Archive

Leo Bersani

Upcoming Conference Talks from my “Extinction Aesthetics” project

3 September 2024
Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Deconstruction, Futurity, Lectures & Events, Leo Bersani, Social Ethics, Time and Temporality, Visual Culture
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“Seething Cauldrons and the Eco-Cosmological Unconscious“

John Paul Ricco

My talk is scheduled from 10-11AM on Friday, September 20, 2024 – University of Toronto – FE Building Room 114, address: 371 Bloor Street West, Toronto

The paper reads Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) on the genesis of the human relation to fire, and the articulation of that analytic narrative with his notions of death drive and the unconscious—the latter of which Freud once described as a “cauldron of seething excitations.” This in turn leads to a critical reading of Anna Kornbluh’s recent essay, “We Didn’t Start the Fire: Death Drive Against Ecocide,” and its decidedly pragmatic conceptualization of death drive. All of this to then ask after a human relation to the elemental force of fire that is neither destructive nor appropriative, with the evidence of such being found, for instance, in correlations between solar flares and sunspots and human excitability and aggressivity. Leading to the question: what if the unconscious stimulated by fire as non-catastrophic force or drive is as much ecological-cosmological as it is psychological and biological? 

“To Become Extinct in the Very Practice of One’s Thinking” 

John Paul Ricco

Friday, September 27, 2024 – Department of Art History, University of Toronto (time and location TBA)

Could it be that a radical re-structuring of our relation to the world, a re-structuring that would prioritize the ethical and the aesthetic, is not only necessary, but would be the very means by which the human as an event in the world (Bersani) stands the chance of surviving? And further, what if such an ethical-aesthetic rapport was a matter of the drives, as these forces have been conceptualized by psychoanalysis? What exactly is the relation between the psychological and the ecological if there is any? And how would such a relation bear upon the question and nature of thinking—including the relation between thought and extinction? Is consciousness and thinking ecological (Abram), as much as it is mental and physiological? In my paper I trace the relations between soma, psyche, and the eco-geological, situating the drives at their frontiers as forces connecting and separating them from each other—a rhythmic oscillation (or tension) that we might sense and then call a world. 

NEW publication: “Afterlives of the Antisocial”

25 July 2024
Anonymity, Art, Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Leo Bersani, Publications, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics
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The special issue of the online journal Postmodern Culture I co-edited (with Austin Svedjan) on “Afterlives of the Antisocial Thesis” is now live and available for free. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/issue/52747

The issue includes introductory essays by each of us two editors, an interview with Lee Edelman, and an Afterword by Tim Dean. Along with articles by Bobby Benedicto, John Paul Ricco, Tom Roach, Mikko Tuhkanen, and Robyn Weigman—each of which engages with the work of Leo Bersani in new and insightful ways, as they also situate Bersani’s work in relation other notable queer theorists and the legacy of the antisocial thesis in queer theory.

Here’s an excerpt from my Editor’s Introduction, “Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman:”

Bersani’s project…was less the resignification of gay male desire (as though this was all a matter of theorization as performative semiotic reiteration) than the recategorization of homosexuality as (or by way of) homoness (sameness).

In this way, the homo– no longer refers to nor is reducible to homosexuality. Instead, homo points to a degree or a form of sameness shared between two or more persons or things—incongruously or inaccurately—and thus homo no longer functions as a predicate of an actuality, but rather is the speculation via “the intellectual imagination” of an as-yet-to-be-realized virtuality (Bersani, “Gay Betrayals” 43). Which is also not “utopic ambivalence” since it is not ambivalent about any possible reparation, redemption, or conclusion.

As Bersani states in “Gay Betrayals,” “The homosexual, perhaps even the homosexual category (what I have called ‘homoness’) rather than as a person … might be the model for correspondences of being that are by no means limited to relations among persons” (43)…Bersani’s recategorization of homo effectively frees it from the imperative of categorization. Homo suddenly becomes the predicate that relieves us—”we”—of predication. For Bersani, the singularity and specificity (not the fixed identity) of the homosexual and of gay male desire is its evacuation of subjective substantiality and seriousness, which is not to be confused with self-erasure. In other words, de-specifying is the specificity of the homo, thus making the homo curiously queer.

My article, “Incongruity” selected as “Weekly Read”

7 October 2023
Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Leo Bersani, Publications, Queer Theory, Social Ethics
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My article, “Incongruity,” in the latest issue of the journal differences, has been selected by Duke University Press as this week’s “Weekly Read.” This means that you can freely access and download the article here https://dukeupress.wordpress.com until October 31st.

You can also purchase a copy of the entire issue (all 300 pages, with 35 essays) at a 30% discount, at the web page linked above.

Incongruity

21 August 2023
Anonymity, Continental Philosophy, Leo Bersani, Publications, Queer Theory, Social Ethics
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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.

Homoverse (on reading Leo Bersani)

21 August 2023
Leo Bersani, Publications, Queer Theory, Social Ethics
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Here is a free-access link to the article I co-wrote with Jacques Khalip, as the Introduction to the special issue of the journal differences that we edited. Access will be available until October 2023.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article/34/1/1/378497/Homoverse?guestAccessKey=931b6969-ab4f-40e3-89ed-12bceaa5c72f