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.
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.
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.
I am thrilled to announce that the special issue of the journal Differences that I co-edited with Jacques Khalip, is now out from Duke University Press.
“Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani” includes short essays by 35 contributors, covering every period of Bersani’s long career, and nearly every aspect of his incredibly diverse range of topics and fields, from modern French literature to the theory of sexuality, aesthetics, critical readings of psychoanalytic theory, film, art, ethics, and sociality.
Each author was asked to choose a sentence by Bersani that spoke to them and has informed their work. And to write an essay that elaborates on the conceptual formulation and ramifications borne by the sentence, while also attesting to the inimitable style and syntax of Bersani’s thinking.
At close to 300-pages, this is not only the largest issue ever published by the journal, but also stands as the most extensive inter-disciplinary and trans-generational engagement with Leo Bersani’s work, as well as the many essays and books he co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit. Published just a bit more than a year after Leo’s passing, the volume provides multiple pathways back into his work, and the experience of “re-registering” the currency of Bersani’s thought today.
I think you will find the essays to be revelatory, insightful, inspired, and beautifully crafted.
On 31 May 2023, a special issue of the journal differences, will be published, that I co-edited with Jacques Khalip, titled: “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani.”
The volume brings together 35 scholars from a wide-range of disciplines and fields, each of whom has written a short essay based upon a sentence or two that they have selected from Bersani’s work. The volume covers the span of Bersani’s career, from his early work on Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire and other authors in the French modern canon; to his many collaborations with Ulysse Dutoit; to his work on sex and sexuality; and his late work on aesthetic subjectivity.
My own essay, “Incongruity,” considers the central role that this concept plays in Bersani’s radical rethinking of sociality in terms of sameness. I find inspiration and a jumping off point, in this sentence from Bersani’s essay, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” originally published in Critical Inquiry and later in his book, Thoughts and Things:
“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.” (Bersani, Thoughts and Things 66)
Austin Svedjan (PhD student, University of Pennsylvania) and I are co-editing a special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, titled, “Afterlives of the Anti-Social.” It will feature essays by Grace Lavery, Mikko Tuhkanen, Tom Roach, Bobby Benedicto, Robyn Weigman, and me, plus an interview with Lee Edelman. Expected date of publication: 2024.
My essay, “Unlovable Oneness,” is structured by the “incongruous coupling” of Eimear McBride’s masterpiece debut novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and Ellsworth Kelly’s painted aluminum panels for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, Blue Black. In the essay, and my reading of Leo Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit’s work (from their early writing on Pasolini’s film, Salò, to their later work on Kelly), I consider the ethical virtue of going along with the unlovable and how literature and art provide us with an aesthetic training as to how to do so, and in ways that avoid reproducing the world’s violence in which we are all implicated.
Through Kelly’s monochromes, the essay also thinks about Bersani’s notion of “oneness,” in terms of chromatics, and how such incongruous oneness as Blue Black enables us to move out of a racial/racist chromatics and toward a different sense of being together. Something that artist Glenn Ligon explored in his curating of “Blue Black,” an exhibition in 2017 at the Pulitzer, that took Kelly’s work as inspiration and jumping off point.
For a special issue of the journal New Formations, edited by Jessica Cotton on the topic of “Loneliness,” I have written an essay titled, “Solitude and the Time that Remains in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail.” The essay is an extended close reading of Shibli’s remarkable novel. It considers the ways in which the book works with solitude and minor details as two key modalities in which the time that remains—as a non-enclosed temporality, not entirely circumscribed by the historical past, present, or future—opens for the anonymous Palestinian female narrator in the second part of the novel, as she travels through the contemporary Israeli apartheid state, in search of information about a young anonymous Bedouin girl who was brutally raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers decades earlier in the Negev desert. Expected date of publication: 2024.
“Sex and Exclusion” is my essay for this collection of essays edited by Ricky Varghese, to be published by University of Regina Press. In it, I theorize the relation between sex and exclusion, partly in dialogue with recent work by Adam Phillips and also Maurice Blanchot, and in relation to artist Dean Sameshima’s photographic series, being alone, which he shot in sex clubs and bathhouses in Berlin during the pandemic. This essays continues writing that I have done on Dean’s work, that has recently been published in the journals, A/R and The Large Glass, both in 2021 (see related posts on this web site).
