A Passion for Sameness: Leo Bersani’s Ontology of Narcissism

. . . we are already out there.

—Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio

In his most recent texts, Leo Bersani frequently refers to Michel Foucault’s argument, in his 1981–82 Collège de France seminar, concerning the importance of Cartesian philosophy in articulating the mode in which the moderns conceptualize their relation to the world. Foucault sees “the Cartesian moment” as a pivot where the ancient forms of “the care of the self” (souci de soi; epimeleia heautou) were over-taken by modernity’s emphasis on epistemology as philosophical practice par excellence.¹ If modernity begins with Descartes, it is driven by epistemophilia. But, according to Bersani, what Foucault misses in dividing, like Pierre Hadot, ancient philosophical discipline from modern regimes of thought is the way in which neither ancient practices nor modern epistemophilics “puts into question a more general assumption common to both: that of a difference of being between the subject and the world” (2015, 62).² Both the care of the self and modern science depend on an understanding of the subject as distinct from the object-world; both rely on confluent conceptualizations of otherness.

One of the twentieth century’s articulations of the Cartesian subject is what has come to be known in contemporary critical theory as “the divided subject.” The divided subject, whose history in Western thought is frequently traced to the Freudian version of the unconscious, has functioned in the field as an antithesis to, an escape from, the alleged certainties of the imperial, essentialist subject, often, since Aristotle, articulated in terms of grammatical logic. It is, in turn, the “antiessentialist” notion of the divided subject that critical theory has keenly appropriated for the ethical work of destabilizing philosophical assumptions about subjecthood and otherness. Yet in his latest book, Thoughts and Things (2015), Bersani suggests that the divided subject may not be as radical or novel a notion as we have assumed. Freud, he argues, rearticulated in psychoanalytic terms the split subject of the Cartesian weltanschauung (61–63, 67–68). There is a false dialectic at work in celebrations of the divided subject: we have understood it as an attack on the autonomous self, the grammatical subject, of Western essentialism; Bersani suggests, by contrast, that, as much as “essence” can be thought in terms unrelated to those describing the target of antiessentialist critiques,³ there is an undivided subject that cannot be identified with the self-possessed essence of ousía, the subject whose fraudulence, according to Jean Laplanche, Freudian theory revealed.

One way to describe the Bersanian oeuvre—if we can call it such⁴—is to say that, throughout his work, Bersani seeks alternatives to the divided subject. His original example of the antagonistic relation between the subject and the other is the Proustian world, which he begins to map in his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965). In the early 1970s, psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freud’s and Laplanche’s, comes to supplement À la Recherche du temps perdu as texts to which Bersani will most frequently, and with a productive ambivalence, return in his subsequent work. Over the years, a number of (literary, painterly, cinematic) texts emerge as counterpoints to psychoanalysis and Proust—as “ontological laboratories” (Bersani and Dutoit 1998, 59, 63) in which alternative hypotheses are tested. In the opening pages of Thoughts and Things, Bersani gestures toward his collaborative work with Ulysse Dutoit, where they locate “models for an aesthetic ethic of correspondences between the self and the world, a community of being in which the recognition of various degrees and modes of similitude is itself a sensually appealing deconstruction of the prestige of knowledge” (5). Examples can be found in The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (1985), where Bersani and Dutoit trace aesthetic repetitions in Assyrian art that seduce the spectatorial gaze away from the reliefs’ imperial war narratives and their sadistic pleasures; in Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), where they find the painter’s later work increasingly de...