This essay examines Intimacies, structured as an asymmetrical dialogue between two of the most astringent commentators of Freud and psychoanalysis: Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. This dialogue takes place at both the intimate and extimate limits of what Bersani calls impersonal narcissism. By this Bersani asks us to move past the psychic dynamics of ego formation and their implicit violence to make way for a mode of relationality in which subjects coexist absent of any demands on one another. This approach draws from Bersani’s own eviscerating critique of the heteronormative deformation of identity to communicate what, after the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, could be called the “bare truth” of subject formation past even the need for subjects.
Bare
joel faflak is a professor in the Department of English and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, and a visiting professor at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He is the author of Romantic Psychoanalysis (suny Press, 2007), coauthor of Revelation and Knowledge (University of Toronto Press, 2011), editor of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Broadview Press, 2009), and most recently coeditor (with Tilottama Rajan) of William Blake: Modernity and Disaster (University of Toronto Press, 2020). He also coedited, with Richard Sha, Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Joel Faflak; Bare. differences 1 May 2023; 34 (1): 27–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10435492
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