The dominance of some Black athletes in some sports after civil rights led scientists and journalists to search for explanations in athletes’ culture, geography, psychology, and, increasingly, in their genes—all contributing, whether they landed on culture or biology, to a resurgent race science that invented what it purported to investigate. Science writers could not stop asking whether Kenyans won marathons because of their genes or because of their nation’s running tradition, frequently turning to a more fully naturalized gender binary to justify their pursuit of racial difference in sports. The question itself, no matter how it got answered, legitimized the idea that the Black athlete constituted a scientifically valid category, a category that in a society that privileges the natural above the social sciences (and all sciences above the humanities) ultimately entered the public sphere in biological form.

Joseph Darda

differences

The Mismeasure of Sport: Race and the Science of Athletic Performance

This essay analyzes Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), a film Gilles Deleuze made famous for its way of “seeing convicts” in a range of social institutions, including the factory, the bourgeois family, and the psychiatric hospital. Recent accounts of Rossellini’s career have tended to emphasize his role in manufacturing narratives of postwar national innocence. By contrast, this essay reads Europa ’51 as offering a critique of the carceral state, though one that knows itself to be contained, disempowered, and confined. Mindful of the limits of this critique, the essay brings Rossellini’s film into conversation with ongoing debates about “reparative reading” and its alternatives. Noting that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick encounters, or rather avoids, a “deinstitutionalized person on the street” in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” this essay highlights the film’s very different understanding of institutionalization, which anticipates the demystifying and consistently anticarceral critique of official psychiatry that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the fantasies sustaining Italian neorealism were reparative, the essay argues, Rossellini’s critical and self-critical turns in Europa ’51 take viewers beyond repair.

Ramsey McGlazer

Rossellini beyond Repair

This composition’s signal concern is the play of Black Studies’ Beloved(s): both the interplay between such Beloved(s) and what play follows from them. By Beloved(s), this essay means not only the varied figurations present in Toni Morrison’s seminal novel and the many meditations on Morrison’s Beloved within the field of Black Studies, but Black Studies’ own haints—how these Beloved(s) bear and shape the langues that Black Studies uses to enunciate both black study and politics. Over the decades since its initial institutionalizations within the academic marketplace, Black Studies has born many such haints in the process of excising the monstrous holdovers of its extra-academic origins and interventions seen as intrusions on Black Studies’ crystallizing institutional forms. On the occasion of Hortense Spillers’s recent remarks about afropessimism and celebrations of Spillers’s work, including that of Spillers’s psychoanalytics, this composition lingers with haints, jamming in a shared site of excision: the break between psychoanalysis and Black Studies.

Dee (Dee) C. Ardan

Black Studies’ Beloved(s): or, afropess-i-missives

Previous scholarship has interrogated how transsexual autobiographies recursively construct a gender-coherent subject through travel analogies. Orientalism has been one of the predominant frames through which these trans travel narratives have been interpreted. Through a close reading of Jan Morris’s autobiography, Conundrum, this paper attends to the overwhelming anti-Blackness that scaffolds these voyages to and through the Orient. Exploring how “Black Africa” has been occluded from Orientalist analyses of trans travel narratives, the author asks what might be found by attending specifically to the role of Africa (as a metaphor for Blackened rather than Orientalized geographies) in these autobiographies. Through Black studies, trans studies, affect theory, and Kleinian object relations theory, the essay demonstrates how Blackness grounds both trans travel narratives and the scholarship about them. Through a metacritique of both Orientalism and trans studies, this paper concludes by suggesting that scholars provincialize Orientalism.

Joshua Falek

“Everything I Wanted Not to Be”: The Specter of Africa in the Trans Travel Narrative

In conversation with Silvan Tomkins, William James, Sianne Ngai, and others, “Piqued: Compounded Interest and the Intersubjective Scene” further theorizes one of the most taken-for-granted of the classic affects: interest. This essay argues that the piquing of interest is essential for projection, attachment, or resentment, even, to follow. Interest not only compounds, or accumulates with itself, sometimes sharpening or transforming into those more intense affects that we tend to associate with driving forces. It also acts combinatorially, as an elemental ingredient of all affects. Because of interest’s fundamental role in initiating momentum, combining with other affects, switching registers—in transmissible, communal, or mediated forms—it is worth confronting interest’s ubiquity to better understand how it, once provoked, functions culturally. To better demonstrate interest as a foundational, compounding affect in coexperienced dynamics and their representations, the author unpacks scenes of intersubjectivity in the television series Killing Eve (bbc America, 2018–22).

