Remembering Leo Bersani

Following the deaths of Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani’s recent passing creates a retroactive cluster effect. For those who study sexuality, a particularly luminous constellation has gone out for good. Amid the warm flood of memorials and testimonials from Bersani’s former students, collaborators, and friends, the question of his vexed relationship to queer theory — a field to which his work was casually annexed but whose insights and key thinkers he frequently critiqued — seems ripe for reconsideration. I take the occasion of his death as an opportunity to retrace his trajectory, and thus in some small way to measure our loss.

Bersani received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard in 1958, and taught French literature at Wellesley, Rutgers, and, most extensively, at Berkeley, where he worked from 1972 until his retirement. From his first monograph, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965), forward, his writing sparks psychoanalysis and literature into open flame. A case in point occurs in Baudelaire and Freud (1977) when the self-divisions limned in Baudelaire’s “L’Heautontimoroumenos” (“The Self-Tormentor”) are used to trace chasms of self-splitting within Freudian psychology: Bersani uses the lines from Les Fleurs du mal in which “je suis la plaie et le couteau / Je suis le soufflet et la joue” (I am both the wound and the knife, both the blow and the cheek) to rethink the relationship between ethical self-criticism and masochistic pleasure as such. It is not an armchair diagnosis of Baudelaire on behalf of Freudian truisms. Rather, in Bersani’s hands, each discourse animates its twin: Both Baudelaire’s poetry and Freud’s theory mutually exhibit “desire turned against itself.”

Taking this urge to cross-multiply disciplines further, Bersani’s The Freudian Body (1986) constellates Mallarmé, Babylonian bas-reliefs, and Pasolini’s cinema in a project at once inspired by and distinct from deconstruction’s engagement with psychoanalysis: “the necessity of reading the Freudian text as if it were a work of art.” Like deconstruction, Bersani searches for theoretical “collapse” within the Freudian text, finding it in the discrepancies between the main text of Civilization and Its Discontents and its footnotes. But the outcome of this reading is not a skeptical abandonment of knowledge, or a triumph of some generalized position about textuality tout court. Rather, it induces a dawning recognition of a core dynamic within Freudian thought: “We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content — which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that it belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life.” In subsequent work, the “nearly” would drop out, and “self-shattering” would become a core definition of sexuality rendered portable by this daring and consequential act of critical condensation.

Had Bersani written only these slim but ambitious early volumes, his intellectual contribution would already be substantial. But the coming of AIDS prompted him to re-apply this analysis from the cultural field to the world of suffering bodies in which he was enmeshed, with field-transforming results.

A meditation in an emergency, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) flings a titular gauntlet at the reader. A lot can happen in a tight space. First things first: the titular image actually comes from the British author Simon Watney mentioning “the rectum as grave”; Bersani lifts Watney’s coinage from a passing phrase to a provocative title, and, to force the issue of readerly consent, turns it into a question. The speculative form of the question might not have occurred to you when your eyes first register its assault, but by the time the title lodges in the mind one is already wondering about the cultural source of the seemingly intuitive fitness of this tenor to that vehicle. We all die, but we aren’t all bottoms. Who benefits and who is harmed when one is coded in terms of the other? How is it, Bersani asks, “that a public health crisis has been treated like an unprecedented sexual threat?” And, to take the analysis farther, how do phobias about gay male sexuality reflect discourses about power and sexuality that also structure heterosexuality, before and after AIDS?

When I first read Bersani’s essay, I was an undergraduate studying philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, not yet out to my parents, but already dating an older man who was HIV positive. His eventual death from AIDS was a drop in an ocean of loss. Reading “theory” — that snarled French and German chessboard of reactions and refinements — could feel chic but airless, an escape into abstraction. Though he could read Flaubert and Plato with precision, Bersani was also attuned to the world of the tabloid cover and the hospital bed; he stood out for his electric capacity to jolt readers, to make relentless demands of them. He was here, defiantly, to advocate for what others regarded as “frivolous” or self-destructive. Here was an agile theorist who spoke of firsthand experiences in bathhouses, and who had (for now) lived to tell. When I read Bersani in college it was as if the anger and urgency of the activist group Act Up and the flagrant theatricality of Queer Nation were kinetically present in the coiled cobra-strikes of his elegant, fanged prose.

