Bersanian fascination is not merely a fleeting affective state. It is, rather, a mode of inquiry and a form of being. If Bersani is initially fascinated with the antisocial nature of sexual desire, he later becomes enthralled with a notion of fascinated witnessing that reveals an ontological enmeshment. This essay homes in on a passage in Homos that presages an important pivot in Bersani’s intellectual trajectory: a pivot from a dialectical conception of a subjectivity forever alienated and at odds with external reality to an immanentist understanding of a subject always already connected to the world. Through an act of betrayal, Bersani leaves behind a Freudo-Proustian conception of desire as lack and embraces a concept of desire so radically exclusionary that it lacks nothing. Betrayal affords Bersani the opportunity to conceive of an ethical response to an inherently exclusionary sexual desire: an implicated, indiscriminate fascination with the world’s appearances, indifferent to the psychology of desire.
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May 1, 2023
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Research Article|
May 01 2023
Fascination
Tom Roach
tom roach is a professor of philosophy and cultural studies, as well as coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Bryant University. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, aids, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (suny Press, 2012) and Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (suny Press, 2021).
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differences (2023) 34 (1): 104–112.
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Tom Roach; Fascination. differences 1 May 2023; 34 (1): 104–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10435618
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