Candace Moore

Piqued: Compounded Interest and the Intersubjective Scene

Cultural depictions of Asian/white miscegenation have long been a source of fascination for scholars within Asian American and sexuality studies. Such a long-standing interest has not only provided key insights into the Orientalist structure of racialized sexuality, but it has also kept our sights set, perhaps too set, on deciphering the Asian woman both in the context of romance and as an object of desire. This essay recasts the narrative of Asian/white sexuality as one of minoritarian retribution, making the argument that insofar as Asian femininity forms the object of racist desires, it can also function as the basis for feminist revenge. The author contemplates racial fetishism through twenty-first-century feminist cultural production, namely the work of mixed-race artists Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal, showing how neoliberal multiculturalism has become further embedded within the infrastructure of everyday encounters, giving rise to something we might call the erotic life of anti-racism.

Anna M. Moncada Storti

Racist Intimacies; or, The Femme Alter Ego and Her Retribution

This essay argues from a Lacanian perspective that capitalism’s current modality promotes a perverted ideal of liberty as an unrestricted acceptance of the prerogatives of the market. The decomposition and decline of the paternal function, a phenomenon through which psychoanalysis condenses the collapse of narrativity structured by normative, moral, religious, and ideological values, has been accompanied by the elimination of limits on which the social state has always relied. Social engineering, based on the calculated and extreme exploitation of man’s helplessness, has replaced social and psychological constraints once transmitted through different narrative orders, as generalized human uncertainty is manipulated through the supreme concept of security.

Gustavo Dessal

The Social Bond Adrift

Common law is predicated historically upon a sense of the common, of custom and use time out of mind. The legal tradition has its roots in a guild, an elite community whose common opinion and conversations provided the substance and sensibility of the normative. Remediation of law, meaning here the changing media of legal transmission, the imaginal turn in the streamed and viral relays of law and its enforcement, confront a monochrome and linear textual tradition, the regimentations of the page, with the fragmentary and anarchic optics of online platforms and social media bytes and nibbles. Increased online visibility, this essay argues, forces the guild to face up to an expanded commons, the diversity of colors, the heuristics of the eye, and the nuances of viewing.

Peter Goodrich

On Our Last Leges

This essay approaches the problem of the act from the perspective of psychoanalysis, which teaches us that the fear of the act as catastrophic—and especially as a mortal threat to the social bond—is often synonymous with the repudiation of the unconscious itself, whether by the individual subject or by the collective. To understand how an act of the unconscious can be received as catastrophic, whether by the actor or by others, we first have to consider both the resistance to the act at the level of the ego and its censorship by culture and civilization. For this we need to be more explicit about the nature of the act with which psychoanalysis is concerned, which is very different from other kinds of acts.

Tracy McNulty

Inviting Catastrophe: The Welcoming of the Act in Psychoanalysis

This article offers an analysis of First Reformed, written and directed by Paul Schrader (2017), as the story of a Calvinist pastor in upstate New York who decides to take extreme action in the face of the political, social, and psychic catastrophe wrought by the seeming invincibility of the triple alliance of capital, state, and religion, and the savage destruction of nature. A close reading of the film leads to a reconsideration not only of Heidegger’s notion of the Gestell but also of the work of Walter Benjamin in 1938–1940, which, in light of our present-day political conjuncture, has once again taken on urgent relevance. This is the “messianic” and “theological” Benjamin, as well as the Benjamin who in his thinking about how we understand and record history always remained implicitly faithful to negativity and to the unconscious.

