Laura Mulvey writes— “[s]adism demands a story” (22), Salò shows us that “there is almost always something else going on” (“Merde” 29 / RB 12). To disengage us from fascist horrors, Pasolini appeals to the spectator’s “radically frivolous” tendencies (29 / RB 11): The saving frivolity with which we simply go on looking creates a consciousness of looking as, first, part of our inescapable implication in the word’s violence and, secondly, a promiscuous mobility thanks to which our mimetic appropriations of the world are constantly being continued elsewhere and therefore do not require the satisfyingly climactic destruction of any part of the world. (31–32 / RB 14; see also FrB 54)

In The Forms of Violence, Bersani and Dutoit, expanding on their earlier commentary, find in ancient sculpture—Assyrian palace reliefs— experimentations with modes of being different from the ones whose

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paradigmatic shape are given to us by Sade and Proust.9 The Assyrian artists present us with compelling narratives that celebrate their countrymen’s exploits of war and hunting. The reliefs are exemplars in the art of spectatorial seduction: the stories are visually organized so that “we are irresistibly drawn to the point of maximal violence” (FV 8). In this way, the reliefs share with The 120 Days of Sodom “a calculated movement toward explosive climaxes” (“Merde” 28 / RB 9). The spectatorial pleasure we find in the reliefs is not only that of observing the conquerors’ and hunters’ triumphs but also that of witnessing the various ways in which men and beasts suffer and die. Much like Sade, Assyrian art exemplifies “the affinities between violence and the way in which we organize experience in order to make sense of it” (FV 40)— an organization that, per Freud and Laplanche, enables the jouissance of our projective masochism.10 However, as much as Pasolini teaches us that “there is almost always something else going on” beyond the narratives of torture, we find in the Assyrian reliefs that “things are going on from one form to another which have little to do with the anecdotal sense of the scene” (FV 47). As in Salò, another mode of representation—and, hence, pleasure—unfolds amidst their violent stories. “Assyrian artists,” Bersani and Dutoit claim, “are unique in their subversion of visual story and their emphasis on formal play”: while constructing compelling narratives to enthrall our gaze, they have also devised “extraordinarily ingenious strategies for diverting our attention from the stories thus emphasized” (FV 9). As they do in their reading of Pasolini’s film, Bersani and Dutoit follow the repetition of forms, lines, and figures across the narratives of conquest: a spear is extended in a line that draws a bar in cage; a horse’s hoof is replicated in the figure of a leaf; the side of a ladder is so positioned next to an arm that a triangle emerges from the background, repeated elsewhere. These repetitions instigate “our perceptual wandering from one part of a scene to another” (FV 14). Bersani and Dutoit suggest that, were we taught to look for such “profusion of forms” (FV 14), we might follow, and get our pleasure from, these transversal connections instead of the narratives that are most likely to monopolize our attention. Such connections

“Merde Alors” is not the only place where Bersani and Dutoit discuss Sade. Their analysis is anticipated by Bersani’s brief commentary on Sade (embedded, as in “Merde Alors,” in a discussion of Freud) in the 1978 essay “The Other Freud” (41–42); The 120 Days of Sodom makes a further appearance in Bersani’s essay “Representation and Its Discontents” (1981) and the subsequent study The Forms of Violence (FV 38–41); the reading of Sade and Pasolini in “Merde Alors” reappears in Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986) (FrB 41–43, 51–54). 10 As in “Merde Alors,” Bersani and Dutoit, in their discussion of Assyrian art, turn to Laplanche’s reading of Freud: FV 31–34, 37–38. 9

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offer something other than the expectation of explosive climaxes, which depend on “the narrative immobilization of privileged scenes”; they distract the viewer’s gaze by “a disruptive mobility of attention” (FV 110). We are not redeemed from our implication in violence; rather, the mode of terror shifts so that we may learn to enjoy “a kind of esthetic ‘violence’: the agitation of multiple contacts producing multiple forms” (FV 20).11 Bersani’s purpose in teaching us to look for the “lateral divertissements” that unfold in Pasolini and the reliefs coincides with the one that in evolutionary theory motivates Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin’s account of “spandrels.”12 In architectural theory, spandrels are geometric forms that emerge as unintentional configurations in built spaces, figurations that, while arising out of the exigencies of design, can assume other uses, often aesthetic ones. The classic example is the triangular shape that is constituted between the side of an arch, a wall, and a ceiling, an interstitial space that, as the dome of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice demonstrates, is frequently decorated. In formulating spandrel theory, Gould and Lewontin sought to contest evolutionary theory’s adaptationist models, which tended to regard all superfluous or unintended phenomena either in terms of uncompleted or failed processes of adaptation, or as insignificant enough to be entirely overlooked. Instead, they wanted to conceptualize evolutionary becoming according to a variant temporality, one that would not dismiss As is frequently the case in Bersani’s work, we find the argument—concerning the “radical frivolousness” disorganizing the deadly serious subject matter of Salò and Assyrian art— prefigured in his earlier texts. For example, in a brief commentary on Charles Baudelaire in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), Bersani observes the ways in which scholars’ tendency to seek a “coherent psychological skeleton under his work” (BB 153) is salubriously stymied by the mismatch between the poet’s weighty subject matter (death, crime, damnation) and his writerly style: “in Les Fleurs du mal a certain frivolity is perhaps the most serious Baudelairean note” (BB 152). In this way, Baudelaire anticipates contemporary fiction, where “frivolity”—the term recurs again—becomes a way to defy “[t]he critic’s hunger for significance” (BB 13). His work beneficially straddles philosophy and literature, disallowing our eagerness for the kind of significance that we have been taught to look for in philosophical discourse. Baudelaire is an example of the way in which “[l]iterature is philosophy entertainingly performing the reasons for its own radical frivolity … Literature liberates to the extent that it takes the risk of undermining its obviously enormous investment in reliable descriptions and settled understanding” (“Subject” 12). Art is supplementary to philosophy, in the way that Pasolini’s frivolity supplements Sade’s grim sex. It activates our “essentially promiscuous attention, that is, an attention always ready to swerve to the sides of its objects and linger over insignificant, irrelevant, and yet sensually appealing digressive activities” (“Other” 36). It is this movement to “the side of objects” (Bersani frequently uses this phrase: see also DSM 60; FV 66; CR 26) that may counterbalance our entanglement in sadistic pleasures. 12 See Gould and Lewontin; for further elaboration, see Gould, “Exaptive”; and Structure esp. ch. 11. 11

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spandrels as “mistakes.” In their challenge to contemporary Darwinists, they proposed that, while spandrels may come into being as surplus matter or space, their function should not be determined by the exigencies of selective adaptation, the dominant mode in which evolution has been theorized since Darwin. As Gould observes, “the principle of spandrels suggests that a high percentage of traits now contributing in important ways to fitness arose for no adaptive reason at all, but rather as automatic side consequences of other forces” (Structure 1258). If spandrels “arise nonadaptively as secondary consequences … but then become available for later cooptation to useful function in the subsequent history in evolutionary lineage” (Gould, “Exaptive” 10750), they constitute sites of potentiality. Spandrels are “exaptations,” a term with which Gould and Elisabeth Vrba refer to actors that, having “evolved for other usages (or [like spandrels] for no function at all),” were “later ‘coopted’ for their current role” (Gould and Vrba 6). As such, spandrels are, to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s term, “untimely,” unzeitgemäße: their function must be considered not according to any presumed originary purpose—the error of thought Nietzsche renounced in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)—or contemporary usefulness, but in terms of what they may become, their unspent potential. Gould evokes Nietzsche in his discussion of spandrels: “Through the principle of quirky functional shift, and Nietzsche’s discordance between reasons for current utility and sources of historical origin, our understanding of how a current trait works cannot elucidate its mode of origin” (Structure 1258).13 To avoid this fallacy, we must allow the thought of untimeliness. In the sense in which evolutionary theory uses the term, untimeliness names the potential of monsters, which—if they survive—either await a future constellation that would activate their dormancies or precipitate the arrival of such futures. In the latter case, spandrels, as exemplars of the untimely, trigger what are called “evolutionary leaps.”14 Echoing Gould’s argument about spandrels, Bersani and Dutoit imply that the transversal repetitions in Assyrian reliefs are spaces of becoming, of a potentiality often missed because of the way in which, given our cultural training, we have framed the world. But we need not think that everyone

As Nietzsche writes, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends” (On the Genealogy 2.12 [513]). See Gould’s further commentary on Nietzsche: Structure 1215– 18, 1249–58. On “the principle of quirky functional shift,” see Gould, Structure 1218–47. 14 On the usefulness of evolutionary theory for understanding politics and becoming, see Grosz, Becoming; Nick; and Time. 13

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has been equally doltish about alternate orientations. Gould writes in 1997 that, like their architectural counterparts, evolutionary spandrels are “not explicitly designed as such but rather aris[e] as an inevitable side consequence of another architectural decision” (“Exaptive” 10751). Yet some years later he comes to question the presumed secondariness of spandrels. Concerning the spandrels of San Marcos, decorated with images of saints, he asks: why must I regard the spandrels as primary nonadaptations constraining a later choice of aptive15 ornamentation? Perhaps the four evangelists represent a primary impetus rather than a secondary accommodation. Perhaps the architect chose to build his church with domes mounted on sets of four rounded arches because he had such a terrific idea for festooning the resulting spandrels of the central dome with mosaics of the four evangelists and the four rivers of Eden. In this case, the spandrels would exist to house the evangelists, and the mosaic designs would become primary adaptations. (Structure 1255)

With the examples of Pasolini and Assyrian art, Bersani and Dutoit similarly allow us to consider this process a conscious part of the artists’ aesthetics, one that has a pedagogical function. Pasolini and the Assyrian sculptors teach us how to look, how to enjoy differently. Rather than mere accidents of design, the “lateral divertissements” that unfold in their work may be the primary purpose for the narratives with which they capture our attention.16 Bersani and Dutoit thus discern an onto-ethical potential in the perspectival shifts inscribed in Pasolini and Assyrian art. Both Pasolini and the Assyrians entice us with something like trick images: while we eagerly follow the violent narratives that constitute Salò’s and the reliefs’ subject matter, our attention can be sidetracked by the aesthetic repetitions that, like the alternative vistas hidden in plain sight in trompe-l’oeil paintings—or spandrels punctuating architectural forms—inhere in the stories. While they read Pasolini’s film as a revision of the ethical nightmare that Sade relishes in The 120 Days of Sodom,

On this concept, see Gould, Structure 1051–53. Like the repetition of aesthetic forms in Assyrian reliefs, René’s homoerotic gaze in Story of O forms an interstitial mode of connectedness, bereft of the kind of significance that motivates the novel’s most compelling stories of desire. René’s attraction to Sir Stephen’s sameness constitutes something of a psychic spandrel, produced by the regime of heterosexual difference that Réage’s and Berg’s novels illustrate. As much as the connective movements of forms in Assyrian palace art are drawn—come to figure—in the interstices of the reliefs’ violent narratives, homo-narcissism emerges as a remainder of sorts in the regime of fascinating difference, of hetero-sexuality.

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the play of forms in ancient art discussed in The Forms of Violence constitutes immanent complications of the ways in which human bodies enable subjects’ access, through pleasure, to the world. Like Sade, Assyrian sculptors give us accounts of torture and pillage that in no way can be understood as critical commentaries: commissioned by the rulers, the reliefs are unambiguous in their glorification of the exploits by the armies and hunting parties they depict—no subversive irony here. Yet, while we have to wait for Pasolini’s retelling to detect the “lateral divertissements” that supplement Sade, in Assyrian art this moment of dédoublement is inscribed in the original representations. Like Gould speculating about the artistic intentions behind the Basilica, Bersani and Dutoit suggest that we underestimate the artists’ genius if we take the images’ interstitial figures as mere accidents of composition. Rather, they propose that these artists are schooling us in a different way of looking: we find ourselves “engaged in perceptual moves which undo narrative organizations and prohibit a fascination with the violent stories of Assyrian history” (FV 14). The sculptors teach us ways to disengage from the powerful glamor of narrative violence.

Redemptive Rhythms In Bersani’s later work, a different appellation emerges for the dynamic exemplified in René’s homo-narcissistic attraction to Sir Stephen, Pasolini’s distraction of spectatorial attention, and the Assyrian sculptors’ construction of interstitial, spandrel-like forms: “sociability.” While the term circulates in his earlier work, the concept comes into full focus with his consideration of Georg Simmel’s sociology in “Sociability and Cruising” (2002). In the essay, Bersani draws from Simmel’s account of the evanescent and artful forms of interaction that emerge from the more institutionalized practices of goal-oriented, profitdriven social routines. Echoing Gould’s speculations about the primacy of spandrels in architectural design, Simmel suggests that profit-oriented social intercourse is secretly motivated by what he calls “sociability drive.” He writes in “Sociability” (1911) that, while people join groups and engage each other for various reasons and with varied goals in mind, inevitably an “impulse to sociability [Geselligkeitstriebe]” begins to speak in them, as if vicariously borrowing the occasions of motivated association (128 / “Soziologie” 2).17 The English translation of “Soziologie der Geselligkeit” was originally published in 1949 as “The Sociology of Sociability.” It is reprinted, as “Sociability,” in the collection On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), from where Bersani cites the text. “Geselligkeitstriebe” is italicized and given in the plural in the German original.

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Simmel claims that, after it has infiltrated the purposeful associative action, the sociable impulse drains the activity of its content in order to delight in the forms themselves: what remains is “the pure, abstract play of form” (129). If the content of a conversation is “merely the indispensable carrier [der unentbehrliche Träger]” of sociable talk (“Sociability” 136 / “Soziologie” 11), sociability is something of a parasite: having insinuated itself into the forms of social interaction, it ultimately comes to inhabit what is only an empty husk of its host. But Simmel suggests that it is in such parasitic forms that we can observe the truth of human interaction. Sociability, he writes, gives us the “essence” of relatedness, uncontaminated by the usual motives that drive groups: “the impulse to sociability distils, as it were, out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association, of the associative process as a value and a satisfaction” (128). This “essence” can be actualized only if its “carrier” disengages from the relations that have not only plugged her into the social world but constituted her in the first place. In entering a scene of sociability, the subject becomes less than she used to be; for sociability to thrive, its subjects must withdraw from their fully constituted selves, must consent to relinquishing the connections that have enriched their lives. As Bersani writes, the gesellig subject is a “self-subtracted being” (IRG 48), an agent of lessness, who discovers in sociability the particular pleasure gained from the restriction of the personal: the pleasure of the associative process itself, of a pure relationality which, beyond or before the satisfaction of particular needs or interests, may be at once the ground, the motive[,] and the goal of all relations. (IRG 46)

For Bersani, “sexuality” consists of interested, goal-oriented action, such as we see exemplified in Marcel’s search for the secrets withheld by the women he loves, or in Sade’s and Assyrian art’s narratives, whose rigid organizations promise to reward us with climactic jouissance. “Sociability,” on the other hand, emerges when we learn to subtract “sexuality” from our motivations. “Sociability,” writes Bersani in “Sociability and Cruising,” “is a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire” (IRG 45). In this formulation, “desire” designates the fascination exerted by the enigmas of otherness, which compel the subject to look for the obfuscated secret of his being in the outside world, the form of desiring relationality that Bersani finds in Proust. In the related terms that he and Dutoit use in their rethinking of psychoanalysis with Sade, Pasolini, and Assyrian art, “desire” constitutes the pull of narratives in whose dénouements we re-experience the jouissance of our originary undoing. Unmarked by such fascinations, “sociability” gives

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us a form of being together that does not seek to solve the other’s enigma or witness, in order to identify with, her jouissance on the rack of sexual torture. The narratives that are likely to capture our attention in Salò and Assyrian reliefs—the narratives that we have been taught to look for—are supplemented by a repetition of aesthetic forms: inaccurate echoes of sounds, figures, lines, and movements. As the byproducts of purposeful action, the empty forms that come into being in the interstices of aim-oriented narration, they constitute spandrels. They solicit something Bersani and Dutoit, in their study of Assyrian art, call “interstitial sensuality” (FV 108),18 a sociability beyond sexuality.19 Not just any scene of gossip, any afternoon at the salon, any random hookup, constitutes sociable contact. Simmel insists on the necessary artfulness of sociability. Sociability must exhibit “good form” (“Sociability” 129); rather than “mere chatter [Geschwätz],” it is composed of—as he restates his case in a chapter in Grundfragen der Soziologie: Individuum und Gesellschaft (1917)—“the art of conversation that has its own, artistic laws” (Simmel, Sociology 52 / Grundfragen 115). Sociable existence is necessarily, in the way that Foucault uses this idea, “an aesthetics.” It must be cultivated: accessing the pleasures of sociability—rendering oneself available to nonsignifying spandrels—requires a certain training. This is no light undertaking; the aesthetics of existence constitutes, as Bersani writes elsewhere, “a big

As Bersani and Dutoit write parenthetically in The Forms of Violence (FV 134n26), the idea of “interstitial sensuality” is further developed in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé and The Freudian Body: Bersani uses the phrase in DSM 76 and FrB 78. 19 Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema yields another example of such sociability. In Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), Bersani and Dutoit quote from an interview in which the director identifies an Ur-scene of the forms of female sociability we find in films such as Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and All About My Mother (1999): a childhood memory of “women in his provincial village sitting together and talking” (FoB 93). Theirs is a form of sharing that contrasts to the mode of attention one finds in Proust: “Almodóvar has a very non-Proustian reaction to the spectacle of people speaking together,” Bersani and Dutoit note (FoB 93). As the exemplar of the psychoanalytic subject, Marcel is haunted by “paranoid mistrust” about secrets whispered beyond his earshot; an unheard conversation is always potentially about him, possibly containing a crucial clue to the enigma of his incomplete being. In observing a conversation, Marcel, with his bottomless appetite for meaning, endows the scene with hidden significance; the women Almodóvar sees, on the other hand, are characterized by their being “exceptionally available [dans une situation de grande disponibilité]” (F. Strauss 29, qtd. in FoB 93, Bersani and Dutoit’s translation) to nothing more than gossipy talk. The crucial term here is “availability”: the women’s chatter renders them “available” for unplanned, promiscuous connections. Almodóvar’s women engage in what Bersani in Homos (1995) calls “intimacies devoid of intimacy,” which demand from their participants “nothing more than that they be … available to contact” (H 128). (See also the discussion of Almodóvar in IRG 71–82.) 18

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program” (“Rejoinder” 164), one that is not likely to be ever accomplished fully. We can become “available” to different pleasures, much like the eye can suddenly discern the play of forms amidst the fascinating violence of Assyrian art, much like the regime of heterosexual difference can precipitate the nonerotic adoration with which René gazes at the aesthetic familiarity of Sir Stephen. Thus, at least since A Future for Astyanax, Bersani’s project—which he shares with Foucault—has been to find ways out of “sexuality” toward “an other order of pleasure” (FoB 128), to attune us to various “seductive invitation[s] to substitute sociability for passion” (H 155). Such relations are parasitically constituted: in the case of the same-sex friendships that Foucault discusses in 1981, they live off the exigent arrangements of various homosocial institutions. In an analogous way, what Simmel calls Geselligkeit needs purposeful social interaction as its “carrier,” much like spandrels must emerge in the interstices of architectonic forms (wall, ceiling, arch). But the parasite, Simmel also suggests, is the “essence” of contact. What is a being whose essence is borne by its parasites? It is, as I indicated in Chapter 2, an “aesthetic” being. We find its early formulation in the theory of “individuation” that Bersani extracts from Proust, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, and Deleuze. In A Future for Astyanax, Bersani similarly discovers with Jamesian realism what Simmel will confirm for him some twenty-five years later (and what Gould will argue concerning spandrels): that “compositional play need not be merely tangential to being” (FA 132). Instead, as Peter Sloterdijk, too, proposes—albeit with different onto-ethical implications— “Dasein is design” (Oosterling 372–73). Echoing Simmel, Bersani often speaks of “art” and “play” when he wants to think about that which might supplement the experience of sexuality, which, as Gayle Rubin, too, tells us, Western modernity has taught us to view “all too seriously” (“Thinking” 35).20 “Art” and “play” constitute “frivolous” modes of contact, characterized by a lightness that, in our Cartesian-Proustian-Freudian training, we tend to overlook or pathologize. It is ethically imperative that we search for “possibilities for deflecting the deadly seriousness of desire within the play of a symbolizing consciousness” (Bersani, “Rejoinder” 163). In a 1978 essay, Bersani suggests we observe, and learn from, the “frivolity” (the word occurs again) with which students read modernist literature, heedless of the professors’ efforts to impress them with “the anguished seriousness of modern art” (“Other” 41). He is impatient For Simmel, “sociability” is “a special sociological structure corresponding to those of art and play, which draw their form from these realities [of society] but nevertheless leave their reality behind them” (“Sociability” 128).

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with the way in which the solemnity of significance hovers over his field of scholarly specialization. As Richard Poirier, too, writes, “Modernism carries a very learned but always a very long face” (125).21 Across his oeuvre, Bersani proposes that, rather than sounding Joycean depths, we might skate on the surfaces of Beckettian comedy; that, instead of getting off on Sade, we might cultivate a taste for Pasolini’s artful divertissements. But if the spandrels that Pasolini extracts from Sade’s narratives, and that Assyrian artists embed in their visual paeans to hunting and war, can “save” us with their “frivolity,” what is the mode of this rescue? How does such frivolous grace differ from the “redemptive” model that Bersani has identified, and condemned, as central to the cultural imaginary of fallen being? The thought of redemption accompanies ontologies anchored in trauma and lack; their narratives share with Sade an appetite for devastating dénouements, the world’s purifying annihilation in moments of climactic violence. It is from such death-driven seriousness that sociability and spandrels are supposed to disentangle us. Simmel, too, speaks of the “saving exhilaration [erlösend Heitere]” of sociable intercourse (“Sociability” 140 / 16). Yielding to Geselligkeitstriebe, we receive the saving grace and blessing effect [die erlösende und beglückende Wirkung] of these realms built out of the pure forms of existence, for in them, we are released from life [sind wie zwar vom Leben erlöst] but have it still. The sight of the sea frees us inwardly, not in spite of but because of the fact that in its rushing up only to recede, its receding only to rise again, in the play and counterplay of its waves, the whole of life is stylized to the simplest expression of its dynamic, quite free from all reality which one may experience and from all the baggage of individual fate, whose final meaning seems nevertheless to flow into this stark picture. Just so art perhaps reveals the secret of life; that we save ourselves [wir uns … erlösen] not by simply looking away from it but precisely in that in the apparently self-governing play of its forms we construct and experience the meaning and the forces of its deepest reality but without the reality itself. (140 / 15–16)

Here given as “saving” or “releasing,” Simmel’s term erlösen/Erlösung is most often translated as “redemption,” the theological concept whose importance

Bersani discusses Poirier’s essay in DSM 57–59.

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for our episteme Bersani has analyzed for the past fifty-odd years. He uses the term in two interrelated contexts. First, it refers to our tendency to conceptualize art as an activity that might yet make sense of “experience.” The Proustian narrator’s effort to discern hidden significances in disparate phenomena exemplifies the functioning of “redemptive art.” The hope is that, with the revelation of the world’s significance to the observer’s keen eye, the subject is also rescued from his emptiness, the terrifying insubstantiality that drives Marcel in his “search.” Second, and relatedly, “redemption” is the operative principle of pastoral ethics, whose practitioners suggest that we can be disentangled from our implication in violence by a radical reeducation program, an argument that Bersani detects in MacKinnon and Dworkin. He suggests that our concerted efforts to defeat the pleasure we take in cruelty, in submitting others to our will, simultaneously disenable the forces that, supplementing our “derived sadism,” may render us disinterested in any sustained scenarios of violence. While sexuality, as psychoanalysis understands it, names the masochistic pleasure we take in identifying with suffering, it also imbues the human subject with an attention deficit capacity that will allow him to dismiss the “stories” that, as Laura Mulvey suggests, sadism requires for its operation. Bersani contrasts representations that call for handwringing over crimes of the past to “the surprisingly austere sensuality” that he finds in Pasolini and Assyrian reliefs, “a sensuality which gratifies our appetites by moving us away from the objects which might have satisfied” those appetites. Rather than promoting “a fanatically organized interest in any part of the world”—rather than, say, eliciting a mournful or protesting devotion to historical atrocities—these works of art persuade us to “swerv[e] away from scenes of violence.” This is an ethical question: “in a sense the very restlessness of desire is a guarantee of its curiously mild and pacific nature” (FV 125). When we seek to disentangle ourselves from various horrors, we remain all the more fascinated by them, insofar as our concentration stymies our “natural tendency to swerve” (FV 125; “Other” 48), “our perceptual and affective mobility” (FV 125)—our ADC. Yet there is a form of “redemption” that remains to be thought, a form that the German Erlösung approximates. Unlike its English translation, Erlösung does not primarily connote the paying of debts; from the root lösen/Lösung, it suggests an “untangling” or “unbinding,” the loosening of a knot or the solution to a riddle (see Ansell Pearson 88–89). This mode is precisely the effect of “saving” or “releasing” (erlösen) that Simmel attaches to sociability. In its disruption of purposeful social action, sociability simultaneously unravels the subject as she has been formed by her interests and positions in the social network. As she is unplugged from the grid, the subject is dispossessed of her many attributes. This disengagement—a desubjectivation—is an operation of

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the sociable ethic, in which the subjectively individual as well as the objectively substantive have dissolved themselves completely in the service of pure sociability [das subjektiv Individuelle, wie das objektiv Inhaltliche sich völlig in den Dienst an der reinen Geselligkeitsform aufgelöst haben]. (Simmel, “Sociability” 137 / 12, emphases added)

Sociability does not save (retten); it redeems, that it, unbinds, untangles, loosens (er/auf-lösen). It effects this according to a certain rhythm, that of “binding and loosening [bindend und lösend]” (136 / 11), reminiscent of the sea’s ebbing and flowing at which we gaze in fascinated recognition. Like rhythmic natural phenomena, art “stylize[s life] to the simplest expression of its dynamic” (140). In this movement, human subjects are unbound from their enriching contexts; significant contact is “leastened” into mere aesthetic pleasure, a “beautiful art” (Greenwell). What Simmel calls the “binding and loosening” of sociable interaction is also the mode, or rhythm, of psychoanalytic thinking. Commentators have observed the centrality of the two terms that Simmel deploys (Bindung, Lösung) for Freud. Freud uses the term Bindung in his early speculations about neuronal physiology: he suggests that we understand the emergence of the ego as the result of the work of “binding”: the ego is “a mass … of neurones which hold fast to their cathexis—are, that is, in a bound state” (“Project” 368). While he soon relinquished the mechanistic views of the early essay, he nevertheless retained the language of “bound” and “unbound” energies in various discussions regarding trauma, loss, and the drives.22 Lösung in psychoanalytic practice, on the other hand, designates the movement of analysis, its work of undoing and reweaving, of loosening associative sequences so that, as Laplanche puts it, “new knots” can be formed (“Time” 253–54). Time and again we find Freud evoking his clinical practice as the work of “Lösung: analysis, solution and resolution, dissolution; a term which unfortunately cannot be translated into French, with all its compounds (Auflösung, Erlösung, Ablösung …)” (Laplanche, “Transference” 230, ellipsis in original). Lösung, then, emerges as the very name for the Freudian methodology, the precise German translation for ἀναλύειν: “‘Psycho-analysis’ could have been named by Freud, if he had not wished to choose a Greek term, Seelen-Auflösung: disentangling, dissolution or resolution of souls” (“Time” 252). Auf/Lösung indicates the solution to the tantalizing enigma whose call has seduced the infant into language and On Freud’s concept of “binding,” see Laplanche and Pontalis, Language 50–52; BorchJacobsen, Freudian 154ff. and “Primal”; Delion; and Livingstone Smith. For Bersani’s commentary, see “Learning” 67–70; and TT 67.

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desire; yet it is a solution that reveals the originary riddle as a false problem and nudges the subject onto further work of translation. From his earliest texts onward, Freud often speaks of the movement of the psyche as its work of “binding” and “unbinding” (Ent/Bindung) stimuli. In this way, analysis is a mode of “decomposition”: “It ana-lyses, that is, it dissolves”; it is a form of “analytic unbinding” (Laplanche, “Transference” 227). Bersani, too, writes: “Ideally conducted, analysis can lead to the dissolution of the self—that is, to the loss of the very grounds of self-knowledge. Psychoanalysis could undo the subjectivity necessary to a psychological philosophy of knowledge” (IRG 161). Conceptualized as a practice of “dissolution” (Auflösung), psychoanalytic treatment … would be an exercise in the depersonalizing of both analyst and analysand, in the creation of a new, third subjectivity to which no individual name can be attached, a subjectivity in which the two find themselves corresponding—co-responding—in the transindividual being which, they have discovered, “belongs” to neither of them, but which they share … We can call such an exchange an experience of impersonal intimacy. (IRG 161–62)

Rather than the sounding of deep, unconscious secrets, analysis in this mode becomes a sociable practice, a form of self-impoverishing contact; it would seek to develop the transindividuality that resides, as Baudelaire tells us, between figured, but “co-responding,” models. Like Simmel’s sociability, which evacuates human interaction of its sober content, psychoanalysis might become a practice in which one “unseriously repeats” constitutive encounters (FoB 114). While Freud, as Foucault argues, has been one of trauma modernity’s major apparatchiks, we may be able to reconfigure psychoanalysis so that its operations begin to resemble the sociability of salons and sexual subcultures. We must experiment with the disentangling of the Freudian science from its constitutive implication in modernity’s dispositif. “The symbolic,” Bersani writes in his commentary on Pedro Almodóvar, “cannot be seriously contested” (IRG 77), or, in the revised phrasing with which he wants to make sure we get the point, “seriously contested” (FoB 104). His project has been to render us available to the frivolities of artworks (as well as philosophies and everyday practices that can be engaged as art), their lessons on how to move in the world in somewhat lighter loafers.

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As Sidney Sheldon knows, psychoanalytic treatment, and particularly free association, can be a perilous undertaking: “There was always the danger in psychoanalysis,” one of his protagonists observes, “that under the venting of free-flow associations, the thin veneer of the id could blow wide open, letting escape all the primitive passions and emotions that huddled together in the mind like terrified wild beasts in the night” (620). The phylogenetic id—the hidden core that has been transferred to the subject from previous generations, perhaps stretching back to prehistoric days—contains archaic forces whose ancient tombs associative work may break open. Freely associating, the analysand risks uttering incantations that can unleash demonic spirits to wreak havoc in the civilized world. This scenario evokes the “obscure fear” that, as Freud writes, many have concerning psychoanalysis: “a dread of rousing something that … is better left sleeping” (Beyond 308). The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, too, writes that “free association breaks down incarcerating ideas” (Mystery 80). But when he refers to the freeing of thought, he is speaking of something different than the work of conjuring ancient ghosts from the burial ground of the phylogenetic id. If repression is the mechanism by which unacceptable ideas are swept from sight, Bollas reminds us that repressed materials do not constitute the unconscious in its entirety. He draws our attention to Freud’s remark, in “The Unconscious” (1915), that “the repressed is a part of the unconscious,” but does not “cover everything that is unconscious” (“Unconscious” 167); indeed, as Bollas writes, “the majority of unconscious ideas are nonrepressed contents” (Infinite viii). The unconscious is only partially made up of the repressed; we, like Sheldon, have operated on an incomplete, if not downright erroneous, concept of the unconscious. Bollas elaborates the idea of the nonrepressed unconscious, a task that has been “virtually ignored” in psychoanalytic theory’s development (Infinite ix). All schools of psychoanalytic thought, he notes, have taken up the theory of repression while overlooking—indeed, repressing—the larger, more encompassing notion of the unconscious that Freud outlines. Bollas’s point is demonstrated, for example, by the poststructuralist readings of Freud that proliferated in postwar France. As Jeffrey Mehlman writes in the introduction

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to the 1972 issue of French Yale Studies that brought the likes of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche to the attention of American readers, the French theorists situate the argument concerning “repression” at the core of the Freudian discovery, an argument that, according to Mehlman, has always been in danger of being itself repressed (“French” 5–6). For Bollas, however, it is this very focus on “repression” that is the sign of the “repression” of the equally important observation that, for Freud, the repressed constitutes only a minor part of the unconscious. “By centering a theory of the unconscious so exclusively around the theory of repression,” he writes, “psychoanalysis thus came to enact the very defence it privileged. It became a repressive force, pushing out of mind of both participants [the analyst and the analysand] a much wider and deeper world of meaning” (Infinite 16). While Mehlman warns us against “the repression of the theory of the repressed” (“French” 6), Bollas argues that what must be dealt with in psychoanalytic theory is in fact the repression of Freud’s thinking about that which remains beyond repression. What would happen to psychoanalysis, Bollas asks, if we cut its existing signifying chains and allowed its regrowth via the theory of the nonrepressed unconscious? Partially taking his cues from Bollas, Leo Bersani suggests that the shift in emphasis would invigorate psychoanalysis by bringing it to the realm of the aesthetic. In some of his latest work, he locates in Bollas’s version of analysis a way to reconceptualize the psychoanalytic model that he has elaborated since the mid-1970s. In Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), he and Ulysse Dutoit describe Laplanche’s account of the unconscious in the following way: The unconscious “collects” that which the infant can’t understand, can’t render intelligible through symbolization, in its visual contacts with the mother’s gaze, its aural contacts with her voice, and its tactile contacts with her nurturing body. A complex set of spatial relations—the meeting of eyes, the proximity of a voice, the enveloping pressure of a cradling body—initiates structuring division of consciousness. What can be interpreted remains conscious, while the unconscious comes into being in order to preserve and to store that which the conscious mind rejects (in an originary and primal repression): the uninterpretable messages from the space in which the infant lives. (CS 63–64)

According to Laplanche, that which cannot be translated—the “waste matter” of the other’s enigmatic messages—is repressed; the properly psychoanalytic unconscious is, as we put it in Chapter 1, the “excremental” unconscious. Here is the brilliance of Laplanche’s reconceptualization: he proposes an unconscious in which nothing specific is repressed, no particular traumatic memory; rather,

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it is the stubbornly nonsignifying bits of the other’s messages that come to constitute the unconscious after their repression. As Laplanche understands it, the unconscious is a mode of evanescence that keeps the human subject fascinated with that which is beyond the knowable. “Fascination” is a name for the process of becoming-human, the ongoing efforts at translating the enigmatic signifiers, begun at the moment of the subject’s constitutive going-astray. For Bersani, À la recherche du temps perdu provides a major example of this model of becoming-human. Marcel is endlessly enthralled by the world’s objects, which he suspects are withholding from him the truth of his being. Like the Laplanchean subject, he is after the enigmatic messages with which the world addresses him. Bersani pays particular attention to the anguished paranoia that marks Marcel’s relationships. For him, Proust’s novel reveals what is at stake in the mode of becoming that Laplanche identifies in Freud: while the unconscious sources of desire are nonsignifying, they nevertheless come to “matter”—are articulated—in terms of obfuscated knowledge of the world. In the above passage from Caravaggio’s Secrets, Bersani and Dutoit, while paraphrasing Laplanchean theory, are already moving toward a conceptualization of the unconscious that Bersani will recognize in Bollas’s theory. As they note, of decisive importance in human experience is the “complex set of spatial relations” into which the subject is initiated early on: the visual, aural, and tactile cues that the adult and the infant exchange. Indeed, if the Laplanchean model is eminently suitable for describing (and reinforcing) our training in the epistemophilic world of Cartesian-Proustian modernity—a “relational system dominated by knowledge” (CS 78)—we must, as Bersani and Dutoit continue, invent “a different kind of intelligence, one whose syntax would map the body’s movements and contacts” (CS 78, emphasis added). While Bersani elaborates on Bollas’s work in his subsequent texts, the appearance of the word “syntax” in Caravaggio’s Secrets tells us that the encounter has already taken place.1 Bollas uses this term to indicate the mode of existence—an aesthetic—into which the human subject is initiated in its earliest experiences. Bollas deploys the term “idiom” as a synonym for “syntax.” He notes that “idiom” and the “id” share their etymological root in the Greek idio-ome, one of whose meanings is “to form” (Cracking 43–44, see also 76). Rather than the ancient secret that the (phylogenetic) id suggests for Freud and Sidney Sheldon, “idiom” indicates for Bollas a stylistic principle: one understands

Bersani mentions Bollas’s work for the first time in the essay “Against Monogamy,” published, like Caravaggio’s Secrets, in 1998: see IRG 94.

