This essay examines the final two sentences of Bersani’s Intimacies, a book he cowrote with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. The strange temporality of Bersani’s correspondence at the end of Intimacies coincides with the “friendly accord” invoked by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus. This conception of correspondence as friendly accord elucidates the notion of impersonal intimacy Bersani described earlier in the book as remaining in touch, through memory, with a god we followed. Correspondence also recalls Bersani’s earlier Baudelaire and Freud, where Baudelairean “Correspondances” signal not the harmony of self and world but an ego-disseminating spiritualization of the senses. This examination of Intimacies’ final passage also tracks a distinctively Bersanian oscillation between particularizing and universalizing engagements with the world in a mise en abyme structure that articulates possibilities for new modes of relation through practices of ascetic spirituality.
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lynne huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She is the author of a trilogy on Foucault’s ethics of eros: Foucault’s Strange Eros (Columbia University Press, 2020); Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Colum-bia University Press, 2013); and Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (Columbia University Press, 2010). She is also the author of Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford University Press, 1998) and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1992). She has published academic articles on feminist theory, queer theory, Foucault, ethics, and the Anthropocene, as well as experimental writing, personal essays, creative nonfiction, and opinion pieces in mass media venues. She is also the author, with Jennifer Yorke, of Wading Pool, a collaborative artists’ book. Her current book project is “The Ethics of Extinction: 99 Anthropocene Fragments.”
Lynne Huffer; Correspondence. differences 1 May 2023; 34 (1): 69–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10435562
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