Elizabeth Stewart

Divine Violence Today: The Question of First Reformed

Between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, Primo Levi, the great Italian survivor and writer, visited classrooms across Italy to talk with students about the Holocaust. During these visits, students openly challenged Levi’s testimony or failed to understand what he had to say. How Levi responded to these challenges is the subject of this essay, which considers how and why Levi, in what would become his last work, turns to the gray zone and the duplicitous figure of Chaim Rumkowski in an effort to encourage his young readers to reckon with the very thing they most wanted to forget: the sense of vulnerability that leads people, in ways conscious and unconscious, to collude with power and seek privileges. In the process, the essay brings into focus the image of Levi as a gifted teacher, deeply interested in and responsive to his young readers and students.

Anthony C. Wexler

Pedagogy in Gray: Primo Levi as Teacher

This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of psychoanalytics. It considers the hieroglyph as a repetitive and enacted (but unrepresentable) force of historical trauma marking black bodies and passed between them generationally (much like the Lacanian object a). Reading the Lacanian pass and erotogenic zones as heuristic features of the hieroglyph, this meditation presents black nihilism as an analytic setting enabling the hieroglyph to speak its ineffable repetition, rather than just a repertoire of hedonistic pleasures and destructive behaviors as described in black optimism.

Calvin Warren

Black Transmission: Toward a Hieroglyph-Analysis

Throughout the United States, in 2020 and 2021, the Trump presidency and the covid-19 pandemic brought to light clashes in shared and lived realities among Americans and displayed them in jarring and perplexing scenarios—with a deadly toll. Strange martyrdoms and enacted oaths of loyalty to Trump in the form of people not getting vaccinated, not taking precautions, often attacking those who did, and throwing themselves away by (simply) dying are collective examples of what Jacques Lacan called the passage à l’acte and are symptoms of a profound decay of political culture. Radicalization of what Timothy Snyder has called “sadopopulism” and Chris Hedges has called “corporate totalitarianism” have led to a pervasive sense of impotence among large swaths of global populations who have been, and are being, abandoned and discarded, made victims of radical neglect, disappearance, and silencing—the covid martyrs a category among them.

Dropping the Bond or Dropping the Act?

Analyzing the Mexican case of collectives of women currently looking for their disappeared relatives due to an escalation of violence related to the socalled War against Drugs that former president Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) started, this essay develops a new conception of politics grounded not only on rational thought but also on affect. These collectives put forward a materialistic, feminist, and performative mode of politics. Publicly lamenting their losses and literally digging bodies out of Mexican land, these women perform and recover the citizenship that the Mexican state has de facto disavowed of them. The author proposes conceptualizing them as “bad victims” since their taking action does not take away their pain; rather, the public exposure of their lament actually turns them into political agents.

Rosaura Martínez Ruiz

Mexican Antigones: In Search of a Stolen Mourning

The United States is in the midst of a struggle over how to remember national history. Since the mid-2010s, much of this struggle has focused on historic monuments. No other country has seen as many monument attacks, renamings, and removals as the United States in this period. This article explores whether monument attacks are an acting out of value conflicts. The distinction between “heroic” and “wounded” modes of remembering the past helps to understand attackers’ motivations. The author compares three types of attacks: 1) on monuments that represent racism, slavery, and white supremacy; 2) monuments associated with violence against Native Americans; and 3) the storming of the u.s. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Freud defined “acting out” (abagieren) as a form of nonverbal working through of past conflicts. Instead of a conscious remembering, a suppressed affect is acted out by repeating it (Wiederholung). The more that conscious remembering is repressed, the stronger the will to act out. This article argues that acting out is a failed attempt at resolving value conflicts.

Stefan Ecks

Damnations of Memory: Monument Attacks in the United States, 2015–2021

This article proposes that a brutal empiricism, constituted in abolitionism’s originary iterations, authorizes contemporary abolitionist politics, interrogating how the focalization of the prison over slavery reveals politicallibidinal investments in the reproduction of antiblackness. It argues that asserting the prison as the object of abolition both presumes and reifies an antiblack historiography, repeating the ruse of Emancipation (therefore imagining racial slavery to be a historical condition) while simultaneously deploying slavery’s idiom to animate a contemporary postracial politics. To arrive at this critique, the essay offers an analysis of the epistemic brutality subtending abolitionist politics during the long nineteenth century to put pressure on its circulation within ostensibly radical political imaginaries today. In other words, it argues that just as the originary abolitionists distorted the political demands of the enslaved to consolidate liberal humanism, so, too, do contemporary deployments of abolition similarly sediment enslavement as a regime of power.