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subject-constitution in terms not of information, but of in-formation. As he writes, rather than operating primarily on knowledge, in dialogue we are “in-formed of [the interlocutor’s] narrative idiom” (Cracking 22, see also 65). What is important is not the content but the form conveyed by the message: it tells us, if we are able to receive it, about the syntax of the interlocutor’s being. As Bollas continues, communication in analysis, too, “is not the stuff of organized comment, but most profoundly the work of different forms of being” (24, emphasis added). Bollas allows Bersani to further deprivilege knowledge by exploring the importance of stylization, of aesthetic individuation in the human subject’s movement in the world. His work helps Bersani to unfold what he and Dutoit had meant with the title of their 2004 collaboration, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. This chapter follows the ways in which, in his recent work, Bersani has taken up Bollas’s challenge to elaborate a concept of the unconscious beyond the mode of repressed knowledge on which most psychoanalytic thought has relied. Having outlined Bollas’s account of the nonrepressed unconscious— which requires that we highlight the role of the aesthetic in the processes of becoming-human—the chapter seeks anticipatory echoes of his ideas in Bersani’s earlier work. Most notably, Bollas’s psychoanalytic aesthetics can be read as an instantiation of the idea of anamnesis, the Platonic concept that Bersani inherits most immediately—and early on—from Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire. While he never speaks of “anamnesis” directly, one of the guises under which the concept appears in his work is the onto-ethics/aesthetics where becoming is organized according to what he variously calls “regions of being” or “families of forms,” the earliest source of which in Bersani’s work is Gilles Deleuze’s study Proust and Signs (1964). This chapter also proposes that Bollas’s “nonrepressed unconscious” appears in Bersani’s work—particularly the later texts—under the name of virtuality, a concept that Bersani originally develops in his commentary on Stéphane Mallarmé. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the concept of “the virtual unconscious” relies on an idea of “concealment” that differs from the “hiddenness” that psychoanalytic theory has thematized in the idea of the repressed unconscious.

The Need to Know and the Force to Become The distinction between the repressed and the nonrepressed unconscious can be thought through the contrast between Laplanche’s and Bollas’s differing accounts of early infant development. For Laplanche, as we have seen, the process of hominization begins with the enigmatic signifier, the moment when the caretaker unknowingly seduces the infant with unreadable

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messages. This prompts primal repression (Urverdrängung), where the messages’ unmetabolizable leftovers come to constitute the unconscious. Laplanche describes the unconscious: Unconscious processes do not reveal themselves to us; they can only be known at the moment when, the censorship having been lowered, the preconscious system finds itself led back to the modes of functioning of the unconscious. In themselves, [Freud] adds, they are thus unknowable, and even—and one can hardly conceive of going any further in this kind of “negative theology”—“incapable of existence” (existenzunfahïg) [sic]. (Unconscious 86)

Negative (or apophatic) theology postulates that God can never be named, that he can be approached only by negation, by articulating, in an infinite regression, what he is not: divinity is only approached asymptotically. Analogously, according to Laplanche’s conceptualization, language can but approximate the unconscious, for language is that which saves the subject from the unknowable, domesticates primary processes into secondary processes. The object of apophasis is that which we know we will never know: the apophatic unconscious might be termed the known unknown, as an analogue to the concept of God in what Christian thinkers from St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa have called docta ignorantia. Bollas proceeds differently: he calls the nonrepressed unconscious our “unthought known” (Shadow 70 and passim). The nonrepressed unconscious is that which is “known”—of which no further “knowledge” is required—but that has not been “unfolded” in thought. It consists of the “heretofore inarticulate elements of psychic life” (210). “This inarticulate element is the unthought known,” Bollas writes; “the patient knows something, but has as yet been unable to think it” (235). While he rejects Freud’s postulation of the phylogenetic id, Laplanche adheres to the theory of repression when he speaks of the unconscious. In the Freudian terms that Bollas highlights, this is only a partially accurate description. In Bollas’s account of infant development, there exists a constitutive event analogous to what for Laplanche is “the fundamental anthropological situation” (“Starting”), the seduction that no human escapes. What Bollas has in mind is the inevitable way in which the primary caretaker, usually the mother, introduces the infant to a spatiality or a rhythm, an introduction that will inform the subject’s later experiences of the self and the world in important ways. By variously handling the infant—“feeding, diaper changing, soothing, crooning, holding and playing” (Shadow 34)—the caretaker imparts a mode of being or an orientation that precedes language. “In the beginning of life,” Bollas claims, “handling of the infant is the primary

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mode of communicating, so the internalization of the mother’s form (her aesthetic) is prior to the internalization of her verbal messages” (33–34). As much as Laplanche argues that the caretaker does not intentionally convey sexualizing-hominizing messages to the infant, Bollas suggests that this early choreography is not consciously coordinated but a replication of the adult’s own (in-)formative experiences. The difference between Laplanche and Bollas is that, for the latter, what happens between the infant and the caretaker does not undergo repression. Whereas the Laplanchean unconscious comes into being, and the infant becomes-human, at primal repression, a repression of “handling” is not a constitutive moment in the infant’s development for Bollas. If the result of the enigmatic signifier’s repression is the implantation of the unconscious in the infant, for Bollas the caretaker’s handling gives the infant something he calls a “sequence” or a “syntax,” a set of rules that informs its orientation in the world. “Syntax,” he writes, is “the peculiar way a speaker works within the rules of grammar” (Infinite 101). Cohering as the result of early handling, syntax designates the style or aesthetic in which a subject moves in the world; it organizes “the grammar of our being,” one that we learn “before we grasp the rules of our language” (Shadow 36). In Receptive Bodies (2018), Bersani turns to Bollas’s work in order to rethink the onto-aesthetics of psychoanalytic thought. He finds in Bollas an alternative to Laplanche’s conceptualization of the process of hominization, of the subject’s calling-into-becoming. Rather than a deep structure of untranslated (and then repressed) messages, “personality,” as Bersani writes of Bollas’s theory, “is a specific aesthetic of handling” (RB 55). Our being need not be determined by the lacunae of knowledge that result from the enigmatic messages’ failed translation; rather, there is another mode of subject-constitution and worldly orientation, one that Bollas theorizes: “at the beginning, we are choreographed into being” (RB 54). Conceptualized in this way, analysis morphs from a pursuit of self-knowledge (a pursuit that takes place via the mirror of the other as thesubject-supposed-to-know) and becomes a series of “revised re-enactments of a choreographed self-fashioning” (RB 55).2 The analyst’s office is not the only place where our constitutive choreographies are reenacted. If the infant experiences the mother’s care as an “aesthetic” process, later aesthetic moments take place when an object activates or resonates with the syntax that our early experiences inculcate in us: For an elaboration of Bollas’s ideas in terms of a theory of “gestures” (via Lacan, Proust, D. H. Lawrence [Women in Love], Kimberly Peirce [Boys Don’t Cry], and Lars von Trier [Melancholia]), see RB ch. 4. See also Bersani’s comments on Bollas and “choreography” of being in “Rigorously” 285–86; and IRG 94, 97, 162. Some of Bersani’s proposals are taken up in Maltais-Bayda and McKenzie.

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The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic. It is the most profound occasion when the nature of the self is formed and transformed by the environment. The uncanny pleasure of being held by a poem, a composition, a painting, or, for that matter, any object, rests on those moments when the infant’s internal world is partly given form by the mother since he cannot shape them or link them together without her coverage. (Bollas, Shadow 32)

An aesthetic experience is precipitated by an object whose own syntax prompts a “déjà vu” (32), a seeing-again or recollection of the way in which the subject had moved with the mother in infancy, an evocative resurrection of an early ego condition often brought on by a sudden and uncanny rapport with an object, a moment when the subject is captured in an intense illusion of being selected by the environment for some deeply reverential experience. (39)

Time grinds to a halt; the subject feels called out of its self by the object, into a state of communication where she “feels held in symmetry and solitude by the spirit of the object” (31). For Bollas, examples of the aesthetic include mystical and religious experiences, characterized by an “absolute certainty that [the subject] has been cradled by, and dwelled with, the spirit of the object, a rendezvous of mute recognition that defies representation” (30). The problem with psychoanalysis, as it has been developed by its theorists and practitioners, is that it has neglected aesthetic modes of articulation, “a sense of the self as an aesthetic movement” (Bollas, Cracking 172). The arts have, of course, figured in psychoanalytic literature, and nowhere more than in Freud, but they have most often been approached as symptoms, that is, as substitutive expressions of the repressed unconscious. Literature, music, and the visual arts have been a way for psychoanalysis to approach the “known unknown”; they have been read as indications of the return of the repressed. In the terms of apophatic theology, art is the obscure mirror (speculum) where traces (vestigia) of the unknowable can be apprehended.3 A psychoanalytic theory of art based on the idea of the unthought known and its syntax regards aesthetic texts not as symptoms in search of repressed For St. Bonaventure, it is in nature’s “mirror” that such traces of divinity can be observed: see Bonaventure ch. 3.

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signifieds, or a permanently absent presence, but as expression in a singular being’s tongue. The aesthetic as Bollas describes it is a method of thinking— of actualizing—the unthought known in varied idioms. It is a mode of producing the new according to the subject’s idiosyncratic, but “known,” syntax, an experience of becoming. As Bollas writes, the aesthetic subject is “formed and transformed by the environment”; that which evokes an aesthetic experience is a “transformational object” (Shadow 33). Both Bersani and Bollas seek to rethink the unconscious, the constitutive concept of psychoanalysis, otherwise than in terms of repressed materials (and their inevitable, uncanny return).4 For Bersani, processes of thinking do not aim at revealing obfuscated, traumatizing, deeply buried knowledge, which is the traditional (and as Sidney Sheldon shows, popularized) way in which the psychoanalytic project has been understood. Rather, because everything is already “known” but only partially thought, there is nothing to “know”; only “thinking,” particularly in an aesthetic mode, remains. The subject of the unthought known is not the traumatized, lacking being of primal repression. Bollas’s definition, in other words, unlinks the unconscious from what we have called the epistemophilia that, according to Bersani, has dominated conceptualizations of subjectivity in Cartesian modernity. If we can redefine psychoanalytic practice—clinical or theoretical—in this way, we lose the prescriptions according to which analysis should aim at increasing the subject’s knowledge about himself and others. We approach a nonCartesian theory of the unconscious. Adam Phillips suggests in Intimacies (2008) that the caretaker-child relationship gets focused on “knowledge” so as to disenable transformations’ frightening potential: “The parents’ wish to know the child, and the child’s wish to know the parents … is, at its most extreme, a defense against what is unknowably evolving, as potential between them” (I 113). To put this in the Deleuzean terms to which we will return below, efforts to guide growing up through processes of “knowing”—where it is assumed that we must get to know ourselves and our others to allow the full development or “maturation” of our human potential—“territorialize” the forces that inhere in becominghuman. As we saw in Chapter 2, Deleuze suggests that these forces unfold in interstitial spaces: the in-between and the transversal. We find an example of such transversal becoming in what Phillips calls the “potential between” the

Bollas several times uses the term “uncanny” when he is speaking of the aesthetic experience (Shadow 31, 32, 37, 39; Forces 48). It may not be the most appropriate modifier, for that which prompts the aesthetic experience in the unthought known has not undergone repression; the memories it evokes do not take the guise of the ghosts and doppelgängers that the repressed unconscious produces.

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adult and the infant. Echoing Deleuze, he identifies this in-between space of potentiality as the space of “virtual being” (I 114). For Bollas, the epistemophilic orientation of analysis does not necessarily disable other potentialities: “The need to know and the force to become are not exclusive, but the latter element of the analytic process has received less attention that [sic: than] it deserves” (Forces 25). What we need is a shift in emphasis whereby attempts at producing “knowledge” in analysis are complemented by other “forces.” Bersani tends to formulate the contrast more forcefully. For him, it is not only a question of supplementing our current orientation, where “knowledge” plays a central role; rather, we must unlearn our “need to know” in order to tap into “the force to become.” We need an ascesis of impoverishment, one that would “leasten” the personalities that we have taken to be the way in which human beings inhabit the world. Part of this process can take place in analysis, but an analysis that has been radically reorganized. As Phillips muses, addressing the potential in Bollas’s reconceptualization of analytic work: “Perhaps the function of psychoanalysis in the future will not be to inform but to evoke” (On Flirtation 164). The goal in “evoking” the unthought known—actualizing it in and through what Bollas calls “the evocative object world”5—is not the release and comprehension of any particular content. In Bollas’s understanding of analysis, as Phillips notes, “the aim is not so much understanding … but a freeing of the potentially endless process of mutual invention and reinvention [between the therapist and the analysand]” (On Flirtation 158). This describes what Bersani suggests might be a new kind of psychoanalysis, one that “would not be primarily a subject-object relation” aiming at the analysand’s self-knowledge but, rather, an exercise in depersonalizing of both analyst and analysand, in the creation of a new, third subjectivity to which no individual name can be attached, a subjectivity in which the two find themselves corresponding—co-responding—in the transindividual being which, they have discovered, “belongs” to neither of them, but which they share. (IRG 161–62)

For Bollas’s discussion of the term “evocation,” see Evocative; and Shadow 239ff. Bollas suggests that evocation is actualization, the calling forth of something that did not exist before: “evocation involves the creation of an object. Before this calling forth, no mental object exists (or no set of internal objects exists) in the form necessary to the mental realization or processing of the called forth” (Shadow 241). Here, he continues the Western tradition of thinking onto-ethics in terms of “vocation” (κλῆσις/Berufung), whose elaboration in Bersani (and elsewhere) I have explored in Essentialist ch. 4.

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This comprises an “impersonal” mode of transformation; psychoanalytic treatment would become “an experience of impersonal intimacy” (IRG 162). It is a mode of becoming that, like what Baudelaire calls “idealization,” takes place between constituted beings. It enables a form of existence Bersani calls “transindividuality.”

Anamnesis, Horizontally What Bollas calls the “nonrepressed unconscious” and the “syntax of the self ” are not new concepts for Bersani. Rather, Bersani recognizes in Bollas’s psychoanalytic theory ideas he has been developing through a number of sources since his earliest texts. The most important of these sources are Proust and Baudelaire. In their accounts of memory and artistic creation, the two French modernists revise the Platonic concept of “anamnesis,” the articulation of unremembered knowledge that, as Plato argues, comes to us from our past incarnations. While he never uses the term itself, Bersani discerns echoes of Baudelaire’s and Proust’s accounts of art’s anamnestic function in Bollas’s theory of psychoanalytic aesthetics. He thus situates— again, implicitly—Bollas in a genealogy of thought that stretches to Plato’s theory of memory. Baudelaire, Proust, and Bollas share an effort to extract from the theory of anamnesis an aesthetic of being. While Bersani most often considers Proust a theorist of the repressed, hidden, enigmatic unconscious, in some of his early texts he is momentarily nudged toward a different reading of À la recherche du temps perdu, a veering encouraged by his reading of Deleuze’s Proust and Signs. In his first discussion of Deleuze, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), he considers a scene to which he will often return: Marcel’s observation about the “unknown homeland” (patrie inconnue) expressed in Vinteuil’s music. As he writes, the notes of “individuality” that Marcel detects in the music evoke not “Vinteuil’s personal existence,” but “[t]he individuality of a point of view embodied in but not dependent on the existence of an individual person” (BB 235). We explored Bersani’s elaboration of this idea— of an individuality “more general than individuals” (BB 235)—in Chapter 2. This individuality is “general” because, rather than belonging to a person, it is a quality shared among entities (human and otherwise): in Proust, Bersani writes, we find an “identification of the absolutely individual with a region of Being transcending individuals” (BB 235). He adopts this analysis from Deleuze, who writes that a Proustian essence “does not exist outside the subject expressing it, but it is expressed as the essence not of the subject but of Being, or of the region of Being that is revealed to the subject” (Proust 43).

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The passage from Proust’s novel in which Deleuze locates the concept of “a region of being” is famous for what scholars have called its reinvention of Platonism, specifically Plato’s theory of anamnesis.6 The Greek term ἀνάμνησις designates “recollection” or “remembrance,” the mind’s (μένος) return or going back over (ἀνά-) the past, or the act of calling (μνα-) something to mind (OED). For Plato, anamnesis is a form of memory, but a memory that re-calls one’s experiences beyond earthly life. He elaborates his theory particularly in three of his “middle period” dialogues, Meno, Phaedo, and Phaedrus. In Meno, Socrates demonstrates that a slave without any formal education nevertheless has access to arithmetical rules because he recalls them from his previous existence (82b–86a [43–51]). Like the slave’s, our knowledge is innate: what we know we have always already known; “seeking and learning are all remembrance” (81d [42]). In Phaedo, Plato offers anamnesis as a version—or verification—of his theory of Forms. Like earthly objects, which are pale replications of eternal Forms (or Ideas), anamnesis gives us intimations of the truths familiar to the soul before its embodiment in this world. The interlinked theories of anamnesis and Forms also resurface in Phaedrus, particularly in the “chariot allegory” Socrates outlines in the palinode. Here anamnesis is rearticulated as a theory of “love”: love is an experience of remembering the soul’s pre-embodiment past. Before descending to earth, souls travel in gods’ chariots in heaven, where they have access to the “true knowledge” with which Meno’s and Phaedo’s theories of anamnesis are concerned (Phaedrus 247c [288]). Once on earth, a soul obscurely remembers its celestial past (“those things our soul once saw while following God” [249c (290)]), a remembering that is experienced as “love.” We love the earthly things that have shared our chariot: we experience “beauty” when faced with things that are familiar to us in memory. Such things share in our mode (or “region”) of being. As Socrates observes to Phaedrus, “he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it” (249e [291]). Beauty is an experience of what Bollas would call a shared “syntax” or “idiom,” of moving together. This movement, Baudelaire would add, pulls us away from (or pulls apart) our realized figurations. The Platonic theory of anamnesis enters Bersani’s work not only through Proust (and Deleuze’s reading of Proust) but also Baudelaire’s poetics. Indeed, as I noted in Chapter 2, Proust inherits the Platonic imagination from Baudelaire; Baudelaire himself draws his theory partially from the theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg. Anamnesis is an important component of Baudelaire’s thought, indeed occupies “the very center of the Baudelairean aesthetic” (Lacoue-Labarthe, “Baudelaire” 21). As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes, Baudelaire seeks See Gilead 96–99; W. Strauss 117–19; Wiskus 29, ch. 3. On anamnesis in Plato, see Gulley 1–47; and Klein 103–73.

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the origin of the subject, which … is empirically inaccessible … but accessible to a kind of over-memory or beyond-memory capable of gaining access to what was never present to consciousness or of returning to this side of the most primitive forgetting (the most immemorial): that is to say the forgetting of the origin itself, of who I was—of what “I” was—before being born, before “falling down here,” being expulsed and sworn to incurable separation, to the dereliction of this world and to the interminable loss of self in triviality. (21)

As Lacoue-Labarthe indicates, anamnesis assumes a lapsarian narrative about our “fallen” state in which we obscurely remember heavenly perfection. Yet scholars have proposed that Baudelaire’s theory of “idealization” renders Platonic metaphysics immanent by turning Plato’s (and Swedenborg’s) “vertical” correspondences into “horizontal” ones. This characterizes his theory of idealization as it occurs in artistic creation. As I put it in Chapter 2, the world’s visible forms (“models”) are undone as the artistic mind at once “dis-members” and “re-members” them by situating them into the dense web of relations from which their stable forms have been abstracted. I suggested we call this movement of dis-membering and re-membering the artistic work of “membering,” of—paradoxically—re-calling an ideal for the first time. While the subject of anamnesis in Plato remembers the heavenly forms of which he partook, Baudelairean idealization is the work of creation, not of re-creation. Baudelaire anticipates the creative concept of anamnesis in Proust, where, as Deleuze writes, “memory and creation are no more than two aspects of the same production” (Proust 147). While echoes of the theory of anamnesis filter into his early work through Proust’s and Baudelaire’s revised Platonism, Bersani turns directly to Plato fairly late in his oeuvre. After making passing references to The Symposium, he considers Phaedrus in Intimacies, his 2008 dialogue with Phillips.7 This reading “recategorizes” the onto-ethics/aesthetics that he has developed with Proust and Baudelaire (among other thinkers and artists), but does so by turning to the Ur-text whose revisions we find in À la recherche du temps perdu and Baudelairean poetics. As I noted above, Plato rewrites his theory of anamnesis in the myth of the “chariot allegory”: all have witnessed incorporeal perfection in heaven; our earthly ambition is to recall “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like” when prompted by various embodied objects (Phaedrus 246e [287]). “Every human soul,” as Bersani paraphrases, Apart from Intimacies, Bersani discusses The Symposium in IRG 55–57, 111–19, 142; and Bersani and Dutoit, “Critical” 125. On Phaedrus, see also Bersani and Dutoit, “Rohmer’s” 35; and, even more briefly, Bersani, “Pedagogy” 17.

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“remains in touch, through memory, with the god it followed” (I 79). Writing that the lover chooses an object that “already belongs to the lover’s type of being” (I 82), he evokes the theory of “regions of being” that he had, in Balzac to Beckett, gleaned from Deleuze’s account of Proust’s revised Platonism. Speaking of his collaborations with Dutoit, which trace the appearance of “families of forms” (IRG 147; see also H 121) in various visual arts, Bersani describes what we might call the anamnestic truth of his onto-ethics/ aesthetics: “We are born into various families of singularity that connect us to all the forms that have, as it were, always anticipated our coming, our presence” (IRG 146). What compels Bersani in Phaedrus is in part the principle of reincarnation (παλινγενεσίᾳ, palingenesía) included in Plato’s theory. Speaking of love as a form of anamnesis, Socrates asserts: “Every one chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his character” (252d [294]). If the lover, as Bersani writes, is drawn to an object that “already belongs to the lover’s type of being” (I 82), the entities that solicit one’s desire may, because of this principle, include forms other than human (see Phaedrus 248c–249d [289–91]). This argument conflicts with what may be the constitutive anthropocentrism of psychoanalytic thought. For Laplanche, becoming-human emerges at the moment of a failure of instinctual satisfaction, a satisfaction that after the fact (après-coup, nachträglich) is coded as a nonhuman—animal—capacity. This failure opens up a gap in nature that sexuality, as a human-specific phenomenon, attempts to suture. Laplanche writes in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970): From birth onward, insofar as this gap subsists, there occurs a kind of disqualification of the instinct: the satisfaction of needs cannot pass through preestablished setups, that will emerge only gradually and according to the maturational rhythm, of the central nervous system, but satisfaction must pass from the beginning through intersubjectivity; i.e., by way of another human, the mother. (60, last two emphases added)

For Laplanche, it is always a human call that fascinates the subject into becoming, an assumption that Bersani, especially in his later, post-1980s work, wants to question. Plato’s theory of anamnesis, and particularly its articulation in Phaedrus, allegorizes a mode of individuation not constrained by the limits of the human. Particularly in its reconfiguration—its “aestheticization”— by Baudelaire and Proust, Plato’s ontology allows Bersani to consider a “metaphysical individuality” (as “distinct from subjectivity”) that would remain “indifferent to the human subject” (CR 82). Bollas’s psychoanalytic theory emerges as a more recent resource in Bersani’s effort to think a “relational mode” of “exchanges and correspondences between the subject and

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the world … that depend on the anti-Cartesian assumption of a commonality of being among the human subject and both the human and the nonhuman world” (TT 62). With Bollas, Bersani continues his project of deprivileging the human as a necessary sense-making perspective onto the world. The move from Plato’s “vertical” to Baudelaire’s “horizontal” account of anamnesis is analogous to the shift, advocated by Bollas, from the “repressed” to the “nonrepressed” unconscious. While Plato’s original theory of anamnesis, where forgotten idealities return in memory, corresponds to the analytic effort to lift repression, Baudelaire disallows the thinking of correspondences in terms of “the return of the repressed.” Horizontal correspondences have not been repressed; they are, rather, the unactualized. They constitute, in Bollas’s phrase, the “unthought known.” The Baudelairean shift from vertical to horizontal anamnesis should itself be considered—should be, as Bersani would put it, recategorized or, in Baudelaire’s terms, idealized—in the context of the move Bollas proposes from “information” to “in-formation,” from an epistemological to an aesthetic orientation in thinking subjectivity. The object of anamnesis in Plato is often knowledge, as is exemplified by the arithmetic rules that the slave recalls in Meno. In Baudelaire, idealization concerns not knowledge but form: in idealization, the model—constituted being—does not accrue any forgotten/repressed knowledge about itself; rather, it moves toward another aesthetic arrangement. “Corresponding” corresponds to the unfolding of a subject’s “syntax” or “idiom,” articulated in the “choreography” with sundry objects. Rather than the excavation of the id’s buried secrets, remembering, as it is understood in and facilitated by what we might call Baudelairean psychoanalysis, concerns id-iomatic work, the elaboration of a singular style. It is, as it were, a dance in which the subject synchronizes with other beings, in which, rather than seeking what it “wants,” the subject is drawn to its “likes.”8 Similarly, Bersani’s recent engagement with Peter Sloterdijk is partially motivated by his recognition of the ways in which Plato’s anamnestic theory is reconfigured in Sloterdijk’s work. In Bubbles (1998), the first volume of his Spheres trilogy, Sloterdijk develops a philosophical genealogy and psycho/ontological account of “intimacy”—an important concept for Bersani—in which one discerns moments of deep agreement with the ontoethics that Bersani has engaged with various versions of revised Platonism. For example, Sloterdijk, drawing from varied sources, speaks of the human organism’s negotiation with its Umwelt as the environment’s “repetition of a constitutive greeting of the human being in its first atmosphere. The human being is the more or less well-greeted animal, and if its center of feeling is to be reactivated, one must repeat the greeting that originally marks its initiation into the world” (Bubbles 505, qtd. in RB 97). Although Bersani does not explicitly make the connection, the argument that each is “welcomed” into the world in gestures that he or she seeks in later life closely resembles Bollas’s theory of the “syntax” or “style” that, having been bequeathed in infancy, the subject attunes to in his or her subsequent encounters.

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Bersani’s paraphrase, in Balzac to Beckett, of Deleuze’s argument about the expression of “regions of being” in Marcel’s explication of signs (BB 235; Deleuze, Proust 43) marks the first occurrence of an idea that will be repeated, in slightly varied forms, throughout his later work. A “region of being” designates what Proust calls the “common essence” or “quality” that art “extracts” or “liberates” from individual objects (Remembrance 2.1164; “Contre” 79). Sometimes calling it that of “families” or “communities” of “forms,” Bersani develops the idea into a principle of desiring relatedness that, rather than fueled by difference or lack, operates on anamnestically recognized sameness, the mode of “love” that Plato theorizes in Phaedrus. As I noted in Chapter 2, the paraphrase from Balzac to Beckett recurs verbatim in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976) (FA 255–56). In the book’s final chapter, “Persons in Pieces,” René’s homo-narcissistic attraction to Sir Stephen—which we explored in Chapter 5—is one of the concept’s early instantiations: the younger man is captivated by the older because he sees in him a familial form, a likeness that Baudelaire would call a “correspondence.” Without making the allusion to Proust and Signs explicit, Bersani goes on to deploy the phrase in a 1989 encyclopedia article, where he, again, notes that art in Proust “expresses an individuality more general than that traced by the particular history of an individual subject,” an individuality linked to “a region of Being” (“Death” 863). He returns to this proposition frequently, most recently in the reading of Phaedrus in Intimacies and his discussion of his own, early work in the preface to the 2013 edition of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (orig. 1965). In the commentary on Plato’s mythopoetics, he suggests that anamnesis—the experience of “love” in which we are drawn by our shared being, our re-found likeness, in earthly objects—offers an account of becoming crucially different from how we have been trained to think of individuation in modernity. The soul in Plato’s myth “is individualized not in the way that personalities are, to our modern psychological understanding, individualized. Rather, it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation” (I 82). While À la recherche du temps perdu remains Bersani’s preferred example of the role of desire in the disciplinary production of modern individuals, Plato’s influence on Proustian aesthetics also means that the novel allows us to figure subjectivation otherwise, in aesthetic (rather than psychological) terms. Recalling his early encounter with Deleuze, Bersani suggests in the 2013 preface that this alternate Proust describes the movement of desire amidst “families” of being, each expressing “a singular universal property distinct from the multiple particular individuals who embody it” (xiv). In such moments Bersani appropriates Deleuze’s reading of Proust in order to conceptualize a mode of “individuality” beyond the entity that, as Michel Foucault claims, is produced and sustained by modernity’s disciplinary-

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biopolitical regimes. His argument about “shared” individualities—a “sharing” that implies an aesthetic—entails an ethical point. As he and Dutoit write in a brief methodological article in 1999, their work tracks artistic and theoretical experimentations with “ontological sameness”: Only that family of sameness can rescue us from a sense of the hostile and intractable otherness to which Freud referred when he spoke of the external world as that which we begin by hating and which, he added, we never completely stop hating. (“Critical” 157)

We can balance out the “intractable” hostility that the world cannot but solicit in us by attuning to “a solidarity or homo-ness of being, the partial reoccurrences of all subjects elsewhere” (FoB 120). In order to invent reasons for making contact beyond the jouissance of derived sadism, we can cultivate the implications of the fact that we are, as Bersani sometimes puts it, “out there.” In moving toward the world, we move toward our differently figured selves; we are drawn by the virtual commonalities (“families of forms”) expressed in other individuated beings, human and otherwise.

The Will to Virtuality The revised Platonism Bersani finds in Proust and (particularly) Baudelaire suggests to him an onto-ethics/aesthetics of becoming that does not depend on the resuscitation of eternal, forgotten (or repressed) truths. Albeit ambivalently, in Baudelaire (and even more ambivalently in Proust), we find an immanent account of being. Rather than the unearthing of the perfection that Plato designates as Ideas or Forms, Baudelairean idealization entails a becoming that unfolds horizontally amidst uncompleted figures, a becoming that, as Deleuze often puts it, takes place in between—and that (as Bersani adds) necessitates the effacement of—realized forms. Yet this mode of immanent becoming is not one of pure dissemination, pure centrifugal flight. For Baudelaire, it is compelled by the logic of correspondances; Bersani calls this the idea of “families of forms”; in Bollas, this logic is premised on infant care that constitutes an “aesthetic of handling.” All of these theorizations are versions of Platonic anamnesis. The prefix ἀνά- indicates a going-back-over, a return to something in the unactualized past that does not let go, something that demands one to revisit the missed scene of origination. Ana-mnesis shares the prefix with ana-lysis. As Lacan, Laplanche, and Derrida have pointed out, Freud, beginning with the account

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of Emma in “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” implies that human time is marked by a constitutive return to the scene of sexuality’s traumatizing emergence: the time of Nachträglichkeit. Bersani, too, suggests that becoming moves in the time of afterwardsness: there is a spiraling return to something that has been missed the first time around, but this return at the same time actualizes the primary moment. What is seen again, the déjà vu, is seen for the first time. One of the words that Bersani, increasingly in his more recent work, uses to designate this logic of untimely becoming is “virtuality.” For example, he speaks of the “incongruous connections” that, echoing Comte de Lautréamont’s metaphors, Proustian analogies, and Baudelairean correspondences, proliferate in Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema as instituting “virtualities” (TT 66, see also 81–82). He rephrases Freud’s argument, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), concerning the ineradicability of the past in mental life by suggesting that “a mental event is virtualized once it has already been,” that “the present contains the virtualized future of our past” (TT 75). More generally, he is invested in outlining “an ontology of the virtual” (TT 68). In contemporary philosophy, the concept of “the virtual” is most often associated with the work of Deleuze, who extracts it from Proust and Henri Bergson. The “virtual,” in its capacity for “actualization,” names the principle of becoming, of genuine creativity and invention, that Deleuze contrasts to the dynamic he calls “the realization of the possible.”9 Yet the term enters Bersani’s vocabulary not through the philosopher but, characteristically, an artist: the poet Mallarmé.10 We can pinpoint the exact moment: it occurs in Bersani’s discussion, in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), of Mallarmé’s analysis of poetic language. In his essay “Crisis in Poetry” (1897), Mallarmé assigns the specificity of poetic language to its ability to defamiliarize the words that “vulgar or immediate [brut ou immédiat]” forms of naming have endowed with a utility similar to that of money (“Crisis” 42 / “Crise” 368). In everyday language, words have been “reduc[ed] to the status of reportable fact, or movable currency” (DSM 42): like coins, they silently circulate from hand to hand, commodified and

See Deleuze, Bergsonism; and Difference 208–14. For helpful commentary, see Smith 252–53; and Grosz, Time 105–10. Bersani speaks briefly about the role of “the virtual” in his work in “Rigorously” 281. 10 While Bersani gleans the term virtualité explicitly from Mallarmé, he nevertheless would have come across Deleuze’s deployment of the concept in the Proustian context in Difference and Repetition (208–09), which he read upon its publication (“Rigorously” 289; see also FA 325n1). As he tells us in an interview, he came much later to Bergsonism, the other early text in which Deleuze discusses the concept at length (“Rigorously” 289–90; see also TT 87–88n). 9

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subordinated to the ideas that they represent in the marketplace of speech. Extracting objects from this circulation, poetry accomplishes what Mallarmé calls their “vibratory disappearance [disparition vibratoire]” (“Crise” 368). Bersani quotes Mallarmé’s description of poetic language: Far from having the function of an easily exchanged and clearly representative currency, as it does first of all with the masses, speech, above all dream and song, recovers thanks to the Poet, out of a necessity inherent in an act devoted to fictions, its virtuality. (“Crise” 368, qtd. in DSM 92n25, Bersani’s translation)11

The concept of “virtuality” appears here for the first time in Bersani’s work. In “Crisis in Poetry,” Mallarmé deploys the term in another passage—one that Bersani does not cite—where he suggests that, apart from disrupting language’s smooth economy, poetry also annihilates the poet: “The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet,” whose words “light up in reciprocal reflections like a virtual train of fire on precious stones [ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries]” (“Crise” 366).12 Both objects (what we can call, after Saussure, the signified) and the speaker (in his “elocutionary disappearance”) vanish, are “virtualized,” in poetic expression. Anchored neither in the speaking subject nor in any sound-sense correspondence, language is deprived of “its epistemological function and its numismatic status” (DSM 42). In contrast to Foucault, for whom Mallarmé represents the modern episteme in his dream of the Book in which language, set free of schemas of representation typical to the classical period, would find its “lost unity” (Foucault, Order 307), Bersani argues that the poet is too readily distracted by “minor” projects, too susceptible to making contradictory theoretical statements, to pursue the totalizing Work that he frequently evokes. Instead of Foucault’s commentary in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (1966), Bersani aligns his reading of Mallarmé with Maurice Blanchot’s.13 In striking contrast to Foucault’s understanding, Mallarméan poetics, as Leslie Hill writes, is “synonymous in Blanchot with

Bradford Cook translates “sa virtualité” as “its full efficacy” (“Crisis” 43). Cook translates: “If the poem is to be pure, the poet’s voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves, which will be set in motion as they meet unequally in collision. And in an exchange of gleams they will flame out like some glittering swath of fire sweeping over precious stones” (“Crisis” 40–41). 13 See DSM 40, 63–64, 69–70, 86n12, and 91n22. On Blanchot’s Mallarmé, see Hill; and Bruns 6–11, 66–68, and passim. 11 12

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the question of the absence of the book and the theme of the fundamental dispersion of writing” (906). Bersani, too, prioritizes Mallarmé’s argument concerning the ability of poetic language to destroy the exchange economy of ordinary discourse, to “silence” language and reduce it to “virtuality.” As Blanchot puts it, poetic language for Mallarmé has “a startling power to nothingness, to pure emptiness” (40). It is by rendering objects virtual—by depriving them of their realized sense—that poetic language, as Mallarmé famously puts it, evokes “the flower which is absent from all bouquets” (“Crisis” 42). “What does writing care about?” Blanchot asks. “To free us from what is” (39). For Mallarmé, virtualité designates the nothingness that language’s habitual usage has patched over. The “recovery” of this dimension in poetry consists in the word’s withdrawal from social utility promoted by the discourses of “narrative, instruction, or description” (“Crisis” 42). We might call this poetry’s volonté de virtualité. This “will” can be cultivated to counteract, as it were, the will to knowledge (volonté de savoir) that Foucault identifies as the organizing force of the modern episteme (and that, alluding to its totalizing impulse, he implicitly assigns to Mallarmé’s project in The Order of Things). Evoking Blanchot, Bersani speaks of “the irrelevance of knowledge to the Mallarméan idea of literature” (DSM 40). In contrast to Foucault, he proposes that Mallarmé’s project is to evade or obstruct the disciplinary apparatus of individuation that, as he has argued in A Future for Astyanax, psychoanalysis and realist fiction serve (see Chapter 2 above). In its will to virtuality, poetic language is a “depersonalizing” and “de-realizing” medium: “the self undergoes an ontological regression in poetry, it recedes into virtuality” (DSM 42). Bersani thus reads Mallarmé as an artist of “impoverishment.” Poetry “virtualizes” being insofar as it teaches us how to withdraw from the world, how to yield—as Samuel Beckett would say—to our “leastening” (Beckett, Worstward 106). Before the Mallarmé study, Bersani has located this dynamic in the “centripetal” texts of French modernism (Balzac to Beckett); he will go on to observe it in Beckett’s antinatalist poetics (Arts of Impoverishment), Jean Genet’s insistence on a traitorous refusal of all bonds of obligation (Homos), and Georg Simmel’s account of the self ’s “subtraction” in sociability (“Sociability and Cruising”). But, as we noted in Chapter 4, this “antisocial” withdrawal is complicated by another momentum: like Beckett, Genet, and Simmel, Mallarmé experiments with what Bersani will call “an expansive diminishing of being” (TT 69). More frequently than Mallarmé’s, Bersani returns, as we have seen, to the laboratory of Baudelaire’s work to outline this onto-ethical/aesthetic proposition. If poetry remembers the object in its uncanniness—“our recollection of the object [la réminiscence de l’objet] thus conjured up bathes in a totally new atmosphere” (Mallarmé,

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“Crisis” 43 / “Crise” 368)14—Baudelaire would see in this the movement of “idealization,” the model’s dis- and re-membering in its gravitation toward its unactualized—that is, virtual—“caractère” (Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846” 456). This movement is not promoted, as it is in Proust, by the potential pleasure of knowing the self in the other; rather, its impetus lies in the purely aesthetic jouissance of the self ’s “effacement” amidst the world’s familiar forms.

