Leo Bersani and the Universe

Over the past twenty-five years, while formulating a series of influential theses about sex, Leo Bersani has also been methodically working through a philosophy of art. This, of course, is no big secret; the subtitle of The Freudian Body (1986), after all, is Psychoanalysis and Art, and much of Bersani’s career has been dedicated to investigating the relation between these two terms. From The Forms of Violence (1985) to Forms of Being (2004), Bersani has always been a formalist, though one for whom the question of form is intimately associated with questions of ethics and ontology. In large part it is this commitment to the aesthetic, rather than more explicitly political concerns, that motivates the rigorous refusal of redemption that has been so influential in queer studies. Bersani opposes, for instance, the seemingly benign tendency to view art as imparting value on experience not only because this compensatory view soothes the sting of injustice, but also because it demotes art to an unseemly subservience to a culture’s need for consolation. Art, for Bersani, has its own value independently of these consolations—a value worth defending.

But what is the nature of this value? Given the masochistic aesthetic formulated in Bersani’s earlier works, we might expect a number of answers to this question. We might anticipate, for instance, the hypothesis that art, like sex, has the potential to overwhelm the self and trigger experiences of jouissance that disrupt the violent hegemony of the ego. And indeed, according to Bersani, art does offer these sorts of experiences. Whereas at one point in his career art came to seem a lot like sex, however, his later writings suggest that it is, on the contrary, sex that begins to resemble art. “The aesthetic is not confined to works of art,” he argues, “sex can also be one of the modalities of the aesthetic” (70). This seeming reversal of emphasis suggests an attempt to rethink the understanding of self-shattering for which Bersani is most famous. The result has been a criticism that does not so much use psychoanalysis to read art, or even art to read psychoanalysis (two projects that he has executed brilliantly throughout his career), but rather that gestures toward evasions of the model of subjectivity associated with psychoanalysis in the first place. For some time now, Bersani has been exploring the possibility that the aesthetic might rewrite our understanding of subjectivity in a way that precedes the sundry dramas of aggression that Freud has taught us to recognize.

What is striking about the development of Bersani’s thought is not its commitment to the aesthetic, but rather the specific vision of the aesthetic to which it is committed. The attempt to imagine forms of relationality that sidestep the violence inherent in the appetitive structure of selfhood has led our most eloquent critic of the culture of redemption to a view of art that appears surprisingly pastoral, a view dedicated to discovering our “at-homeness in the world” (55, 119). For Bersani, art might lead us “to see our prior presence in the world, to see, as bizarre as this may sound, that, ontologically, the world cares for us” (152–53). This aesthetic is a mode of interacting with the world that doesn’t strive to master or obliterate otherness, but rather that accepts “the pleasure of finding ourselves harbored within it” (153). We are both in the world and of the world, and it is one of the constitutive tragedies of human existence, Bersani argues, that we find ourselves compelled to blot out this reality.

These ontological tendencies are not a new development, but they are underlined with particular elegance and force in Bersani’s recent collection Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. Or, rather, they are underlined in the Other Essays of the collection’s title. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), it would seem, is among the least aesthetic of Bersani’s writings, a landmark work of...