Patrick Teed

Whither Abolition?

Freud’s readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what this article foregrounds, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. Venus and Adonis shows that Shakespeare’s poem is replete with asexual encounters. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance. Venus’s insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud’s point about the paradoxicality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, “It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself.” This essay reads asexuality not as a particular orientation; rather, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.

Steven Swarbrick

Epicures in Kissing: Asexuality in Venus and Adonis

Talia Schaffer has noted that care work needn’t be joined with the feeling of care. This article extends this insight to explore medical kink (“sadomedicine”) as a form of distantiated yet attuned care work that resituates the literary debates on symptomatic versus surface reading. Through the performances of Bob Flanagan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1882 novel Doctor Zay, the 1991 film Misery and its source novel, and Maria Beatty’s 2009 film Bandaged, sadomedicine is situated as an engagement with symptoms that delights in surfaces but that might also exacerbate symptoms, introduce them from outside the text, and/or attend to symptoms disconnected from deep pathologies. The term “parasymptomatic reading” conceptualizes this play with symptoms and the surface/depth distinction: it captures the role of the parasympathetic nervous system and its connection to surface bodily responses, the dialectic of sympathy and symptomaticity, and the meaning of the prefix “para” to indicate both proximity and error.

Elizabeth Freeman

Parasymptomatic Reading: Medical Kink, Care, and the Surface/Depth Debate

This article interrogates feminist frameworks for understanding the racial and sexual politics of United States secularism. It theorizes the history of religious freedom law as a history of racial performance. Reading the aesthetic practices surrounding the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case and the subsequent consumer culture flurry around Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and building on accounts of religious freedom law as a vehicle for launching competing rights-based claims, the author shows the processes through which Hobby Lobby’s Christian family secured its religious exemption by conjuring ghosts of settler dispossession of indigenous people, even as an elderly Jewish justice was made to refuse submissive white femininity in the likeness of rapper Biggie Smalls. Circulated as competing minstrel brands, both performances consolidate the anti-Black and settler colonial grounds on which religious freedom laws—as well as some forms of mainstream protest against them—have flourished under neoliberal capitalism.

Lucia Hulsether

Family Corporation v. Minstrel Feminism: Reproducing Religious Freedom from Hobby Lobby to Notorious R.B.G.

This article studies the role of the typewriter in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). When a printing press was unavailable during the war, women militants used the typewriter to process articles for El Moudjahid, the designated newspaper of the anticolonial revolutionaries. Providing a media history and theory of this event, the article argues that the typewriter—both woman and machine—was an active militant who cut texts and bodies to advance the revolutionary cause. The typewriter denaturalized assumptions about the newspaper’s colonial appearance, thus bringing forth a new form for anticolonial journalism.

Akrish Adhikari

The Typewriter Cuts

Leo Bersani’s writings on aesthetics, often coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit, repeatedly deploy the trope of withdrawal, finding in the aesthetic works they discuss, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt, a paradoxical double movement of bringing into view while projecting the erasure of form and distinction. In their reading of Contempt, Bersani and Dutoit adumbrate a uniformity that would depend on the elimination of measurement, reference, and subject-object relations. In doing so, they transfigure the idea of antirelationality often attributed to Bersani, associating the death it surely names with the illumination of Being.