The Concealment of Being In “The Subject of Power”—a 1977 review article of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality— Bersani notes that poststructuralist readings of Freud have urged a move beyond the paradigm of hiddenness in conceptualizing the unconscious, the kind of obscure depth illustrated by Sidney Sheldon. He writes: “one of the achievements of recent Freudian thought in France [has been] to demonstrate the non-hidden (the non-profound) nature of the repressed, its elusive presence” (20). Yet if the repressed in the unconscious is “not hidden,” neither is it “immediately visible” (20). The unconscious remains opaque, elusive, mysterious, concealed. This idea becomes important for Bersani beyond his reconfiguration of the theory of the unconscious. With various sources, he invites us to speculate about the concealment of being, an example of which we find in what I have called “the virtual unconscious.” He is not the only thinker to situate the concept of “concealment” at the center of his work. Amidst twentieth-century philosophers, Martin Heidegger does the most with the ancient Greek concepts of a-letheia (ἀ–λήθεια), of “concealment” and “disclosure” of being. In his early work, Bersani develops the thought of concealment not via Heidegger but through such sources as Proust, Mallarmé, and Laplanche. While, in some of his later texts, he makes brief references to Heidegger’s work, recognizing there parallels to his own ontoethics/aesthetics,15 artworks remain his most frequent sources for developing the thought of concealment beyond trauma and repression. One of his first sustained efforts to do this is the 1982 study of Mallarmé; the 1998 Dutoit Mallarmé’s argument about poetry’s capacity for estrangement has become something of a commonplace: shattering the familiarizing mirror of everyday discourse, poetic language allows us to look at the world anew. On the echoes of Mallarmé in subsequent theorizations of literature, see Hill 895–96. 15 See CS 42, 111n3; TT 33; RB 119–26. Bersani and Dutoit’s reading of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line in (FoB ch. 3) should be considered in the Heideggerian context that Kaja Silverman makes explicit (see Silverman, “All”), especially given Bersani and Dutoit’s acknowledgment of Silverman’s essay in FoB 117–18n. 14

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collaboration, Caravaggio’s Secrets, constitutes a particularly illuminating moment in the subsequent work. There are, Bersani writes in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, “two types of difficulty in modernist writing,” typified by Joyce and Mallarmé (DSM 60).16 Joyce’s work solicits the reader’s attention with puzzles in which one obscurely senses the fragments of a secret map to the cosmos. The reader must work hard to break the code, to trace the various allusions that Joyce has expertly hidden in his texts.17 Speaking of Joyce scholarship, Bersani writes: “Criticism has almost invariably treated these texts as if their difficulty could be resolved through exegesis” (DSM 58). These “exegetical” readings—the reference to the interpretation of religious texts is intentional18—are symptoms of Joyce’s own “textual imperialism” (DSM 58): with his literary practice, he has assumed the position of what Lacanians call “the subject supposed to know,” the master in whose blank gaze the analysand/reader tries to detect the truth of his being/the text. Compelled by texts such as Joyce’s, literary scholarship has frequently assumed that its role is to address “a certain opaqueness intrinsic to art,” to bring to light the hidden messages that art’s elaborate surfaces at once advertise and obfuscate (DSM vii). Art calls out to an interpreter, a trained mediator who can listen to the work’s manifest, and often muddled, content with an ear to the hidden desires that dare not fully speak their names. In the eyes of critics, an artwork is like a chattering or silent patient who cannot bear to know herself. A scholarly reading thus “penetrates and illuminates texts which it thereby rescues from their own enigmatic density” (DSM vii). This mode of criticism is pursued as a missionary venture, an effort to redeem the other from her darkness, to bring her to the light of self-knowledge. Psychoanalysis is alluded to only in passing in the Mallarmé study— Freud and Lacan get one reference each (DSM 84, 27), while Laplanche’s name is not mentioned—yet it is not difficult to see that Bersani implicitly likens the mode of “critical imperialism” (DSM vii, see also 27, 58–60) to the work that goes on in most analysts’ offices. Literary scholars have frequently approached works of art as an analyst would address a patient he thinks is hiding traumatic memories from herself. Furthermore, while the critic reminds us of the analyst, he also becomes the infant bewildered by

See the comparison between Joyce’s and Mallarmé’s difficulty also in FrB 26–27. Joyce famously confesses to the strategy: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant” (qtd. in Ellman 521). For a sense of his profligate allusiveness, see Thornton; and the Wikibooks page for Ulysses (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Annotations_to_James_Joyce%27s_Ulysses). 18 Bersani links Joyce scholarship to the “exegetical” also in CR 170, 175–78, 187. 16 17

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the other’s untranslatable dispatches, which he follows in his queer path of becoming-human. That Bersani uses the phrase “enigmatic density” when speaking of what scholarship responds to in literary texts indicates, in other words, that the criticism he has in mind operates on the ontological principle that Laplanche calls the hominizing fourvoiement (going-astray) under the spell of the enigmatic signifier.19 Determined to make sense of these messages—one’s life seems to depend on it—the literary critic and the fascinated child remain in an inquisitive, imperious, and paranoid relation to otherness (literary works such as Joyce’s; the human others whom Freud calls der Andere). This dynamic is likely to result in a violent confrontation between, an annihilative synthesis of, the subject and the object. Bersani writes that the “imperial” critic practices a mode of reading that “does away with its objects by embracing them” (DSM viii, see also 22). In this, the critic is like Marcel: he looks for the truth of his self in the world’s images; each object he desires seems to tempt him with a secret whose revelation would solve the riddle of his being. With its implicit references to Laplanche, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé indicates Bersani’s doubts about the outcome of what he in “The Subject of Power” had called French psychoanalytic theory’s effort to reconfigure the unconscious—and, by extension, the desiring human subject—beyond the ontology of traumatized unknowingness, the kind of hiddenness that the paradigm of repression postulates. If Laplanche gives us something of a revolutionary reading of Freud, the revolution, Bersani now suggests, may itself have been a false start. In this, Laplanche would faithfully follow Freud, whose revolution, as Laplanche himself repeatedly asserts, was quickly aborted. Bersani suggests that Laplanche is an unwitting Proustian: he prioritizes the mysteries with which the other compels the subject into becoming. The life of the Proustian-Laplanchean subject unfolds—like À la recherche du temps perdu itself—as “an epistemological detective story” (DSM 41). Because of this, we must persist in the task of rethinking ontoethics, our efforts to substitute another mode of concealment for the enigmatic or repressed secrets that we find in Proust and psychoanalysis. Mallarmé’s work actualizes this other mode. Bersani suggests that, in discussing Mallarmé, critics have mistaken his texts for Joyce’s. The “exegetical” mindset has contaminated Mallarmé scholarship, with critics bent on finding in his work the kinds of alluring messages with which Joyce teases the reader:

The word “enigma,” a central term in Laplanche’s idiom, is insistently repeated by Bersani in the Mallarmé study: DSM viii, 16, 30, 42, 59, 69, 72.

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Exegetical readings of Mallarmé are, so to speak, vertical replacements of the erased Mallarméan text (they implicitly present themselves as the text’s transcendently illuminating reading of itself) rather than a horizontal movement away from the text which leaves the text intact by virtue of the very mode in which it turns away from it … (DSM vii, ellipsis in original)

Evoking the revised Platonism in Baudelaire’s theory of correspondances, Bersani proposes that we morph the “vertical” orientation of misled mallarmistés—those closet Joyceans—into a reading practice that would outline, without totalizing, the web of “horizontal” connections in Mallarmé’s various writings. With this move from the vertical to the horizontal, we would relinquish the ontology of lack that Bersani suggests has organized our readerly imagination. While we have taken the fragmentary words on the page as the simulacra of the lost perfection of transcendent Ideas, we must now develop a reading practice that sees in the artwork, and then recapitulates in its own practice, the movement of disintegration that Baudelaire calls “idealization.” The solicitation of horizontal correspondences in idealizing reading requires that we train ourselves in the digressive mobility exemplified by Mallarmé. Whereas Ulysses and Finnegans Wake compel us to crack their complex codes, Mallarmé’s work “offer[s] a model of a very different type of interpretive activity,” one that requires “an extreme mobility of attention” (DSM 58, 60). This readerly “mobility” would replicate the author’s own “restless availability to various sorts of projects … the ease with which he moved among diverse modes of writing” (DSM 46–47). Reading Mallarmé should, in other words, precipitate a “theoretico-genesis,” or perhaps “aesthetico-genesis,” which Laplanche (and Bersani after him) diagnoses in the Freudian text’s repetition of the human subject’s digressiveness. As Bersani notes, Mallarmé was perpetually distracted from writing “the Book,” the coherent body of texts worthy to be called an “oeuvre,” that he in some of his correspondence suggested he was preparing. Instead, moving forgetfully between genres, his writing consisted of an “extraordinary diversity of literary projects”: “No single compositional activity seems to have occupied or held Mallarmé as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake held and centered Joyce” (DSM 46). The Mallarméan mind is too flighty and disjunctive to yield to the imperialist “occupation” that holds sway over the author and readers of Ulysses. To avoid such imperialism, it is ethically imperative that we follow— that is, allow ourselves to be infected by—Mallarmé’s aesthetic attitude. Instead of embracing “the anguished seriousness of modern art” (Bersani, “Other” 41), we should give into our rescue from Joycean weightiness by

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Mallarmé’s “frivolity,” make ourselves as “available” to sundry contingencies as the author did, and partake in the “sociability” of the artful chatter that filled the salon as his guests were waiting, in vain, for the Master to enlighten them with his insight (DSM 45–47, 55).20 As Bersani writes in the foreword to the 1982 study, he himself tries to pay the kind of attention to the Mallarméan oeuvre with which the author observes the world: he speaks of his “own non-exegetical mobility around, toward, and away from Mallarmé’s writing” (DSM vii). This circular, digressive practice of reading, recapitulating the artwork’s operative form or rhythm, will develop in Bersani’s later work into what I will in the concluding chapter call his “speculative” mode of thought. Bersani’s argument about Joyce and Mallarmé—that they exemplify “two types of difficulty in modernist writing”—is echoed with precision in his and Dutoit’s proposal, in 1998, that “Caravaggio paints two kinds of concealment” (CS 39). Whereas Joyce and Mallarmé train their readers in contrastive modes of literary attention, Caravaggio not only gives us examples of both but also demonstrates these modes’ inextricability. He can play the masterful game of hide-and-seek exemplified by Joyce’s ostentatiously obscure literary allusions, but also solicit the spectator’s desire by suggesting a hiddenness—a mystery—that does not promise the revelation of a repressed truth, that is not available for dissection and assimilation. At the same time, his work is illustrative of the way in which the desiring subject’s movement toward the world cannot be purified of the “imperial” violence that at once mobilizes and enslaves the Joycean reader: the effort to penetrate, dissect, dissolve, and assimilate the enigmatic text/object. The first type of concealment in Caravaggio coincides with the mode that not only establishes Joyce’s literary imperialism but also initiates the Proustian search. It is best exemplified in Caravaggio’s portraits by the twofold gestures executed by his young male models: they offer themselves to the viewer In training us in “frivolity,” “availability,” and “sociability”—all keywords, as I have noted, in Bersani’s work—Mallarmé also models a form of “concealment” that does not coincide with the hiddenness of repressed secrets. His work is, as scholars say, “difficult,” but this is not because it is “enigmatic” in the Laplanchean sense. Something remains “obscure” in Mallarmé, but this obscurity is not that of mysterious messages that demand painstaking translation. Rather, his difficulty is premised on the mode of concealment that is characteristic of the “spandrel spaces” I discussed in the previous chapter. Spandrels, as we saw, are not at all hidden in the picture. It may be difficult to see them, but this is not because of their enigmatic qualities. The spandrels that unfold in the Assyrian reliefs are not the kinds of puzzles (or rebuses) to which Freud likens dreams. They are not clues that will be organized into a meaningful narrative—the solution of a crime—at the conclusion; the delight we get out of them is not that of discovering a clandestine story. Rather, spandrels offer the aesthetic pleasure of observing their (nonsignifying) repetition. In Bollas’s terms, they “cradle” us in the repetition of forms, if we can make ourselves available to their company.

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and then, through an enticing withdrawal, suggest their unavailability. This “double movement” (CS 3) rivets the spectator in the same way that objects capture Marcel’s attention by suggesting secrets that these objects appear “at once to contain and to conceal” (Proust, Remembrance 1.183). Indeed, later in Caravaggio’s Secrets, Bersani and Dutoit identify this double solicitation in the call the world issues to Marcel: “The address excites him, and he strains to penetrate the secret being simultaneously offered and withheld” (CS 66). Marcel becomes a subject in his search for the meaning behind the world’s various mystifying solicitations. Replicating a line of thought that is by now familiar to us, Bersani and Dutoit go on to identify in Laplanche a major theorist of this model of desiring. The teasing performances of Caravaggio’s models activate “enigmatic desire”; its vehicle is the “eroticized address” with which the models prod the viewer (CS 39). With these phrases, Bersani and Dutoit are alluding to the theory of the enigmatic signifier, whose unmetabolizable excess will constitute, in primal repression, the unconscious. Indeed, the solicitous secrecy of Caravaggio’s models fashions the spectator as “the psychoanalytically constituted subject” (CS 39). The enigmatic mode of concealment exemplifies a way in which the subject is called into existence vis-à-vis a world of objects. It offers us, that is, a mode of subjectivation. In Proust as much as Caravaggio, the subject provoked into being by enigmatic concealment is fascinated by (most immediately human) others who possess, and tease him with, something that has been stolen from him while he was slumbering. The psychoanalytic name for this theft is “castration”: a key piece of the self has gone missing, a crime that demands redress and punishment for the subject to become, once more, self-possessed. The castrated being’s relation to the world is that of a detective trying to solve the crime of which he is the victim. It is my awakening to the theft—the sense that something (I do not exactly know what) has been taken from me—that renders me a subject and everyone else a potential criminal. My startled coming-to-consciousness of my privation constitutes my subjectivation. This regime of subjectivation has two major consequences. First, it constitutes the subject and the object not only as definitively separate but also as antagonistic entities (hence the aptness of the detective/criminal model). Since I am called into the world by messages that I cannot understand and that, moreover, seem to tease me with the missing truth of my being, my relation to the seeming originator of these dispatches is marked by aggrievance, aggression, and suspicion. The other, as Bersani often writes, emerges as an object of “paranoid fascination” (CS 38, 42, 95; C 66; IRG 92, 177). Second, since the subject’s constitutive task is not only to reclaim his lost being but also, and primarily, to understand what it is that has been stolen from him,

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his relation to the world takes the form of an epistemological quest: he must, above all, know what the other hides from him.21 What the subject loves in the object is the key that will allow him to decode the world’s mysteries. The subject’s relationship to the world is an “epistemophilic” one. Bersani and Dutoit thus speak of the psychoanalytic subject’s “paranoid fascination with the enigmatic signifier. That fascination … is the originary mode for a relationality in which subject and object are separated by the distance of an imaginary secret, a distance that only ‘knowledge’ might cross or eliminate” (CS 95–97). We come into the world as fascinated beings. An important corollary to the second consequence of one’s subjectivation in enigmatic desire—the primacy of knowledge as a mode of encountering the world—concerns the centrality of “sexuality” in mapping the modern world. As Caravaggio’s portraits suggest, the subject is seduced into being primarily as a mode of sexual curiosity, a hunger for sexual knowledge. When Bersani and Dutoit write that the teasing performances of Caravaggio’s models— their “eroticized address”—interpellate subjects as carriers of “enigmatic desire” (CS 39), they are alluding to Laplanche’s theory of hominization. “The seductive address Laplanche speaks of,” they write, “is … embedded in the very calling forth of the infant’s being as an independent subjectivity” (CS 40). If this seduction is constitutive of hominization, becominghuman is synonymous with sexualization. Psychoanalytically understood, “sexuality” names the human subject’s constitutive erring from “nature,” the proliferation of vicarious enjoyments when “the vital function” has failed the prematurely individuated human infant. The infant is “called” into sexuality, led astray (fourvoyé) by the mysterious solicitations that the external world (in psychoanalytic theory, always human others) seems to direct at him. The human, constitutively, goes astray. The name for this drift is “sexuality.” Bersani’s concept of modern era’s “sexual subject” emerges as much from his commentary on psychoanalytic theory as from his early engagement with Foucault’s emerging ideas about sexuality’s role in the modern disciplinarybiopolitical episteme. Bersani early on recognizes the importance of his colleague’s overturning of “the repressive hypothesis”; he is perhaps the first Anglo-American critic to integrate the lessons of La volonté de savoir into his own work. While he never rejects psychoanalytic theory like Foucault does, Such knowledge can be obtained only by an identification that risks the integrity of the subject. In a dynamic that has become a cliché particularly in serial killer narratives, the detective must assume the thought processes of the perpetrator in order to solve the crime, but in the process he risks becoming that which he seeks to abolish. This dynamic recapitulates what I have indicated is the “fascinated” logic of subjectivation: captured by the sight of the other, the subject is intent on “metabolizing” its alien presence; but, as the logic of fascination would tell us, it is in fact the glamored subject who will be devoured.

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he is interested in supplementing psychoanalysis’s insights about human ontology with Foucault’s argument about the limits of what is possible in a particular episteme. In a way that Freud and Laplanche never do, Foucault suggests that our contemporary mode of subjectivation is timebound, historically determined; it can, therefore, be modulated. The project of his later years was to write (and practice) “a history of the present” (Foucault, Discipline 31) that would locate in ancient texts dormant potentialities that, creolized with contemporary life, might help us formulate novel modes of self-making. He sought new forms of subjectivation, forms that would guide us beyond the sexual subject of modernity. Modes of subjectivation can be found also in art. Bersani and Dutoit argue that, while Caravaggio expertly paints the spectator’s calling-into-desire in his “erotically provocative” models (CS 82, 99), he also experiments with another form of secrecy, one that they call “the ‘concealment’ of an unmappable extensibility of being” (CS 39). Unlike the representatives of otherness who invite us to penetrate, by “understanding,” their sexual secrets, the second type of concealment is evoked in gestures that disperse our attention from privileged sites of sexual intensity. Bersani and Dutoit identify an example of this mode of secrecy in The Fortune Teller. For most scholars, the painting pokes fun at the young aristocrat’s vanity, which the fortune teller, carefully gauging the effects of her touch on his hand, manipulates either to solicit him sexually (she is suggestively rubbing the Venus mount of his palm) or to pilfer the ring from his finger. Bersani and Dutoit map the play of gazes differently. They go along with the critics’ suggestion that the woman’s inquisitive look bespeaks her effort to understand, and with her knowledge take advantage of, the young man. The look she directs at him is the same with which we are invited to read Caravaggio’s posing boys: it seeks to penetrate its object in search of a hidden truth. Yet the young man’s response is notably different from the suggestive promise that enthralls us in the bacchino malato or the fruit vendor. While the fortune teller looks in his face for a knowledge that would allow her to get what she wants, his “blank” gaze expresses nothing but a “disinterested availability” to her efforts at making contact (CS 18). Rather than returning her gaze, he looks somewhere beyond her, as if suggesting that, instead of connecting through the “understanding” that her interrogative expression represents, she join him at gazing beyond the frame of their couplehood—that they together witness something that is not visible in the painting itself. Observing we do not know what, his gaze is “impersonally directed” (CS 18): it expresses no “personality,” the kind of interiority that is a central assumption in modernity’s disciplinary-biopolitical regimes of control. While his look opens up to a connection, this is “not toward her as a psychologically or socially individuated presence, but toward her as

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an occasion for formal extensions of his own physical presence,” evident, for example, in the way in which “the upper part of her outer garment … prolongs the diagonal shape of his sword” (CS 18). This connectedness occurs in the kind of formal play that Bersani and Dutoit discern in the nonsignifying repetitions that punctuate the climactically oriented narratives of war and hunting in Assyrian art. The young man’s vacant staring can teach the woman—like the ancient reliefs can teach us—how to be captured by the world beyond its ruinous sexiness. According to Bersani, the curiosity triggered by sexual secrets is a central component of subjectivation in the modern regime. Caravaggio expertly illustrates the operation of such mysteries: he paints “the apparently unfathomable nature of the erotic” (CS 6, emphasis added) in the provocative gazes of the bacchino malato and the fruit vendor. Bersani and Dutoit use the same term as they discuss Laplanche’s theorization of the infant’s sexualization into the human subject by enigmatic messages. “The seduction is a mystification,” they write: “the child’s body is erotically stimulated by unfathomable ‘messages’” (CS 41). They go on to evoke the word again in a later passage where they describe the constitution of the unconscious in primal repression: The enigmatic signifier Laplanche describes refers us to an unconscious sexual secret, to those words, looks, objects, and scenes with which the child, unable to interpret them, created an unconscious. The mystery that shattered us into sexuality is by definition unfathomable; in its original form, it can never be dredged up from the unconscious and worked through (like, say, the Oedipal conflict, which is a secondary repression, less profound than the uninterpretable primary repressed material). The enigmatic signifier that is the stuff of primary repression22 is unknowable. (CS 81)

If the modern regime of subjectivation is premised on an “unfathomability,” this is because the repressed sexual secrets whose translation is the human “vocation” cannot be conclusively known: they reside in bottomless depths. Despite his claims to have found in Freud a “revolutionary” account of subjectivation, the unconscious that Laplanche theorizes is “unfathomable”

Bersani and Dutoit render Urverdrängung/refoulement originaire as “primary repression”; Laplanche and Pontalis, on the other hand, note: “It would seem preferable to translate ‘Urverdrängung’ by ‘primal repression’ rather than by the frequently used alternative of ‘primary repression’; the prefix Ur- is invariably rendered by ‘primal’ in the cases of Urphantasies (primal phantasy) and Urszene (primal scene)” (Language 333).

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in the same sense, indicated by the maritime idiom. We know that the unconscious, as das Andere, exists; but we will never be able to conclusively sound its depth, to discover its bedrock. We know that the bedrock is there; and we know that we will never reach it. Whether a body of water or the unconscious, an unfathomable entity is the “known unknown.” Not only is the subject of unfathomable secrets—the sexual subject of modernity—a subject of the repressed unconscious; he is also a worshipper of the apophatic God, the absolute other whose “unfathomable” (in some translations, “unsearchable”) ways remain beyond human understanding (Romans 11.33). We can only ever approach such mysteries asymptotically, gauging their effects in secondary phenomena (the lifeforms or refuse that drift toward the surface; the symptoms that issue from unknowable depths; the vestiges of divinity that we see in nature’s mirror). For Bersani, the Other’s unfathomability has consequences on how the subject relates to his others. He notes the term’s repetition in Lacan’s discussion of the concept of “the neighbor” in Freud: the neighbor’s jouissance elicits in me an “unfathomable aggressivity” (Seminar VII 187), the envious rage that, as Lacanians have proposed, is symptomized in racist and homophobic hatred.23 This dynamic is illustrated, Bersani proposes, in Marcel’s baffled reactions to the world’s enigmas. The repressed unconscious, as theorized by Laplanche and others, consolidates this mode as the only available means of approaching otherness. In order to move us beyond the work of “sounding knowing,”24 Bersani has sought to reconfigure the repressed/apophatic unconscious as the “virtual” unconscious. Mingling Mallarmé with Bollas, he suggests that we understand the unconscious as “an empty virtuality,” “a vast psychic reality that is always present” (TT xii). “The unconscious never is,” he writes; it is perhaps an essentially unthinkable, intrinsically unrealizable reserve of human being—a dimension of virtuality rather than of psychic depth—from which we connect to the world, not as subject to object, but as a continuation of a specific syntax of being. (IRG 147–48) For Freud’s original, see Civilization 299ff. For Bersani’s discussion, see FoB 126; I 59–61; and IRG 64. 24 In a short 1999 essay, Bersani and Dutoit advocate critical practices that would de-emphasize knowledge in favor of other modes of engagement with art. Nevertheless, they concede that the pedagogical project they have in mind—our retraining in desiring/ reading—is a difficult one: “It is of course true that criticism can’t help but sound knowing” (“Critical” 157). While the phrase indicates that critics cannot but strike the recognizable tones of “knowledge,” it also suggests—given the verbal double entendre— the maritime model where “knowledge” is figured as an “unfathomable” realm that requires the work of “sounding” its depths. 23

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In this reconceptualization, he implicitly draws from his and Dutoit’s reading of Caravaggio; Caravaggio’s work becomes one of his “ontological laboratories” in which the shift from the repressed to the virtual unconscious is experimentally set up. As Bersani and Dutoit write, in painting the second type of concealment, Caravaggio urges us “not to be satisfied with a relationality grounded in the erotic secret and, more generally, with forms of intersubjective knowing that assume a hidden unconscious” (CS 15). Rather than the form of hiddenness that psychoanalysis has figured in the repressed unconscious, we should think of relationality—work toward “new relational modes”—by actualizing “the ‘concealment’ of an unmappable extensibility of being” (CS 39). This form of hiddenness is lodged, as Bersani and Dutoit continue, in “[t]he body’s unmeasurable connectedness, its unmappable extensibility into space” (CS 89–90). With this formulation, they silently allude to René Descartes, in whose philosophy Bersani identifies an immensely influential, early articulation of our modern modes of being. They suggest that we should think of our relatedness to the world not in terms of the res cogitans that Descartes assigned as the exclusive property of humans; rather, we can learn to be fascinated by res extensa, the extensibility of our being, which we share with human and nonhuman entities alike. Rather than a repressed interiority, the unconscious in its “virtual” mode resides in the extended world, but a world of extension that has to be reinvented beyond Cartesian dualities. As Bersani writes in 2006, “The unconscious is not the region of the mind most hidden from the world; it resists being known because it so vastly exceeds what might know it” (IRG 149). We must understand it not as an unfathomable depth but as a field of “unmappable extensibility.” For psychoanalytic practice, this shift from depth to virtuality, from vertical to horizontal anamnesis, means that the excavation/detonation of repressed secrets, promoted by Sidney Sheldon and others, gives way to facilitating what Bollas calls “the aesthetics of a life” (Cracking 44). In many ways, this rethinking parallels Foucault’s largely unactualized project of producing an ethics that, like the ancient ethics that interested him, was “an aesthetic one” (Foucault, “On the Genealogy” 254). This onto-ethics/aesthetics reconfigures subjectivation by tapping into the unspent potential of ancient practices of self-regulation. As much as he differs from Foucault in his reading of Mallarmé, Bersani, in taking up this project, wants to complicate his colleague’s critique of psychoanalysis. He proposes that, rather than seeing, per Foucault, volonté de savoir as the only investment of the Freudian science, we conceptualize the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious in terms of its will to virtuality. But we can do so only by radically reinventing psychoanalytic theory—only by revving up the desiring-machines that, according to Deleuze and Guattari,

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all of its major thinkers (Freud, Klein, Lacan—and, Bersani would add, Laplanche) have, intentionally or not, dialed down. This means abandoning the repression model and understanding the unconscious not as “a reservoir of repressed representations and impulses,” but as “the original reservoir of psychic virtualities” (TT 67). Bersani’s account of the nonrepressed unconscious gives us a mode of being and becoming that demands a shift in our ontological paradigm from the psychological to the aesthetic. We can render this in Baudelairean idiom: Psychology is a science of depth, of vertical correspondences; it proceeds by linking symptoms to their repressed ideas (in the Platonic sense of this term). As Bollas puts it, the nonrepressed is realized in the subject’s “syntax” or “grammar,” an aesthetic that unfolds by horizontal correspondences, by the synchronization that, as I will propose in the next chapter, can be thought in terms of shared “rhythms.” This, Bersani suggests, is what the coming epistemic shift will entail: our relinquishing of “sexual/psychological” subjectivities in favor of tuning into “aesthetic” modes of being.

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Part Three

… But Is It Art?

… being can’t help but find itself elsewhere.

Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies

… art went that route, as did the bird … Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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In his most recent work, Leo Bersani speaks of “corporeal rhythm[s]” as an analytic category with which such notions as “psychic content” should be replaced in our thinking about the human subject (RB 55).1 This proposal entails an ethical model for psychoanalysis, art criticism, and various forms of sociable contact. Bersani suggests that, rather than seeking the hidden, repressed depths of a traumatized mind (or, say, of an enigmatic literary text), we should observe, perhaps replicate, the movements—the synchronies and asynchronies—in which a body travels amidst a world’s objects. “Our uniqueness, our individuality,” he writes, “is the form of how we have, over time, moved ourselves and how others have moved us, through space. A personality is a specific aesthetic of handling” (RB 55). With the phrase “aesthetic of handling,” Bersani echoes Christopher Bollas, for whom “the unthought known” that is the nonrepressed unconscious unfolds according to a singular rhythm. In early life, the infant adopts certain cadences and patterns from the caretaker, a temporalization that makes up the mother’s “aesthetic of handling.” As much as Bollas calls this aesthetic an “idiom” and a “syntax,” it also constitutes a “rhythm.” When Bollas speaks of “the unconscious rhythms of everyday experience” or “th[e] rhythm of unconscious creativity” (Cracking 72, 74), he means the aesthetic mode that, rather than providing the subject knowledge about the other, gives form to, or individuates, beings in their communicative existence. We have been taught that as ethical beings we must inform ourselves about our others, know them as well as we can. Bollas suggests instead that we attune to the ways in which we are in-formed, that is, how we emerge amidst the world’s forms, in the movements and rhythms that we share with our others (22, 65). Given that the “syntax” of being into which the infant is habituated includes rhythmic movements, aesthetic experiences frequently constitute

The question of “rhythm” in Bersani’s work was first pointed out to me by Tim Dean (see Dean, “Rhythms,” a chapter version forthcoming in his What Is Psychoanalytic Thinking?). Here, as in innumerable other moments in thinking about Bersani, I owe a debt of gratitude to Dean, who has for a long time been among the most perceptive commentators on Bersanian onto-ethics/aesthetics.

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encounters with a certain pacing or tempo. We speak of being “moved” by affectively resonant moments in, for example, art and religion; Bollas writes that such moments characteristically evoke an “absolute certainty that [the subject] has been cradled by, and dwelled with, the spirit of the object” (Shadow 30). An aesthetic experience is one where we recall, and resume, a movement of which we have been a part. In this description, one should hear echoes of Bersani’s career-long elaboration of Plato’s concept of “anamnesis,” whose modulations via Proust, Baudelaire, and others I traced in the previous chapter. If “rhythm” is a part of the “idiom of care” that the mother bequeaths the infant—a syntax that the child will replicate in her subsequent encounters—an aesthetic experience evokes the subject’s obscure memory of having shared a rhythmic “cradling” with others. As much as the idea of “the virtual unconscious” emerges in Bersani’s work before finding a new point of reference—a new frame of recategorization— in Bollas’s concept of “the unthought known,” Bersani has been thinking “rhythms” since his earliest texts. Already in the 1977, he speaks of “cradling rhythms of desire” in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (BF 48, 100, 102). Stéphane Mallarmé’s and Marcel Proust’s texts are as important for him as Baudelaire’s in his early efforts to outline an onto-ethics/aesthetics that might also ground such varied practices as clinical analysis and art criticism. Schematically put, Bersani suggests that we unlearn our “vertical” ambition to plumb the secret depths of the analysand or the artwork and, instead, trace the networks of “horizontal” connections in which the subject or the text emerges and metamorphizes, connections that can be understood as shared “rhythms.” Thus, we should attune to the “cradling rhythms” of a literary text, rather than trying to identify its “central or final truth”; if we do the latter, we will trap “the poet within an excessively coherent scheme,” overlooking his “excitingly playful, if risky, adventure in self-scattering and self-displacement” (BF 151). Ours will become a disciplinary-biopolitical—not to mention heteronormative and ableist—program of “straightening out” the object, of redeeming the patient or the text from the “sick[ness]” and “deficien[cy]” of its failed or inadequately elaborated meaning (DSM vii). According to Bersani, this has indeed been the shared fate of literary criticism and psychoanalytic practice, both of which have been organized, in their most influential forms, by the epistemophilia of our Cartesian era.2 Beyond the examples that this chapter will highlight, the question of “rhythm” resurfaces in Bersani’s work in, for example, his discussion of the “rhythms of knowledge” that we find in Gustave Flaubert’s fiction (CR ch. 5) and his suggestion, in Homos (1995), that S&M practices tap into “a certain rhythm of mastery and surrender in the psyche” (H 98), a rhythm that Bersani in Receptive Bodies calls “the great contrastive rhythms of living bodies” (breathing, waking/sleeping, eating/excreting) (RB 85).

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Starting with its title, this chapter proposes that we contextualize Bersani’s work in two emergent scholarly fields. Given his recurring evocations, from his earliest texts, of “rhythms” in art and philosophy, his oeuvre offers a case study for what Pascal Michon has recently called “rhythmology,” the analysis of representations of rhythms in various traditions and periods.3 I begin to situate Bersani in this field by, first, observing some of the occasions in which he addresses rhythms and, second, by connecting his thinking to Nicolas Abraham’s phenomenologico-psychoanalytic account of “rhythmizing consciousness” (conscience rythmisante) or “rhythmizing attitude” (attitude rythmisante). Outlined in the essays collected in Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis (1985), Abraham’s analysis of the subject’s turn from her everyday orientation to a rhythmizing consciousness overlaps with Bersani’s conceptualizations in two ways. First, the move to rhythm entails for Abraham a move analogous to the kind of “withdrawal” or “unplugging” whose necessity for any reconfiguration of our extant ontoethical imagination Bersani insists on. Bersani’s notion of “sociability,” developed with Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Georg Simmel, and others, is premised on a similar desiccation of the known world, an unlearning of the pleasures that we have been taught to take in our knowable others. “Rhythm,” as Bersani writes in his commentary on Simmel, “is what remains when content is stripped away” (IRG 46); or, as Avittai Aviram puts it, “where theory fails, rhythm begins to speak” (201). The “rhythmizing” subject attunes to the world in other ways than by obeying the epistemophilic dicta that have organized our lives in the Cartesian-Freudian-Proustian modernity. Beyond epistemophilia, Bersani finds “the aesthetic subject.” In this, too, he is in synchrony with Abraham’s revision of phenomenology: while Edmund Husserl seeks to “bracket” the world in order to enable the subject’s “phenomenological” orientation, Abraham suggests that it is an “aesthetic attitude” that will replace everyday positing. Second, apart from the shared concern with “rhythms,” Abraham’s work is helpful for the present chapter’s purposes because of his diagnosis of the “fascinated” character of the rhythmizing consciousness (Rhythms 23). “Fascination,” like “rhythm,” is one of Bersani’s crypto-concepts; and thus the In addition to Michon’s, an exploration of Bersani’s thinking about rhythm would turn to Henri Meschonnic’s, Clémence Couturier-Heinrich’s, Amittai F. Aviram’s, and Janina Wellmann’s studies; it would map the place of his thinking in what Wellmann calls modernity’s “rhythmic episteme” (14), particularly as this episteme’s assumptions are inflected in the most important of Bersani’s sources (Freud, Proust, Baudelaire, Deleuze). For a recent meditation on queer rhythms, see Freeman. As I briefly proposed in Chapter 3, notwithstanding Freeman’s critique of Bersani, her project can be productively explored in its overlaps and resonances with Bersanian onto-ethics/aesthetics.

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second scholarly context in which this chapter suggests we situate his work is what I propose we call “Fascination Studies.” This appellation indicates the work of recent scholars who have, with various emphases, traced the circulation, and metamorphoses, of the concept from antiquity to the twentyfirst century. Intimately linked with the malevolent influences of an otherness that turns out to be inscribed in the subject’s being, “fascination” allows us to insist on the onto-ethical core of Bersani’s thinking: the “intractable” way in which the human subject—and perhaps not only the human subject— is inhabited by violence, driven by a death-orientation. That the human subject is a fascinated being is one way to articulate Bersani’s insistence on the unredeemable infiltration of death’s forces in all of life’s manifestations.4 Contributors to rhythmology, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and John Mowitt find in “rhythm” “the condition of possibility for the subject” (LacoueLabarthe, Typography 195), “the senseless precondition of the subject” (Mowitt 33).5 The logic of rhythm’s constitutivity is that of contamination or infection. As Aviram writes, we often speak of “rhythm as having a distinctive ‘catchiness’—of inviting or urging or seducing the listener into participation” (7). Rhythm compels the subject to move in time with its syncopation; the shared dance, Bersani implies, marks her very emergence. So, too, with “fascination”: the alluring object infiltrates, and by this infiltration constitutes, the subject’s being. The force of “fascination” has most frequently been conceptualized in terms of an evil enchantment: it is not an accident that serpents, the precipitators of tragic humanity, figure as its mythic agents. Various twentieth-century thinkers have mobilized the trope of “fascination” to trouble Western philosophy’s tendency to characterize the human subject in terms of the abstract solipsism of such entities as “the cogito” or “the transcendental ego.” In his career-long effort to reconfigure the subject’s imbrication in the world, Jacques Lacan, for example, evokes the concept in his seminars and essays across the decades. The subject’s constitutive capture by her doppelgänger, most famously exemplified in the “mirror stage,” renders

While Bersani’s most frequent point of reference for this argument is Freudian psychoanalysis, it is also here that his work most clearly intersects with Jacques Derrida’s onto-ethical commitment to “mortal life.” I have indicated Bersani’s disagreements with and divergences from deconstructive thought in some of our previous chapters; but his thinking shares a considerable deal with Derrida’s insistence on life’s “autoimmunity,” the idea that all that exists does so only by virtue of a temporalization or “spacing” that contaminates life with the seeds of its undoing. For a clear exposition of Derrida’s philosophy from this perspective, see Hägglund, Radical. 5 For discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe and rhythm, see Aviram ch. 12. Apart from Mowitt’s Percussion (2002), see Catherine Clément’s Syncope (1990) for a psychoanalytically informed study on rhythm and subject-constitution. 4

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it impossible to conclusively distinguish the outside from the inside, the self from the other—a fact that Lacan sought to illustrate with the increasingly complicated topological figures that he presented to his audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the name for the strictly coeval emergence of the subject and the world is often, precisely, “fascination.”6 Bersani counts among the contemporary thinkers who, like Lacan, have implicitly taken persistent recourse to the concept in their work. Like Abraham, moreover, he frequently thinks “fascination” in the context of “rhythm,” or “rhythm” as a variable mode of “fascination.” In what follows, I trace the two concepts’ (often joint) recurrence from his earliest texts to the recent study Receptive Bodies (2018). This mapping will both suggest the longue durée of Bersani’s thinking—the “spiraling” movement of “recategorization,” evident in the persistent returns to a set of themes in his texts—and help us get beyond some of the most familiar lessons scholars have gleaned from his work. The chapter will conclude with a reading of Receptive Bodies, whose opening and closing chapters, written almost forty years apart, evoke, with important differences, the “fascinating rhythms” that remain at the core of Bersani’s onto-ethical program.

Cradling Bersani poses the question of rhythm, not only as a literary-formalist but also as an ontological issue, in his earliest texts. In Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), he outlines a theory of French modernism in which different artistic experimentations (by Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Camus, and Beckett) constitute a literary field characterized by a shifting between what he calls “centrifugal” to “centripetal” modes of expression—the rhythms of expansion and contraction, of dissemination and impoverishment. Proust retains a crucial “Fascination,” as Lacan puts it in 1954, “is absolutely essential to the phenomenon of the constitution of the ego” (Seminar II 50). He speaks of the mirror image’s “dyadic fascination” (“On My Antecedents” 56) and of “the ineffable jouissance [the subject] finds in losing himself in the fascinating image” (Lacan and Cénac 122); these exemplify what he later calls “the fascinations of the imaginary” (Seminar VII 199). For a helpful account of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a project to rethink the status of the object, see De Kesel. De Kesel adopts from Lacan the tendency to evoke, without analyzing, the concept of “fascination”: see e.g. 82, 208, 235, and 240. Something of the concept’s importance in Lacan is suggested by the entry “Fascination” in the online Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Of contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, Michel Thys has explored the concept most extensively: see Thys, “On fascination”; and (more extensively, in Dutch) Fascinatie.

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(because ambivalent) place amidst the writers discussed in Balzac to Beckett. His novelistic enterprise, as well as his account of onto-aesthetics, entails a certain “rhythm of thought.” In a book of that name, Jessica Wiskus suggests that, in his description of the mind’s shifting between the past and the present, as well as between various objects, Marcel is delighted not by the sensual recollection evoked by a particular object, but by the movement, the rhythmic substitutions, of the present and the past: It is not the past that inspires within Marcel a feeling of joy—it is the rhythm of the past and present. This rhythm—as a binding relation—is not contingent on the particular sensual content of his experience, as if the madeleine were itself imbued with magical power. Rhythm is not derived from a particular external object through the operation of the senses, nor from an interior image of the past, through recollection or imagination; it is not the object or subject that constitutes rhythm. Rather, rhythm is a structure that binds the past and present, subject and object, ideal and sensible; it holds together the “inside of the outside and the outside of the inside,” through which a common vision arises as expression. (120)7

In a study whose importance for Bersani I have explored in previous chapters, Gilles Deleuze similarly suggests that Marcel’s “apprenticeship” proceeds according to a certain “rhythm” (Proust 4, 26 85, 91). Often, this rhythm is one of digressiveness, of (what Bersani calls) “swerving.”8 This rhythm of distraction is the psycho-ontological mode of Marcel’s apprenticeship of “explicating” signs. As Proust writes, “the mind, following its habitual course[,] … advances by digression, inclining first in one direction, then in the other” (Remembrance 2.191). Bersani adopts this as an ontologically valid description: speaking of “our natural tendency to swerve” (“Other” 48; see also FV 125), he suggests that we have had to unlearn the “natural” rhythms by which our attention “floats”9 from one object to another: “We have … been educated to feel uneasy about our perceptual and affective mobility” (FV 125). To counter this discipline, Bersani has suggested our possible rehabituation into the distractive rhythms of inattention, an “attunement with the rhythm of Being” (Wiskus 121). One way that we have been trained out of our innate attention deficit capacity is to have us organize our perception according to the rhythms of Wiskus’s quotation comes from Merleau-Ponty 164. On Bersani and “swerving,” see Tuhkanen, “Leo.” 9 The term “floating” circulates as something of a keyword in Bersani’s 1970s work: see esp. BF 148, 150, and passim. 7 8

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a narrative imagination. The disciplinary role of “narrativity” in modern culture is a central concern in Bersani’s 1970s and 1980s work, particularly from A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976) until The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986). This emphasis begins with his meditation, in A Future for Astyanax, on the way in which psychoanalysis, despite the disruptive potential it identifies in human ontology, has generated the kinds of normative practices that we witness particularly in Kleinianism and the adaptationist models of ego psychology in the United States. The hypotheses concerning sexual development become a case in point: much of the normativity of psychoanalytic theorizing has hinged on the account of an individual’s steady progression through various psychosexual stages until she reaches the telos of adult, genital, heterosexual sexuality.10 The tightly developmental shape Freud’s followers (and, more than occasionally, Freud himself) gave to his account of sexual maturation functioned as a form of authoritarianism. If sexual development is a story with a predetermined endpoint, “the perversions of adults,” as Bersani writes in The Freudian Body, “… become intelligible as the sickness of uncompleted narratives” (FrB 32). Perverts have failed to conclude their sexual stories; the analyst is supposed to step in and help the patient take up the missed beats. Some years earlier, in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), Bersani suggests that literary critics have often, and often unknowingly, adopted a role analogous to that of the analyst. He writes—surely with a wink—that literary criticism, in its traditional form, has constituted the work of “straighten[ing] out” “difficult” works of art (DSM vii).11 This approach assumes that, because artworks speak to us in enigmatic messages, we need an interpreter—the critic—who has been trained in their obscure idiom. Like the form of psychoanalytic theory that sees in nonnormative sexuality “uncompleted narratives,” such criticism deems (particularly modernist) art “deficient in narrativity” (DSM vii). It is the task of the critic, as it is of the analyst, to help the patient and the text resume their interrupted stories and reach an illuminating dénouement. If the optics of narrativity are operative in psychoanalysis and art (and particularly art criticism), both are training grounds for us to learn to make sense of experience. While goal-oriented stories offer the security that comes with eliminating the unexpected—not perhaps the twists in the tale (which

On this normative aspect of Freudianism, see Brooks ch. 4; de Lauretis, Practice ch. 1; Morrison; Roof, Come; Tuhkanen, “Binding.” 11 Bersani continues his punning in The Culture of Redemption when he suggests that critics have frequently been encouraged in the work of “straightening out” recalcitrant artworks by their “training” by texts like Ulysses: Joyce criticism exemplifies a scholarly “intent on getting everything straight” (CR 159; see also 187). 10

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comprise a mode of the expected unexpected that has produced its own genres for the literary marketplace), but disruptive voices that break into the story as something like irrelevant chatter—Bersani detects yet another reason for the eagerness with which we look for, and relish, teleological narratives. We love narratives because their often-catastrophic conclusions remind us of the pleasures of the orgiastic undoing that he, following Freud and Laplanche, posits as the human subject’s founding experience. The subject emerges in a moment—that of ébranlement—where consciousness is at once constituted and exploded. Goal-oriented narratives thrill us with echoes of this originary shattering. As Bersani writes in The Freudian Body, “a calculated movement toward explosive climaxes … is the narrative rhythm most appropriate to the masochistic origin of sexuality” (FrB 52). The remembered intensities of this masochistic jouissance make us love tragedies: we tremble with excitement in our identification with a hero whose momentary glory we know to be followed by peripeteia, a spectacular fall from grace. Bersani finds in varied examples—Sade, nineteenth-century literary realism, ancient Assyrian palace reliefs, the theater of Tennessee Williams—representations that thrill us with death-oriented rhythms: their “pacing” constitutes “a calculated movement toward explosive climaxes” (“Merde” 28 / RB 9; see also FV 40). Narrativity, in Freud and art, thus has a double function. First, the narrative organization of fragmentary experiences (or “partial impulses,” as Bersani writes, following Deleuze and Guattari, in A Future for Astyanax) neutralizes experiential multiplicity by arranging its scraps into predictable stories where the main storyline and minor incidents are consigned to their appropriate places to produce the final resolution. Yet, while we often think of such endings as the moments where the seemingly disparate narrative strands “come together,” that is, are bound into a cohesive, readable whole, the French term “dénouement”—from the verb nouer, “to bind” or “tie”—indicates the radically ambivalent character of such conclusions: at stake is not so much a tying-together but an unbinding, a “decomposition, disintegration, dispersion” (OED); at the end, the world unravels (dé-nouer). Thinking psychoanalytically, we can suggest, with Bersani, that language here indicates something essential about human ontology: the way in which our being wills its own pleasurable extinction by framing existence through the rhythm of narrative arcs. When we say that a story “came together in the end,” we should hear the sexual resonances in our description. Teleological narratives tempt us with the “little deaths” that we also look for in sex. This is why we are captured by scenes of the world’s suffering: we stare at them in “mimetic fascination” (FV 37). We are mesmerized by violence because it prompts our constitutive jouissance. Narrativity plugs into this tendency:

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the narrative sequestering of violence produces the ideal conditions for a mimetic relation to violence … [As Freud and Laplanche suggest, s]uch a relation to spectacles of violence includes a sexually induced fascination with it. The immobilization of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment. (FV 52)

What Bersani, again repeating our keyword, calls “our fascination with destructive historical violence” (“Other” 48) reveals the many ways in which we not only have been trained in eschatology but are ontologically deathdriven: our pleasure is intimately connected to the possibility of the world’s apocalyptic unraveling. The implication of our jouissance—psychoanalytically thinking, our being—in violence is inescapable. This is a truth that art and psychoanalysis have done their best to evade: particularly in the hands of “secondary” readers (literary critics and Freud’s followers), the distractive forces of the human condition that speak in art and the Freudian text have been neutralized into “narratives.” At the same time, however, such programs of narrativity have misplaced what might yet rescue us from our eagerness to embrace the apocalypse: rigidly structured narratives blind us to the “saving frivolity” of the world’s pleasurable distractions. Compounding the ethical error of nullifying such playfulness, narratives end up in fact servicing the most destructive aspects of human ontology—our masochistic love of death. As Bersani, noting the contradiction, continues in The Freudian Body, “the logic of narrativity … both domesticates sexuality and hypostatizes its violence” (FrB 52). Narratives defuse the unbinding forces of becoming— of what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring-machines—but at the same time deliver us directly to the death drive. One way to understand Bersani’s entire oeuvre is to see it as a consistent effort to explore alternatives to both sexuality’s (self-)destructive forces and its domestication into the normative stories that paradoxically perpetuate sexuality’s most despotic aspects. In different ways, and with a variety of sources, Bersani has sought to model “nonsadistic” ways of moving in the world. He has proposed, for example, that we cultivate occasions for the modes of “sociability” that “supplement” sexuality, experiment with the forms of contact that, spandrel-like, arise as sexuality’s unintended side-effects. One way to unlearn our attraction to the commanding rhythms of narrativity is by turning to—or inventing—occasions or texts marked by an absence of rhythm. We should deprive ourselves of our rhythmicity. Bersani identifies such efforts in Robert Wilson’s experimental theater, where plotlines are replaced by an austere staging and the actors’ repetitive movements, in plays that can last a week. Wilson experiments with a temporality different

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from the meaningfulness and anticipation that motivate narrative progression: his pieces are “[t]emporally discontinuous, obsessively repetitive, indifferent to rationality and to the discursive or informational function of language” (FA 281). Unlike narrative art, which distinguishes important elements from lesser ones, “[n]o one moment in Wilson’s works seem[s] designed to be more dramatic or more significant than other moments” (FA 281). Wilson’s theater destroys the rhythmicity that we expect—that we have, at least partially, been trained to expect—from representation. The ruination of narratives that Bersani identifies in Wilson is typical of modernist, or postmodern, experimental art. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels provide another example. As Bersani notes earlier in A Future for Astyanax, Roland Barthes contrasts the “rhythm” of traditional storytelling to the postmodern novel, such as RobbeGrillet’s, where “no one moment of writing has more value or weight than any other moment” (FA 51). At the far end of modernist experimentations we find Beckett’s work, which gives us, as Bersani writes in Balzac to Beckett, “the most extreme monotony of being” (BB 310). All such efforts can be seen as efforts to move away from the commanding rhythms of narrativity. Yet if the narratives that seduce the subject by evoking her originary masochism produce a mesmeric effect—“the mimetic fascination of [derived] sadism” (AI 137)—and thereby entrance us with “the glamour of historical violence” (Bersani and Dutoit, “Merde” 28 / RB 9), the rhythms of modernist or experimental art similarly compel us with something like the force of “fascination”: Bersani speaks of “Wilson’s hypnotic theater” (FA 281). We remain in a fascinated relation to the world, whether spellbound by deathdriven narratives or lulled into distraction by the experience of nothing taking place. Either way, we are “cradled.” Like “fascination,” Bersani uses this term to indicate the slipperiness of the mode in which subjects participate— become—in the world’s rhythms. When he identifies in Baudelaire’s poetry “cradling rhythms of desire” (BF 48, 100, 102), he anticipates Christopher Bollas’s later conceptualization of the aesthetic experience as the subject’s obscure recollection of her having been “cradled by, and dwelled with, the spirit of the object” (Shadow 30). Yet while “cradling” names the subject’s encounter with the anamnestic object, the term returns in Bersani’s subsequent work as a different kind of fascinated capture. In The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit note the way in which Assyrian artists construct stories that capture our attention in the same way that teleological narratives do in their aim-oriented movement toward climactic resolutions. While it seems that, in their death-orientation, such narratives would seek to find their dénouement as quickly as possible, detours are an important part of their seductiveness. For the narratives to work, their “straight lines,” aiming at the story’s resolution, must be supplemented with “curved” ones that rhythmically

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“cradle” the spectator. Here, Bersani and Dutoit use the term “cradling” to indicate a movement whose ostensible variability hides a homogeneity—a “sameness”—that is more easily observed in scenes dominated by stories that, as we say, go straight to the point: while a perfectly straight line could be taken as a geometric metaphor for a deathlike world in which change (and therefore time as well as differentiated space) has been eliminated, the very fact that it leads us always in the same direction allows us not only to abbreviate our perception of it but also to become inattentive to it, to turn away from it. (FV 81)

In its predictability, a “straight” story enables the kind of “digressive” wandering that the Proustian imagination at best exemplifies. As opposed to such “straight” spectacles (Bersani’s language, let us parenthetically note, should indicate for us the queer shape of his psychoanalytic onto-ethics/ aesthetics), a scene of “curved” lines cradles the mind with apparent shifts, but these shifts are nevertheless in the service of the “death drive” that more blatantly teleological narratives reveal. “Cradling movement” has an “insidious appeal”: Cradling seductively combines mobility and exact repetition; it gives us the illusion of difference within the reality of sameness. The certainty of always returning to the same points encourages the passivity peculiar to being cradled or watching cradling movements. Nothing is more hypnotically tranquilizing than movement without surprises. Most appropriately, we put infants to sleep by rocking them gently; cradling— somewhat like breathing—is a minimal experience of the agitations intrinsic to life; it is an agitation compatible with the immobility of sleep. (FV 81)

Such “cradling” is exemplified not only by the visual pleasures with which Assyrian artists tell their savage stories but also in the fascist pageantry of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). In this documentary, commissioned by the National Socialist Party to commemorate its 1934 Congress in Nuremberg, the viewer is seduced by “the hypnotic rhythms of sameness in motion” (FV 86) evoked by aesthetically pleasing camera movements and various spectacles (for example, “the monotonous sameness of the military march” [FV 86]). Bersani and Dutoit discern in the movement of fascist bodies the force of a fascination: “The pseudomobility of these cradling movements,” they write, “seduces us into a hypnotically sensual fascination with repetition” (FV 86). If the “cradling” cadences of Baudelaire’s poetry

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evoke “the rhythms of mobile fantasy” (BF 7), in the narratives of Assyrian art and spectacles of Triumph of the Will the apparent movement of “cradling” produces a hypnotic effect that renders the human subject immediately vulnerable to the masochistic enjoyment whose fascist potential, as Bersani and Dutoit write in “Merde Alors” (1980), Pier Paolo Pasolini recognizes in Sade. This is the deadly allure that paralyzes the subject with “th[e] sort of fascination which is exercised by the strange and unexpected forms of an approaching death” (Proust, Remembrance 2.87). The proximity of the rhythmic sensuality of Baudelaire’s language to the fascinating rhythms of Riefenstahl’s Nazi documentary points to the central knot of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. For him, the human subject is inextricably involved in the murderous/suicidal passions that Sadean tortures and fascist spectacles skillfully elicit. Such scenes of annihilation glamor us with the fascination of a death that, as Proust continues, “a man already has, in the popular saying, written on his face” (Remembrance 2.87). We easily (because constitutively) respond to sadistic pageantry. Yet if we assent to being “cradled” by Riefenstahl’s sensual images, such mesmeric rhythms can also neutralize our intensive engagement with death: we might become fascinated by the inevitability of a certain drift in our attention, the inexorable way in which other scenes—“there is almost always something else going on” (Bersani and Dutoit, “Merde” 29 / RB 11)—call to us.

Rhythmic Emergences A number of scholars have recently made a collective argument for “fascination” as a neglected keyword of modernity.12 The term is derived from the Latin fascināre, whose semantic range moves from “irresistibly attractive influence” and “enchantment” to the obsolete meanings of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” (Lat. fascinum). In its older denotation, it refers particularly to the kind of deadly, arresting magic that folklore deposits on the “evil eye.” Serpents are said to wield this magic in hypnotically immobilizing their prey; under this spell, the victim surrenders to being eaten alive. Fascination names a capture—most often, a specular one—by a malevolent other. While Among the recent texts to have inaugurated what we might call “Fascination Studies” are those by Baumbach; Baumbach, Henningsen, and Oschema; Degen; Hahnemann and Weyand; Massey; Seeber; Thys; and Weingart. See also the variously slanted encyclopedia articles by Beth; Desprats-Péquignot; Lotter; and Türcke. The present chapter will conclude with some commentary on Bersani’s theorization of cinematic fascination. For discussions on cinema and fascination, see Abbas; Connor; Harris; Shaviro; and Tuhkanen, ed., “Fascination.” For Bersani and cinematic fascination, see also Tuhkanen, “Accompanying.”

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Enlightenment modernity is often figured in terms of the eradication, by protocols of rationality, of such superstitions as were articulated in (ancient or medieval) discourses about “fascinating” influences, scholars have traced the persistence with which various “premodern” ideas have continued to inhabit the modern mind. As much as Enlightenment modernity is supposed to have woken us up from the spell of ancient superstitions and forced us to observe the world “with sober senses [mit nüchternen Augen]” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 476 / Manifest 465), we have in fact never been disenchanted. Our eyes continue to be clouded by the glamor of otherness: fascination remains a “key concept [Schlüsselphänomen] in modernity” (Hahnemann and Weyand 26). This history resonates in Bersani and Dutoit’s discussion, in “Merde Alors,” The Forms of Violence, and elsewhere, of the “fascination” with which spectacles of violence capture us, precipitating the jouissance of projected masochism/derived sadism. One way to begin to situate Bersani in Fascination Studies is to turn to Nicolas Abraham’s work on “rhythmizing consciousness.” In his adoption of and departure from Husserlian phenomenology, Abraham’s work will help us return to what I above called “the central knot” in Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, the difficulty that has kept him insisting that the kind of pedagogical project (of our “deprogramming” and “retraining”) that he sometimes proposes remains a daunting, perhaps impossible, undertaking. As much as Georg Simmel suggests that not just any “chatter” (Geschwätz) facilitates sociability—that sociable contact demands “good form,” an artfulness13—Abraham proposes that not all “regular recurrence of intervals” qualifies as “rhythm.” Something must be added to “intervallic repetition” for the emergence of what he calls “a rhythmizing attitude” or “rhythmizing consciousness”: “a creative act” (Rhythms 108). In the essays collected in his book Rhythms, he twice gives the example of a train passenger to illustrate this subjective mood. In the first instance, he narrates the passenger’s experience: Seated in the compartment of a train, I distractedly contemplate the receding landscape. Without paying any particular attention to it, I feel myself surrounded by a whole world of presences: my fellow passengers, the windowpane, the rumbling of the wheels, the continually changing panorama. But now here I am, for the past moment or so, nodding my head, tapping my foot, and my whole body is vibrating [tout mon corps vibre] to the beat of a rhythm that seems unending. (Rhythms 21 / 28) See Simmel, “Sociability” 129; Sociology 52 / Grundfragen 115; and the discussion in Chapter 6 above.

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This synchronization of the body with the locomotive indicates “[a] radical change of attitude” in the passenger: “from the moment my body embraced the cadencing of the wheels, the surrounding objects appeared to lose their solidity and they took on the flavor of an almost dreamlike unreality.” The narrator has adopted, or become, a “rhythmizing attitude”: “To abandon oneself to a rhythm is momentarily to cease positing [poser] the existence of the surrounding world” (21 / 28). This attitude emerges when the passenger, rather than passively receiving the jolts of the train, begins to expect them. He orients his being along what Husserl calls the retention-protention axis (retaining a perception in consciousness in order to anticipate the future).14 Returning to the example, Abraham continues in a later essay: in the interval between the sounds, I was taken hold of by a tension, an expectation, which the next shock would either fulfill or disappoint. And so the jolts, which were merely endured before, are now expected; my whole body prepares to receive them. My passivity of a moment ago has changed into an active spontaneity: I am no longer at the mercy of external forces; on the contrary, it is now they who obey me. At just the right time, I tap my foot—and instantly trigger the event. My expectations have no other meaning: in reality, they are desires, demands, incantations. When the event occurs, I experience the satisfaction of my efficacy. Thus, rhythmizing consciousness is apprehended as activity, as spontaneity. (70–71)

When, in slipping into “rhythmizing consciousness,” the passenger ceases to “posit” the world around him, he abandons what Husserl calls “the natural attitude” (die natürliche Einstellung). Abraham follows the project of Husserlian phenomenology, in which “the natural attitude” is to be overtaken by “the phenomenological attitude”: insisting that one not “posit” the world, Husserl sought to clear the ground of all the positivist assumptions that he saw informing empirical sciences. The “natural” outlook is replaced by a “phenomenological” orientation when the subject “brackets” or “parenthesizes” the world as an entity that he has assumed to preexist experience and, instead, “goes back to the things themselves”—to phenomena.15 Epokhē (ἐποχή), the Greek term Husserl borrows from the Sceptics to indicate the starting point of the “phenomenological reduction,” connotes a “suspension” or “cessation” of judgment: taking his time, the

On Husserl’s theory of temporality, see his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. 15 On “the natural attitude” and “bracketing,” see Husserl, Ideas I §30-32. 14

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subject stalls the usual routine of things, preventing “the being-acceptedbeforehand of ‘this’ world” (Husserl, Ideas I §32). The world’s bracketing imposes a cut or delay in experience, one that enables us to—or demands that we—look again. The aim is to get beyond all presuppositions about the world and to isolate pure consciousness as the realm where meaning is constituted. Similarly, in Abraham’s anecdote, the passenger in an everyday attitude “posits” the surrounding world as he “distractedly”—a self-removal allowed by such customary positing—gazes at the speeding landscape. What is at stake in Abraham, as in Husserl, is the morphing of this “natural” attitude into another orientation. For both, the work of “general positing [Die Generalthesis]” (Husserl, Ideas I §31)16 must be suspended and “thetic consciousness” put out of play. Like the Husserlian subject, the train passenger, undergoing “a radical change of attitude,” “cease[s] positing the world.” Yet the emergent attitudes—Husserl’s “phenomenological” mental state and Abraham’s “rhythmizing” consciousness—differ from one another. While the Husserlian subject struggles to wakefulness at the moment he renounces the natural attitude (his is “the waking ego”), the train passenger enters a realm of oneiric instability, “an almost dreamlike unreality.” For Abraham, the emergence of rhythmizing consciousness denotes the subject’s slipping into a dream, his falling under a “spell.” The passenger loses the sight of his fellow travelers and the speeding landscape; joining the rhythm of the locomotive, he begins to “vibrate” with it. When this spell is broken—when the train’s clanking is disturbed or changed too much—the subject “awakens,” entering “the pragmatic world of reality” (Rhythms 72). Thus, the result of the world’s bracketing in Abraham is not the clarity at which epokhē aims for Husserl. Rather than the subjective “freedom” that Husserlian phenomenology sought to guarantee, rhythmizing consciousness veers close to a paralytic mode of capture: “the rhythm,” as Abraham continues, … ceaselessly urg[es] consciousness to give itself over; a deliberate act of will may be required for consciousness to break free from rhythm’s grasp. Rhythmizing consciousness is thus to some degree a prisoner of the rhythm that comes implacably to fill the protention of “what comes next.” Rhythmizing consciousness thus emerges as a fascinated consciousness, subject to a fatal, horizonless future [La conscience rythmisante apparaît donc comme une conscience fascinée, soumise à un avenir fatal et sans horizon]. This fascination admits of degrees, ranging from the normal to the pathological. (23 / 29) Paul Ricoeur translates this as “la position (ou thèse) générale” (Idées §30).

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If phenomenology seeks to awaken the subject from his capture by the natural attitude, Abraham suggests that on the other side of thetic consciousness we find another mode of mesmeric absenting, a “fascinated consciousness.” This fascination, which can range from propitious to pathological, takes over as general positing is suspended—more accurately, perhaps, as it precipitates this suspending—and the subject enters another world. “Fascination” names the edge, the dividing line, between freedom and capture. While it designates one’s immobilization by the natural attitude, it also names, for Abraham, an aesthetic attitude that threatens to capture the subject like the snake would glamor the bird.17 In a subsequent essay, Abraham refines the dividing line between “rhythmizing” and “fascination,” turning to an example from African cultures. In its trance-like effects, African drumming evinces, as he writes, a succession that does not advance: the same cycle is constantly repeated, and duration … marches in place. Clearly, this is not free and creative rhythmizing consciousness, but a fascinated consciousness, subjected to an inevitable, horizonless future [une conscience fascinée, soumise à un avenir fatal et sans horizon]. A gradual increase of volume accompanied by a progressive shortening of the intervals can carry this fascination as far as the total abdication of freedom, to the point of the abolition of consciousness itself, to catalepsy or ecstasy. (Rhythms 84 / 90) While the phrasing is nearly identical, the argumentation has shifted from the earlier formulation: this time, the distinction between the “free and creative” activity of “rhythmizing consciousness” and the futurelessness of fascination is rendered firmer. While the former names a creative reorientation, the suspension or cessation of positing in fascination yields to fatal paralysis. It seems that this redefinition is enabled by Abraham’s reference to African drumming as an example of fascinated consciousness. Africans come to figure a temporal stasis, their art demonstrating a way of being that goes nowhere, locked in a dead-end cycle. As Elizabeth Freeman notes, we witness here Abraham “tapping into a long history of understanding nonwhite cultures as without proper differentiation, rhythmically or otherwise” (42). Indeed, he is not alone in linking African and Africandiasporic cultures to the sense of temporal paralysis that “fascination” connotes. Using the same term, Theodor Adorno critiques the modern culture industry by comparing its ideological effects to those of “premodern” arts. Describing consumers of contemporary music, he writes of “their transformation into beetles whirring around in fascination … The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums”; this leads to “pseudoactivity” (292), precisely what Abraham, when he evokes African drumming, calls “fascinated consciousness.” It is in “fascination” that the promise of modernity fails insofar as the term connotes the immobility and self-absenting that commentators from Hegel onward (see Lectures 173–90)—consciously or not, an important model for both Abraham and Adorno—have connected to non-Western cultures (and particularly Africa).     If critics such as Abraham and Adorno “den[y] temporal complexity to people of African descent” (Freeman 41), we can turn to the remarkable analyses of Brent Hayes Edwards and Ashon Crawley to reorient the question of diasporic rhythms: see Edwards’s exploration of James Weldon Johnson’s writing and music (as an example of what he elsewhere calls “the practice of diaspora”) in Epistrophies (2017) ch. 2; and Crawley’s account of black church practices in Blackpentecostal Breath (2017). 17

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Importantly for us, Abraham nudges phenomenology toward a study of aesthetics, a field that Husserl largely avoided. Whereas for Husserl the suspension of thetic consciousness enables the “phenomenological” attitude—the subject’s turn to “things themselves”—in Abraham’s example, beyond the natural attitude one finds an aesthetic orientation. Notwithstanding his prevarications, this aesthetic subject is necessarily a “fascinated” being, captured by an experience such as one finds in attuning to the rhythms of the locomotive or African drumming. Abraham goes on to analyze a number of artworks—mostly literary texts—for the way in which their rhythms elicit such fascination. His program of “psychoanalytic aesthetics” theorizes the artwork as an “enrapturing object” (Rhythms 68) that lures the subject away from the world of thetic consciousness. Indeed, as Abraham concludes, in art we always discern “procedures of trickery and fascination [procédés de leurre et de fascination]” (130 / 132). As Sibylle Baumbach, too, notes, poetic rhyming and meter frequently “produce a hypnotic lure” (135). Elicited by the “monotonous and hypnotic murmur” of rhythmic verses, rhythmizing consciousness casts a “spell” on the subject: a “demiurgic activity” of an “incantatory nature,” it operates with “magical injunctions” (Abraham, Rhythms 123, 72–73). Abraham suggests that the subject shifts to an aesthetic consciousness by adopting the object’s peculiar rhythm, by slipping across the ontological division on which Western thought, at least since Descartes (with the notable exception of Spinoza), has insisted. “How is it that I come to possess the rhythm-object?” he asks. “By making myself a rhythmic object. And so I have it because I am it” (75). The “rhythm-object” in Abraham’s anecdote is not the locomotive; rather, it is the fascinating rhythm that emerges as the traveler begins to “vibrate” (21) with the movement. The train itself does not “have” this rhythm; it is actualized only at the moment—“a creative act” (108)—when the passenger falls under its spell. Abraham speaks of “rhythmic emergences” (78); the editors write that this phrase “designates the emerging itself rather than what emerges” (164n6). At stake is the process of becoming rather than the actualized object; or, to put this differently, the (e)merging subject of rhythmizing consciousness does not become the other—the rhythm-object—but rather becomes-other, in the sense in which such hyphenated constructions appear in Deleuzean idiom. In “rhythmizing consciousness,” the human and the locomotive enter what Deleuze and Guattari call “a zone of proximity” or “indiscernibility.” In their terms, fascinating rhythm names “a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up … two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other”

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(Thousand 293, see also 273, 279). The subject begins to “rhythmize” when it joins the object in its movement, begins to, as it were, resonate with it.18 In this way, Abraham’s notion of rhythmizing consciousness returns us to one of the recurrent concerns in Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics: modernity’s devastating error of splitting the subject from the object, the thinking from the thought, res cogitans from res extensa. If, in the aesthetic agreement that Abraham discerns in his example, the passenger’s body “vibrates” with the locomotive, there emerges a shared frequency between the subject and the object: they are in synchrony, moving in mutual (re)sonance. As Ella Fitzgerald tells us, fascinating rhythm sets the subject, no less than the object, “all aquiver”: both are taken over by a movement—a trembling—that occurs in place, but a “place” in which one exceeds her extant boundaries. Suggesting the undoing of the subject-object division, Abraham’s “rhythmizing attitude” shares a considerable deal with the dynamic that Simmel calls “sociability.” Both modes demand the subject’s withdrawal from the constituted world. Abraham’s “rhythmizing” begins with the stalling of the thetic mind, the cessation of “positing.” Husserl sometimes calls this As is the case with Bersani, “rhythm” is one concept that Deleuze deploys to think beyond Western modernity’s insistence on the separation of the self and the Umwelt, the subject and the object. We can discern echoes of Deleuze’s argument about the elaboration of Proustian signs in the space between the subject and the object (see Chapter 2 above) in his and Guattari’s characterization of the composition of “milieus” and “territories” through “the refrain,” “the motif,” and “the counterpoint.” A bird establishes a territory through a refrain, the rhythmic punctuation of “chaos” by a melodic repetition. Yet an excess in the refrain—as Friedrich Nietzsche would say, a becoming or force characteristic of all being—leads to its disengagement from immediate usefulness, an abstraction whereby the territorializing refrain is overtaken by—turns into—a “rhythmic emergence”: “Instead of a motif being tied to a character who appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 319). Even Richard Wagner, the most territorial of composers, cannot but demonstrate this. Although Deleuze and Guattari accept assessments according to which Wagner fails in his artistry in identifying his leitmotifs too literally with characters and their development, such motifs’ internal differences—a concept that Deleuze extracts from Henri Bergson—guarantee that, “as the work develops, the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer their own plane, become autonomous from the dramatic action, impulses, and situations, and independent of characters and landscapes; they themselves become melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters continually enriching their internal relations” (319). An excess resides in the rhythmic refrain: while rhythm territorializes chaos, inevitably all “functional rhythms” yield to “the becoming-expressive of rhythm” (322). Whether in Wagner or the bird’s refrain, this abstraction constitutes a “stylization,” a becoming whose future destinies are undecided: “The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art’s last word, but art went that route, as did the bird: motifs and counterpoints that form an autodevelopment, in other words, a style” (319). For an elaboration of the argument concerning life’s artful becoming in Deleuze (and his sources, most notably Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson), see Grosz, Becoming; and Chaos.

