Derek Jarman's Caravaggio -- Notes -- Credits.
Leo Bersani Books
Leo Bersani is a significant figure in literary theory whose work critically examines the structures of identity and subjectivity. He explores how dominant cultural narratives shape our understanding of the self, often challenging conventional notions of authenticity and individuality. Bersani's incisive analysis delves into the complexities of desire, power, and the ways in which social forces impact personal experience. His contributions offer a profound lens through which to reconsider the very foundations of selfhood and social relations.
Thoughts and Things
- 136 pages
- 5 hours of reading
Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including 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 being—of 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.
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made 'gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.' Mired in micropolitics, for Bersani, queer activism had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as 'Gay Betrayals', Bersani's intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through 'antimonogamous promiscuity'. Building on extensive artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani's polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality comes into view. A series of statuesque figures are caught as they feel the outlines of existing power structures, try out new strategies of inclusivity and, ultimately, wrestle with the blurred lineaments of identity and community.
Baudelaire and Freud
- 268 pages
- 10 hours of reading
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.