Damon Ross Young

Withdrawal

This essay reflects on Bersani’s sexually explicit, homosexually specific writings about sex from the vantage of sexual positioning, which can itself be thought of as complexly gendered, corporeally and psychically. Whereas gay male sex in the missionary position is the centerpiece of Bersani’s famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” Homos, the no less polemical book that follows it, also theorizes another position: coitus a tergo, the approach to what is behind from behind. Through a reading of Genet’s wartime erotic novel Funeral Rites, which is replete with a tergo couplings, Bersani makes his case for the transportive value of nonrelational sex, while retaining an indicatively male-male erotic specificity. These theorizations also open onto a noncastrative rereading of the Wolf Man’s story, which likewise turns on coitus a tergo, offering a gay rereading that, this essay suggests, points to a possibility of relationality.

Richard Rambuss

A tergo

Beyond parody, gay men’s identification with heteromasculinity, in its dead seriousness, appears to Bersani as being almost mad. In spatial terms, madness marks a proximity to—and not a distance between—powerfully normative images of gender. In his reading of the dynamics of madness, Bersani embraces this instability of identification that may ultimately cause the subject to collapse. Gay sex practices provide the occasion for this scene of vertigo, which, in Bersani’s work, opens a space that exists after the fall of the ego and that is often further explored through a turn to art: following the death of the psychoanalytic subject, the aesthetic subject appears. This essay, however, returns to the scene of the sexual. It traces the path of sexual practices discussed by Bersani, from gay anal intercourse to rimming, finally introducing fisting as a sexual practice that deserves to be read in Bersanian terms, insofar as it produces a form of “new masculinity.”

Peter Rehberg

Fisting

In “Cradling,” a chapter of Baudelaire and Freud, Leo Bersani shows how desire rocks the self. Desire always manifests as a movement that draws the self both toward and away from the object that excites it. Rocking simultaneously invokes infantile erotic enjoyment, an adult sexual act, and the way that fantasy images travel in time and create new temporalities. This essay links Bersani’s 1977 reading of Baudelaire’s poem “Hair” with his later work by showing that when the sexual power of fantasy is denied, it often returns in the form of a fantasy of sexual power.

Elissa Marder

Excitement

Can we appear in the world otherwise than seduced by the promise of its suffering? Persistently returning to this question, Leo Bersani seeks the potential for the human subject’s nonsadistic reinitiation. He does this by visiting the “ontological laboratories” of Baudelaire, Freud, and Caravaggio, among others. This essay threads the work of this experimentation across his texts, assessing the appeal and anguish of the summons to the undoing—a before—of life’s actualized forms.

Mikko Tuhkanen

Before

This essay studies figures of arrest and mobility, imprisonment and release, and “rigor and extravagance” in Leo Bersani’s writings. Focusing on The Forms of Violence, a study of late Assyrian sculpture coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit and first published in 1985, the essay at once follows and moves away from the book’s analysis of “a cage which imprisons nothing.” Asking what this analysis discloses and what it occludes, the essay turns briefly to the vast expansion of California’s carceral state that forms a historical backdrop for the book’s composition. The author reads The Forms of Violence as unseeing this expansion as well as the history of the institution that sustains Bersani and Dutoit’s reflections: the museum. Written as a tribute to Bersani, the essay attends to both his style and the movements of his thought.

Cage

A radical identification predicated on unlikeness: this is how Leo Bersani understands the singular mode of desiring that Emily Brontë invents in her incomparable novel. With Catherine and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights offers new “forms of being,” untethered to the world (of society, of romance, of realism). For Bersani, Catherine and Heathcliff exist more on the order of gravitational forces than characters in any conventional novelistic sense. This essay explores Bersani’s provocative treatment of Wuthering Heights with a particular focus on his practice of reading, one that “extracts” distinctive and “devouring” forces of desire and as yet unrealized forms of being from a novel far removed from the dominant modes of narrative realism. Bersani’s reading of Brontë—first published in 1976 and his only excursion into British Romanticism—prompts a thought experiment: to imagine a Bersani limit-place Romanticism, quite unlike any available version, a Romanticism of “unqualified negativity” and “aspiring openness” with an eye and an ear to unknown pleasures.

Forest Pyle

Unlike

Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is often described as an early entry into the strain of queer theory that offers queerness as tarrying in abjection, failure, and antisociality. This essay, however, is much more interested in thinking about the ways Bersani mobilizes connections to femininity in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” As Bersani moves from “women and gay men” to “average, law-abiding family” to “being a woman,” femininity haunts, each of these individual nodes further illuminating an insight about femininity with and without women.