Reread today, after its canonization within an emergent critical movement, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” still dazzles because of the relentlessness of its tempo, the range of its inclusiveness, and the daring of its argument. Vaulting from minoritarian reflections on inclusion in public-health policy to skirmishes with gay leather machismo and the camp mimesis of femininity to summaries of Michel Foucault, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon on sex and power, Bersani tests the load-bearing capacity of the essay form, asking his compact screed to do more than some whole books accomplish. And while the essay awaited the arrival of a queer-of-color critique that would identify its false choice in the demographic comparison of the relative oppressions of “gay people” and “Blacks,” Bersani’s observation that “gay men are no less socially ambitious, and, more often than we like to think, no less reactionary and racist than heterosexuals” has proved prophetic of the defanged uplift of present-day rainbow capitalism, surveillance-state pinkwashing, and Queer Eye For the Straight Guy’s nakedly classist makeovers.

In his essay’s final operatic stretch — in contradistinction to thinkers including academics, philosophers, and anti-porn activists — Bersani advocates on behalf of “the inestimable value of sex as anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.” This claim still startles, perhaps because now more than ever many of us struggle to advocate on behalf of those very values — community, equality, love — in the crucible of a deathbound and deeply unjust (deep breath) racist imperialist transphobic misogynist petro-capitalist political economy. Against the grain then and now, Bersani crankily insisted that sex didn’t have to entail any of those political commitments in order for its pleasures to have value. The self-shattering experienced in sex did not need to draw legitimacy from, to cite another Bersani title, The Culture of Redemption (1990). Furthermore, it was precisely the un-redeemability of sex that could become a site of political pedagogy; if there is a kind of latent political hope launched in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” it is that “the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power.” We could stand to learn from sex, but that won’t happen if we misrepresent it in advance on behalf of our standing credos and values; with a comedic deflationary force, Bersani insisted that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it.”

These proclamations took on a life of their own as “the anti-relational thesis,” a turn within sexuality studies and queer theory which often seemed to amount to tribal shorthand for “Bersani, or people who want to think with him.” The irony of a communal relation to the insistence upon the anti-communal was not lost on anyone. In various ways, the essay made Bersani’s career and would come to define him; years later the collection Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (2010) would solder together the provocation of 1987 with an array of later essays that took the thought elsewhere. From the methodological border wars and consolidations of Homos (1995) onward, Bersani lived to have a substantial second act. In later works like Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998) with Ulysse Dutoit or Intimacies (2008) with Adam Phillips, Bersani’s thought phase-shifts toward collaborative encounters with aesthetic objects that challenge him to rethink both the hold of psychoanalysis and “relationality” itself.

Bersani’s decision to confine his intellectual project to gay-male studies rather than to a looser and more inclusive “queerness” can look fastidious from some directions, like a lost opportunity for solidarity. But it is a strict consequence of the positionality that Bersani’s thought seemed to require. At various points across his oeuvre, we can see Bersani pushing himself to imagine the figural implications of a particular sequence of bodily acts. See, for instance, the psychic excavation offered in the essay “The Gay Daddy,” in which Bersani describes the penetrated bottom “offering the sight of his own penis as a gift or even a replacement for what is temporarily ‘lost’ inside him.” For another example, consider the speculation — outrageous, intuitive, instantaneous — that the nude Eros who smirks at us from Caravaggio’s canvas is inserting the unseen hand tucked behind his back into his own anus, and that the boy’s defiant gaze is the outward sign of an encrypted and inescapable moment of self-pleasuring. “Thinking sex,” to cite the phrase of Gayle Rubin, requires us to look carefully at the implications of the body’s actual forms, the melt and mesh through which a bodily act occupies and alters the mind that experiences it.

The flip side of this exclusive focus upon gay-male cultures and practices is that the excavation of their meanings relentlessly returned Bersani toward meta-psychological frames in which the duty of the critic became the dismantling of the cultural scripts of maleness and femaleness as such. I will close this remembrance with the climactic, in all senses, final image of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani alleges that a society eager to stigmatize gay men in the midst of the AIDS crisis is really motivated by its own captivating but disavowed relationship to “the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” It’s deliberately outrageous, meant to provoke us into a startled recognition of the nested relationalities in which homophobia and AIDS panic borrow from and rely upon prior and standing discourses of misogyny. We, as a culture, cannot stop imagining a destruction we both desire and disavow. Looking into the blinding mirror that Bersani’s texts still hold up to our own faces, we blink and ask, “Whose fantasy is this?”