Leo Bersani

Queer Theory and Beyond

Mikko Tuhkanen

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438454108, 9781438454115
• eBook ISBN: 9781438454122
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani's writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book's extensive introduction outlines in detail Bersani's oeuvre, particularly its place in queer thought and his complicated relationships with the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis. The subsequent contributions by notable scholars in various fields demonstrate the richness and open-endedness of his work. The book concludes with a new interview with Bersani.

I

Queer

1

Bersani on Location

HEATHER LOVE

To desymbolize reality may be the precondition for reeroticizing reality.

—Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption

The call to which Bersani awakens every day comes from the phenomenal world.

—Kaja Silverman, “Looking with Leo”

In his 2011 article, “Ardent Masturbation,” Leo Bersani contemplates the “heroically impossible project of psychoanalysis”: the attempt “to theorize an untheorizable psyche” led to a form of writing that “allowed unreadable pressures to infiltrate the readable” (13).¹ Bersani considers the outright contradictions, moments of textual collapse and opacity, and logical gaps of psychoanalytic writing, noting the fact that “[t]he Freudian text frequently performs the demolishing of its own arguments” (12). At the heart of the project, he notes “a certain incoherent connectedness that has always seemed to me central to Freud’s genius” (12). Bersani expresses admiration for heroic questing after inaccessible knowledge and for the production of a text that incorporated rather than vanquished ignorance and impossibility. This disruption at the scene of writing has sustained Bersani’s interest in Freud; it also Bersani’s own critical project. Over the last several decades, in rigorously analyzing inaccessible or unlikely states of being, Bersani has produced effects of opacity and contradiction; as in the case of Freud, a “certain incoherent connectedness” constitutes the lure of his work.

The productive contradictions of Bersani’s writing have received insufficient attention from critics; despite the visible fractures across his work, he is often identified with a single approach or position. Such a reduction is evident in Bersani’s identification as a psychoanalytic critic; this description ignores his stringent critique of psychoanalysis as an interpretive framework, the phenomenological aspects of his work,² and his attention to the social as well as the psychic determinants of personhood. Although theorizing concrete sexual practice has been crucial to Bersani’s writing, sex also seems, at times, to be beside the point in the face of his thinking about intimacy, sociability, and other less corporeally intensive ways of being together. In the context of contemporary queer theory, Bersani has come to be identified with what is known as the “antisocial thesis,” where even his name is sufficient to conjure extremes of negativity and the refusal of relationality.³ As Tim Dean has argued, however, attention to “the anti-relational moment in Bersani’s thinking” has obscured the significance of his attempts to imagine new forms of sociality (“Sex” 389).⁴ Taking Bersani as an exemplar of negativity does not capture what David Kurnick points to as “the defining tension between the tragic and the utopian” in his work (“Carnal” 123). The contradictions can be explained to some extent as a matter of intellectual biography: the early period focuses on sex, self-shattering, betrayal, the critique of redemption; late Bersani shifts to concerns of ontology, intimacy, self-extension, and being together. And yet, as Brian Glavey observes, such periodizing rubrics can only partially account for the tensions that structure Bersani’s writing throughout his career.⁵

These responses to Bersani’s work demonstrate the desire to claim Bersani as an authorizing figure for a variety of critical projects. Opacity and inconsistency are not necessarily the qualities that one looks for in an intellectual precursor, although that is often what one finds there; fields are generated and shaped by contradiction, not certainty. The temptation to read past such contradictions has been particularly strong in queer studies, a field that—despite a high-voltage intellectual heritage and some prominent (but uneven) institutionalization—remains chronically unauthorized. The orphaned condition of queer scholarship has led second- and third-generation critics to respond to founding figures with a mix of idealization and aggression.⁶ Ambivalence and overinvestment have made it difficult to come to terms with the tensions that structure the work of queer precursors. How to make sense of Michel Foucault as the relentless critic of the ideology of liberation and as the utopian thinker of “bodies and pleasures”?⁷ How to reconcile the sublime paranoia of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet with her call to reparative reading in her late essays on Klein? What to make of early Butler’s stringent antifoundationalism in light of the humanism of her work on recognition, ethics, and politics? More broadly, it remains difficult to bring together the corrosive refusals of queer with the field’s investments in world-making and the thriving of queer subjects.

