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For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani's writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book's extensive introduction outlines in detail Bersani's oeuvre, particularly its place in queer thought and his complicated relationships with the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis. The subsequent contributions by notable scholars in various fields demonstrate the richness and open-endedness of his work. The book concludes with a new interview with Bersani.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction
Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond
Mikko Tuhkanen

Part I: Queer

1. Bersani on Location
Heather Love

2. Embarrassment and the Forms of Redemption
David Kurnick

3. Queer Betrayals
Jack Halbstam

Part II: Psychoanalytic

4. Cinema a tergo: Shooting in Elephant
Ellis Hanson

5. Reading Freud: Bersani and Lacan
James Penney

6. Addressing Oneself: Bersani and the Form/Fold of Self-Relation
Patrick ffrench

7. Monadological Psychoanalysis: Bersani, Laplanche, Beckett
Mikko Tuhkanen

Part III: Aesthetic

8. Is the Rectangle a Grave?
Michael D. Snediker

9. Proust, Shattering: Aesthetic Subjects and Metonymies of Desire
E. L. McCallum

10. A Future for Henry James
David McWhirter

11. Extreme Style: Firbank, Faulkner, and Perspectives on Modern Traditions
Kevin Ohi

Part IV: Interview

12. Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani
Mikko Tuhkanen

Contributors
Index

Sujets

Literary theory

History of film

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	14 novembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438454122
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

