In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Ridding Oneself of Mad Masters
  • Tom Roach (bio)
Thoughts and Things
Leo Bersani
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xv + 120 pp.

“As it is,” spews the tempestuous Birkin in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, “what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.” Arguing against the will to conceptualize Eros, a will that at root is a lust for power, and in favor of an immanent sensuality untainted by psychology, Birkin and his creator resonate throughout Leo Bersani’s new collection of essays, Thoughts and Things. If in the past Marcel Proust has been Bersani’s most frequent literary guide through the nine circles of the sexual psyche (he appears here alongside René Descartes and Sigmund Freud in essay-title-of-the-year contender “ ‘Ardent Masturbation’ ”), Lawrence seems the spectral chaperone—the unconscious?—of Bersani’s output since 2004’s Forms of Being, perhaps even since the stunning final essay of 1995’s Homos, “The Gay Outlaw.” In other words, if Bersani via Proust once worked to “make it all mental,” as Birkin would have it, his more recent ontological and, in chapter 5 of the new volume, cosmological explorations of sensuality and relationality might best be designated Lawrentian.

This, then, is neither the Bersani who, so the story goes, inaugurated the antisocial turn in queer studies, nor is it the Bersani celebrated for his meticulous psychoanalytic investigations of sexual desire and its discontents. The intellectual rigor remains brilliantly on display, and one can certainly find traces here of the sex-induced self-shattering and phantasmic ego dissolution the author championed in his seminal “Is the Rectum a Grave?” However, the Freudian interpretative framework that once buttressed these concepts seems itself to have imploded. Despite an engaged reckoning with Freud throughout—chapter 4, for example, begins with dream analysis and proceeds to an assertion that the Freudian self is in fact not divided but an incongruous, nonidentical unity—this volume on the whole could [End Page 318] indicate that Bersani is simply through with talking about sex. Or, to put it more precisely, flipped and reversed: through with talking about sex, Bersani simply is. As the essays collectively develop the author’s signature concepts concerning connectedness amid estrangement, difference within sameness, and self-divestiture in the face of a seductive and voracious narcissism, one gleans in Bersani’s style and tone an “at-homeness” even in the most unheimlich of environments—notably the cosmos. Unlike earlier essays such as “Against Monogamy” and “Sociability and Cruising” in which queer sex plays a key role in realizing a nonviolent ethics, here we find an ecstatic yet humbled self emerging in decidedly nonsexual characters and circumstances: in Carol White, protagonist of Todd Haynes’s Safe (chapter 2), and even in the disorienting relationship the author has with his own thought and work (the antipreface, “Against Prefaces?”). Might this turning away from sex be the inevitable result of maturity? Might it be for Bersani a new form of post-Freudian, post-Proustian freedom? Recall the wise words of the wizened Cephalus, one of Socrates’s first interlocutors in Plato’s Republic: “When the desires cease to strain and finally relax, then what Sophocles says comes to pass in every way; it is possible to be rid of very many mad masters.” For Bersani, the maddest of masters is the ego and perhaps only when one is through with sex—that is, through with affording sex both the power of individuation and the status of a self-hermeneutic—that our ontological porosity, our solidarity with world-being, becomes sensible.

But to be through with sex one must first endure it, experience it, and experiment with its potential. To be rid of mad masters one must know them intimately and confront their folly head-on. This is to say, everything Bersani was not afraid to ask about sex in the past suffuses each page of Thoughts and Things. These essays are not merely the culmination of his previous inquiries into antirelational sexuality and impersonal intimacy, however; they are openings to dazzlingly...

pdf

Share