Although he has not been directly involved in the antisocial debates, Bersani is implicated in them; as a result, his reception has been marked by a stark separation of the utopian and tragic strains in his work. The lack of a mediating position in the confrontation between utopia and antisocial thought is striking in these debates, as is the difficulty of staking out a position in queer affect studies that emphasizes the centrality of ambivalence, rather than wholly good or bad feeling. Ambivalence, and the foundational role it has played in both the formation of gay and lesbian identity and in the constitution of the field of queer studies, is an odd blind spot in these disputes about optimism and cynicism, utopia and antiutopia, and the political value of positive and negative affect. Bersani is regularly identified with the antisocial, despite his deep investment in cultivating new forms of sociality.

I follow Kurnick in suggesting that this tension between utopia and tragedy is central to “the homosexuality of Bersani’s work” (“Embarrassment” 403). As Kurnick argues, homosexuality has a double presence in Bersani’s work, identified with both formal transcendence and social abjection. It is this paradoxical quality of homosexuality—at once highly specific and elusive—that helps to explain the fact that although “no critic has been more dubious about identity categories … there is no critic writing today whose work seems so inescapably gay” (“Carnal” 121).⁸ I draw on this insight in order to put pressure on an important but underspecified term in Bersani’s work: the social. Even in work that is primarily concerned with aesthetics, Bersani is concerned with social relations, and particularly with how structured, hierarchical relations unfold in social space. Because he is understood primarily as a psychoanalytic critic; because his treatment of world and experience are routed through phenomenology; and because his primary investment in the category of the aesthetic has been misread as antisocial, Bersani’s investments in social life have been largely ignored. To characterize his thought as antisocial—at once destructively negative and detached from the shared conditions of being—is to ignore his engagement with collectivity and social space and his critique of the renunciation of experience.

At the end of the first chapter of The Culture of Redemption, Bersani imagines an aesthetic practice that would offer an alternative to Proust’s poetics of desire, his attempt to redeem damaged experience by transforming it into a “higher” symbolic form. “No longer a corrective replay of anxious fantasy,” he writes, “such an art may even reinstate a curiously disinterested mode of desire for objects, a mode of excitement that, far from investing objects with symbolic significance, would enhance their specificity and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic intent” (CR 28). Bersani imagines an aesthetic that invests in the world—in its concreteness, its specificity, its sensually perceptible forms. In the following readings, I suggest that Bersani attempts to render his objects of analysis specific enough to resist “the violence of symbolic intent.” That is to say, he situates his critical objects in space, as concrete, sensuously realized entities that are in and of the social world, not set apart from it or “above” it.

Bersani’s destruction of the subject—his contention that, in Kaja Silverman’s words, there “is no such thing as an individual” (410)—is crucial to his project of imagining new forms of intimacy. This refusal to recognize the boundaries, self-sufficiency, and even the reality of the isolated ego has been understood in his work as an effect of his engagements with psychoanalysis and phenomenology. However, we might also understand this radical displacement of the self in social—or even sociological—terms. Such a reading might appear perverse in sidestepping Bersani’s commitments to psychoanalysis and to the aesthetic, which function in his work to escape the trap of identity and to frustrate a reductive empiricism. Yet the aesthetic is bound up with the concept of social space: the aesthetic functions to displace the subject by dispersing it into a social landscape that is concretely rendered. The spatial analyses that characterize Bersani’s readings of both literature and visual are oddly literal, informed by his concern with physical proximities and contact, relational configurations, and social location. Bersani’s adamant refusal, throughout his work, of “the monotony of thematic depth” (BB 20) is effected through a spatialization of the subject, a mapping of social spaces, and a drive to the margins.

Bersani claims that relatedness is deduced from “our perceptions of physical space,” but instead of reading space in purely phenomenological terms, I want to insist that space is social for Bersani. Space is not merely an arena for the unfolding of being; rather, it is shaped by institutions, interactions, and inequalities, which, though they might not always explicitly be discussed, nonetheless leave their traces. In his career-long interest with center and peripheries, Bersani attended to the distribution of power between the norm and the margin. Because of the literal quality of his account of marginality, his work resonates with postwar research on social deviance, which turned its attention to human practice on the margins of the city. Also, in his attention to pattern, distribution, spacing, and system, Bersani registers the concerns of another key movement in postwar social science: microsociological and symbolic interactionist research into group dynamics and communication. Placing Bersani’s work in this somewhat unexpected context makes visible the full spectrum of his commitments to the social. While acknowledging the contributions of postwar social scientific research would expand the canon and methodological range of queer studies, it would also shift our understanding of the work of foundational literary, cultural, and philosophical figures such as Bersani.⁹

Deviance studies and symbolic interactionism were crucial in shifting the understanding of homosexuality from individual pathology to social phenomenon in the postwar period. To the extent that Bersani also sought to socialize desire, I suggest that we understand his rethinking of the subject in relation not as a destruction of the individual but rather as the individual’s dispersal and absorption into collective forms and concrete social spaces. In this sense, the destruction of the individual is not antisocial for Bersani; it is a precondition of sociality.