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bracketing “Weltvernichtung”: the world is “annihilated” (Ideas I §49). This eradication should remind us of the subject’s unplugging from the social world that for Simmel is the condition of sociability. To become-sociable, one must withdraw, or be untied, from the social networks that have constituted her. The subject must become less than she is; such self-dispossession is a condition for one’s access to “the fundamental rhythms of sociability”: “We live rhythmically only if we renounce possession,” Bersani writes in his essay on Simmel. “… A willingness to be less … introduces us (perhaps reintroduces us) to the pleasure of rhythmed being” (IRG 47, 48, emphasis added). What Bersani, beginning with the review essay “No Exit for Beckett” (1966) and then the final chapter of Balzac to Beckett, calls “impoverishment” is the Beckettian version of this operation. Exemplified by the Unnamable, the subject becomes unresponsive to the solicitations that bid her to speak her name. Yet this subtractive (or centripetal) mode alternates with, or prepares for, an expansive (centrifugal) dissemination. As Simmel writes, sociability is characterized by the rhythmic “binding and loosening” (“Sociability” 136) that one witnesses not only in sociable interactions but also in natural phenomena like the ebbing and flowing of the sea, “its rushing up only to recede, its receding only to rise again … the play and counterplay of its waves” (140). Our inclination is, in part, to move with the world, to yield to its rhythms. This inclination is stymied not only by the human subject’s “intractable” hostility toward otherness; Bersani proposes that we have been trained into dissociating ourselves from the world insofar as Cartesian modernity has promoted a weltanschauung where the subject contemplates the object across an unbridgeable gulf, where the other is encountered in paranoid fascination and mystified rage. Yet Bersani also indicates that we can turn to various artistic and philosophical experimentations to remind ourselves of our capacity to organize the subject-object relation otherwise than through “differential otherness.” Indeed, as he suggests, the work of unbinding ourselves from the world of our habituation will reintroduce us to the rhythms we share with the human and nonhuman world.

Forms of Fascination This brief contextualization of Bersani (and some of his varied sources) in Abraham’s phenomenological psychoanalysis, and of Abraham in Husserl’s thought, highlights the central ambivalence in Bersani’s onto-ethics/ aesthetics, as it is articulated in the themes of “rhythm” and “fascination,” which crisscross each other throughout his work. This ambivalence has to

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do with his understanding of the human subject’s inescapable imbrication in violence, in the pleasures of her “sadistic movement” toward the world, driven by “a sexually induced fascination with violence” (FV 38). Because of our necessary seduction into becoming-human, this capture is inevitable. There is no way to escape fascination: we will never have been disenchanted. Yet as much as there are forms of violence, forms of modernist difficulty, and forms of concealment, there are also forms of fascination. There is the fascination with the climactic narratives (inextricable from the occasionally cradling rhythms that dissimulate their death-driven straightness) of Sade, Riefenstahl, and Assyrian art; but there is also the fascination with the formal repetitions whose possibilities Pasolini and the Assyrian sculptors explore. To put this in another way: there is Proustian fascination; but there is also Baudelairean fascination. If Marcel, captured by an “object of desire [that] is now an object of fascination” (IRG 57), seeks the secret interiority of his others, Baudelaire’s poetry outlines a different type of attention: “Baudelaire’s interest in women is frequently expressed as a fascination with their swaying movements as they walk” (BF 43). This alternative mode of capture is evident in his poetry, which, in its “cradling rhythms of desire,” “gives us a desire uninhibited by psychological fascination” (BF 48). In this, Baudelaire differs crucially from Proust, the exemplar of the subject’s paranoid relationship to psychologized otherness. While the “sexual fascination” (IRG 58) of the Proustian subject indicates for Bersani the production of “personalities” in the biopolitical regime of modernity, Baudelairean “fascination” is not with a woman’s interior life; it is, rather, with her corporeal rhythm, the “swaying movements” with which she occupies space. Bersani uses the same term, “fascination,” to designate both Baudelairean attention (to a woman’s bodily rhythms) and Proustian attention (to her cryptic personality). The term’s reappearance in what seem like crucially different onto-ethical registers suggests that Proustian desire and Baudelairean desire cannot be conclusively separated; as fascinations, they condition each other, in the same way that our capture by the violent narratives of conquest in the Assyrian reliefs may allow our (re)training in other, supplemental forms of spectatorial pleasure (which themselves remain vulnerable to being reverted to the jouissance of derived sadism). In the same way, Baudelairean “cradling” is distressingly proximate to the “cradling” movements of Riefenstahl’s fascinating fascism; and the fascination with which Sade compels us cannot be fully distinguished from the “hypnotic” effect of Robert Wilson’s experimental theater. The queer pleasures of the swerving mind can be appropriated by “straight” spectacles that cloak their deadliness in—lull us with—their “curved” (story)lines. All are, in their own way, rhythms that fascinate; all leave us aquiver.

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We find this dynamic of different forms of “fascination” restaged in Receptive Bodies. Bersani’s use of the term in the recent study’s opening and closing chapters, “Merde Alors” and “Staring,” recalls, with some precision, his (implicit) comparison of Proustian and Baudelairean fascination in earlier texts. As it did before, the term’s recurrence in Receptive Bodies points to Bersani’s effort—a central task in his onto-ethics/aesthetics—to think through the difficulty we have in escaping our imbrication in sadistic pleasures, in loving the world except as a stage where we can repeatedly witness our constitutive annihilation. The appearance of “Merde Alors” as the opening chapter of Receptive Bodies, almost four decades after the essay’s original publication, is designed to force Bersani’s readership to rethink the lessons we have drawn from his best-known texts. In ways that we have observed throughout this study, Bersani remains consistently ambivalent about the onto-ethical implications of the theory of ébranlement, which he begins to develop in the mid-1970s with his engagement with Laplanche and Freud. His work becomes associated with this theory particularly with the publication of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), an essay that energized many would-be queer theorists in the late 1980s. While “Is the Rectum a Grave?” sold us the idea of ébranlement’s ethical potential—that shattering disables the violence that selfhood promotes—what has remained less frequently observed is Bersani’s discomfort with some of the ramifications of the psychoanalytic thesis. As I noted in previous chapters, the discomfort stems from his observation, in his analysis of Laplanche and various literary texts, that the pleasures of primary masochism are solicited by scenes of sadism. The subject of shattering is identical to the sadistic torturer whose political embodiment Bersani and Dutoit suggest we find in the fascists of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In proposing that the subject of ébranlement is not readily distinguishable from the sadist, and even the Nazi, “Merde Alors” spells out the onto-ethical complexity that “Is the Rectum a Grave?” allows the reader to downplay. If the essay’s republication as the opening chapter of Receptive Bodies invites us to complicate our take on the ethics of ébranlement, “Merde Alors” also prepares us for the interlinked themes of “rhythm” and “fascination” as they appear across the recent book. In the essay, Bersani and Dutoit highlight the subject’s capture by the fascinating rhythms of representations: the compelling “pacing” of sadistic narratives leaves the spectator in thrall of their murderous jouissance, caught by a “fascination” with the violent spectacle. The subsequent chapters go on to investigate, more explicitly than most of Bersani’s earlier texts, the cadences of “our sexual, affective, and spiritual rhythms” (RB 62–63). By these rhythms, Bersani means, for example, the ways in which our bodies receive and resist the world, evident in

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the phenomena of sleeping, eating, and breathing (which he calls “the great contrastive rhythms of living bodies” [RB 84]). Because we are marked by an “indissoluble bond between reception and resistance,” we never get out of such “shifting rhythms” (RB x, 44). They are constitutive of life. Similarly, if Bersani and Dutoit note in “Merde Alors” that Sade’s narratives capture the viewer with the force of “fascination,” this term returns in the final chapter’s commentary on the film Humanité (1999), directed by Bruno Dumont. Bersani recognizes in the film an occasion to rethink many of the questions that he has been addressing in his work. This work of recategorization concerns, on the one hand, the onto-ethical/aesthetic problems we have encountered in “Merde Alors” and The Forms of Violence. Like The 120 Days of Sodom or Assyrian art, Humanité forces us to witness, and demands a response to, the world’s atrocities; yet the subjective mood that the film imagines in its protagonist (and solicits from its audience) differs from the fascinated attention that grips Sade’s readers or the reliefs’ viewers. On the other hand, in the final chapter Bersani implicitly returns, as he often does, to reconfigure the interplay between the subject and the world as it is exemplified in Proust. Like À la recherche du temps perdu, Dumont’s film details its protagonist’s “search” (RB 109), his attempt to solve a mystery. Humanité narrates a criminal investigation, led by the protagonist Pharaon de Winter, into the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. As much as Proust’s novel follows Marcel’s efforts to penetrate the enigmas with which the world taunts him, the story in Humanité concerns the detective’s attempt to make sense of the brutal killing that has destabilized the small community in which the film’s action takes place. Both protagonists are spellbound by the mysteries that the world has staged for them. Yet the detective’s is a gaze that, while as “fascinated” as Marcel’s, differs in important ways from the one modeled in Proust. The film opens with Pharaon’s inspection of the murder scene, a sight (given in detail by the camera) that, as Bersani writes, leaves him gazing in stunned blankness at a world “uninhabitable” for its incomprehensible violence (RB 107). His looking is marked by a “fixed, perhaps fascinated but affectless gaze,” a “wide-eyed stare” with which he takes in his surroundings (RB 111); his is “a strangely neutral fascination with an alien world” (RB 110). “Fascination” is, indeed, the appropriate orientation for Pharaon: as a detective facing a crime scene, we expect him to attend to, in order to “fill in,” what Roland Barthes calls, in his analysis of the structure of detective stories, “the fascinating and unendurable interval separating the event from its cause [le temps fascinant et insupportable qui sépare l’événement de sa cause]” (“Structure” 189 / 192). A crime occurs, pulling causality out of joint; the detective’s task is to reveal the secrets that have motivated the rupture

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and, by bringing the perpetrators to justice, restore order. Suturing the fascinating wound that the crime has opened in a community, “the detective,” as Barthes continues, “… becomes the modern figure of the ancient solver of riddles (Oedipus), who puts an end to the terrible why of things” (189). In this account, detective stories narrate the return to an originary balance by neutralizing the disequilibrium that the crime has introduced. The enigma of the crime—as a wound, a lack—fascinates in that it presumably robs the community the “transparency” that, as we briefly noted in Chapter 1, characterizes the ideal (but always already lost) way of communal being for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Marcel’s approach to the world is informed by this ambition: he seeks to undo the trauma that he considers to haunt being, even if this trauma concerns his own lack of self-knowledge. Like a detective, he must understand the world in order for it—and him—to retain equilibrium. He sees the world as a crime scene where the unities of knowable essences have dissipated; it is particularly the role of art to heal the world by constructing analogies in which scattered being is restored to completeness. This is why Bersani calls Proust’s novel an “epistemological detective story” (DSM 41; CR 114). We can expand the designation and note that, for Bersani, the entire episteme of Western modernity has since Descartes been organized as such a “detective story.” We have been trained to understand ourselves and the world as riddles—in Laplanche’s terms, enigmas—to be solved. In this system, Enlightenment “progress” is premised on a model where the promise of our “perfectibility” can be fulfilled by increasing our “knowledge” about the world’s operations. Beginning with La volonté de savoir, Michel Foucault suggests that the apparatus of “sexuality” has carried out an important role in modernity’s epistemophilic regime. For Bersani, Proust is one of the most prominent manifestations of this regime in modern literature. While the narrative of Humanité is similarly a detective story, its protagonist’s specular capture is of a peculiar kind. It is, as Bersani insists, a “fascination”; yet, as indicated by the modifiers appended to the description—Pharaon’s staring is “strangely neutral” and “affectless”—the looking exemplified in Dumont’s film is different from the other examples of representations’ paralytic glamor Bersani has addressed in the context of Proust, Salò, and Assyrian art. Rather than the penetrative eye that guides Marcel’s recherche, Pharaon’s is an “empty, monotonous, yet intense staring at the world in which such acts [as the girl’s rape and murder] can take place” (RB 109). His staring constitutes an “epistemologically useless” (RB 112) taking in of the world. Bersani suggests that, even though Dumont’s protagonist is a detective, he does not primarily seek to neutralize the violence that immobilizes him into paralytic receptivity by rendering it

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comprehensible (in identifying the perpetrator); unlike Marcel, he does not attempt to solve the world’s enigmas with the intention of understanding his own place in the once again familiar, mappable world. Different from Marcel’s epistemophilic orientation, “Pharaon’s stare reads nothing” (RB 109). It refuses to, or cannot, metabolize the devastating violence of the crime by resolving it into an “epistemological detective story.” Neither does his gaze bespeak the thrill of derived sadism, the ethically dubious, and often unacknowledged, pleasure—also a “fascination”—that motivates our eager viewing of representations of historical atrocities. Consequently, his movements in the world are paced differently than Marcel’s swerving from one object to another in his search for the key to his being, as well as from the intense rhythms of narrative violence Bersani and Dutoit point to in Sade and Assyrian art. Rather than the eye that eagerly follows the storyline to its climax, the detective story in Humanité evokes a different kind of fascinated capture. Bersani thus suggests that Dumont’s film offers us an alternative approach to a world from which cruelty cannot be eliminated. Rather than compound the violence by prioritizing it in narratives that “glamorize,” and thus leave us enthralled (“glamored,” as if by the vampire’s gaze) with, atrocities, he suggests that we can negotiate this world otherwise than by being compelled by the promise of solving mysteries. In Dumont’s film, Bersani finds an example of what he has repeatedly called for, often doubting its very possibility: a nonsadistic way of encountering, and moving in, the world. Pharaon’s gaze is unlike Marcel’s in that it does not seek to go beyond representation in order to “dis-solve” the world’s enigmas; it does not exemplify the absorption in the violent, and carefully paced, stories that enchant us in Sade and the Assyrian reliefs; neither does it isolate the violent event as an exceptional (and, hence, fascinating) breach of an otherwise peaceful order of a transparent world. Rather, his is a passive, paralytic, fascinated taking in of the word’s spectacle, which always includes the possibility for the incomprehensible violence typified by the young girl’s rape and murder. That Bersani looks to Dumont for guidance on how we might begin to “de-Proustify ourselves” (“Rigorously” 283) is perhaps surprising. This is not only because, structurally a fairly traditional whodunit, Humanité is formally aligned with the Proustian narrative; it is also because, as Bersani proposes, cinema as a medium is peculiarly apt to solicit from the audience the kind of fascinated attention that we find in less suitable media in Sade’s and Proust’s literary texts or even the visual but immobile representations of the Assyrian reliefs. “Film,” Bersani writes, “… constitutively privileges sight and sound as conducive to knowledge (in a frequently intricate play between showing and hiding, exposure and concealment)” (RB 112). He suggests that cinema

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is an integral part of our episteme insofar as it encourages, and its function depends on, modes of sense perception typical to modernity. Cinema is a vehicle for epistemophilic attention: it mobilizes the dynamic of desire that he has earlier identified in Proust and then Caravaggio. As we observed in Chapter 1, the Proustian subject is seduced by enigmatic objects that flaunt, while refusing to reveal, their hidden, secret depths: desire is solicited by a movement that “propos[es] and conceal[s]” (FA 87) enigmatic essences. In Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), Bersani and Dutoit continue that such “double movements” “fascinate” the viewer by “eroticiz[ing] the body’s apparent (and deceptive) availability” (CS 8, 3). As an object becomes eroticized—begins to solicit the sexual—it captures the subject’s “fascinated” interest. Such eroticization demands a rhythm—of extending and withdrawing, proffering and refusing, turning toward and turning away—that the subject, in “mimetic fascination,” adopts from the world’s erotic tableaux. In his reading of Humanité, Bersani suggests that cinematic representation, allowing an “intricate play between showing and hiding, exposure and concealment,” is particularly suitable for the work of the object’s becoming-fascinating. Like Proust and detective stories, the cinematic medium invites the spectator’s investigative zeal: this constitutes what Laura Mulvey calls “the fascination of film” (14) and Ackbar Abbas “the fascination of the cinematic” (363). Yet, while it is constitutively implicated in the mode of desiring Bersani has called Proustian, cinema is also likely to position the spectator differently vis-à-vis the spectacle. As much as the keyword “fascination” occurs in the opening and concluding chapters of Receptive Bodies, Bersani’s brief theorization of cinematic spectatorship in “Staring” is doubled by his and Dutoit’s equally passing observations about the medium in “Merde Alors.” Discussing Pasolini’s Salò, they note “film’s potential for a vertiginous passivity (its eagerness merely to register)” (31 / RB 13). While cinema solicits Proustian fascination, the paralysis it induces in the spectator is radically ambiguous. Not only does it render him the voracious interpreter of visual clues that tempt him with the force of enigmatic signifiers; it also turns him into a passive recipient of the images on the screen, someone who “merely” takes in the scene, without any analytic ambition. Pharaon embodies this doubleness. His fascinated gaze suggests his epistemophilic capture by the enigma of the crime—a fascination that seeks its own undoing in the solving of the murder—while also marking his passive spectatorship of various, and often bewilderingly trivial, details in his surroundings. As much as he looks for clues that would help him reveal the criminal and explain the crime, the camera also registers his fixed gazing at material objects around him: the sweaty neck of his superior, the swollen belly of a sow, the sliver of blue sky in a painting. In them, the film

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medium’s seduction of its viewers by Proustian enigmatics is complicated by the protagonist’s capture by a series of “unsignifying yet absorbing objects” (RB 110). While they “absorb” him like the signifiers that fascinate the Proustian-Laplanchean subject, the objects at which the detective stares in fascination imply no revelatory knowledge. Rather than luring him with the promise of repressed truths, they offer him more of the world in its dumb materiality. Thus, there are two modes of fascination in Humanité: one prompted by the crime, the other by the world’s nonsignifying flesh. As a medium, cinema is apt to engage both: we are likely to be enthralled by the murder mystery in Humanité and the increasingly intense stories of sexual torture in Salò; but amidst these narratives we can also be seduced by the fleshiness of the chief inspector’s neck or the “lateral divertissements” that Pasolini weaves into—or out of—Sade’s stories (“Merde” 29 / RB 10). The two forms of fascination are prompted by two forms of inarticulation, of hiddenness. Bersani’s observation of the constitutive doubleness of the cinematic medium is, in this way, analogous to his argument concerning “the concealment of being,” whose elaboration in Caravaggio’s Secrets we followed in the previous chapter. While the movement of “showing and hiding, exposure and concealment” in cinema and Caravaggio’s art solicits us with the kinds of enigmas Bersani identifies with Proustian desire, there is another mode of concealment, one that operates on a different principle. This is the hiddenness of an infinite, nontranscendent extensibility—of what the previous chapter called “the unthought known” of “the virtual unconscious.” Artworks like Assyrian reliefs, Salò, and Humanité model for us more than one way of being fascinated. They seduce us with the readily recognizable pleasures of sexual torture, prompting our “derived sadism.” But once we are so captured, they can also show us different forms of enchantment, solicited by the aesthetic play of forms or the compelling presence of mute materiality. As Bersani writes, cinema’s enigmatic fascination becomes, “in Humanité, complicit with Pharaon’s mute and uncomprehending staring. We are reduced to staring at Pharaon’s staring” (RB 112, emphasis added). Proustian fascination shifts into Baudelairean fascination; as Bersani and Dutoit observe in “Merde Alors,” “It is as if a fascinated adherence … were, finally, identical to a certain detachment” (31 / RB 13). The process of our “reduction” is imperative: with Pharaon, we learn how to become less—how to shed the richly rewarding spectatorial habits of Proustian modernity— in order to become more, to see what we might become amidst the world’s nonsignifying forms. By supplementing Proustian with Baudelairean fascination, and then, in Receptive Bodies, the pleasures of witnessing sadistic tortures with Pharaon’s

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specular capture by—his “staring” at—an incomprehensibly beautiful and violent world, Bersani suggests that if there exists a “nonsadistic type of movement,” it remains a fascination. The lexical coincidence implies that Proustian desire cannot be conclusively neutralized by cultivating our participation in nonenigmatic concealment. Analogously, cinema’s ability to render the spectator a passive recipient of aesthetic play does not render inoperative its capacity to construct him as an avid consumer of violent narratives. To argue this would be to acquiesce in a “redemptive” model of epistemic shifts: the ambition to have us retrained into pastoral peacefulness. Instead, we must persist in allowing for the doubleness that Bersani identifies in the function of art: the disturbingly easy convertibility of ethical staring into violent inquisitiveness. These are not separable modes of involvement. If we think otherwise, we are all the more, because blindly, implicated in a violence against our others: our worldly movements remain motivated by the unacknowledged pleasures of derived sadism.

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Original thought cannot be “criticized”; one can only move with—which is to say, be moved by—it, only yield to its rhythm or fascination. “Critical” approaches not only assume that an object is available for recognition, that extant criteria suffice for its translation; they also embrace the reactive ethos whose hegemony in nineteenth-century historiography Friedrich Nietzsche traced to the insidious influence of Hegelian dialectics (“On the Utility” 142–43). Forsaking all critical postures, all ambition to rub against thought’s grain, reading happens, and happens only, when a text is approached “without reserve, without trying to criticize it” (Wright 238). Leo Bersani suggests that another name for an “unreserved” readerly attitude is “speculativeness.” All thought worthy of the name speculates: its operation coincides with the self-reflexivity indicated by the term’s etymological history (Lat. speculārī, speculum). In this, Bersani commits to an unpopular position: notwithstanding the recently re-emergent tradition that runs via Alfred North Whitehead to contemporary “speculative realists,” claims to the efficacy of speculations have not fared well since Immanuel Kant dismissed synthetic a priori propositions in metaphysics and Karl Marx designated speculative thought, exemplified by Hegel, as the constitutive error of Western philosophy. The term “speculation” and its derivatives recur in Bersani’s texts with striking frequency. When, in a recent interview, Bersani was asked if this repetition signals his work’s affiliation with what is called “speculative philosophy,” he expressed hesitation and doubt: “That I’m not sure of,” he grumbled and changed the subject (“Rigorously” 292). The wager of our concluding chapter is that, a little uncannily, Bersani’s oeuvre, in its unfolding for over half a century now, contributes to this philosophical history—is itself a speculative elaboration of speculative thought. The claim for this kinship is uncanny because, as the interview response suggests, Bersani himself is not fully aware of—nor, it is important to add, does he care about—the implications of his thought’s participation in this genealogy. While he consistently indicates that the only thought worth committing to is always “speculative,” he is not attuned to this term’s full resonance in the history of philosophy (a deafness shared, I happen to know, by the interviewer who posed the question).

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The recent book Receptive Bodies (2018) contains some of Bersani’s most explicit statements about the nature of “speculative” thinking. Bersani proposes that “essayistic writing”—a style with which he identifies his own work—constitutes “a way of writing that wanders, inconclusively,” one that, as he rephrases, “moves speculatively” (RB 126, 128). Speculative writing demands that one is “thinking rigorously, but with an unemphatic, even somewhat relaxed rigor” (RB 126); it is marked by “the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking, and of inconclusive being” (RB 128). Bersani asks, “why not simply welcome the pleasure in repeatedly failing to conclude—in our thinking, in our writing, in our sexuality?” (RB 127–28).1 Why not, that is, yield to our becoming as speculative beings? While these ideas are given the most explicit attention in Receptive Bodies, they are not new in Bersani’s work. In a characteristic moment in 1995, for example, Bersani encourages us to “speculate” about a work of art beyond what the text “seems to authorize” (H 117); in 1990, he speaks of “the risky movement of speculative thought, of thought unanchored, set loose from all evidential ‘land’ securities” (CR 151); and, in 1982, he finds in Stéphane Mallarmé’s work a mode of thought marked by—we will come back to this—“speculative restlessness” (DSM 42–43, 44). It is particularly in Freud that Bersani identifies the speculative artistry that he comes to promote as his own method of thinking: in several texts over the decades, he wants to attune us to the “speculative movement” (“Subject” 7), “speculative procedures” (FV 120), and “speculative mobility” (IRG 126) characteristic of Freud’s—and Freudian—thought. Bersani’s persistence with the thought of “speculativeness” from the mid1970s until Receptive Bodies suggests that this concept, all but abandoned after Marx as a self-serving bourgeois alibi, carries an unfinished potential. Yet without further definitional work, terms such as “inconclusive,” “unanchored,” and “restless,” which Bersani deploys in the recent book, fail to fully describe “speculative” thinking. This becomes particularly evident when we situate the concept in the history of philosophy about which he, probably sincerely, claims to be uninformed. In this context, the speculative mind is not merely an “anchorless” observer who “swerves” from one object to another without a predetermined goal, not merely a “wandering” spirit released from all teleological frames onto endless, disseminative play. Rather, the speculative thought that Bersani elaborates, and identifies as his own mode of thinking, is driven by what Hegel, the speculative philosopher par The gesture of “simply welcom[ing]” one’s speculative orientation repeats Bersani’s suggestions, explored in Chapter 3 above, that we can “simply disappear[]” from the dispositif’s radar, “simply leave” the Oedipal family, “simply … desert[]” the identities we are called to defend (TT 35, 13, 23).

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excellence, calls the “self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life” (Hegel, Science 35): speculations unfold according to an “immanent rhythm” (Phenomenology §58 [36]), and follow a “self-constructing path” (Science 10). When Bersani reads various works of art as experimentations with the possibility of “true singleness” (FA 181), or of “an identity wholly independent of relational definitions” (AI 51), he is testing the viability of what Hegel would call “the speculative proposition” (der spekulative Satz). In this, he parts company with most of his contemporaries, especially those influenced by Jacques Derrida. In their variously slanted critiques, Marx and Derrida finished off, so it has seemed, speculative philosophizing in its Hegelian mode. “The concept of speculation,” as Werner Becker modestly proposes, “has seen better days” (1368); “speculation,” writes Walter Cerf, has become “a bad word” (xi). Bersani’s ability to deploy and develop the concept in various contexts since the mid-1970s depends on his lack of investment in philosophy’s disciplinary conceptuality. His and Derrida’s contemporaneous readings of speculative thought, overlapping mostly in their commentaries on Freud but also Mallarmé, at once synchronize and diverge, in ways that will allow us to identify the peculiarities of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. This chapter makes a case for “speculation” as one of Bersani’s most important “crypto-concepts.” As we have noted, by this phrase Jean Laplanche designates an implicit concept, never explicated in any sustained way, that condenses something central in the work’s operation (Laplanche, “So-Called” 458). While Bersani hardly ever directly addresses the question of “speculation”—the passages in Receptive Bodies constitute his lengthiest elaboration—the concept emerges early on as something of an organizing principle in his onto-ethics/aesthetics. I will trace the idea in his texts from its first appearance in the mid-1970s to its implicit presence in his first substantial discussions of Hegel’s work some forty years later. Because Bersani’s references to speculativeness in Receptive Bodies tend to gloss over the concept’s most distinctive characteristic, what follows seeks to take up and continue the movement of his thought beyond its explicitly articulated forms. Bersani’s work is organized around what Hegel, speaking of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, calls “the speculative kernel [das Spekulative]” (Faith 186 / W 2.429),2 a kernel originally coalesced, I will argue, in his early engagement with Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s studies on Hegelian philosophy. Derrida and Nancy are relatively recent contributors to the long history of speculative thought, which the essay’s first section briefly outlines. Kant, Hegel, and Marx are often cited as turning points in this history, thinkers at odds with each

The German originals for Hegel are from Werke, ed. Moldenhauer and Michel.

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other in whose work the tenability of modern speculative thinking is debated. Such debates, I argue, carry over to Bersani’s work, where their philosophical stakes are met with a certain playful disinvestment. This loosening of the grip of philosophical conceptuality is indeed typical to Bersani; as he reminds us, he is not “a professional philosopher” but a reader of literature and other works of art (“Rigorously” 289). With its insistent attention to the echoes of Bersani’s philosophical contemporaries in his work, our concluding chapter risks anchoring his “floaty” ideas to the “land securities” of conceptual histories: we take the inescapable gamble of having our Baudelairean fascination congeal into a Proustian one. Yet our aim is to trace the frivolity and consistency— their strange coincidence—with which the idea of “speculativeness” is transformed in Bersani’s texts across five decades. At stake is the question of “rigor” in speculativeness: What is the precise meaning of this modifier? How does one rigorously speculate? Toward the end of the essay, I propose that, to fully gauge what Bersani means by the term, we read it in the context of the revised Platonism that he first gleans from Charles Baudelaire’s and Marcel Proust’s aesthetics and that will morph into what I will call his theory—an onto-ethics/aesthetics—of “speculative narcissism.”

A History of Speculation The famous impermeability of Hegel’s system to critiques—the fact that all attacks are found to have been anticipated by the Master3—is a feature of his philosophy’s “speculativeness.” For Hegel, in order to revive philosophy after Kant’s assault on classical metaphysics, we must forge a thought that evolves not by overcoming external obstacles but by actualizing its own immanent logic; we must, in other words, become “speculative” thinkers, moving from “reflection” to “speculation,” from “subjective” to “absolute” idealism. As he writes in the Lesser Logic, speculation is “philosophical in the proper sense” (Encyclopaedia §9 [33]): the most advanced mode of thought, it supersedes the dogmatism of “the understanding” and reconciles the concepts’ internal contradictions that “dialectical” thought will have revealed.4 With his See Foucault, “Discourse” 235–36; and Butler, Subjects 183–84. For a condensed account of the three stages of logic by Hegel, see his Encyclopaedia §79–83 (125–34). Throughout, I quote from The Encyclopaedia Logic, the 1991 translation of Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss (the Lesser Logic) by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris; references are indicated parenthetically as Encyclopaedia. Bersani, on the other hand, quotes from William Wallace’s 1892 translation, The Logic of Hegel. When discussing Bersani’s quotations, I will use this edition, parenthetically referred to as Logic.

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insistence on the “speculative,” Hegel indicates his disagreement with critical philosophy: his project consists of an effort to reassert the importance of speculativeness—but a speculativeness yet to be thought—after what he considered its wrongheaded dismissal by Kant. Kant had demanded that we relinquish all pretense of speaking of that which is constitutively beyond our epistemological capacities to confront. The target of his critique was speculative metaphysics, his goal to undo the “skeptical despair” that his speculative predecessors had elicited (Kant, Critique A407 / B434). “A theoretical cognition is speculative,” he advises us in the Critique of Pure Reason, “if it pertains to an object or concepts of an object to which one cannot attain in any experience” (A634 / B662). Instead of the speculative reach for things-in-themselves, thinking must acknowledge its inherent limitations: only objects that conform to the mind’s conditions can be thought. Going beyond “appearances” (Erscheinungen)—beyond objects that are given in space and time, the a priori conditions of our intuition—we not only court the unbridled fantasies of Schwärmerei but also produce irresolvable antinomial conflicts. Only by making sure that we stay within the bounds of human cognition can we overcome the crisis in reason, put an end to “reason’s unfounded groping and frivolous wandering about” (Critique Bxxx). Hegel saw a revolutionary potential in critical philosophy. As he writes in 1801, “the authentic principle of speculation [is] boldly expressed” in the transcendental deduction of the categories (Difference 81); Kantian thought, as elaborated in the Critique of Judgment, allows for the possibility of speculativeness in the form of “intuitive understanding” and “inner purposiveness” (Encyclopaedia §55 [102]). Yet, for Hegel, Kant’s attempt to disrupt philosophy’s self-indulgent delusions had stalled from the start. In the 1812 preface to the Science of Logic, he laments the “renouncing [of] speculative thought” by Kant and his followers, who had decreed that “the understanding ought not to be allowed to soar above experience, lest the cognitive faculty become a theoretical reason that by itself would beget nothing but mental fancies” (7–8). While Kant had sought to move us beyond the “groundless pretensions” (Critique Axi) of speculative philosophy, he had, because of a grounding failure in his thought, remained trapped in that which he thought to have escaped (dualism and skepticism).5 As Hegel asserts in his early essay on Fichte and Schelling, Kant had “allowed argumentation [das negative Räsonieren] to go on replacing philosophy, as before, only more pretentiously than ever under the For Hegel’s critique of Kantian skepticism, see S. Sedgwick ch. 3. Apart from Sedgwick’s study, my overview of Hegel’s reading of Kant draws particularly from McCumber. For condensed introductions to the history of “the speculative” in philosophy, see Becker; and Ebbersmeyer.