LEO BERSANI
LEO BERSANI
Queer Theory and Beyond
Edited by
MIKKO TUHKANEN
Cover image: Wolfgang Tillmans, “Freischwimmer 54” (2004). Used by permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leo Bersani : queer theory and beyond / edited by Mikko Tuhkanen.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5411-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5412-2 (ebook)
1. Bersani, Leo—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Homosexuality in literature. 3. Homosexuality and literature. 4. Queer theory. I. Tuhkanen, Mikko, 1967–editor of compilation.
PN75.B45L48 2014 801 .95092—dc23 2014002320
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond
Mikko Tuhkanen
Part I: Queer
1 Bersani on Location
Heather Love
2 Embarrassment and the Forms of Redemption
David Kurnick
3 Queer Betrayals
Jack Halberstam
Part II: Psychoanalytic
4 Cinema a tergo : Shooting in Elephant
Ellis Hanson
5 Reading Freud: Bersani and Lacan
James Penney
6 Addressing Oneself: Bersani and the Form/Fold of Self-Relation
Patrick ffrench
7 Monadological Psychoanalysis: Bersani, Laplanche, Beckett
Mikko Tuhkanen
Part III: Aesthetic
8 Is the Rectangle a Grave?
Michael D. Snediker
9 Proust, Shattering: Aesthetic Subjects and the Metonymies of Desire
E. L. McCallum
10 A Future for Henry James
David McWhirter
11 Extreme Style: Firbank, Faulkner, and Perspectives on Modern Traditions
Kevin Ohi
Part IV: Interview
12 Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani
Mikko Tuhkanen
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the volume’s contributors for their engagement; Andrew Kenyon at SUNY Press for his patience; Nicholas Royle for the assignment of “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; Tim Dean and Mary Ann O’Farrell for their comments; and Leo Bersani for his availability. MT.
Jack Halberstam’s “Queer Betrayals” has previously appeared in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political , ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 177–89. © 2013. Reprinted with permission from the publishers.
An earlier version of David Kurnick’s “Embarrassment and the Forms of Redemption” appears in PMLA 125.2 (Apr. 2010): 398–403. © 2010. Revised and reprinted with permission from the Modern Language Association of America.
An earlier version of David McWhirter’s “A Future for Henry James” appears as “Bersani’s James,” Henry James Review 32.3 (2011): 211–17. © 2011. Revised and reprinted with permission from The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Abbreviations AI Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993). BB Bersani, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1970). BF Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977). C Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: BFI, 1999). CR Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990). CS Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998). DSM Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1982). FA Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976; New York: Columbia UP, 1984). FoB Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004). FrB Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). FV Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1985). H Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995). I Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008). IRG Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010). MP Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1965).
Introduction
Leo Bersani
Queer Theory and Beyond
MIKKO TUHKANEN
Is Leo Bersani a queer theorist? Although he has become a frequently cited source for queer thinkers of various orientations, the answer to this query is not quite self-evident. The question becomes necessary when we observe not only that Bersani’s work precedes by decades queer theory’s naming, but also that in its range his oeuvre exceeds anything that might reasonably be designated as “queer scholarship.” What is queer about his readings of Beckett, Proust, Baudelaire, Malick, Resnais, Caravaggio, or Assyrian art? How might we connect his thematic concerns—his work on aesthetics, ethics, and ontology—with queer thought’s extant epistemologies?
Bersani’s reputation as a queer thinker rests mainly on two texts, the essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and Homos (1995). Participating in the field’s self-definition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they book-end its formative period. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” shares its date of publication with both Judith Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987); it predates by some years Butler’s influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Teresa de Lauretis’s “queer theory” issue of differences (1991), and Diana Fuss’s collection inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (1991). While “Is the Rectum a Grave?” responds, like many other queer-theoretical texts of the late 1980s, to the urgency of the AIDS crisis—which compelled experimentations, often via the defamiliarizing potential of “high theory,” with praxes not immediately recognizable as politically useful or relevant— Homos addresses what by the mid-1990s had become one of queer thought’s major imperatives: the move, inspired by Foucault, to historicize and, consequently, de-essentialize identity categories, including those organized around “sexual preference.” Bersani’s insistence that we rethink the implications of antiessentialism is not a merely polemical, and polemically counterintuitive, antithesis to queer theory’s incipiently hegemonic formulations. It is informed by his by-then extensive work on philosophy and art. In the book’s final chapter, “The Gay Outlaw,” Bersani grafts queer thought onto this body of work: he conceptualizes queerness as an aesthetic, ontological, and political mode that he designates with the neologism “homoness.” What remains difficult about “The Gay Outlaw”—and the chapter shares this with Bersani’s larger oeuvre—is that its propositions bear scarcely any relation to other, including antiessentialist, conceptualizations of queerness and queer thought. 1
To approach Bersani’s putative queerness, it is useful, then, to consider the larger trajectory of his work, which had accumulated its characteristic emphases long before queer theory’s emergence as a recognizable disciplinary orientation. Bersani begins his career in the 1960s with literary-critical commentaries on modernism: his first book, published in 1965, is a monograph on Marcel Proust, an author who remains a constant reference point and sparring partner in all of his later work. The following study, Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), deals with a number of authors who similarly influence Bersani’s subsequent thinking. The writers in question are not only the luminaries of French modernism—Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, Camus, Robbe-Grillet, and, most importantly, Proust and Beckett—but also such philosophers as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Blanchot. In Balzac to Beckett , Bersani arguably becomes the first Anglo-American critic to consider what soon were recognized as the founding texts of French poststructuralist theory. It is this crossillumination of literary texts (and, in later work, and particularly his collaborations with Ulysse Dutoit, painting and film) and philosophy (including, importantly, psychoanalytic theory) that characterizes Bersani’s subsequent thought.
After Balzac to Beckett , Bersani’s work in the 1970s is marked by his encounter with psychoanalysis, most notably Jean Laplanche’s reading of Freud. While the final chapter of A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976) briefly acknowledges the importance of Laplanche’s work ( FA 332n2), it is in Baudelaire and Freud (1977) that Bersani provides the first steps toward the synthesis of art and psychoanalysis that he is to elaborate in all of his subsequent work. In ways that I will detail below, the following study, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), continues, if implicitly, to work toward an onto-aesthetics, which is also an onto-ethics, inflected through Laplanche’s understanding of desire. Bersani turns to Freud four years later, in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986), a study of the aporetic s