This essay considers Leo Bersani’s concept of “incongruity” as a key term in his thinking of ethical relation and, 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 replaces 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 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.
Incongruity
john paul ricco is a professor of comparative literature, art history, and visual culture at the University of Toronto. His recent publications include “The Virtue and Value of Disappearance: Muse-ecology and Invisible Flight of the Birds,” in These Birds of Temptation (K. Verlag, 2021); “Moths to the Flame: Photography and Extinction,” in Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021); “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The covid Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together,” in Topia (2020); and “Jean-Luc Nancy: Drawing the Edge of the Common,” in Parallax (2020). He is currently completing two books: “The Intimacy of the Outside: Essays on Queer Finitude” and “Extinction Aesthetics: Essays on the Collective Afterlife of Things.”
John Paul Ricco; Incongruity. differences 1 May 2023; 34 (1): 156–164. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10435716
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