Bersani’s argument in The Culture of Redemption—that art should not be understood as compensating for the life’s failures—is easy to recapitulate but hard to think. In a discussion of sublimation in the introduction, he rolls out the key elements of the argument. Emphasizing, he writes,

the restitutive or redemptive power of cultural forms and activities … give[s] us extraordinarily diminished views of both our sexuality and our cultural imagination. The forms of culture become transparent and—at least from an interpretive point of view—dismissible: they are, ultimately, regressive attempts to make up for failed experience. And the fragmenting and destructive aspects of sexuality gain the ambiguous dignity of haunting the invisible depths of all human activity. A fundamentally meaningless culture thus ennobles gravely damaged experience. Or, to put this in other terms, art redeems the catastrophe of history. … Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing perhaps is more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow do not matter. Everything can be made up, can be made over again, and the absolute singularity of human experience—the source of both its tragedy and its beauty—is thus dissipated in the trivializing nobility of a redemption through art. (CR 22)

As in the case of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, Bersani’s refusal of art as compensation for damaged experience has been difficult to incorporate into our thinking. The possibility of refusing the compensation of art and symbolization persists but as a subterranean possibility, or in distorted form. Bersani attacks the moral monumentality of art, a consequence of understanding it as a consolation for what is lacking in life; refusing to assent to this redemptive view of art would allow us to come to terms with “modern works that have more or less violently rejected any such edifying and petrifying functions” (CR 22). In addition to serving as a manifesto for a new kind of aesthetic, The Culture of Redemption is also a call to a fuller encounter with history and to a socially responsive criticism; Bersani suggests that the key to acknowledging both the singularity and the damage of experience is the recognition that the world is. Art is in the world and of the world, but it cannot transform the world, which is not to be “made up.” By virtue of its sheer existence the world is out of reach; it is already happening, and there are no do-overs.

To suggest Bersani is concerned with the world out there (rather than on the aesthetic forms that mediate it) and that this world is social (rather than an abstract projection of individual experience) may seem like a willful misreading. However, framing Bersani as a psychoanalytic or phenomenological critic does not reckon with the force of his argument, here, on behalf of “all human activity” against the “invisible depths” said to lurk beneath. If Bersani is, on occasion, recognized as an antipsychological thinker, that resistance is understood in light of a familiar distinction between psychoanalytic and psychological modes of thought, which pitches the radical insight of psychoanalysis against the reductions of psychology.¹⁰ However, both psychoanalysis and psychology are indicted by Bersani’s insistence on the primacy of experience and history in this passage.

Bersani’s concerns about the privatization of experience and the refusal to come to terms with the social world can be understood as a critique of modernism, with melancholic horror of experience. But we might also see it in the context of the postwar antipsychiatry movement, and in particular to queer resistance to both psychoanalysis and psychology that developed in response to a widely shared experience of therapy as a treatment for homosexuality. Psychology was, as Jeffrey Escoffier has argued, “the dominant intellectual and therapeutic discipline in the public discourses on homosexuality” (125). Critiques of the normalizing function of postwar psychology often put pressure on it from the perspective of a radical psychoanalysis. However, one may also displace the psychological view of the subject by shifting the frame to a concretely realized social world. Bersani did both, attacking the intact, isolated subject both from the inside and the outside.

The emergence of sexuality studies as an account of something other than an individual pathology—as the domain of social and cultural studies rather than psychology—is one of the key developments of the postwar period. This shift in focus was accomplished, as several scholars have argued, primarily by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians.¹¹ Escoffier, in American Homo, considers two ways in which social scientists “refashioned homosexuality as a social phenomenon, rather than a purely psychological or individual one. First, they defined homosexuality as a social problem, ambiguously framing it either as an issue of homosexuals’ social adjustment or as a matter of eliminating prejudice against homosexuals. Second, these writers publicly recognized the existence of a homosexual social world” (82–83). Although it may not seem self-evident that redefining homosexuality as a social problem is a political advance, Escoffier makes a persuasive case that focusing on social deviance rather than individual pathology constituted an important step in acknowledging the existence of homosexuality as a social form and in taking the epistemological and institutional pressure off of individuals.

The development of gay and lesbian studies out of social scientific studies of homosexual behavior and communities may seem quite distant from Bersani’s research as a professor of French literature during this period. However, beginning with his attention in his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965), to Proust’s dream of forging an objective portrait of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Queer
• Part II: Psychoanalytic
• Part III: Aesthetic
• Part IV: Interview
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover