...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...

... not to knowing truth as a rational and self-conscious knower would know, but to loving truth, or, as Augustine would put it, to loving God, as an impassioned and self-abnegating lover would love. Augustine relies on images of bodily desire precisely because no set of abstractions could stimulate a love like...

... of thirdness by being able to hold in tension her or his subjectivity/desire/ awareness and the needs of the child. Otherwise the mother confuses self-abnegation with recognition of the child’s needs. The attempt...

... as a moral standpoint, such an ethic will include caring for their own lives. Perhaps, but it seems as though this discourse denotes responsibility for the growth and protection of others' egos, demands warmth, nurturance, and caring often precisely to the point of selfsacrifice. Failure and self-abnegation...

... circumscribes this as sexual violence—drives feminism and sexuality, but their pleasures do not neutralize the anguish that precedes, and exceeds, them. Something does not add up. Perhaps the self-abnegating intensity of MacKinnon’s knowingness is a powerful measure of what cannot be known: of sex...

... whether all morality is indeed “sphincter-morality” and, if so, whether moral responsibility is fundamentally coercive. “Is there a theorization of responsibility beyond bad conscience?,” Butler asks, or is all of morality the by-product of violent self-abnegation ( Giving 100 )? Although Butler...

... civilization” (Horkheimer and Adorno 37). From the interpretation of the Sirens episode as the founding moment of sexual self-abnegation to the reading of primitive patriarchal kinship in the com- munity of Cyclopes, Adorno’s attention...

... of German Romanticism and classical political economy. His new project, Murmurs of Democracy , explores the politics of poetic abnegation from Novalis to Beckett. Adorno, Theodor. “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre.” Gesammelte Schriften . Vol. 8 . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972 . 457 -77...

... converting the prostitute into "symbol" because she has no class-guilt-inspired commitment to violent tactics or self-abnegation. In fact, she confesses to the reader immediately after this passage, "I'm a frank physical coward, and the prospect of being worked over by pimps," should she begin to organize...

... is also, from another perspective, the ascetic reader, the reader of self-denial and self-abnegation, the reader who is only insofar as he or she (although gender might well go the way of history, biography, and psychology) is not. Dead to the world, the Author gives way to the reader, not exactly alive...

... or the common),17 is founded in envy may, says Freud, be observed in later processes where it turns up symptomatically in the self-abnegation people feel before desired objects. Freud gives us a rather peculiar list of examples...

... and power, without falling prey to social determinism. And she gives an account of the material nature of the human body without reinstalling the body's materiality as foundational or self-evident. These accounts of the subject and of the body's materiality are brilliantly linked together through her notion...