Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles"

We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisting one another, also continuously repeat, re-find one another. The viability of our being-in-the-world depends on a certain continuity in our exchanges with an otherness never wholly differentiated from ourselves. The perception of correspondences and analogies is the preliminary step to the discovery as well as the creation of new correspondences and analogies.

--Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies

Original thought cannot be "criticized"; one can only move with—which is to say, be moved by—it, only yield to its rhythm or fascination. "Critical" approaches not only assume that an object is available for recognition, that extant criteria suffice for its translation, they also embrace the reactive ethos whose hegemony in nineteenth-century historiography Friedrich Nietzsche traced to the insidious influence of Hegelian dialectics ("On the Utility" 142-43). Forsaking all critical postures, all ambition to rub against thought's grain, reading happens, and happens only, when readers approach a text "without reserve, without trying to criticize it" (Wright 238). Leo Bersani suggests that another name for an "unreserved" readerly attitude is "speculativeness." All thought worthy of the name speculates: its operation coincides with the self-reflexivity indicated by the term's etymological history (Lat. speculārī, speculum). In this, Bersani commits to an unpopular position: notwithstanding the recently re-emergent tradition that runs via Alfred North Whitehead to contemporary "speculative realists," claims for the efficacy of speculations have not fared well since Immanuel Kant dismissed synthetic a priori propositions in metaphysics and Karl Marx designated speculative thought, exemplified by Hegel, as the constitutive error of Western philosophy.

The term "speculation" and its derivatives recur in Bersani's texts with striking frequency. When, in a recent interview, Bersani was asked if this repetition signals his work's affiliation with what is called "speculative philosophy," he expressed hesitation and doubt: "That I'm not sure of," he grumbled and changed the subject ("Rigorously" 292). The wager of the present essay is that, a little uncannily, Bersani's oeuvre, unfolding over the last half century, contributes to this philosophical history and is itself speculative. This kinship is uncanny because, as the interview response suggests, Bersani himself is not fully aware of (nor, it is important to add, does he care about) the implications of his participation in this genealogy. While he consistently indicates that the only thought worth committing to is always "speculative," he is not attuned to this term's full resonance in the history of philosophy (a deafness shared, I happen to know, by the interviewer who posed the question).

The recent book Receptive Bodies (2018) contains some of Bersani's most explicit statements about the nature of "speculative" thinking. Bersani proposes that "essayistic writing"—a style with which he identifies his own work—constitutes "a way of writing that wanders, inconclusively," one that, as he rephrases, "moves speculatively" (Receptive 126, 128). Speculative writing demands that one is "thinking rigorously, but with an unemphatic, even somewhat relaxed rigor" (Receptive 126); it is marked by "the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking, and of inconclusive being" (Receptive 128). Bersani asks, "why not simply welcome the pleasure in repeatedly failing to conclude—in our thinking, in our writing, in our sexuality?" (Receptive 127-28). Why not, that is, yield to our becoming as speculative beings? While these ideas are given the most explicit attention in Receptive Bodies, they are not new in Bersani's work. In a characteristic moment in 1995, for example, Bersani encourages us to "speculate" about a work of art beyond what the text "seems to authorize" (Homos 117); in 1990, he speaks of "the risky movement of speculative thought, of thought unanchored, set loose from all evidential 'land' securities" (Culture 151); and, in 1981, he finds in Stéphane...