Non-Readings and Misreadings of “The Jamesian Lie”

Leo Bersani’s “The Jamesian Lie” has had less of an impact than it deserves. It has often been ignored or misread. For Sharon Cameron, Bersani critiques how consciousness “betrays the social order” in James; in fact, Bersani shows how betrayal is the index of a notion of truth against which his work does battle. In “The Beast in the Closet” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pulls away from a surface-level secret (“the secret of having a secret”) to the depth of underlying causes (“the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”). “Truth” here denies the reality of the lie that only Bersani has recognized as a productive rather than privative force in James.