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name of critical philosophy” (Difference 80 / W 2.10). “With Kant,” Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda write, “philosophy had died stillborn” (12). Kant failed to precipitate speculativeness because, having hypothesized the existence of intuitive knowing, he ruled it out as a possibility for the human mind: operating in concepts and sensible intuitions, human intellect is “discursive” instead.6 Our discursive cognition has access only to appearances, and “the thing-in-itself is supposed to remain an absolute beyond” (Hegel, Encyclopaedia §60A1 [107]); hence, human thoughts are “cut off from what the thing is in-itself by an impassable gulf ” (§41A2 [83]). For Hegel, this inevitably leads to critical philosophy’s inability to overcome dualistic thinking. Because Kant assumes that the “discursive” intellect of human cognition cannot access “the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute” (Faith 62), he ends up constructing a series of dualisms around which his philosophy operates: sense/intellect, intuition/concept, discursive/intuitive, appearance/in-itself. While critical philosophy, like much of modern thought, executes a reflective turn insofar as it demands that we move from observing the object of knowledge to thinking the subject of knowing, in resorting to dualisms Kant commits an error from which it is Hegel’s self-appointed task to rescue modern thought. The name for this rescue operation is philosophy’s becoming-speculative. For our context, the most important of the dualisms in which Kant ends up taking refuge is that of “knower and known [Erkennendes und Erkanntes]” (Hegel, Difference 164 / W 2.105). If reason “make[s] itself reflection by opposing itself to the object absolutely,” the “supreme task” of speculation is to “suspend the separation of subject and object in their identity” (164, 177). One of the ways in which Hegel sought to conceptualize the speculative identity of the subject and the object was via the grammatical terms in which Western metaphysics has often been thought. The “speculative proposition” in his logic is one in which “predicates” are not accidents but “inhere” in the subject. External encounters are characteristic of “argumentation” or “ratiocinative thinking” (das Räsonieren, das räsionierende Denken), which is carried out in predicative propositions: “Subject constitutes the basis to which the content [as accident and predicate] is attached, and upon which the movement runs back and forth” (Phenomenology §60 [37]). Predicative propositions assume a passive subject (ein ruhendes Subjekt), one that receives form—phenomenality—only through its attributes, the accidents that befall it from the outside. For us to become subjects—for us to begin

On Kant’s “intuitive” and “discursive” forms of intellect, see S. Sedgwick ch. 1. For Hegel’s assessment of the speculative potential in Kant, see ibid. 108–18.

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thinking—we must transcend this mode, move beyond passively or inertly welcoming the world’s eventualities.7 This shift takes place as the general nature of the judgment or proposition, which involves the distinction of Subject and Predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition [durch den spekulativen Satz zerstört wird], and the proposition of identity which the former becomes contains the counterthrust against that subject-predicate relationship. (§61 [38] / W 3.59)

Moving to the realm of speculative thinking, we find that “the Predicate is really the Substance, the Subject has passed over into the Predicate, and, by this very fact, has been sublated [das Subjekt zum Prädikat übergegangen und hiermit aufgehoben]” (§60 [37] / W 3.58). In the speculative proposition, the subject and the predicate are enfolded upon, or inhere in, one another. In this way, speculative thought undoes the dualism of which Hegel deemed Kant guilty. It also avoids the assumptions of pre-Kantian metaphysics insofar as it designates a strictly internal process: while classical speculative philosophy sought to read the traces of being in the material world, Hegel’s speculative mind turns in on itself, as if to face a mirror, to work out the strangeness that it encounters in its self.8 The speculative proposition, and speculation in general, highlights the aspects for which Hegelian philosophy is often celebrated and dismissed: on the one hand, its rigorous immanentism; on the other, its totalizing, perhaps totalitarian, ambitions.9 Hegel’s revolutionary insistence that dialectical Hegel writes in the Phenomenology:

7

Since the Notion is the object’s own self, which presents itself as the coming-to-be of the object, it is not a passive Subject inertly supporting the Accidents [ist es nicht ein ruhendes Subjekt, das unbewegt die Akzidenzen trägt]; it is, on the contrary, the selfmoving Notion which takes its determinations back into itself [der sich bewegende und seine Bestimmungen in sich zurücknehmende Begriff]. In this movement the passive Subject itself perishes [In dieser Bewegung geht jenes ruhende Subjekt selbst zugrunde]; it enters into the differences and the content, and constitutes the determinateness, i.e. the differentiated content and its movement, instead of remaining inertly over against it. The solid ground which argumentation has in the passive Subject is therefore shaken, and only this movement itself becomes the object … Thus the content is, in fact, no longer a Predicate of the Subject, but is the Substance, the essence and the Notion of what is under discussion. (§60 [37] / W 3.57–58) 8 On the speculative in Hegel, see Gasché, Tain ch. 3; Nancy, Speculative; and Malabou ch. 12. 9 For studies tracing the ways in which twentieth-century Continental thought, particularly in France, has wrestled with the presumed totalitarianism of Hegelian philosophy, see Butler, Subjects; and Roth, Knowing. Much of Butler’s own work, influential in a number of fields, constitutes an effort to reread Hegel in a way that, while recognizing the “totalizing impulse” of his philosophy, also takes him as “an ironic artist,” whose “vision is less ‘totalizing’ than presumed” (Subjects xx). For works that make the case for Hegel’s complexity, see Malabou; Nancy, Hegel; and Macherey. Butler provides a helpful update of the scene in the preface to the 1999 edition of Subjects of Desire.

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movement is fueled by the instability inherent in being has been enabling to generations of political and cultural theorists; its legacies can be detected, for example, in the founding principle of late-twentieth-century Cultural Studies, according to which any system’s internal contradictions precipitate the “subversion” of the system’s norms. Yet critics, often following Marx’s lead, have also seen in speculative philosophy an insidious effort to undo all the otherness with which predicative events might challenge the subject’s autonomy. In Marx and Engels’s influential summary, Hegelian thought exemplifies “the illusions of German speculative philosophy” insofar as it has been disastrously “abstract” and, as such, a natural ally to the market “speculators” who, by obfuscating the material conditions of the economy, benefit from exploitative systems (German 171). In the form of “speculative philosophy of law,” Hegelianism affirms some of Western philosophy’s worst habits in that it supplies nothing but “abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state [dies abstrakte überschwengliche Denken des modernen Staats]” (Marx, “Contribution” 181 / “Zur Kritik” 384).10 As the term’s etymology tells us—abstrahere and abstractus suggest the “incorporeal” and the “secluded” (OED)—the Hegelian subject gazes at the world from the heights of disembodied solitude. Thus, apart from the totalizing tendencies of theological models,11 the speculative subject evinces the spirit of the despotic monarch who contemplates the world “enthroned in sublime solitude” (Marx, “Critique” 328). In this way, the Hegelian mind betrays the revolution that was supposed to have unseated all such imperious rulers.12 Subsequent critics have echoed Marx in proposing that “totalizing history” such as Hegel’s

Characterizing Hegelian thought, Marx uses the same term—überschwenglich (effusive, rapturous, exuberant)—with which Kant dismisses “speculative” philosophy as the ravings of Schwärmerei: as Kant writes in his 1787 preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, the critical project seeks to “deprive speculative reason of its pretension to extravagant insight [der spekulativen Vernunft zugleich ihre Anmaßung überschwenglicher Einsichten benehme]” (Bxxx). With the echo, Marx indicates that Hegel’s philosophy regresses to pre-Kantian metaphysics, more precisely to the seventeenth-century idealist metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz (see Marx and Engels, Holy 125–32). 11 If speculative thought unfolds according to an internal logic—it “journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature” (Phenomenology §77 [49])—it has reminded many of the kinds of teleological projections one finds in the redemptive imaginations of various theologies: the Phenomenology’s editor, for example, suggests we observe in the above an allusion to the Stations of the Cross (§77 [49n]). 12 On Marx and “speculation,” see Ebbersmeyer 1367–69. While the condemnation of Hegel’s idealism is best known in the form Marx gives it in his “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General” (1844), he borrows heavily from Ludwig Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) (see esp. §§29–30). For a discussion of Feuerbach that is relevant for us, see Konersmann. 10

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“leads to a totalitarian political philosophy” (Roth 54); Hegel is frequently evoked as philosophy’s “totalitarian bogeyman” (Pippin 5). With its totalizations, and perhaps totalitarianism, the Hegelian system suffers, in Fredric Jameson’s recent diagnosis, from a narcissistic disorder, “the narcissism of the Absolute” (Hegel 131). In speculative philosophy, the self and the world have always already coincided; nothing exists that is not in an a priori relation with the subject. “Consciousness,” as Hegel boasts, “provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself ” (Phenomenology §84 [53]). If the speculative mode “affirm[s] … the ultimate unity of subject and object, of the I and the non-I,” as Hegelian subjects “[w]e … search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching ourselves, only seeing our own face persist through multitudinous differences and forms of otherness” (Jameson, Hegel 2, 131). Like the narcissist, the speculative philosopher, enraptured by his mirror image, dissolves all otherness into sameness. The Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer similarly identifies in Hegelianism a perfect example of “modern narcissism,” driven by the sinful error that Martin Luther called the human incurvatus in se, the subject’s speculative turning upon itself, away from revelation. We hubristically assume to reach divinity by reason, deducing its otherness from what we see in this world’s mirrors. Yet God, as Bayer writes, “is not our mirror-image; God does not allow himself to be the object of human speculation” (“Modern” 312). Heedless of Luther’s warning against theological speculations, Western tradition proceeded on its speculative way, ending up with Hegelian idealism: With great style, the Western concept of the movement of selfconsciousness as a “complete return of Mind to itself ” reaches its apex in Hegel’s thought. Even theologians have not been able to extricate themselves from the fascination of the thought of the speculative mind that is in love with its own mirror reflection. (Bayer, “Modern” 304)13

The Hegelian subject, something of an aesthete in his “stylishness,” is frozen in an adoring posture in front of Narcissus’s instrument, deaf to the call of love that issues from beyond the fascinating mirror. In ways that most of his texts do not quite explicate, this philosophical history resonates in Bersani. Before Receptive Bodies, the concept emerges in

The importance of the term “speculation” for Bayer is emphasized by the subsection title “Spekulieren?” (Bayer, “Neuzeitliche” 76), omitted in the English translation.

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its most elaborated—although still implicit, “cryptic”—form in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1985). In this study, “speculativeness” is symptomized in the “theoretical collapse” that for Bersani marks the “authenticity of Freud’s work,” the articulation of what he calls, with some hesitation, “psychoanalytic truth” (FrB 3, 10). Freud is at his most original when his theorizations fail to offer us knowledge about the object of his investigation and, instead, take on—recapitulate—the fate of the human subject whom he seeks to theorize. By “recapitulation,” I again evoke the law of “theoretico-genesis,” which for Laplanche indicates the peculiar way in which Freud’s texts systematically repeat (rather than describe) the human subject’s errancy and aporias. Instead of an authoritative description of the subject’s coming-into-being, Freud’s texts, as if contracting the traumatized condition of its object, begin to exhibit “a type of blocked thought, of speculative repetition” (FrB 5), a stuttering with which the Freudian text performs the human subject’s inability to speak of the unassimilated catastrophe of its origination.

Becoming-Speculative Yet before The Freudian Body, the crypto-concept of “speculation” occurs in its embryonic form in the conclusion to the 1976 study, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, amidst a commentary on recent tendencies in literary scholarship. Bersani describes contemporary criticism by suggesting that, rather than producing “knowledge” about literary texts, critics performatively replicate art’s operations in ways that render their work all but indistinguishable from literature: “the critic follows his writer so closely that he begins to duplicate the latter’s achievement” (FA 311). Bersani is alluding to the emergence of the kind of theorizing exemplified by Blanchot, Barthes, and Derrida, whose recently published Glas (1974) he calls “a fascinating attempt to move toward authentically new shapes of ‘critical’ discourse” (FA 333n4). He describes this “new” kind of scholarship14 as follows: “While criticism continues to lean on other texts, it also now seems to be making a claim for the esthetic appeal of its own procedures; the myth of criticism as a transparent explication of literature is abandoned”

Notably, however, Bersani points to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) as “[t]he best example of seductively artistic criticism” (FA 333n3), an observation that should be unpacked by situating it in the context of Lawrence’s (often submerged) influence on Bersani’s thinking. For the most important occasions in which this influence becomes explicit, see FA ch. 6; and RB ch. 4.

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(FA 311–12, emphasis added). Since this passage comes from the concluding section of a chapter in which Bersani has, for the first time, taken on Laplanche’s analysis of Freud—an influence that is to be formative for all of his subsequent work—the phrase “lean on” demands some attention. Describing the critic’s relationship to the artwork, the locution is silently, and perhaps unconsciously, borrowed from Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). In this study, Laplanche points to “leaning on” (Anlehnung, anlehnen) as one of the repetitive phrases whose centrality—whose status as “crypto-concepts”— in Freud’s work has gone all but unnoticed. On several occasions, Freud uses the word (which James Strachey translates as “anaclisis”)15 to designate the way in which the human-specific aptitude he calls “the drive” attaches itself to “nature” (or “the vital function”), whose satisfactions have proven to be inaccessible to the prematurely individuated being that is the infant. As Laplanche writes, Anlehnung in Freud designates “the fact that emergent sexuality attaches itself to and leans on [s’étaye] another process which is both similar and profoundly divergent: the sexual drive leans upon a nonsexual, vital function” (Life 16, trans. modified / Vie 31).16 If the drive “leans on” the vital function, this means that human life is saved by its ability to use parasitically that which it cannot directly plug into. To illuminate this with a false cognate, it is in the “beside-place” or “otherplace” (para-site) of the drive that life is conserved by a kind of forgery or vampirization. The drive takes over the vital function, thereby at once preserving and perverting it—which is to say, preserving it by perverting it. Let us call this takeover an act of “supplementation”; to do so is to render obvious the echoes, in Laplanche, of some of his contemporaries’ commentaries on Freud. Influenced by—but also influencing—Derrida’s analyses of the temporality of human ontology that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, Laplanche suggests that the relationship between the vital function and its parasite is, as Derrida would say, undecidable. It is only in the parasite-supplement that the “original” becomes observable, a dynamic that, as we know by now, renders “the origin” an aporetic notion. Anlehnung is the mechanism by which not only the human subject goes astray but also the Freudian text replicates the subject’s errancy. Before he

See Laplanche’s commentary on the concept’s translation in Life 15–16; and in Laplanche and Pontalis, Language 29–30. 16 I have substituted Mehlman’s “propping” with “leaning on,” as per Laplanche’s comments on the shortcomings of the original English translation (Fletcher, “Psychoanalysis” 25n29). For Freud’s original, see Three 99 / Drei 89. For further commentary by Laplanche, see “Drive” 128–29; “Masochism” 199, 208–09; and New 144–45; as well as Laplanche and Pontalis, Language 29–32. 15

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follows Laplanche in observing this dynamic in Freud, Bersani proposes that we conceptualize the relation between literary criticism and the literary text as analogous to the après-coup continuity of “the vital function” in “the drive,” of absented nature in the human subject. He suggests that the “cut” between art and scholarship should be similarly cultivated into undecidability: the critic must “lean on” the artwork; criticism is to parasite art. We can no longer consider the two entities as separated by an ontological gulf across which scholarly discourse is supposed to build an epistemological bridge. The criticism that “leans on” its object does not produce “knowledge”; rather, it joins its object in replicating, or synchronizing with, the activity we call “art.” With its “blocked thought” and “speculative repetition,” criticism loses its status as an explicative appendix to the literary text. Instead of mastering the object, it joins the artwork—as Freud joins the human subject—in a moment of “theoretical collapse.” To deploy a Deleuzean formulation for this dynamic, criticism becomes-art: the clear-cut identities of scholarship and art unravel as both discourses gravitate toward one another, as their “molecules” mix to the extent that their “molar” identities begin to give way, opening “a passage between categories that undermines both poles of opposition” (Bogue, Deleuzian 20). Baudelaire would call this movement “idealization,” the process in which extant “models” are undone in their gravitation toward their “correspondences.” It is because of this unraveling that we must read the Freudian text as a work of art: Freud fails to produce scientific knowledge about the human subject and, instead, rescues his object from its indecipherability by compulsively repeating, in the “theoretical collapse,” its destiny of failure. Admittedly, the coordination of the sentence in the passage from A Future for Astyanax makes the reference to Anlehnung an ambivalent one. While Bersani primarily contrasts criticism’s “continue[d] lean[ing] on” literary works to the aestheticization that modern scholarship undergoes in parasiting art, a strictly Freudian-Laplanchean argument would emphasize a necessary causality between “leaning” and “imitation”: the critical text, or the drive, takes on the characteristics of the literary text, or the vital function, because of, rather than despite, its propping on the latter. In insisting on an aspect that is ambiguously present in the sentence construction, my commentary glosses the passage from a position of retrospection: I read the text in the form in which it would be rewritten upon our return to it after our encounter with Bersani’s subsequent work. If this practice needs defending, we can not only point out its coincidence with the method that Bersani variously calls that of “recategorization”—and with which he identifies his own readerly practice—but also note that our retrospective reading allows us to see in Anlehnung a version of what will emerge, around this time, as the concept

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of “speculativeness” in his work. What Bersani says about modern criticism’s indistinguishability from art anticipates—but only by a twinkling of an eye— his characterization of the unraveling of Freud’s discourse by the gravitational pull of the failed being that is the human subject. In both cases, commentary responds to its ostensible object by yielding to a raving ventriloquism: it allows—cannot but allow—the undoing of its coherent formulations at the assault, or the seduction, by the text’s unrepresentable complexity. Indeed, Bersani deploys our keyword as he continues his proscriptive commentary on modern literary criticism. He writes that, as result of the reader’s infection by the text, “[t]he play of criticism becomes visible. And we discover that the pleasures of conceptual experimentation, of dismissible speculation, are the specific pleasures of critical form” (FA 312). The reader’s “leaning” on the artwork makes the work of criticism a “speculative” endeavor, participating in the “play” that Derrida identifies with dissemination.17 In Bersani’s subsequent work, Freud becomes the exemplary speculative reader. While this argument emerges most forcefully in The Freudian Body, the connection is made initially in “The Subject of Power” (1977). In this review essay of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir and La volonté de savoir, Bersani seeks to assess psychoanalytic theory’s role as a part of—but also, possibly, beyond—the apparatus of disciplinary modernity. He suggests that, if there is a psychoanalytic theory that jams the dispositif—a possibility refused by Foucault—it will be given to us in Freud’s “speculations.” He credits “French theory” for drawing our attention to this “speculative Freud.” “At its best,” he writes, the recent discovery of “French Freud” has been an effort to locate in Freud himself those speculative developments which wreak havoc with his own systematizations, which return in his later work as supplementary disruptive movements that trivialize those “central” theoretical certainties … responsible for the politicizing of psychoanalysis within a reactionary pouvoir-savoir complex. (“Subject” 7)

The most important source for the idea of “speculativeness” in psychoanalytic theorizing is Derrida’s commentary on Freud. This source is not primarily “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the essay by Derrida See Derrida, Dissemination e.g. 93, 127–28, and 156–71; Of Grammatology e.g. 7, 42, 50, 57–59, 71, 259–60, and 266; and “Structure” 292. See also my discussion, in Chapter 2 above, of what the repetition of this term suggests about the overlaps of Derrida and Bersani.

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included in “French Freud,” the 1972 special issue of Yale French Studies that Bersani alludes to in “The Subject of Power”;18 it is, rather, Derrida’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in “To Speculate—on ‘Freud.’”19 In this essay, Derrida tracks “the singular drifting” of Freud’s thought, exemplified by “the essential impossibility of holding onto any thesis within it, any posited conclusion of the scientific or philosophical type, of the theoretical type in general” (“To Speculate” 261). Derrida picks up the term from Freud himself. What the latter calls his “speculations”— he uses the term repeatedly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—are related to speculative trends in the history of philosophy: they consist of conjectures that, as Kant and others would have it, exceed what can be known through and observed in experience. Freud thus seems to be giving in to the kind of thinking that, as he tells his biographer Ernest Jones, he had rigorously sought to extricate himself from in his early career. If in his younger years he had “felt a strong attraction towards speculation and ruthlessly checked it” (qtd. in Jones, Life and Works 1.32), in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he cannot but become a “speculative” thinker, indulge in “speculative assumptions” (Beyond 275). It is this yielding that marks his originality for both Derrida and Bersani. For Derrida, Freud’s speculations must be distinguished from the speculative idealism exemplified by Hegel. Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle follows “the singular path of speculation,” but “[t]he speculation which is in question in this text cannot purely and simply refer to the speculative of the Hegelian type, at least in its dominant determination” (“To Speculate” 268, 277).20 Before his commentary on Freud’s speculations, Derrida had discussed Hegel’s philosophy in terms of what he called, in Dissemination, its “speculative production” (20) and, in Glas, “the untiring desire of speculative dialectics” (260). The movement that Hegel assigns to the world, and that his own thinking is to exemplify, entails a circle where

Bersani notes the journal issue’s importance also in FA 9, 319n4. Bersani refers to Derrida’s essay in FrB 56, 66. While “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” saw its first publication as part of La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà in 1980, a section of the essay was published in 1978 in Etudes Freudiennes (and translated, in the same year, as “Speculations—on Freud” in Oxford Literary Review). As Derrida notes, the essay is an extract from the seminar La vie la mort, held at École normale supérieure in 1975 (“Legs” 88); it also shares its title with a seminar that he gives in 1977–78 at Yale (Jacques Derrida Papers Box 61, Folder 14; see the catalogue available at http://pdf.oac. cdlib.org/pdf/uci/cta/c001.pdf]). 20 Derrida makes an analogous distinction between Rousseau and Hegel in Of Grammatology: because of its “indefiniteness,” the logic of supplementarity, such as we find in Rousseau, “makes history escape an infinite teleology of the Hegelian type” (298). 18 19

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“Absolute knowledge is present at the zero point of the philosophical exposition” (Dissemination 20),21 an immediacy that would allow there to “be no more discrepancy between production and exposition, only a presentation of the concept itself, in its own words, in its own voice, in its logos” (30–31). Rendering “presentation” in italics, Derrida suggests that Hegel, in his quest to elevate thinking to the speculative level, betrays his desire for an appearing where something like the an-sich would be heard speaking in its presentness and self-determinacy, in the voice (Stimme) of its Selbstbestimmung, without its adulteration into “writing.” If Hegel wanted to rescue speculative thought from the pedestrian strictures of Kantian “understanding,” Derrida’s ambition is to replace “the speculative” with “the disseminative”: “dissemination interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning [un après-coup du sens]” (Dissemination 21 / La dissémination 27). Deconstructive reading reveals the legerdemain of speculative philosophy: the ostensible origin is produced by smoke and mirrors, the trick of Nachträglichkeit. Contrasting dialectics to psychoanalysis, Derrida suggests that Freud’s meditation on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle renders readable aspects of speculative thought that are more obfuscated in the work of his philosophical predecessors. Unlike the latter, Freud is charmingly forthcoming about the fact that his attempts at drawing a metapsychological map of the human subject often amount to nothing more than creative guesswork. For Derrida, this is not a failing in Freudian theory, but its generative principle. In Freud’s openness about his speculative prodding his text veers close to a kind of self-deconstruction, in which the system’s operational principle is acknowledged to coincide with its aporia. As described in “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” the psychoanalytic theory’s speculative movement thus approximates the dynamic that Derrida calls “dissemination,” “différance,” and “play.” If Freud is “the great speculator” (“To Speculate” 332), he also, by the same token, comes close to being an exemplary deconstructionist. What Bersani calls the “theoretical collapse” of Freud’s thinking echoes Derrida’s description of the “disseminative” principle of speculation

Derrida is referring to passages such as the following from the Science of Logic: “the science presents itself as a circle that winds around itself, where the mediation winds the end back to the beginning which is the simple ground; the circle is thus a circle of circles, for each single member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member” (751; see also Encyclopaedia §15 [39]).

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that organizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle.22 He discerns in Freud’s metapsychological work an effort to speak of that which is strictly unrepresentable in the ontological experience of becoming-human. In The Freudian Body, he observes “the speculative movements” and “the speculative process” of Freudian thought (FrB 3); he suggests that Freud, at his most original, unwittingly courts a “speculative truth” to which the “empirical anecdotes of therapy are irrelevant” (FrB 102). In the repeated moments of “theoretical collapse,” Freud’s text gives up on scientific discourse and begins not to describe but to recapitulate the object of his investigation. This is, Bersani suggests, Freud’s revolutionary practice: in his writing, he joins—synchronizes with—the human subject in its aporetic movement. It is from this perspective, explicated in The Freudian Body, that his evocation of “leaning” in the concluding chapter of A Future for Astyanax should be read as a translation of Freud’s Anlehnung. Like the literary critic who, rather than accurately describing, and hence rendering “knowable,” the literary text, begins to replicate the artwork’s “play,” Freud does not produce knowledge about the human subject. Instead, he performs the subject’s inability to speak about the devastation that constitutes its cominginto-being. Even though Freud seeks epistemological mastery over the object, he cannot but “lean” too close, thereby taking on, or symptomizing, that which ails the human subject. Like the subject, whose constitution coincides with its ébranlement—its masochistic shattering under the assault of overwhelming stimuli—Freud is unable to address his object in the terms that, at least since the Cartesian revolution, modern thought has stipulated as necessary for scientific discourse; instead, he becomes the artful critic who renders himself susceptible to “the pleasures of conceptual experimentation, of dismissible speculation,” characteristic of the literary text (FA 312). He finds that his work fails as the kind of scientific discourse whose dignity he (as he tells Jones) has wanted psychoanalysis to participate in; rather, he sees the human subject, his ostensible “object,” staring back at him like an uncanny double. Getting too close, he becomes fascinated by that which he wants to submit to his analysis; investigating his object, he is compelled to repeat what he sees in the occult mirror. Similarly, the critic, ensnared by the doppelgänger in the mirror of art, begins to recapitulate its movements,

Although, speaking of “the speculative works of Freud” (FrB 111), he sometimes refers to other texts, he, like Derrida, locates the ground zero for Freudian speculativeness in the 1920 essay. Other texts evincing Freud’s speculativeness include “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (FV 31, “Other” 45), “The Economic Problem of Masochism”—with its “extraordinary speculative mobility” (BF 81)—and “Character and Anal Eroticism” (CR 45).

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to participate in the artwork’s “conceptual experimentation,” driven by a “pleasure” that is identical to all conceptuality’s dissipation.23 For Bersani, this speculative permeation of the subject and the object, the thinking and the thought, constitutes an “estheticizing movement” (FrB 11). In its repeated undoing into incoherence, the Freudian text, originally aiming for scientific validity, becomes an aesthetic work. It is at this moment that psychoanalysis turns into a foreign body infesting the apparatus of modernity, begins to disrupt the “pouvoir-savoir complex” (“Subject” 7). Departing from Foucault’s assessment of Freudian sexology, Bersani suggests that beyond psychoanalysis as disciplinary discourse there is psychoanalysis as an aesthetics. In its repetition of—its parasitic “leaning on”—human ontology, “the speculative psychoanalytic text,” “particular[ly] the speculative works of Freud,” becomes “the critical artistic text of our time” (FrB 111). Witnessing it in Freud, we should regard “this estheticizing movement not only as a ‘coming-into-form’ but also as a subversion of forms, indeed even as a kind of political resistance to the formal seductions of all coercive discourses” (FrB 11–12). The work’s becoming-speculative, its aestheticization, constitutes “an epistemological catastrophe” (FrB 30) insofar as this movement undoes the separation of the thinking subject from the thought object that modern culture has taught us to bridge by appropriative knowledge. For Bersani, the Freudian text is one model that we can heed in our apprenticeship of unlearning the psychologized mode of being-inthe-world. Like Freud, we can become aesthetic subjects. This dynamic of speculative aesthetics, of the work’s becoming-art as exemplified by literary criticism (Derrida, Lawrence) and psychoanalytic theory (Freud), occupies the ethical center of his thinking.

Apart from “The Subject of Power” and The Freudian Body, Bersani alludes to Freud’s speculativeness in numerous texts. In The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), he and Ulysse Dutoit claim that “the most speculative side of Freud” is also “the side that is most mobile in terms of theory” (FV vii). The “speculative” Freud is the counterpoint to the “dogmatic” and “authoritarian” and “orthodox” Freud, who has been most prominently adopted by the psychological establishment of the United States (FV vii); this “‘other’ Freud” is a Freud “whose theory is insecure, incomplete, paradoxical, and even contradictory” (FV vii). (See, further, FV 31, 37, 110–11, 120.) The phrase “‘other’ Freud” evokes Bersani’s essay of that name from 1978. In that essay, Bersani anticipates the 1985 and 1986 studies by speaking of the “speculative Freud,” whose work is marked by “speculative mobility,” “a kind of speculative openendedness [that] defeats theoretical certainties and systematic coherence” (“Other” 45). In Baudelaire and Freud (1977), he similarly speaks of “speculative psychoanalytic texts” (BF 6) and the “highly speculative thought” that we find in Freud’s theory of masochism (BF 80). I will return to the idea of “speculativeness” in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982) below.

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Toward Speculative Narcissism When Bersani, in his 1970s and 1980s texts, writes of psychoanalytic thought as a “speculative” endeavor, he does not, like Derrida, distinguish Freud’s speculations from Hegel’s. Indeed, he hardly mentions Hegel at all, most immediately because the master of German Idealism is not the presence in his scholarly field that he is in Derrida’s.24 We should nevertheless observe the appearance of an Hegelianism without the proper name in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), implanted there, I suggest, as an echo Bersani picks up from some of his colleagues. Commenting on the French symbolist poet’s oeuvre, Bersani writes that his “subversion of literature” becomes visible above all in “the speculative restlessness with which Mallarmé moves among different theoretical positions” (DSM 45, 42–43, emphasis added). The author’s “restlessness” is symptomized not only, as Bersani notes here, in his inability or unwillingness to settle on a coherent account of contemporary poetry but also in his habit of shuttling between various projects and genres of writing: instead of producing le Livre—the “Great Work” that he sometimes claimed to be preparing for—Mallarmé wrote prose poems, fashion journalism, Easter egg inscriptions, and doggerel on outhouse walls. Instead of psychologizing the author’s procrastination as Freud did Leonardo da Vinci’s, Bersani suggests that we should regard this slipperiness as his most innovative commentary on literature: “speculative restlessness,” he continues, repeating the phrase a second time, “… is perhaps the major ‘statement’ of Mallarmé’s theoretical writing” (DSM 44). Indeed, it is in such agitated disquiet that one finds a text’s literary specificity: “literature’s peculiar nature may have to do with a certain type of restlessness or moving away from its own statements” (DSM 45). As exemplified by Mallarmé’s practice, literature is constitutively “speculative” in its genre-defying agitations. The term “restlessness” evokes the Unruhigkeit that Hegel assigns to spirit’s becoming. With it, Hegel indicates the movement that results from being’s noncoincidence with itself: being is riven by an internal gap that unbalances the system into its forward-leaning tilt, forcing the spirit’s sojourn toward speculativeness. As Hegel writes in the Lesser Logic, becoming is the true expression of the result of being and nothing; it is not just the unity of being and nothing but it is inward unrest [die Unruhe in sich]—a unity which in its self-relation is not simply motionless, but In the early work, the sole reference to Hegel is an endnote in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, where Bersani evokes the question of German Idealism’s influence on Mallarmé (DSM 86n12).

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which, in virtue of the diversity of being and nothing which it contains, is inwardly turned against itself. (Encyclopaedia §88 [143] / W 8.191)

He continues in the Phenomenology: “Spirit is indeed never at rest [nie in Ruhe] but always engaged in moving forward” (§11 [6] / W 3.18); when we enter the speculative movement of thought, “the passive Subject itself perishes [geht jenes ruhende Subjekt selbst zugrunde]” (§60 [37] / W 3.57). Life itself is characterized by its “sheer unrest [reinen Unruhe]” (§46 [27] / W 3.46). In the Mallarmé study, Bersani borrows the concept of “restlessness” not directly from Hegel, but from his philosopher contemporaries, whose commentaries on Hegel had in turn been influenced by the work of Jean Hyppolite, Paul Ricoeur, and others.25 Apart from Derrida, the most important of such contemporaries may be Jean-Luc Nancy, who, in his 1973 close-readerly account of Hegel’s theorization of “speculative language” and “speculative words,” writes of “the very restlessness [inquiétude] of the speculative” (Nancy, Speculative 78, brackets in trans.).26 Although Bersani nowhere mentions The Speculative Remark, his language indicates at the very least a shared intellectual context with Nancy. When, speaking in this common language, he later alludes to the “interpretive restlessness” (FV viii) and the “troubled, speculative mobility” (FrB 19) characteristic of psychoanalytic theory, he implies that we read Mallarmé’s and Freud’s texts as mutually resonant moments in a genealogy of onto-ethical experimentation. The connection is made explicit in The Freudian Body, where he assigns speculativeness to both Freud—noting the “extraordinary speculative mobility” of his thought (FrB 81)—and Mallarmé (whose “speculative restlessness” is now rephrased as “speculative turbulence” [FrB 25]). The first substantial occurrence of Hegel under his proper name takes place relatively late in Bersani’s work. Here, too, Bersani remains uninterested in parsing the differences between Hegel and Freud as thinkers of “the

Writing in 1946, Hyppolite points to “unruhig” as Hegel’s favorite adjective to describe spirit: “being of life is not substance but rather the disquiet of the self …. This life is disquiet, the disquiet of the self which has lost itself and finds itself again in its alterity. Yet the self never coincides with itself for it is always other in order to be itself …. [I]t always negates itself to be itself ” (149–50). In his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965), Paul Ricoeur devotes some important passages to the concept (281–309, 465, 467). 26 French translators give Hegel’s “Unruhigkeit” as “inquiétude,” a term that Nancy highlights, twenty-five years later, in the title of his 1997 study, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif. See also Nancy’s comments in the 1999 epilogue, “The Speculative Unrest,” in Speculative esp. 148. 25

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speculative.” Critiquing the notion of the divided subject in Thoughts and Things (2015)—for him, this concept, which many have considered to have been enabled by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, merely reinvents the dualisms typical to Cartesian modernity27—he makes a brief detour through the Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hegel, as we have noted, is frequently trotted out as the proponent of the narcissistic, “Crusoesque” subject whose centrality to Western philosophy contemporary thinkers have sought to displace, Bersani implies that, eager to recognize in his thought nothing but a philosophical Robinsonade, we may have missed some of its unspent potential.28 If various formulations of “the divided subject” leave unaddressed, indeed bolster, what Bersani claims is the most consequential aspect of the episteme—the self/other separation that the subject at once cherishes and rages against—Hegel suggests to us that “thinking has its otherness within itself ” (TT 68). Bersani’s reference is to §55 in the English-language edition of the Phenomenology, where Hegel defines thinking as the activity of the self-determined concept that entails all its predicates—that is, the speculative subject. While existence (Dasein) in its movement (Bewegung) seems at first to be prompted “by an alien power [durch eine fremde Gewalt],” it soon appears that having its otherness within itself [daß sie ihr Anderssein selbst an ihr hat], and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and selfdifferentiating thought, it is its own inwardness, it is the pure Notion. (§55 [34] / W 3.54)

For the theorists of the divided subject, such passages in Hegel symptomize his philosophy’s “totalizing” or “narcissistic” character: the Hegelian subject is a monadically self-sufficient being who is never disturbed by external objects but follows “the rhythm of its movement” (§57 [35]), enthralled by its own reflection; it is, as Derrida argues in Glas, a subject who relates to its object in “consuming destruction,” assimilates otherness into the sameness of its becoming (65). Yet it is precisely the Hegelian subject’s voracious intimacy with otherness, Anderssein, that appeals to Bersani. For him, the notion of otherness that informs theorizations of the divided subject assumes a division between

On Bersani’s critique of the divided subject, see Tuhkanen, “Passion.” “Crusoesque” is Laplanche’s term (“Drive” 128–29), “Robinsonade” Marx’s (Grundrisse 83; Capital 1.169–70).

