Synopses & Reviews
Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory—his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.
Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and although Foucault rejected psychoanalysis, Bersani contends that by considering his ideas alongside Freuds, one gains a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another. For Bersani, art represents a crucial guide for conceiving new ways of connecting to the world, and so, in many of these essays, he stresses the importance of aesthetics, analyzing works by Genet, Caravaggio, Proust, Almodóvar, and Godard.
Documenting over two decades in the life of one of the best minds working in the humanities today, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays is a unique opportunity to explore the fruitful career of a formidable intellect.
Review
"Thoughts and Things accomplishes more in its pages than some full bookshelves in my office. This is an original and intellectually consequential book that will become, like multiple past books by Bersani, a classic.”
Review
"It is one of the miracles of intellectual possibility that Leo Bersani, an indispensable thinker of disjunctions in the self and the intractability of violence, should also be our greatest theoretician of relational connectedness. The essays collected in Thoughts and Things show Bersani at the height of his powers, unpacking the paradox by which his theory of connectedness, of the relations that unite us in the oneness of being, rests not on a simple opposition to negativity but rather on a non-relation to it. In the tension informing that paradox, Thoughts and Things offers its readers the thing we so rarely get to encounter: the high-voltage current of living thought."
Review
“From our preeminent philosopher of relationality comes a stunning meditation on the oneness of being. With great tact and sophistication, this book mounts a critique of the misguided dualisms that separate self from world, mind from body, consciousness from the unconscious, and past from present. In its ambition and originality, Thoughts and Things is classic Bersani, offering readers conceptually dense formulations—‘psychic time is unitary mobility—that no other contemporary thinker could plausibly have uttered.”
Review
"Thoughts and Things is a thrilling meditation on the relational—on what connects authors to readers, authors to themselves, the actual to the virtual, the mind to the body, the drive to the stars, and our systems of thought to the universe. Embedded in this meditation are brilliant readings of a number of individual books, essays and films, ranging from Jean Genets Our Lady of the Flowers and Claire Deniss Beau Travail, to Sigmund Freuds 'A Special Kind of Object Choice,' and Lawrence Krausss Universe from Nothing. Thoughts and Things also offers a provocative account of 'conception.' It is Leo Bersanis best book—to date."
Synopsis
Leo Bersanis career spans more than 50 years, and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsfrom French studies, modernism, realist fiction, and psychoanalytic criticism, to film theory and queer theory (a field Bersani could be said to have invented). In Thoughts and Things Bersani emerges as a thinker of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, i.e., he emerges as a philosopher of the first order. In this elegant series of essays, he posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). His exemplary texts range from Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) to Claire Denis (the French filmmaker whose masterpiece is Beau Travail). But he then asks whether a fissure of being between the subject and the world might simply be masking a more fundamental oneness, arguably a oneness intrinsic to our being in and with the world. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources from Dsecartes to cosmology, Sufi mysticism, and neo-Platonism. Cosmos and individual, past and present merge in the idea that our bodies contain atoms from stars that exploded millions of years ago: res cogitans and res extensa, for Bersani, are united in the oneness of cosmic being. This little book, in its sensitive treatment of films and literary texts, succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. It is a new departure for Bersani, and will be devoured by his growing body of devoted readers.
Synopsis
Leo Bersanis career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsincluding French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.
Thoughts and Things posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of beingof our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, Thoughts and Things will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.
About the Author
Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part 1 | The Sexual Subject
1 Is the Rectum a Grave?
2 Is There a Gay Art?
3 Gay Betrayals
4 Sociability and Cruising
5 Aggression, Gay Shame, and Almodóvars Art
Part 2 | Toward an Aesthetic Subject
6 Against Monogamy
7 Sociality and Sexuality
8 Can Sex Make Us Happy?
9 Fr- oucault and the End of Sex
10 Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject
11 The Will to Know
Part 3 | Two Interviews
12 A Conversation with Leo Bersani with Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman
13 Beyond Redemption: An Interview with Leo Bersani with Nicholas Royle
Index