Amber Jamilla Musser

Femininity

This essay examines the role of failure in the work of Leo Bersani through the lens of self-shattering, impersonal narcissism, and castration. It revisits Bersani’s account of narcissism and masochism in “Erotic Assumptions” and critiques his subsequent shift toward impersonal narcissism in Homos and Intimacies. The essay concludes by showing how the notion of castration, roundly rejected by Bersani, may address the impasse between solipsism and sociality that he attempted to resolve through sameness.

Bobby Benedicto

Failure

This essay remarks how a missing “hand” in Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption illuminates more than a rhetorical strategy; with it, Bersani undermines the problem of “incongruent counterparts” made famous by Kant. While Bersani’s “hand” replies most plainly to the logic of hands in Melanie Klein’s “Early Analysis,” as Bersani reads Proust with Klein, it ultimately offers its most powerful gesture in an antiredemptive comparative literary method in which association, rather than a historical or otherwise redemptive justification, undergirds literary-critical argument. With his severed hand, Bersani also offers an unlikely counterpart to Freud’s uncanny.

Andrea Gadberry

Hand

Leo Bersani was an enormously seductive critic, and he frequently wrote about seductiveness, beginning with his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. This essay focuses on a passage in that book where Bersani discusses Proust’s character, the Baron de Charlus, whose seductive orientation toward the world Bersani relates to Charlus’s “homosexual talk.” This essay considers the fate of seductiveness within Bersani’s own career-long homosexual talk. It moves, by way of his queer provocations of the 1980s and 1990s, from his first book to his 2013 preface to that book, and shows how, even as Bersani reformulated the seductive in increasingly austere terms, he continued to deploy it, never forgetting how close it is to the intolerable.

Joseph Litvak

Seductive

The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness but disindividuation. Bersani’s reading of Freud and his identification of sexuality at odds with the happiness of liberal society also provides a nascent account of neoliberalism’s capture of queer sex.

Claire Colebrook

Happiness

This essay considers Bersani and Dutoit’s alignment of passivity and the aesthetic in “Merde Alors,” their essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò. Passivity is a key strategy for the production of works of art and is key to understanding the mode of the aesthetic itself. The question of passivity appears elsewhere in Bersani’s work, and “Merde Alors”—in whole or in part—was republished at key moments in Bersani’s career. This essay gestures toward why “Merde Alors” has had such an interesting and prolific afterlife.

John David Rhodes

Aestheticism

This essay describes Bersani’s exploration of oneness and difference in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and relates it to a larger discussion of trauma, love, and afterlife.

Amy Hollywood

Ghosts

This essay explores Leo Bersani’s relationship to deconstruction, arguing that although his thinking about language and signification is indebted to the deconstructive tradition, he ultimately departs from this tradition in his structural understanding of desire qua habit. A close reading of a sentence from Homos forms the refrain for a discussion of the ontology of sexuality, the exclusionary nature of desire, resistances of self and world, and the nature of habit.

S. Pearl Brilmyer

Deconstruction

While Leo Bersani makes repeated stringent critiques of relationality and other-oriented sexuality, drawing on an array of literary examples including Gide, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet, he evinces a somewhat ambiguous relation to the question of sadism and to sadism’s inherent relation to masochism. Very similar notions of self-shattering not structured by the other, the world, or the couple are formulated by Gilles Deleuze in the late 1960s, but in this case as characteristics of Sadean demonstrative reason fully distinct from a psychoanalytic position that would insist on the relation between sadism and masochism. This missed connection between Deleuze and Bersani is broached through Deleuze’s reading of Michel Tournier’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe.