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the subject and the other, even if this split is now located within the self (TT 68). As exemplified by the Laplanchean subject, whose becoming is the endless work of translating the other’s enigmatic dispatches, the division is coincident with the production of knowledge as an attempt to bridge the gap. Bersani discerns in Hegel an effort to think beyond this constitutive split, whether external or internal, of the subject and the object, the knower and the known: speculative logic, as he writes, gives us “an otherness inherent in the same, in the self-identical” (TT 68). Because the knower and the known (Erkennendes und Erkanntes) are speculatively identified, there is nothing to “know”: no epistemophilic pressure drives the individualized subject toward itself in the other. For Bersani, this reconfiguration of the subject-object dynamic is enabled by Hegelian speculativeness. In this, he departs from Derrida’s reading of Hegel, according to which the speculative subject consumes all otherness. Both note that the Hegelian being narcissistically finds that everything in the world—all possible predicates—always already inheres in its being, yet diverge in their assessments of this characteristic. We begin to detail the different emphases given to this aspect by Derrida and Bersani when we note that the latter returns a second time to Hegel in Thoughts and Things as he links Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) to the Lesser Logic. As he has done many times before, he draws our attention to Freud’s argument about the persistence of the past in memory: “in mental life,” Freud writes, “nothing which has once been formed can perish” (Civilization 256). Freud’s claim about the imperishability of the past suggests to Bersani a mode of becoming that entails what he calls “recategorization”: thought returns to that which has been in order to tease out what remains dormant in the familiar, to sound, once again, what Proust calls our lives’ “fundamental notes” (Fugitive 591). For Bersani, this constitutes a creative process in which what appears is actualized for the first time. This account of a spiraling, involutionary return to a missed scene of origination reminds us, of course, of Lacan’s, Derrida’s, and Laplanche’s insight that the traumatic structure of human experience postulated by Freud assumes a time of “afterwardsness”—to use Laplanche’s translation of Nachträglichkeit29—which undermines the organization of psychoanalytic theorizing according to developmental certitudes or the metaphysics of presence. As Freud notes already in his discussion of the case of Emma in 1895 (“Project” 353–56), sexuality’s emergence—the moment of hominization—is marked by a nachträglich, and thereby constitutive, return to the scene of the missed injury, an idea that he repeats in postulating the

On “afterwardsness,” see Laplanche, “Notes”; and “Time.”

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famous “diphasic” arrival of sexual life (Three 158–59; “Outline” 384). In a letter he sends to Wilhelm Fliess the following year, he suggests that this structure of traumatized memory is characteristic of human development in general: airing what he, importantly for us, calls his “latest bit of speculation,” he proposes that psychic life consists of memory traces’ continual “rearrangement” or “retranscription” and that, consequently, “memory is present not once but several times over” (Freud, Complete 207). If, as Freud writes, his theory of sexuality’s emergence is a “speculative” account, Laplanche might propose that, typical to his “theoretico-genetic” genius, this is because the subject’s return to the missed scene of trauma obeys a “speculative” logic, one that Freud cannot but repeat in his own theorizing. Despite what he tells Ernest Jones, he has always been a speculative thinker. For Bersani, the notion of memory’s “retranscription” offers an example of the profound agreement between Freud and Proust. Freud’s theory of memory coincides with the spiraling-deepening movement typified not only by Proust’s account of involuntary memory but also by the very structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, the novel’s unfolding as a series of creative echoes of the Combray section. In the preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (2013 [1965]), Bersani renders this connection explicit, proposing that Freud’s claim in Civilization and Its Discontents about the permanence of memory traces, and the consequent structure of repetition in psychic life, is illustrated by the novel’s “ever widening concentric circles of drama and analysis” in which its opening section is inaccurately repeated (xi). The agreement binds, moreover, not only Proust and Freud. As I have suggested in the preceding chapters, Bersani explicitly or implicitly suggests that we find this account inaccurately replicated in various contexts, including Charles Baudelaire’s theory of aesthetic idealization, Christopher Bollas’s rethinking of the unconscious as the “syntax” of the subject’s being-in-the-world, and, most recently, Peter Sloterdijk’s account of the human subject’s “constitutive greeting” into the world. All of these examples can themselves be described as recategorizations of Plato’s theory of anamnesis, which, as we saw in Chapter 7, Bersani considers most extensively (but without naming it as such) in his reading of Phaedrus in Intimacies (I 77–87; see also TT 84–85). The theory of anamnesis—of the past’s speculative repetitions—emerges as one of Bersani’s oeuvre’s “fundamental notes.” In Thoughts and Things, this repeating idea of repeating ideas finds a new frame of reference in Hegel. Bersani rounds off his discussion of Civilization and Its Discontents by describing Freud’s account of the past’s persistence, as well as Freud’s own hesitations regarding—his rejection of and return to—this theory, with a turn of phrase whose Hegelianism we immediately

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recognize: Freud postulates, and then rhetorically performs (thus, once again, “leaning on” his subject), the way in which the past is “at once negate[d] and preserve[d]” in the present (TT 74). If this Aufhebung requires that we posit the “oneness of past and present,” Hegel also gives us language with which to describe what for Bersani are the typically modern conceptualizations of “the divided self ” and the subject/object (or res cogitans/res extensa) dualism: The type of negation that authorizes what Hegel calls “the mere ‘Eitheror’ of understanding” institutes that discontinuity in mental life that leads to such notions as the divided self and the distinction between the present and a lost but intact and retrievable past. (TT 74)

In contradistinction to the temporality of the nachträglich weaving of the past into the present, the logic of “either-or” operates on oppositions between which the understanding endlessly toggles. Intriguingly, Bersani neglects to observe that, in the passage he alludes to, Hegel’s point is about the inability of the understanding to come to grips with language’s speculative character. In the same paragraph, Hegel, not for the first time, singles out “aufheben” as a “speculative” verb par excellence, that is, a word that accommodates contradictory, indeed mutually exclusive meanings. He writes in the concluding sentence of the Zusatz, which Bersani partially quotes: This double usage of language, which gives to the same word a positive and negative meaning, is not an accident, and gives no ground for reproaching language as a cause of confusion. We should rather recognise in it the speculative spirit of our language rising above the mere “Either-or” of understanding. (Logic §96 [180])

One might expect Bersani to pick up on Hegel’s term not only because of its repeated emergence, since the 1970s, in his own work, but also because Jean-Luc Nancy, in a book whose influence on his early work I hypothesized above, provides an extended commentary on the corresponding passage from the Science of Logic devoted to the speculative strangeness of “aufheben.”30 That Hegel is feigning surprise when he exclaims how

For Hegel’s original, see Science 81–82. Nancy, too, draws our attention to Hegel’s discussion of speculative words in the Encyclopedia: see Nancy, Speculative 56.

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“remarkable” it is “that language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings” (Science 82) is suggested by the fact that such words in fact evince the truth of speculative idealism: concepts that we may have taken as radically incompatible move in synchrony, occupy the same vehicle. Like the speculative proposition, speculative words demonstrate for Hegel the folly—Kant’s—of thinking being dualistically. In the speculative proposition, otherness, in the form of predicative difference, is enfolded into the (grammatical) subject. Speculative words reveal that, as Freud would say, strangeness is already in the home.31 Turning directly to Hegel’s texts in his later work, Bersani recognizes this aspect as a correspondence between his project and that of speculative idealism. Both constitute efforts to overcome the subject-object dualism typical to modern thought. For Hegel, the speculative subject “makes itself into the object and is one with it” (Difference 173); the dualism of subject and object is dissolved in their identity. If “speculation” in Hegel names the mutual infestation of the knower and the known, Bersani, too, seeks a “speculative turn” in this precise sense: as much as, for Hegel, we must unlearn the Kantian error of critical thinking, Bersani suggests that we need to be “deprogrammed” (CS 94) through an apprenticeship in the aesthetic so as to render us available to our “speculative” orientation. As he writes in 2000, ours is “a civilization that has privileged an appropriative relation of the self to the world, one that assumes a secure and fundamentally antagonistic distinction between subject and object” (IRG 106). While many, beginning with Marx, have identified in Hegelian dialectics precisely a system that consumes all otherness,32 Bersani, entering Hegel’s work slantwise, through Apropos our previous chapter, we can add that “rhythm” should be counted as an “uncanny” (as Freud would say) or (in Hegelese) “speculative” word. As John Mowitt writes: “On the one hand, rhuthmos (Greek) denoted river or flow. On the other, rhythmus (Latin) denoted blockage or dam”; thus, “coiled within rhythm itself [is] a certain undecidability” (24). Mowitt is drawing from Sachs. 32 An important moment in this history of reading Hegel is Derrida’s characterization, in Glas, of “the speculative dialectics of digestion and of interiorization” in the Phenomenology (115). Nothing escapes speculative spirit’s endless appetite and capacity for assimilation; the Hegelian subject is marked by an “effort to assimilate the remain(s), to cook, eat, gulp down, interiorize the remain(s) without remains [le reste sans restes]” (236, brackets in trans.). As Derrida puts it in an interview from 1990, he hones in on the figures of incorporation that are to be found in speculative thought— the very notion of comprehending as a kind of incorporation. The concept of “Erinnerung,” which means both memory and interiorization, plays a key role in Hegel’s philosophy. Spirit incorporates history by assimilating, by remembering its own past. This assimilation acts as a kind of sublimated eating—spirit eats everything that is external and foreign, and thereby transforms it into something internal, something that is its own. Everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system—nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism. 31

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his decades-long engagement with such thinkers as Freud and Mallarmé, discerns in “the speculative” the kernel for a revolutionary rethinking of relationality. For Hegel, Kant is the culprit in securing the subject’s separation from the world; according to Bersani, this became a dominant mode of being at what he calls, after Foucault, “the Cartesian moment.” As if echoing the diagnoses that, ironically (Jameson) or not (Bayer), assign the Hegelian subject a narcissistic pathology, Bersani theorizes “narcissism” as an important vehicle for disorganizing the modern episteme. If, apart from Bayer, narcissism has been designated the modern ailment par excellence by the likes of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, James Baldwin, David Riesman, and Christopher Lasch,33 Bersani proposes that it is here, at ground zero of the modern subject’s pathological failure to encounter its others, that we can radically challenge our episteme’s assumptions. He is after what we might call a theory of “speculative narcissism.” Notably, his rethinking of the subject’s self-love begins precisely at the moment when the thought of “the speculative” emerges in his work, that is, in the concluding chapter of A Future for Astyanax. Here, as I observed above, Bersani proposes that scholarship, rather than working to straighten out the mysteries of art in critical language—rather than domesticate artistic enigmas into scholarly knowledge—begin to move with (as Laplanche would say, lean on) the art object, replicate its styles of being. Exemplified by D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature or Derrida’s Glas, scholarship, in other words, should engage in “the pleasures of … dismissible speculation” (FA 312). In the same chapter, Bersani draws our attention to a novelistic scene that exemplifies the pleasures of a speculative, and speculatively narcissistic, orientation. In his discussion of Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954)—which takes its cues from Laplanche and includes the first mention of the theory of “shattering” in his

The figures of incorporation in hermeneutics and speculative philosophy are what I call the “tropes of cannibalism.” Nowhere is this clearer than in Hegel, but these tropes are at work everywhere in Western thought. (“Interview” [with Birnbaum and Olsson] n. pag.) Echoing Derrida, Butler describes the Hegelian subject as “that omnivorous adventurer of the Spirit who turns out, after a series of surprises, to be all that he encounters along his dialectical way” (Subjects 5–6). This characterization of the Hegelian sojourner comes close to Bersani’s depiction of the Proustian subject, whose endless appetite for others’ presumed secrets exemplifies the ramifications of the subject-object division in Cartesian modernity. For Bersani, however, Hegel’s subject differs from Marcel in, precisely, the speculative dimension of his desiring. 33 On Horkheimer and Adorno’s (and, more generally, the Frankfurt School’s) account of the role of (homosexual) narcissism in the psychopathology of fascism, see Hewitt ch. 2. On Riesman, Lasch, and other American commentators, see Lunbeck. The study on the role of narcissism in Baldwin’s account of diasporic modernity is yet to be written.

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work—he briefly reflects on the male protagonist René’s homo-attraction to an older man, Sir Stephen, a desire whose contemplative “calmness” Bersani contrasts to the intensive pleasures that the novel’s sadists experience in witnessing their bottoms’ suffering. As I proposed in Chapter 5, while the observation is something of a tangent in the analysis, this is an important moment insofar as it shows that, from the beginning of his engagement with psychoanalysis, Bersani supplements the psychoanalytic theory of the self ’s undoing in masochistic jouissance (the sadists’ ébranlement) with a mode of pleasure in which the subject, rather than intensively imploding, can unravel differently, through an “untroubled nonsexual adoration” of his likenesses outside his self (FA 295). While Bersani, in a brief 2010 text, suggests that it is only in his later work that he has complicated “the Laplanchian notion of ébranlement, of sexual shattering” by coupling it with “another, less dramatic, … version of ego disidentification”—what he defines here as “the milder sensual pleasure of discovering our inaccurate self-replications in the world, the aesthetically pleasing correspondences between the world and multiple aspects of our subjecthood” (“Broken” 415)—the emergence of this mode is, rather, strictly coincident with that of ébranlement theory. It is first outlined in Bersani’s depiction of the way in which René “worship[s Sir Stephen] without curiosity,” that is, without the epistemophilic paranoia that marks the Proustian subject’s efforts “to penetrate the secret of someone else’s mysteriously different ‘formula’ for sexual excitement” (FA 294). Writing twenty years after A Future for Astyanax, Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit might be describing René’s homo-narcissistic contemplation of Sir Stephen when they assert: A nonantagonistic relation to difference depends on [an] inaccurate replication of the self in difference, on our recognizing that we are already out there. Self-love initiates the love of others; the love of the same does not erase difference when it takes place as a dismissal of the prejudicial opposition between sameness and difference. (C 72)

If, for Hegel, “[t]he principle of speculation is the identity of subject and object” (Difference 80), René’s narcissism constitutes a speculative orientation insofar as it radically modifies the subject’s relationship to the world. Rather than Marcel’s anguished curiosity about the enigma of the other’s desire, his attraction to Sir Stephen is informed by the recognition of his imbrication in the other. It is speculatively narcissistic. While the scenes of sadomasochistic jouissance—in which the subject identifies with the other’s pain—are organized around radical otherness (most often figured in the unbridgeable

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gap of sexual difference, the “tragic” principle in Réage’s work, as Bersani writes [FA 301]), René’s pleasure issues from his recognition of the sameness of his self and the other. As we noted above, in the same chapter Bersani proposes that scholarship, rather than attempting to forge an identity separate from its object, begin to narcissistically love its self in the text. In this way, criticism would become the kind of speculative, and speculatively narcissistic, practice that Freud unwittingly pioneers. The speculative critic finds in art not an object of mysterious otherness whose riddles he, Marcellike, needs to solve; rather, he attunes to the object’s immanent rhythm, yields to his capture by a (nonparanoid) fascination with its “other sameness” (FoB 120). The subject’s speculative entwinement with the world deactivates “knowledge” as the mechanism of accessing otherness, typical to Cartesian modernity. In speculative aesthetics, as Bersani writes with Dutoit, “there is nothing ‘to know,’ only the consciousness of the movement in which we participate” (CS 72). The speculative reader is moved not by epistemophilia but by the aesthetic pleasures of shared rhythms. Receptive Bodies is not the first occasion where Bersani affirms his adoption of “speculation” as his own mode of thinking. In an endnote to The Freudian Body, he observes his infection by Freud’s speculative method: even when his subject is not Freud, his own writing is “informed by a certain type of psychoanalytic speculation” (FrB 118n2). In the foreword to The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, he similarly writes that, in his commentary on the poet, he will be indulging in “the pleasure of taking a few speculative risks” (DSM ix).34 Here, as in A Future for Astyanax, speculation is evoked as a work of “pleasure” (FA 312). The “pleasure” of speculations is different from—yet related to—the pleasure associated with the notion that has to a large extent informed the reception of Bersani’s work: ébranlement, the experience of the self ’s “plunging” into an “antisocial” sexual jouissance (IRG 30, 93). While this—the “antisocial thesis”—has often been cited as Bersani’s contribution to queer theory, the speculative mode of pleasure has received considerably less attention, despite its role, in the form of “homoness,” as the central idea presented in Homos (1995). Like René’s speculative narcissism, the pleasure of homoness is that of sociability: it is an attunement where the subject meets the world in “correspondence” or “solidarity,” where the self is discovered to

“Freud,” Bersani continues in The Culture of Redemption (1990), “has determined more than anyone else of the ways in which I read art,” particularly “the experience of having followed the modes of theoretical failure and even collapse in his work, the processes by which arguments are at once elaborated and disformulated” (CR 44). Whether its subject is Freud or not, Bersani’s own thinking, in other words, remains—as he writes in 2008—“highly speculative” (I 121).

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have always already entailed the world’s predicative difference. From early on, the “antisocial thesis” in Bersani is doubled by the crucially different dynamic that I have proposed to name “the correspondence thesis.” Bersani declares toward the end of Receptive Bodies: “epistemes change” (RB 124). If we are to disentangle ourselves from the ethical disaster of modern epistemophilia and precipitate “a new episteme” by “discover[ing] a new relation to the world” (IRG 160), we need to train ourselves in modes of homoness and speculative narcissism. Our “deprogramming” will require an “ascetic” practice, a term with which Bersani indicates the affinity of his thinking with that of later Foucault. It is an “aesthetic” program, aiming at what Foucault, too, calls “an aesthetics of existence” (History 2.253). Bersani concedes Foucault’s point that Freud has been one of the most important contributors to disciplinary modernity; yet he also suggests that we glimpse a model for our reorientation in the speculative moments that—like the intensive pleasures Freud considered the enemy of civilizational work— “convulse” his intellectual practice (Freud, Civilization 267). As Bersani puts it, in an echo of Martin Heidegger, “psychoanalysis[,] like art … [,] might train us to see our prior presence in the world, to see, as bizarre as this may sound, that, ontologically, the world cares for us” (IRG 152–53). When he uses “apprenticeship” as a synonym for “ascesis” (we need an “apprenticeship for a relationality founded on sameness rather than difference,” he writes [IRG 44]), he implicitly proposes a connection between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze: the term enters his vocabulary through his early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), and then in A Future for Astyanax, with Deleuze’s account of Marcel’s “apprenticeship” in reading the world’s signs.35 Such moments also indicate the unexplored affinity of his thinking with such onto-ethical models as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, according to whom our lives constitute an “apprenticeship” in the rapport of being. “Our life,” Emerson writes, is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. (“Circles” 403)

On Marcel’s “apprenticeship,” see Deleuze, Proust and Signs esp. ch. 3. For Bersani’s discussion of Deleuze’s study, see BB 234–35 and FA 256. He evokes the concept in FA 314; for later uses, see DSM 3; H 6; CS 69; IRG 69. See also the discussion in Chapter 2 above.

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For Bersani, as for Emerson, the movement of our thinking agrees with, or replicates, “the universal circularity of being” (FoB 170); or, as he continues in his latest book, We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisting one another, also continuously repeat, re-find one another. The viability of our being-inthe-world depends on a certain continuity in our exchanges with an otherness never wholly differentiated from ourselves. The perception of correspondences and analogies is the preliminary step to the discovery as well as the creation of new correspondences and analogies. (RB 48–49, emphasis added)

As much as he associates À la recherche du temps perdu’s “ever widening concentric circles of drama and analysis” with Freud’s argument about the imperishability of mental events (preface xi–xii), the term “re-find” in Receptive Bodies evokes Freud’s theory of the subject’s uncanny discovery of the earliest object in love: “The finding of an object,” as Freud writes, “is in fact a refinding of it” (Three 145). Bersani invites us to read the moments in Civilization and Its Discontents and the Three Essays as Freudian versions of anamnesis, the Platonic concept whose long history, as I have suggested here, intersects with German Idealism in the Hegelian speculative subject.36 When Bersani writes in 2008 that, in Plato and Freud, “love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination” (I 81), he is recalling—perhaps without conscious memory—his own argument, thirty years earlier, about René’s More precisely, as Ernst Bloch argues, we find Hegel’s version of anamnesis in his concept of Erinnerung, the mode of memory that operates by the past’s “inwardization” (Er-innerung). If Bloch is critical of the ramifications of Hegel’s anamnestic model of becoming for theorizing of futurity, Derrida sees in Erinnerung a continuation of the tradition in classical metaphysics that thinks the self/other relation in terms of the subject’s consumption and assimilation of the object. In the interview from which I quoted above, he suggests that Erinnerung belongs to the long line of Western philosophy’s “‘tropes of cannibalism’” (“Interview” [with Birnbaum and Olsson] n. pag.); its mechanism, as he puts it in Glas, is to achieve the “holocaust” of all otherness, a “[p]ure consuming destruction” (242–43, 238). Bersani, on the other hand, suggests that it is only by deprivileging difference and, like Hegel, insisting on sameness—on the speculative identity of the subject and the object beyond all dualisms—that we can possibly get beyond our “intractable” desire to annihilate otherness: “It seems that the only way we can love the other or the external world,” he writes, “is to find ourselves somehow in it. Only then might there be a nonviolent relation to the world that doesn’t seek to exterminate difference” (IRG 43). While he never mentions Hegel’s theory of Erinnerung, Bersani would recognize in it another moment in the genealogy of anamnestic, “speculative” memory that he has mobilized in Baudelaire, Proust, Freud, Sloterdijk, and others.

36

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“fascinated worship” of Sir Stephen (FA 295). What he calls “fascination” in Intimacies is different from the “paranoid fascination” with which the enigmatic other captures the Proustian and the Laplanchean subjects (see CS 38, 42, 95; FoB 37; IRG 92, 177, 178, 180). Equally a “fascination,” anamnestic love operates as the subject’s enthrallment with a “re-found” object, but an object that—as Deleuze suggests of Proust’s involuntary memory and Bersani of Baudelaire’s idealization—is thereby “created.” In it, the subject loves the other not as the source of hidden knowledge about his self, but aesthetically, as a repetition, perhaps an amplification, of his likeness. It is an ethics of “inaccurate replications” rather than one of radical differences, an ethics that, counteracting our “intractable” hatred of otherness, may yet enable “[t]he viability of our being-in-the-world” (RB 49). This can take place if we cultivate the flash of anamnestic recollection where the subject “re-finds” its others in the world, like the lover who discovers that she already—to use language we must unlearn—“knows” the beloved in the mirror.

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Index abjection 83, 122 Abraham, Nicolas 13, 227, 229, 237–9, 240, 241–2, 243 the Absolute 88, 92 adaptation (evolutionary theory) 180–1 Adorno, Theodor 174, 175, 240, 277, 277n33 aesthetics 82, 167, 192, 196, 214n20, 269 aesthetic education 11 aesthetic individuation 69–75 aesthetic sociability 11 care and 196–7, 225 fascination and 241, 243–51 mother’s care as “aesthetic process” 196–7, 225 Proustian 2 psychoanalytic theory and 6–7 rhythm and 225–51, 241, 279 speculative 253–82 violence and 180 aesthetic subject 6, 12–13, 15, 167–90 African culture 240n17, 241 Agamben, Giorgio 63n20, 80n3 AIDS crisis 79, 86, 171 Almodóvar, Pedro 11, 160, 164, 185n19, 190 alterity. See otherness Althusser, Louis 40 analogy 9n8, 56, 60–1, 70, 71, 74–5, 281 Proust, Marcel and 67 anamnesis 12, 194–207, 204n8, 220, 226, 274, 281, 281n36, 282 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 9n8 Anlehnung (“leaning on”) 263–5, 268 “antisocial thesis” 9n8, 9–10, 82, 106, 107–8n35, 117–35, 118n3, 160, 167, 177, 279

Anzaldúa, Gloria 3, 79 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 72n29, 80n1 “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island” 72n29 “Haciendo caras, una entrada” 72n29 apophasis 195, 197, 219 apparatus (dispositif ) 6, 54n18, 247 Aristophanes 44, 144 Aristotle 62, 78 Armah, Ayi Kwei, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 114 art 9n8, 169–70, 180n11, 180–1, 186, 241, 268. See also aesthetics connectedness and 216–17 criticism and 268–9 Foucault and 169–70 generality and 55n13 idealization and 72–3 knowledge and 219, 219n24 modes of subjectivation and 216–17 psychoanalytic theory and 197–8, 211–12 redemptive 187–8 subjectivation and 216–17 Artaud, Antonin 7, 57 assimilation 120, 121, 272, 276–7, 276–7n32 Assyrian art 169, 176, 179, 181–6, 188, 214n20, 218, 232, 234–6, 244, 247–8, 250 Aufhebung (“overcoming”) 125, 126, 275 Augustine 43, 194 Auschwitz 174 availability 15, 214n20 Aviram, Avittai 227, 228

312

Index

Badcock, Christopher 19 Baldwin, James 277, 277n33 Balzac, Honoré 69n25, 229 Barnes, Hazel 93–4 Barthes, Roland 98, 99n26, 128–9, 134n17, 234, 246–7, 262 Baudelaire, Charles 7–8, 165, 186, 194, 200–7, 226, 234–6, 243–4, 256, 274, 282 aesthetic individuation and 69–75 aesthetic theory of 10, 67–75, 143 “correspondence of forms” and 120 “Correspondences” (Correspondances) (poem) 70 correspondences and 10, 67, 69, 70, 71–3, 74, 119–20, 156–8, 204–5, 206, 213 “The Essence of Laughter” 123–4 “Further Notes on Edgar Poe” 70n26 idealization, theory of 15, 67, 71–73, 75–77, 157–58, 158n13, 200, 202, 204, 206, 210, 213, 264, 274, 282 individuality and 8, 48–9, 66–7, 75–8 Les Fleurs du mal 67 narcissism and 155–60 “The Painter of Modern Life” 71–72, 156–7 “The Salon of 1846” 71, 71n27, 73, 210 “The Salon of 1859” 73 theory of idealization 15, 157–8, 158n13, 202–4, 213, 264, 274 Baumbach, Sibylle 24n6, 236n12, 241 Bayer, Oswald 261, 261n13, 277 Becker, Werner 255 Beckett, Samuel 7, 11, 48, 60n16, 80, 102, 111, 116, 159, 187, 209, 227, 229, 234 “impoverishment” 73, 73n30, 112, 114, 243

“leastening” 73, 73n30, 114, 209 becoming 4–5, 76–7, 99, 109–10, 117, 203. See also individuation becoming-human 4, 32, 37–9, 117, 135, 193, 196 (see also hominization) becoming-other 109–10, 241 becoming-speculative 262–9 Hegelian model of 88–9, 270–1, 271n25, 271n26 “queer becoming” 110 repetition and 114 zones of 74 being concealment of 210–21, 250 grammar of 12, 196 leaps of 54–63 modes of 220, 221 styles of 12 syntax of 225–6 Benjamin, Walter 21 “On the Image of Proust” 67n23 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 67n23 Berg, Jean de (Catherine RobbeGrillet) 154 The Image 146, 159, 160, 170, 171, 176, 182n16 Bergson, Henri 14, 64, 207 Berlant, Lauren 134–5 Bersani, Leo 9n8, 26, 45, 58, 69, 73, 173, 191, 198–200, 204–9, 219, 225, 251, 270, 276 Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais 159–60, 209 Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction 3, 8, 41, 43, 47, 47n1, 48–9, 53, 56, 59, 62, 64–5, 67, 74, 77–8, 200, 203, 205, 209, 229–30, 234, 280 Baudelaire and Freud 8, 49, 67, 71, 74–5, 77, 145, 156–60, 159, 161, 226, 234, 269n23

Index “Broken Connections” 110–11 Caravaggio’s Secrets (with Dutoit) 143, 163, 169, 192–3, 211, 214–18, 220, 248–9 “Critical Reflections” (with Dutoit) 24n5, 205, 219 “crypto-concepts” of 214n20 227–8, 255, 262–3 (see also specific concepts) The Culture of Redemption 20, 71n28, 75–6, 143, 145, 156–8, 158n13, 159–61, 231n11, 279n34 The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé 143, 207, 209, 211–14, 231, 269n23, 270, 270n24, 271, 279 “The Deconstructed Self ” 56–7 on Deleuze and Guattari 50n6, 50–1 Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (with Dutoit) 133, 185n19, 194, 210n15 The Forms of Violence: Native in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture 45, 133, 169, 183, 234–5, 237, 246, 254, 269n23 The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art 118n2, 135, 140–1, 231–3, 262, 265, 268, 268n22, 269, 269n23, 279 A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature 3, 8, 10–12, 24, 41, 47–52, 52n9, 53–6, 59, 64–7, 70, 74–7, 76n34, 97–8, 102, 127–35, 142–9, 153–8, 168–70, 176, 186, 205, 231–4, 243, 262–4, 268, 277–80 “The Gay Outlaw” 111–12 Homos 8–9, 64, 74, 79–82, 87, 94–9, 95n23, 98–9, 106–13, 117–19, 131, 143, 149, 150–3, 158–61, 164, 209, 226n2, 279

313 as “homo-thinker” 10, 14 Intimacies (with Phillips) 202, 274, 282 “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 79, 81–2, 85–7, 106–7, 110, 117, 119–20, 135, 139, 141, 159, 167, 171, 173, 177 Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays 8, 41, 43, 69, 74, 167–8, 199–200, 203, 219–20, 227, 245, 280 Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art 2–3, 15, 21, 24, 27, 44, 56, 205, 274 “Merde Alors” (with Dutoit) 171, 172, 174–5, 177–9, 236–7, 245–6 “Against Monogamy” 143 “The Narrator and the Bourgeois Community in ‘Madame Bovary’” 2n2 “The Other Freud” 213–14 “Pedagogy and Pederasty” 202n7 political praxis and 81–2 Receptive Bodies 13, 111, 196, 226n2, 229, 244–6, 249–50, 254–5, 261–2, 279–81 “A Response to Patrick ffrench and Peter Caws” (with Dutoit) 7 “Rigorously Speculating” 6n5, 14, 17, 27n11, 64, 207n9, 253, 256 “Rohmer’s Salon” (with Dutoit) 202n7 “Secrets du Caravage” 11, 23 Sloterdijk and 204n8 “Sociability and Cruising” 143, 169, 184 as source for antisocial thesis 117 as “speculative thinker” 13–14, 253–82 “The Subject of Power” 41, 210, 254, 265, 269n23

314 Thoughts and Things 13, 65, 74, 78, 101–3, 107, 111, 115, 254n1, 272–4 at University of California, Berkeley 9n8 Beth, Karl 24n7 betrayal 96n25, 96–9, 99n26, 102, 104, 107, 131 Bhabha, Homi 151 binding 189–90 Birmingham School 95n23 Blanchot, Maurice 105, 208, 209, 262 Bloch, Ernst 281n36 Bogue, Ronald 68n24, 264 Bollas, Christopher 7, 11–12, 19–20, 192–6, 193n1, 198, 198n4, 200–1, 219, 274 Cracking Up 197, 225 The Evocative Object World 199n5 Forces of Destiny 198n4, 199 The Mystery of Things 191 The Shadow of the Object 197, 198n4, 199n5, 226, 234 Bonaventure 197n3 Boswell, John 86–7 Brée, Germaine 14, 24 Brix, Michel 72 Bush, George W., administration of 113 Butler, Judith 50n6, 63n20, 119 Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death 83n8, 122 “assimilationist” logic of deployment of dialectic 104 Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” 83n7, 84 deconstruction and 80n3 Derrida and 79 dialectical theory of politics and becoming 119 Edelman and 120–6 Foucault and 79, 99–116

Index Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 8, 64, 79, 81, 85, 89, 95n23, 105n33 on Genet 90–9, 100, 113 Genet, Jean 122–3 Hegelianism and 9, 13, 79, 87–90, 88n14, 89n16, 89n17, 117, 125, 135 Lacan and 122n5 lack and 142 negation and 134 “negative generativity” and 122 negativity and 10, 120–6, 134 paradigmatic differences with Bersani 87–90 parody and 84 performativity and 79–81, 83n7, 87, 101, 116, 119, 122–3, 126, 151 The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection 83n7 queer theory and 8–9, 79–116, 152 speech acts and 122–3 Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France 8, 50n6, 79, 87–8, 89, 90–9, 101, 115, 125, 259n7, 277n32 subversion and 110 Camus, Albert 229 Caravaggio 10, 23, 143, 160, 217–18 care the aesthetic and 196–7, 225 idiom of 196–7, 225–6 of the self 109, 162 caretaking, infants and 35–6, 195–9, 206, 225–6 Cartesianism 107n34, 162, 277, 279 Caruth, Cathy 5n4 castration 142, 215 Catholic Church 81 Cerf, Walter 255

Index Chauncey, George 100n28 cinema 13, 177, 185, 207, 248–9 Clément Catherine 228n5 Coleman, James 9n8 colonialism 161 commonality 204, 206. See also sameness concealment of being 210–21, 214n20, 250 connectedness 70, 119, 147, 149, 160, 167, 182n16, 216–17 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 161 consciousness 261 aetheticizing 13 fascinated 13, 239–40, 240n17 rhythmizing 13, 227–8, 237, 238–40, 241 Cook, Bradford 208n12, 208–9 Cooper, Dennis 146 Copjec, Joan 47, 50n7, 104n30, 133n16, 140n3 correspondence(s) 9n8, 10, 15, 70, 73–7, 119–20, 120, 143, 149, 154, 156–60, 164–5, 167, 203–6, 221, 264, 278–81. See also correspondence thesis Baudelaire and 71–3, 156–8, 204–5, 206, 213 of forms 82 idealization and 72–3 language and 208 narcissism of 143 onto-ethics/aesthetics of 73–4 Platonic theory of 9n8, 69, 71, 202, 213 shattering and 164 vertical vs. horizontal 202, 213, 221 “correspondence thesis” 7, 10, 135, 160, 208, 280 Couturier-Heinrich, Clémence 227n3 cradling 226, 229–36, 244

315

Crawley, Ashton, Blackpentecostal Breath 240n17 Crimp, Douglas 79 criticism, art and 268–9 “crypto-concepts” 16, 227–8, 255, 262–3 Culler, Jonathan 70 cultural constructionism, queer theory and 151–2 Darwin, Charles 9n8, 78, 181 Davidson, Arnold 43n30 Davis, C. 19 Dean, Tim 9n8, 26, 118–19, 122n5, 142, 225n1 death drive 120, 122n5, 125, 176, 228, 233, 236, 267 De Berg, Jean (Catherine RobbeGrillet), The Image 144, 147, 149 décalage 123 décalage horaire 123 decolonization 114 deconstruction 82, 84 Degen, Andreas 24n6, 236n12 dehumanization 161 De Kesel, Marc 50n7, 229n6 De Lauretis, Teresa 79, 231n10 De Lautreamont, Comte de (IsidoreDuncan Ducasse) 57–8, 61, 70, 74, 207 Les Chants de Maldoror 54–6, 70 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 7–10, 12, 15, 95n23, 96, 107n34, 109, 155, 168, 186, 199, 203, 207, 241–2 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Guattari) 8, 47, 49–50, 50n6, 51–2, 64, 76n34 “Coldness and Cruelty” 39 desiring-machines and 220–1, 223 Difference and Repetition 49n5 Hegel and 79 individuality and 47–78