Bernhard Christoph Francke (gest. 1729), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leinwand 81 x 66 cm
In the Fall 2021 semester I taught a graduate seminar on “Queer Monadology.” The course emerges, in part, from out of my thinking and current writing on solitude, as part of my ongoing work on the anti-communal intimacy of anonymous singularities (strangers, the clandestine, the nameless passerby)—as for instance, in cruising.
Drawing upon Daniel Tiffany’s brilliant book, Infidel Poetics, and his theorization of sociologically obscure, solipsistic communities of opacity, imperceptibility, and illegibility, the seminar at the same time was rooted in Leo Bersani’s notion of impersonal narcissism and what Mikko Tuhkanen, in his indispensable study of Bersani’s lifework, The Essentialist Villain, refers to as “homomonadology.” With this neologism, Tuhkanen crafts a reading of Bersani that foregrounds the degree and extent to which Bersani is our current day Leibniz. With these authors and texts as our principle guideposts, the seminar was launched with a reading of Leibniz’s Monadology (1714), along with The Fold, Deleuze’s uniquely illuminating engagement with the latter.
Other topics and questions included: living in a world without others (Deleuze); the inertia of being (Kaufman); the sovereignty of quiet (Quashie); looking away (Terada); and last things (Khalip). We read Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Hands” (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919); Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967); and looked at the work of artists Dean Sameshima and Deirdre Logue. We ended the course with Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and its own suggestion that giving oneself over to the elemental transience (and non-transcendence) of singularly monadic finitude, might be the “secret to superhuman strength.”
Here are the eleven sections of the course and assigned readings:
Week 1 Monadology
Week 2 Homomonadology
Week 3 Pornographic Life
Week 4 Living in a World without Others
Week 5 Looking Away & Being Quiet
Week 6 Inert Being
Week 7 On Queer Isolation and Loneliness, Then & Now
Week 8 Aesthetic Solitude
Week 9 Not Having Us
Week 10 Last Things, Last Addresses
Week 11 The Secret to Superhuman Strength
A new article in The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/12/criticspage/Muse-ecology-on-birds-and-other-tuning-forks
Appearing in the December 2021-January 2022 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, my article was commissioned by WJT Mitchell for the Critic’s Page that the magazine invited him to curate and edit. Tom’s chosen theme was “Sounding the Idols,” inspired by Nietzsche’s Preface to Twilight of the Idols where the philosopher advocates approaching the idols with a tuning-fork, thereby not smashing them with a hammer, but tapping them so that they are made to emit music.
My essay is part of my current book project on “extinction aesthetics” wherein ethical and aesthetic responses to species extinction—such as the ongoing loss of millions of birds and their birdsong—are argued to involve being attuned to these ensuing silences, to this mute music.
Featured in the new book, Pause.Fervour: Reflections on a Pandemic, jointly published by the Journal of Visual Culture and the Harun Farocki Institute, and edited by Manca Bajec, Tom Holert, and Marquard Smith. A free downloadable copy is available here.
Click on any of the images below to get a larger view.
It is a beautifully-designed publication, featuring short texts and artworks by over 50 writers and artists. The book is divided into four sections:
Click on the image of the article below, to open a larger view of the text.
I presented this talk on 15 April 2021, as part of “Thinking Loneliness” the sixth and last instalment in a series on “Loneliness and Technology,” organized by The English Association (UK).
Here is a description of the event:
What is the relationship between loneliness and the history of thought? How have thinkers thought about loneliness through time? The reinvention of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe saw an influential upheaval of the relation between solitude and sociality. Whereas aesthetic experience might remain a lonely state in practice, its ability to conjure the human faculties into a state of ‘free play’ was thought to register its inherently communal nature, which Hannah Arendt understood to form the core of an unwritten and arguably still unrealised political philosophy. Like solitude, loneliness has also been a site of philosophical fantasies: of self-presence and self-sufficiency, but also of the possibility of disposing with, or escaping from, markers of identity or difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality.
This event brings together scholars whose work has addressed loneliness at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and queer theory. We will be asking: what role has loneliness played in the history of philosophy? How has it structured philosophy’s attempts to establish the foundations, possibilities and limits of both subjectivity and community?
unbecoming community 