Eleanor Kaufman

Sadism

This brief article considers Leo Bersani’s descriptions of Maggie Verver, a character in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, in relation to some of Bersani’s famous arguments about sexuality. Observing that Bersani’s presentation of Maggie in “The Jamesian Lie” and elsewhere makes her an apt figure not just for sexuality but also for Bersani’s later notion of queer sex as a negation of the social, the article considers both how an ampler consideration of this character might reflect back on Bersani’s use of her to instantiate his claims about desire, and how his account of Maggie might speak to readers torn between competing accounts of queer negativity.

Julia Jarcho

Maggie

Leo Bersani is well known for making a case for the pleasures of sameness. But “to circulate within sameness,” he notes, “we must first of all welcome [ . . . ] lessness.” This essay explores that hospitable gesture in Bersani’s work, focusing on the self-abnegating practice of willing ourselves “to be less than who we are.” What does it mean to be “uncontaminated by a psychology of desire” and “unaccompanied by an essentially doomed and generally anguished interrogation of the other’s desire”? There can be no single answer to that ethically consequential question, which explains the jubilant restlessness of Bersani’s oeuvre. The author concludes with a reading of Freud’s infamous fort/da game, arguing that the child lessens his stake in a magisterial and anxious identity so as to extend himself, or parts of himself, joyfully and impersonally, into the world.

David L. Clark

Less

Aiming at rendering “somewhat irrelevant” the “question of sadism” in the critique of film’s “seductive epistemological promise,” Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argued for a “participation in the film” that is “at once self-reflexive and self-shattering.” Such participation may bring about the very panhuman condition of “being-togetherness” that Bersani and Dutoit have registered in the ontology of Alain Resnais’s and Terrence Malick’s films. This peculiar “community of all being” is based on a specific (and paradoxical) kind of movement within the spatiality of a remembrance engendered by the inhibition of movement. Certain films thus render possible connection and participation due to the mobility they entail.

Tom Holert

Participation

This essay considers Leo Bersani’s concept of “incongruity” as a key term in his thinking of ethical relation and, specifically, as a description of the desynchronized movement and impersonal configuration of bodies, psyches, thoughts, and things, in which the formal mobilization of aesthetic perceptions of sameness replaces the immobilizing forces of desirous knowing and difference. Highlighted is the way in which sameness is not based on a single predicate of commonality, but instead obtains in similar forms of movement that inaugurate correspondences with others and the world. This sheds light on Bersani’s familiar notions of inaccurate replication and homo-narcissism within his broader exploration of potential intimacies pleasurably discovered via a sense of universal sameness as opposed to the often murderous fixation on identity and difference.

John Paul Ricco

Incongruity

Responding to the theme of this special issue’s engagement with the work of Leo Bersani, “Un/reading” tracks the itinerary of a single quotation across the four appearances it makes in published work between 2011 and 2018. While it is easy to query whether Bersani was aware of the citational redundancy, this essay focuses on the pedagogy of reading it suggests, not only in terms of Bersani’s own thought but for the critical humanities more generally. The quote in question posits the absolute necessity and impossibility of psychoanalysis in its attempt to “theorize an untheorizable psyche.” By focusing on the role that repetition plays in Bersani’s work, including his interest in nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Bersani’s work in order to value the critical intuitions he repeated in order to hone.

Zahid R. Chaudhary

Robyn Wiegman

Un/reading

This essay examines Intimacies, structured as an asymmetrical dialogue between two of the most astringent commentators of Freud and psychoanalysis: Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. This dialogue takes place at both the intimate and extimate limits of what Bersani calls impersonal narcissism. By this Bersani asks us to move past the psychic dynamics of ego formation and their implicit violence to make way for a mode of relationality in which subjects coexist absent of any demands on one another. This approach draws from Bersani’s own eviscerating critique of the heteronormative deformation of identity to communicate what, after the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, could be called the “bare truth” of subject formation past even the need for subjects.

Joel Faflak

Bare

In Leo Bersani’s essay “Sociality and Sexuality,” bracketing emerges as a critical procedure for sensing and for practicing nonsovereign forms of sociality. Following Foucault’s desire to discover modes of relation, forms of the homosexual, that do not yet have a world for their reception, Bersani brackets the literature on sociality and sexuality that has come before, including his own, which variously posits the homosexual and the queer as figures of radical negation. Averse to such recuperations of the sovereign self, Bersani’s bracketing instead makes space for the homoerotic as a set of fragile, experimental modes of relation in which the self is neither an enemy nor a heroic site of resistance.