316

Index

influence on Bersani 45, 80, 80n3, 89–90 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (with Guattari) 49n5 on Proust 280–2 Proust and Signs 8, 47, 57–9, 64–70, 75–8, 76n34, 194, 200, 205, 230, 280n35 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Guattari) 77, 242n18 De Man, Paul 120, 121–6 D’Emilio, John 152 depersonalization 199–200 deprogramming 6, 168, 237, 280 Derrida, Jacques 13, 16, 28n13, 40, 49, 54, 57, 63, 63n20, 78, 88n14, 269 Butler and 79, 81, 82, 277n32 Dissemination 88n14, 266–7 Freud and 206–7, 255, 270 “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 265–6 Glas 262, 266, 272, 276n32, 277, 281n36 Of Grammatology 28n13, 29, 56, 59–61, 60n16, 64, 266n20 Hegel and 80n3, 270, 273 “La parole soufflée” 57n15 onto-ethical commitment to mortal life 228n4 The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond 7 “To Speculate—on Freud” 266, 266n19, 267 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” 59–60, 60n16 “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” 57n15 Descartes, René 14, 41, 43n29, 65, 71, 107n34, 108, 220, 247, 260n10. See also Cartesianism desire 10, 129–30, 144, 212

difference and 142–3, 154 vs. drive 125 fascination and 134 Freud and 38–42 homo-narcissistic 148 (see also homo-narcissism) infants and 189–90 lack and 119–20, 127–35, 144, 164 narcissistic 148, 155–60 of others 278–9 psychoanalytic theory and 38–45 redemptive mode of 154 relationality and 127–8 rhythm of 226 tragic 131–2, 135, 141–2 desiring-machines 220–1, 223, 233 desubjectivation 82, 102–6, 108–9, 111, 115–16, 135, 188–9 Dewey, John 112–13 dialectical reversal 106 dialectics. See Hegelian dialectics difference 10, 14, 146, 148, 153, 155 desire and 142–3, 154 hetero-sexuality and 186, 278–9 reconfiguring ethics of 143 vs. sameness 10 suspicion of 165 tragedy and 127–35, 132n15, 141–2 differences (journal) 79 dispositif. See apparatus doubleness 249, 251 doubling 124, 183 Doyle, Arthur Conan 19, 19n1 drive, vs. desire 125 dualisms 258 Dumézil, George 43n30 Dumont, Bruno, Humanité 246–9 Dutoit, Ulysse 22n4, 23–4, 45, 74, 112, 119, 159–60, 163–4, 173, 184, 203, 278–9 Caravaggio’s Secrets (with Bersani) 192–3, 211, 214, 215–18, 218n22, 220, 248

Index “Critical Reflections” (with Bersani) 24n5, 205, 219 Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (with Bersani) 77, 133, 185n19, 194, 210n15 The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (with Bersani) 133, 169, 183, 234–5, 237, 246, 254, 269n23 “Merde Alors” (with Bersani) 171, 172, 174–5, 177–9, 236–7 “A Response to Patrick French and Peter Caws” (with Bersani) 7 “Rohmer’s Salon” (with Bersani) 202n7 Dworkin, Andrea 173, 174, 176, 188 ébranlement 86, 109, 111, 117–20, 127, 170–1, 176–7, 232, 268, 277–9. See also shattering ethical potential of 245 Freud and 134–5 narcissism and 141, 145–9, 153–4, 159 psychoanalytic subject of 154 theory of 167–8 Edelman, Lee 10, 99, 104, 106, 109, 119, 122n5, 126, 126–7n8, 130 Butler and 120–6 desubjectivation and 135 “high theory” and 119 Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory 121–2 lack and 142 negation and 134 negativity and 10, 120–6, 134, 135 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 118, 120–6, 126–7n8 “queer ontology” and 10

317

Sex, or the Unbearable (with Berlant) 124–5, 126–7n8, 134–5 Edwards, Brent Hayes 240n17 effacement 206, 210 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 69, 280–1 empathy 172–3, 175 Engels, Friedrich 88, 237, 260 enigmatic signifier, theory of 215 Enlightenment 174–5 epistemophilia 162, 198, 199, 216, 226, 247–9, 278–80 epokhe 13, 238–9 Eribon, Didier 6n5, 42n27 essence(s) 41, 55n13, 69, 73–8, 90, 93–4, 186, 247, 249 Proustian 43, 55n13, 55–6, 58–9, 61–2, 65–8, 70–1, 73–8, 200, 205, 247 of relatedness 184 sexual 150 estrangement, poetry and 210n14 evolutionary theory 180–1 “exaptations” 181 existentialism 93–4, 147 Fanon, Frantz 114 fascinating rhythm, theory of 13, 107–8n35 fascination 12–13, 15–16, 91–2, 134n17, 146–7, 155, 189, 203, 220, 225–51, 229n6, 282 aesthetics and 241, 243–51 analysis and 268–9 cinema and 248–9 desire and 134 epistemophilia and 249 fascism and 235–6, 244 forms of 13, 243–51 Lacan, Jacques on 229n6 modes of 250 as neglected keyword of modernity 236n12, 236–7 otherness and 184

318

Index

paranoid 215–16 rhythm and 245–6, 249 rhythmizing and 239–40, 240n17 with sameness 279 sexual 244 subjectivation and 215–16, 216n21 suffering and 172–3, 175 violence and 172–3, 183, 186, 188, 232–3, 237, 244, 248, 251 (see also sadism) “Fascination Studies” 228, 236n12, 236–7 fascism 174–5, 178, 244 fascination and 235–6, 244 pleasure and 170–7 Feuerbach, Ludwig 260n12 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 255 figurality 55, 60–1, 67, 70, 71, 74–5, 121–3, 126, 281. See also specific figures Fink, Bruce 19 Flaubert, Gustave 2n2, 59, 67, 226n2 Fletcher, John 5 Fliess, Wilhelm 274 Foster, Hal 9n8 Foucault, Michel 9, 44, 54n10, 63n20, 79, 80n3, 185, 190, 205, 269, 277, 280 on the “apparatus (dispositif )” 6, 54, 54n18 art and 169–70 at Berkeley 6 Bersani and Butler on 99–116 care of the self and 109, 162 desubjectivation and 82, 102–3 Discipline and Punish 41, 99, 105–6, 168, 210, 217, 265 early work on eros 107–8n35 “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” 43n29 “Friendship as a Way of Life” 6, 170

friendship(s) and 110 “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” 6n6, 220 Hegelianism and 88–9, 89n16 The Hermeneutics of the Subject 43n29 History of Madness 9n7, 105, 105n33, 106, 107, 108, 109 The History of Sexuality 41–2, 43, 53, 80–1, 99–100, 103, 105, 105n33, 149–50, 168, 174, 210, 216–17, 247, 265 on individuality 8, 61–2, 65, 70–71 on modern subject’s production 81 narcissism and 139, 152–5 The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences 41, 53, 208 overturning of “repressive hypothesis” 216–17 on power 62n18 “queer becoming” and 110 queer theory and 105 on receptive sex 86–7 same-sex friendship and 141, 155, 162, 168, 177, 186 on sexuality as part of colonizing apparatus 167 theory of power 88 fourvoiement (going-astray) 32, 127, 170, 212, 216 Francis, Pope, “Order of Creation” 81 freedom 93–4 Freeman, Elizabeth 107–8n35, 227n3, 240 “French theory” 3, 6–7, 265 Freud, Sigmund 7, 14, 79–80, 112, 115, 125, 170, 174, 226, 228n4 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 266–7, 268

Index on binding (Bindung) 189 “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’” 145, 171 Civilization and Its Discontents 26, 207, 273–5, 281 “Copernican revolution” instigated by 3–6 on death drive 267 desire and 38–42 ébranlement and 134–5 “The Economic Problem of Masochism” 145, 171 homophobia and 143 “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” 27n12, 40, 145, 171 interest in murder mysteries 19n1, 20 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 19 Laplanche and 10–12, 89n17, 168, 171, 173, 179, 206–7, 221, 233 memory and 274–5 narcissism and 141–3, 144, 148, 152n9 otherness and 27, 135 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” 207 psychoanalytic theory and 10–12, 14, 27, 45, 47–8, 50–1, 57, 78, 89n17, 135, 140–8, 152n9, 165, 168, 171, 173, 179, 190, 206–7, 211–12, 221, 233 speculativeness and 254, 263–71, 268n22, 277, 279n34, 280, 281n36 on subject-constitution 146, 165, 168, 173 subject-object dichotomy and 14 “theoretical collapse” of his thinking 267–8 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 263n16, 281 “The Unconscious” 191 friendship(s) 154–5

319

Foucault and 110, 141, 155–6, 162, 168, 177, 186 as “queer becoming” 110 same-sex 141, 155–6, 162, 168, 177, 186 frivolity 11, 15, 167–90, 180n11, 214, 214n20, 256 Fuss, Diana 79 futurity 120, 121, 122, 130, 281n36 Gasché, Rodolphe 90, 90n18 gay macho 85–6 gayness 152 gender 81–3, 85–6 genealogies of thought 80, 80n3 Genet, Jean 9, 48, 81, 91n21, 96n25, 100, 101, 104, 107, 109–13, 131, 143, 209 Bersani and Butler on 90–9 Funeral Rites 94, 95–6, 98, 110, 111–12, 112n38 The Maids 94, 97, 110 Our Lady of the Flowers 101–2 Geraets, T. F. 256n4 Gide, André, The Immoralist 160–2, 164 Girard, René 147 Godard, Jean-Luc 74, 207 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 6 Gould, Steven Jay 180–1, 183, 186 “grammar of being” 12, 196 Groddeck, Georg 89n17 Grosz, Elizabeth 3, 29, 64 Guattari, Félix 6–7, 10, 12, 71, 220–1, 241–2 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Deleuze) 8, 47, 49–50, 50n6, 51–2, 64, 76n34 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (with Deleuze) 49n5 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Deleuze) 77, 242n18 Three Ecologies 6

320

Index

Hadot, Pierre 43, 43n30 Haeckel, Ernst 140 Hägglund, Martin 63n20 Hahnemann, Andy 24n6, 236n12 Halberstam, Jack 107–8n35, 118n3 Halperin, David 89n16, 152 Harris, H. S. 256n4 Haynes, Todd 104, 107 Safe 101–2, 110, 111, 114–15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 13–14, 79, 80n3, 81, 174, 253–60, 270n24, 274–5, 276–7n32, 281 on becoming 270–1, 271n25, 271n26 Butler and 87–8 Derrida and 266n20 The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy 257, 276, 278 The Encyclopaedia Logic 256n4 Erinnerung and 281n36 on language 275–6 The Lesser Logic 270, 273 Marx and 113, 260n10 narcissism and 13 Phenomenology of Spirit 92, 117, 255, 259n7, 260n11, 261, 271–2 Science of Logic 255, 257, 267n21, 275–6 speculation and 278–9 speculative idealism and 266–7, 275–7 speculative narcissism and 278–9 Unruhigkeit 271, 271n26 Hegelian dialectics 13–14, 87–90, 88n14, 89n17, 96, 259–60 assimilation and 276–7, 276–7n32 “assimilationist” logic of deployment of 104 Butler and 13, 125, 135 “decapitated” 88, 88n14, 93, 113, 125

negation and 117 otherness and 276–7 subject-object dichotomy and 276–7 Hegelianism 79 Butler and 9, 13, 87–90, 89n16, 89n17, 125, 135 Foucault and 88–9, 89n16 narcissism and 261, 272, 273, 277 negation and 117 negativity and 117 Sartre and 91, 91n21 speculative idealism and 270, 281–2 Heidegger, Martin 80n3, 210–11, 280 Henningsen, Lena 24n6, 236n12 hetero-normativity 153 hetero-sexuality 10, 154 difference and 186, 278–9 pornographization of 173, 174, 176, 177 queer theory and 10 rape and 173 tragedy and 127–35, 160 “heterosexual matrix” 89 hetero-sexual theorizing 14 hetero-tragedies 127–35 Hill, Leslie 60, 208–9 Hocquenghem, Guy 79 Holocaust 174 hominization 4, 32, 34, 158, 170, 171, 195–6, 212, 216, 273 homo-aesthetics 10, 12, 13 homo-attraction sexuality extricated from 161–2 two modes of 143 homo-essentialism 15 “homomonad” 16 homo-narcissism 131, 135, 153, 159, 162, 164, 177. See also narcissism “homoness” 15, 82, 118–19, 130, 143, 149, 152, 158, 164–6, 167 of being 206

Index coining of term 164 of desire 164–5 homo-narcissism and 164 redefinition of homosexuality and 164–5 sociability and 279–80 homophobia 141, 143, 219 homo-sexual being 162 homosexual identification 153 homosexuality 152 emergence as identity category 100–1 “homoness” and 164–5 as identity category 149–52, 152n9, 166 medical discourse on 100n28, 100–1 psychoanalytic theory and 139–66 redefinition of 164–5 relationality and 139 speculative etiology of 155 without sexuality 160–6 homosexual specificity, queer theory and 149 homosocial desire, male 147–8 homosociality 177 homo-thinking 10 Horkheimer, Max 174, 175, 277, 277n33 Horowitz, Louise 97–8 Huffer, Lynne 102–3, 105n33, 105–7, 107n34, 107–8n35, 108, 109 human ontology 86 Husserl, Edmund 13, 41, 63n20, 93, 227, 238, 241, 243 Ideas I 238–9 Hyppolite, Jean 271n25 idealism. See speculative idealism idealization, theory of (Baudelaire) 15, 67, 71–73, 75–77, 157–58, 158n13, 200, 202, 204, 206, 210, 213, 264, 274, 282 immanence 63n20, 206

321

impersonal intimacy 15, 143, 190, 199–200 in-betweenness 198–9, 206 individuality 8, 15, 47–78, 205–6 Baudelaire and 8 Foucault on 8 impersonal 63–7 “metaphysical” 203–4 more general than individuals 75–8 Proust and 62–3 “transindividuality” 200 individuation 76–7, 204. See also becoming aesthetic 69–75 theory of 186 infants 12, 32–8, 51, 135, 175, 193 caretaking and 4, 12, 33, 35–6, 195–9, 206, 225–6 cradling and 235 desire and 189–90 development of 7, 194–6 “grammar of being” and 12 language and 12, 35–6, 189–90, 194–5, 211–12, 225–6 mirror stage and 157 otherness and 27n12, 211–12 sexuality and 32–9, 86, 117, 216, 218, 263 the unconsicous and 192, 194–6 “interstitial sensuality” 185 intimacy 185n19, 204n8 impersonal 15, 143, 190, 199–200 nonsexual 11, 176–7 (see also sociability) with otherness 272–3 otherness and 272–3 inversion 92–3, 100–1 irony 123–6 Jagose, Annamarie 81, 105n33 James, Henry 12, 15, 15n9, 227 Jameson, Fredric 84, 261, 277 JanMohamed, Abdul 83n8, 104

322 Johnson, James Weldon 240n17 Jones, Ernest 266 jouissance 86, 118, 127, 129–30, 135, 146, 156, 176, 179, 184, 206, 210, 219, 233, 244, 278–9 Joyce, James 7, 211, 211n16, 211n18, 212–14 Finnegans Wake 213 Ulysses 158n13, 213, 231n11 Jung, Carl 7 Kant, Immanuel 13, 14, 63n20, 253, 255–6, 257n5, 258, 260n10, 266–7, 276–7 Critique of Judgment 257 Critique of Pure Reason 257 Keeling, Kara 48n2 Khalfa, Jean 9n7 Kipling, Rudyard, The Jungle Books 24 Klein, Melanie 47, 51, 57, 221 Kleinianism 231 knowledge 195, 196–8, 199, 209, 216, 216n21, 218–19, 219–20 art and 219, 219n24 otherness and 273, 279, 282 power and 269 sexual 216 speculation and 258–9 Kojève, Alexander 79 Krauss, Lawrence 274 Kristeva, Julia 19 Murder in Byzantium 19 The Old Man and the Wolves 19 Possessions 19 Kurnick, David 131 Lacan, Jacques 7, 47, 50, 79, 121, 123, 125, 127, 134, 154, 273 on desire 129–30 on fascination 228–9, 229n6 model of subject constitution 104 psychoanalytic theory and 19, 25–7, 128, 129–30, 155, 157, 206–7, 211, 221, 228–9

Index Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 229n6 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 229n6 sexual difference and 128 on subject-constitution 157 theory of mirror stage 155, 157, 228–9 Lacanian theory 26n10, 50n7, 82, 103–4, 122n5, 126, 229 lack 10, 119–20, 125, 126, 128, 131–4, 142, 144, 164. See also castration; negation Laclau, Ernesto 126–7n8 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 228n5 “Baudelaire” 201–2 Typography 228 language correspondence(s) and 208 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich on 275–6 infants and 12, 35–6, 189–90, 194–5, 211–12, 225–6 poetic 207–8 speculative character of 275 the unconscious and 195–6 virtuality and 209–10 Laplanche, Jean 3–6, 16, 86, 117–18, 127, 134, 168, 173–4, 176, 247, 255, 262, 264, 272n28, 273–4, 278 “The Drive and Its Source-Object” 263n16 Essays on Otherness 5n4, 38 “Exigency and Going-Astray” 5 Freud and 10–12, 89n17, 168, 171, 173, 179, 206–7, 221, 233 “Gender, Sex and the Sexual” 38 Hegel and 89n17 The Language of Psycho-Analysis (with Pontalis) 263n16 law of “theoretico-genesis” 140–1 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis 5n4, 39, 145, 168, 170, 203, 263

Index “Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction” 263n16 narcissism and 144–8, 154, 156, 159 psychoanalytic theory and 21, 26, 30–45, 47–8, 50–1, 67, 77–8, 135, 144–8, 154, 156, 159, 192–6, 206–7, 210, 212, 215–16, 218, 218n22 “A Short Treatise on the Unconscious” 4 “Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation” 5 The Unconscious 194 “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution” 3n3 Lasch, Christopher 277, 277n33 laughter 123–4 Lautrémont, Comte de (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) 98, 115, 186 Lawrence, D. H. 12, 65, 269 Studies in Classic American Literature 277 Women in Love 12, 196n2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 260n10 Leonardo da Vinci 270 Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 40, 63n20, 80n3, 134 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 28n13, 78 Lewontin, Richard C. 180–1 likenesses 158. See also sameness literary criticism 231 literary realism 7, 49–54, 52, 52n9, 186, 232 Livingston, Jennie 84 Lorenz, Konrad 12 love anamnestic 282 memory and 281–2 Luther, Martin 62, 261 Lutheran Reformation 65 macho culture, performativity and 85–7 MacKinnon, Catharine 173, 174, 176, 177, 188

323

Madonna 93 Malabou, Catherine 16 Malebranche, Nicolas 260n10 Malick, Terrence 9n8 The Thin Red Line 77, 210n15 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 10–11, 61n17, 194, 210n14, 211–14, 214n20, 219, 226, 254–5, 271, 277 “Crisis in Poetry” (“Crise de vers”) 207–10 frivolity and 214 German Idealism and 270n24 Marx, Karl 8, 48, 59, 65, 78, 88, 99, 113, 117, 276 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” 260 “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General” 260, 260n12 Hegelianism and 253, 255, 260, 260n10, 260n12 “On the Jewish Question” 48n3 Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Engels) 237 masochism 9n8, 145, 148–9, 170, 173, 176, 233, 234, 236, 237, 278–9 masochistic shattering 148–9 originary 165 primary 176 projected 146, 171, 179 projective 177 sexuality and 232 subject-constitution and 173, 174 Massey, Christopher Scott 24n6, 236n12 Masson, Jeffrey 4, 5 May, Todd 15, 64 McCallum, E. L. 119, 135 Mehlmann, Jeffrey 191, 192, 263n16 memory 73. See also anamnesis Freud’s theory of 274–5 idealization and 72–3 “inwardization” of past and 281n36

324

Index

love and 281–2 Proust’s account of involuntary 274 “restranscription” of 274 Meschonnic, Henri 227n3 metaphor 55–6 Michon, Pascal 227, 227n3 Mieli, Mario 79 Miller, D. A. 52, 52n9 Millot, Catherine 132n15 Miller, Jacques-Alain 26n10 mirror stage, theory of 155, 157, 228–9 modernism 187, 214 modernity 174–5. See also Enlightenment Mowitt, John 228, 228n5, 276n31 Mulvey, Laura 178, 188, 249 Nachträglichkeit 263, 267, 273–4, 275 Nancy, Jean-Luc 13, 255, 275, 275n30 Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif 271n26 The Speculative Remark 271, 271n26 narcissism 10–11, 15, 135, 139–66. See also homo-narcissism Baudelairean 155–60 of correspondences 143, 158–60, 164 Freud and 141–3 Hegelianism and 261, 272, 273, 277 homo-narcissism 139–66 nonspecular 164, 165 relationality and 143 shattering 143, 158–60, 164 specular 11, 155 speculative 11, 256, 270–82 virtualities and 155–6 Narcissus 261 narrative 13, 123, 230–5 Nazism 174–5, 177, 235 negation 91, 104, 117, 124, 134, 195, 275

the negative, queer theory and 117 negativity 10, 104, 105, 117–26, 118n3, 126–7n8, 134–5 Nicolas of Cusa 195 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 63n20, 78, 81, 90, 96, 97, 105, 181, 242n18, 253 On the Genealogy of Morals 181 Human, All Too Human 96n25 nonrepressed unconscious 191–2, 194–200, 204, 221, 225 nonsexual intimacy 11, 176–7. See also sociability novel, realist 49–54 October (journal) 79 Oedipal complex 10, 115 onto-ethics/aesthetics 7, 8, 12, 63n20, 80, 82, 107–8n35, 119, 126, 129, 141. See also aesthetics; ethics of correspondences 73–4 otherness and 135 queering of 177 of sameness 10 speculative 110 ontology 3. See also onto-ethics/ aesthetics; queer ontology tragic 127–35 oppression, power and 114 Oschema, Klaus 24n6, 236n12 the Other 91–2, 219. See also otherness otherness 3–6, 14–15, 132n15, 134–5, 142, 144–5, 149, 153, 159, 175, 212, 219, 278–9, 281n36 annihilation of 149 fascination and 184 Hegelian dialectics and 276–7 hegemonic conceptions of 154 infants and 27n12, 211–12 intimacy and 272–3 knowledge and 273, 279, 282 onto-ethics and 135 psychoanalytic theory and 10

Index sexuality and 146–7 theory of 10 Paris is Burning 84 parody 87–90 performativity and 82–7, 122–3 subversive function of 84, 85–6 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 11, 176, 184 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom 74, 169, 171, 174–5, 177–80, 180n11, 182–3, 185, 187–8, 245, 248–9 patriarchy 147–8 Patterson, Orlando 83n8, 104 Peck, Dale 108–9, 110, 111, 113, 115 performativity 8–9, 87–90, 105, 105n33 Butler and 79–81, 83n7, 101, 116, 119, 122–3, 126, 151 macho culture and 85–7 parody and 82–7, 84, 122–3 political potential of 83–4 queer theory and 79–80 repetition and 83–4, 116, 123 speculative politics and 79–116 straight masculinity and 85 subversion and 95 phenomenology 93, 237, 238–40, 241 Phillips, Adam 198–9 On Flirtation 199 Intimacies (with Bersani) 198, 274 Picasso, Pablo 2 Plato 7, 9n8, 12, 56, 67, 70, 144, 200, 204n8, 226, 281. See also Platonism anamnesis and 12, 204 Meno 201, 204 Phaedo 201 Phaedrus 68, 165, 201–3, 205, 274 The Symposium 44, 202, 202n7 Platonism 9n8, 67, 69, 69n25, 70–1, 77, 157, 202, 203, 204n8, 206, 213 play 60, 60n16, 186, 217, 268

325

pleasure 170–7, 186. See also jouissance plenitude 164 poetry 208–10, 210n14 Poirier, Richard 187 politics political praxis 81–2 queer theory and 108 speculative 79–116 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 218n22, 263n16 pornography 176 postcoloniality 114, 114n440 power 109 escape from 96 Foucauldian theory of 62n18, 88 knowledge and 269 negation and 81 oppression and 114 subjectivation and 80–1, 86 turning away from 81 primal repression 12, 218n22 privation, ontology and 125 Proust, Marcel 47–8, 53, 58–62, 80, 148, 160–1, 179, 186, 226, 229, 243–4, 248, 256 account of involuntary memory 274 analogy and 56, 60–1, 67, 71, 74 Bersani, Leo and 7 “Contre Sainte-Beuve” 24, 55n12, 55n13, 67n23, 78 figurality and 60–1 The Fugitive 273 individuality and 62–3 metaphor and 55–6 Platonism and 68, 68n24, 69 “À propos de Baudelaire” 67n23 psychoanalytic theory and 7, 8, 19–30, 22n4, 24n5, 39–40, 44–5, 194, 200–7, 210, 219 Remembrance of Things Past 1–14, 20–2, 22n4, 24n5, 24n7, 25, 27, 43–4, 55–6, 61, 66–75, 78,

326 127–35, 145–6, 158n13, 163, 165, 168, 175, 184, 185n19, 188, 193, 200–2, 205, 212, 215, 230, 236, 246, 274, 281 subject-object dichotomy and 14 Time Regained 76, 76n34 tragic ontology and 129 transversality and 76n34, 76–7 psychoanalytic theory 3–4, 7, 8, 19–45, 86, 127–35, 140–1. See also specific theorists aesthetics and 6–7 desire and 38–45 homosexuality and 139–66, 149–55 otherness and 10 potential remaining in 10 queer theory and 107n34 realist novel and 49–54 rhythm and 189–90 sexualization and 32 as sociable practice 190 virtual unconscious and 190–221 “queer becoming” 110 “queering,” artistic 72, 72n29 queerness 121 figurality and 121–3 irony and 126 negativity and 122 queer ontology 10, 104 queer theory 8–9, 74, 97, 119. See also specific theorists antisocial thesis and 9–10 Butler and 8–9, 79–116, 152 contemporary 9 cultural constructionism and 151–2 Foucault and 105 hetero-sexuality and 10 history of 8–9 homosexual specificity and 149 indebtedness to hegemonic models of sameness and difference 152–3

Index the negative and 117 origins of 79 performativity and 79–80 politics and 108 psychoanalytic theory and 107n34 Racine, Jean, Andromache 97–9, 99n26, 102, 109, 128, 130–1, 134n17 rape, hetero-sexuality and 173 Réage, Pauline 165, 279 Story of O 128–9, 131, 144–9, 154–6, 160, 162–4, 170–1, 176–7, 182n16, 183, 186, 205, 277–9, 281–2 realist novel 49–54. See also literary realism recategorization 14–15, 204, 229, 264, 273 redemption 187–8 Reisman, David 277, 277n33 relatedness, tragic mode of 128 relationality 113–15, 118–19, 162, 203–4, 219, 220, 277 desire and 127–8, 184 homosexuality and 139 narcissism and 143 new modes of 139, 177 reconfiguring 107–8 rethinking 139–40 virtual 155 repetition 86, 93, 214n20, 237, 274, 282 becoming and 114 dialectical 89 performativity and 83–4, 116, 123 subversive 151 repression 75, 191–2, 194–200, 210–21 Foucault’s overturning of “repressive hypothesis” 216–17 “primal” 12, 218n22 “primary” 218n22 the unconscious and 194–200 resignification 100, 151

Index resistance 113–14. See also subversion Resnais, Alain 159 reverse discourse 100–1, 101–3, 106, 109 “rhythmized consciousness” 13, 236–43 “rhythmology” 227, 228–9 rhythm(s) 12–13, 15, 107–8n35, 195, 214, 225n1, 226n2, 227n3, 242n18, 243 the aesthetic and 225–51, 279 of desire 226 fascination and 225–51, 240n17, 245–6, 249 narrativity and 230–5 psychoanalytic theory and 189–90 redemptive 183–90 rhythmic emergences 236–43 of sociability 13 subject and 228–9 of teleological narratives 13 as “uncanny” or “speculative” word 276n31 Ricardo, David 48 Richter, Gerhard 9n8 Ricoeur, Paul 271n25 Riefenstahl, Leni 236, 243 Triumph of the Will 235 Rilke, Rainer Maria 9n8 Rimbaud, Arthur 57–9, 76, 98, 115 Roach, Tom 89n16, 109–10 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 229, 234 Rohmer, Éric 160, 177 Rohy, Valerie 151–2 Ronell, Avital 7 Rothko, Mark 159 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16, 28, 82, 83, 174, 246, 266n20 A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences 28 A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 28 “The General Society of the Human Race” 29

327

Rubin, Gayle 17, 147, 186 “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” 17 “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” 82 Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse François) 74, 129, 169, 171, 174–9, 180n11, 184, 187, 243, 249 sadism 144–9, 170, 173, 178, 206, 237, 244, 248, 251, 278–9 derived 146, 188 nonsexual 165 sameness 10, 15, 143, 147–9, 153, 155, 164–5, 235, 272, 281n36, 282 vs. difference 10 same-sex friendship 141, 155, 162, 168, 177, 186 Sartre, Jean-Paul 79, 125 Being and Nothingness 91 on Genet 113 Hegelianism and 91, 91n21 Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr 81, 91n21, 91–9, 100, 101, 110, 113 Schlossman, Beryl 67n23 Sebald, W. G. 173 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 79, 152, 152n9 Epistemology of the Closet 148 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial desire 147–8 seduction 32, 33, 37, 189–90, 194–5, 216, 218 narrative and 234–5 Seeber, Hans Ulrich 24n6, 236n12 Segal, George 160 self-effacement 158n13, 158–9 sex antisocial thesis and 117–18

328

Index

receptive 86–7 redemptive reinvention of 173, 174 “the unbearable” and 135 “sex/gender system” 82 sexual difference 128n9, 128–9, 131, 148, 154–5, 176, 182n16, 186, 279. See also difference; hetero-sexuality sexuality 9n8, 32–9, 216–17, 231, 233 apparatus of 247 deprivileging of 11 emergence of 273–4 epistemophilia and 247 extricated from homo-attractions 161–2 infants and 32–9, 86, 117, 216, 218, 263 as interested, goal-oriented action 184 masochism and 232 otherness and 146–7 as part of colonizing apparatus 167 redemptive reinvention of 176, 177 relinquishing of 167 self-experience and 11 sociability and 169–90 social dysfunction and 117–18 subject-constitution and 161–2 suffering and 173 transgression and 94 violence and 176 sexualization 38–9, 218. See also hominization psychoanalytic theory and 32, 34 sexual secrets 220 subjectivation and 218–19 sexual shattering, ethics of 172 Shakespeare, William 2 shame 91, 93, 106 shattering 9n8, 15, 30–8, 86, 109, 117–19, 118n2, 127, 141, 145, 156–7, 159–60, 167, 177, 277–8. See also ébranlement

correspondences and 164 ethics of 172 hominization and 158 masochistic 148–9 mimetic 156 negativity and 119 shattering narcissism 143, 153 violence and 245 Sheldon, Sidney 191, 198, 210, 220 Silverman, Kaja 9n8, 210n15 similitude 10. See also sameness Simmel, Georg 7, 11, 13, 169, 183–9, 209, 227, 237 Sloterdijk, Peter 186, 204n8, 274, 281n36 Bubbles 204n8 Spheres 204n8 Smith, Adam 48 Smith, Daniel W. 29, 63, 63n19, 63n20, 64–5, 68n24 sociability 11, 15, 82, 149, 167–90, 185n19, 188, 214n20, 225, 233, 237, 243 aesthetic 11 artfulness of 185 beyond sexuality 185 “homoness” and 279–80 pleasures of 185–6 rhythm of 13 sexuality and 169–90 social death 104 Socrates 201 solidarity 15, 74, 82, 149, 167, 206, 279–80 Sontag, Susan 172–3, 175 Sophocles, Antigone 122 spandrels 180–3, 182n16, 186, 187, 214n20, 233 spectatorship 249 speculation 13–15, 16, 112–13, 254, 264–6, 271–2 Hegel and 278–9 (see also speculative idealism) history of 256–62 knowledge and 258–9

Index occurrence in Bersani’s texts 253 speculative aesthetics 253–82 speculative idealism 13, 80n3, 266–7, 270, 275–7, 281–2 speculative metaphysics, Kant’s suppression of 13, 257 speculative narcissism 11, 256, 270–82 speculative politics 79–116 speculative proposition 259–60 speculative thought 13, 141, 214, 253–60, 254–5, 258–9, 260n11, 267, 269n23, 276n32 Spinoza, Baruch 63n20, 260n10 Stanton, Mark 5n4 Starobinski, Jean 28 Stendahl, Marie Henri-Beyle 59, 229 straight masculinity, gay parodies of 85–7 subject 215–16. See also subjectobject dichotomy abject 83 (see also abjection) aesthetic 12–13, 15, 167–90 becoming-sociable 13 constitution of 7, 30, 32, 40–2, 125, 145, 146, 157, 161–2, 165, 168, 173–4, 228–9, 274 desire and 38–45, 212 enslaved 83n8 essence of 90 Hegelian 261 the Other and 91–2 post-psychoanalytic theory of 13 production of 80–1 Proustian 21–30, 282 psychoanalytic 19–45 rhythm and 228–9 rhythmizing consciousness and 236–43 sexual 216–17 “shame” and 91 speculative 115, 260, 272, 273, 276, 281

329

transgender 83 undoing of 86–7 “unmournable” 83 subjection 80–1 subjectivation 105, 114, 161, 168, 205, 216 art and 216–17 consequences of 215–16 contingent modes of 216 fascination and 215–16, 216n21 Freudian account of 218–19 modes of 11, 109, 216–17 power and 86 sexual secrets and 218–19 “subjective destitution” 82, 103–4 subjectivity 107n34, 109, 198. See also subject subject-object dichotomy 75–6 Hegelian dialectics and 276–7 model dismantled by Freud 4–6 reconfiguration of 273 speculative idealism’s effort to undo 14 subversion 95, 95n23, 101, 110, 113–14, 151 Suchting, W. A. 256n4 suffering 172–3, 175. See also masochism supplementation 82–3 Swedenborg, Emanuel 9n8, 69, 69n25, 70–1, 77, 201 the symbolic 121–3, 125, 190 sympathy 172n4, 172–3 Tallis, Frank 19 teleological narratives. See narrative Thys, Michel 229n6 totalitarianism 178, 260–1 tragedy difference and 127–35, 132n15, 141–2 hetero-sexuality and 127–35, 160 transcendence 63n20

330 transgression 94, 96 “transindividuality” 200 transversality 10, 15, 76n34, 76–7, 179–82, 198–9 trauma 142, 190 Trigo, Benigno 19 the unconscious 107n34, 190–221 anamnesis and 200–6 hidden 11–12, 220 hiddenness and 210–21 infants and 192, 194–6 language and 195–6 nonrepressed 11–12, 191–2, 194–200, 204, 221, 225 repression and 194–200 virtual 190–221, 219–20 unfathomability 218–19, 219n24 “unnaming” 101–2, 104, 107 Unruhigkeit (“restlessness”) 270, 271n25, 271n26 untimeliness 181, 207 Urverdrängung (“primal repression”) 12 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 43n30 Veyne, Paul 43n30 viability 15, 110 violence 188 aesthetics and 180

Index fascination and 172–3, 183, 186, 188, 232–3, 237, 244, 248, 251 (see also sadism) sexuality and 176 shattering and 245 virtuality 155–6, 206–10, 177, 207n10 narcissism and 155–6 virtual unconscious 190–221, 219–20 von Trier, Lars 196n2 voyeurism 173 Vrba, Elisabeth 181 Weber, Max 8, 48, 59, 62, 65, 78, 99 Weeks, Jeffrey 85, 86 Weyand, Björn 24n6, 236n12 Whitehead, Alfred North 64, 253 Wiegman, Robyn 117 Wilkinson, Lynn 70n26 Williams, Tennessee 134, 232 Wilson, Richard 233–4 Wilson, Robert 243 Wiskus, Jessica 230 Wright, Richard 104 Wynter, Sylvia 114, 114n440 Yale French Studies 192, 266 Yanigihara, Hanya A Little Life 132n15

Žižek, Slavoj 83n8, 104, 122n5

331

332

333

334