...Mikko Tuhkanen “Homomonadology” outlines the emergence and elaboration of Leo Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics over the past half a century, focusing particularly on his interest in the shared references to Leibnizian metaphysics in twentieth-century philosophical and literary texts. The essay...

...Forest Pyle A radical identification predicated on unlikeness: this is how Leo Bersani understands the singular mode of desiring that Emily Brontë invents in her incomparable novel. With Catherine and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights offers new “forms of being,” untethered to the world (of society...

...Karen Redrobe This essay explores Leo Bersani’s use of intellectual uncertainty, openness, and tautness in his writing to create a space for thinking about “what is politically unfixable in the human” ( Homos 71). In particular, this essay, which travels under the banner of the word perhaps , pays...

...Eleanor Kaufman While Leo Bersani makes repeated stringent critiques of relationality and other-oriented sexuality, drawing on an array of literary examples including Gide, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet, he evinces a somewhat ambiguous relation to the question of sadism and to sadism’s inherent...

...John Paul Ricco 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...

...Whitney Davis Mobility is one of Leo Bersani’s hardest-working terms, ubiquitous in his many studies of sexuality, art, and culture. This essay examines the valences of the term with specific reference to Bersani’s application of it in visual analyses, notably in his 1985 book on ancient Assyrian...

...Andrea Gadberry This essay remarks how a missing “hand” in Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption illuminates more than a rhetorical strategy; with it, Bersani undermines the problem of “incongruent counterparts” made famous by Kant. While Bersani’s “hand” replies most plainly to the logic...

...Bobby Benedicto This essay examines the role of failure in the work of Leo Bersani through the lens of self-shattering, impersonal narcissism, and castration. It revisits Bersani’s account of narcissism and masochism in “Erotic Assumptions” and critiques his subsequent shift toward impersonal...

...Mikko Tuhkanen Can we appear in the world otherwise than seduced by the promise of its suffering? Persistently returning to this question, Leo Bersani seeks the potential for the human subject’s nonsadistic reinitiation. He does this by visiting the “ontological laboratories” of Baudelaire, Freud...

...Lee Edelman Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences—sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced—this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view...

...Jacques Khalip; John Paul Ricco The editors’ introduction to this special issue of difference s titled Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani describes the issue’s focus on the speculative importance of aesthetics in Leo Bersani’s scholarship, especially his attention to a “syntax of thought...

...Tom Roach 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...

...Elissa Marder In “Cradling,” a chapter of Baudelaire and Freud , Leo Bersani shows how desire rocks the self. Desire always manifests as a movement that draws the self both toward and away from the object that excites it. Rocking simultaneously invokes infantile erotic enjoyment, an adult sexual...

...Joseph Litvak Leo Bersani was an enormously seductive critic, and he frequently wrote about seductiveness, beginning with his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art . This essay focuses on a passage in that book where Bersani discusses Proust’s character, the Baron de Charlus...

...S. Pearl Brilmyer This essay explores Leo Bersani’s relationship to deconstruction, arguing that although his thinking about language and signification is indebted to the deconstructive tradition, he ultimately departs from this tradition in his structural understanding of desire qua habit. A close...

...Richard Rambuss This essay reflects on Bersani’s sexually explicit, homosexually specific writings about sex from the vantage of sexual positioning, which can itself be thought of as complexly gendered, corporeally and psychically. Whereas gay male sex in the missionary position is the centerpiece...

...Ramsey McGlazer This essay studies figures of arrest and mobility, imprisonment and release, and “rigor and extravagance” in Leo Bersani’s writings. Focusing on The Forms of Violence , a study of late Assyrian sculpture coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit and first published in 1985, the essay at once...

...David L. Clark Leo Bersani is well known for making a case for the pleasures of sameness. But “to circulate within sameness,” he notes, “we must first of all welcome [ . . . ] lessness.” This essay explores that hospitable gesture in Bersani’s work, focusing on the self-abnegating practice...

...Ryan Dohoney In their ruminations on Mark Rothko’s Chapel paintings, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit posit a mode of aesthetic consciousness produced by acts of renunciation. Rothko deliberately relinquishes his paintings’ visibility and thus, like Beckett and Resnais, impoverishes a primary feature...

...Lynne Huffer 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...