Kris Cohen

Bracket

Mobility is one of Leo Bersani’s hardest-working terms, ubiquitous in his many studies of sexuality, art, and culture. This essay examines the valences of the term with specific reference to Bersani’s application of it in visual analyses, notably in his 1985 book on ancient Assyrian narrative sculptures, The Forms of Violence (with photographs by Ulysse Dutoit).

Whitney Davis

Mobility

The editors’ introduction to this special issue of differences titled Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani describes the issue’s focus on the speculative importance of aesthetics in Leo Bersani’s scholarship, especially his attention to a “syntax of thought,” or the structural innovations of thinking, reading, and perception explored throughout his critical writings. The introduction also emphasizes Bersani’s ongoing attention to relationality through the aesthetic and how it contributed to his decades-long rethinking of sexuality, sociality, politics, and art.

Jacques Khalip

Homoverse

This essay examines the final two sentences of Bersani’s Intimacies, a book he cowrote with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. The strange temporality of Bersani’s correspondence at the end of Intimacies coincides with the “friendly accord” invoked by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus. This conception of correspondence as friendly accord elucidates the notion of impersonal intimacy Bersani described earlier in the book as remaining in touch, through memory, with a god we followed. Correspondence also recalls Bersani’s earlier Baudelaire and Freud, where Baudelairean “Correspondances” signal not the harmony of self and world but an ego-disseminating spiritualization of the senses. This examination of Intimacies’ final passage also tracks a distinctively Bersanian oscillation between particularizing and universalizing engagements with the world in a mise en abyme structure that articulates possibilities for new modes of relation through practices of ascetic spirituality.

Lynne Huffer

Correspondence

This essay explores Leo Bersani’s use of intellectual uncertainty, openness, and tautness in his writing to create a space for thinking about “what is politically unfixable in the human” (Homos 71). In particular, this essay, which travels under the banner of the word perhaps, pays attention to Bersani’s first brief, then extended response to Jean Genet’s statement (in the context of his play, The Maids), “I suppose that there is a union for domestic servants—that is not our affair.”

Karen Redrobe

Perhaps

This essay discusses a remark on the eye and the mouth in Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio’s Secrets that links Caravaggio to Samuel Beckett. Exploring the idea of the gaze and the voice as “things” rather than objects that confirm the subject in its place, and connecting Bersani’s understanding of the thing as escaping the subject-object relation in Beckett to Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a, the essay posits this understanding of the thing as the basis of Bersani’s interest in the possibility of a nonrelational sociality.

David Lloyd

Things

This essay argues that Leo Bersani’s immersion in a discipline of reading theoretical and psychoanalytic texts and literature with close critical attention effectively writes out his observations from an epistemology of being gay. His attention to visual materials is similarly acute and detailed, and the observed and the read fragment interfere with each other in a virtuosic demonstration of criticism that is both involved and detached. In this process, his writing refuses any illusion of the possibility of theoretical coherence as a purpose of his text. Rather, Bersani’s writing produces new queer knowledge as a collateral effect of who he was.

Adrian Rifkin

Assyrians

Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences—sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced—this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view of homosexuality as betraying the seriousness of statements. By examining how the latter betrayal gets enacted in the betrayal his sentences perform, it identifies the tension in Bersani’s work between an explicit resistance to the “de-gaying” he associates with queer theory and the “de-gaying” impulse of his own work, which made it central to queer theory itself.

短名	Differences
Journal Impact	0.98
国际分区	WOMENS STUDIES(Q3)
期刊索引	SCI Q4中科院 4 区

ISSN	1040-7391, 1527-1986
h-index	34
国内分区	社会学(4区)社会学文化研究(4区)社会学女性研究(4区)

涉及主题	哲学艺术心理学社会学精神分析政治学法学历史美学认识论性别研究计算机科学
出版信息	出版商: Duke University Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: 2001，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

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