Here is a link to my article, “Incongruity,” recently published in the special issue of the journal differences that I co-edited with Jacques Khalip. Free-access is available until October 31, 2023.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article/34/1/156/378504/Incongruity

The article considers Leo Bersani’s concept of “incongruity” as a key term in his thinking of ethical relation. Specifically, as a description of the desynchronized movement and impersonal configuration of bodies, psyches, thoughts, and things, in which the formal mobilization of aesthetic perceptions of sameness replace the immobilizing forces of desirous knowing and difference. 

Highlighted is the way in which sameness is not based on a single predicate of commonality, but instead obtains in similar forms of movement and/or stillness that inaugurate correspondences with others and the world. This sheds light on Bersani’s familiar notions of inaccurate replication and homo-narcissism within his broader exploration of potential intimacies pleasurably discovered via a sense of universal sameness, as opposed to the often-murderous fixation on identity and difference. 

My jumping off point is the following sentence from Bersani’s book, Thoughts and Things (66):

Incongruity institutes virtualities that have no intrinsic reason to be actualized. This retreat from the actual creates a freedom that might be defined as a kind of being to which no predicate can be attached.