Leo Bersani : A Speculative Introduction

For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”-the questions that we find and refind-in Bersani's extensive oeuvre across the decades.

The chapters explore Bersani's engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Laplanche, Klein, Lacan), French and American modernist fiction (Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, James, Beckett), poststructuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot), queer theory (Butler, Edelman), and the visual arts (Caravaggio, Almodóvar, Pasolini, Malick, Dumont). This first introduction to Bersani's work provides a chronological overview of his thought and details his contributions to literary studies and critical theory.

“Leo Bersani's greatness is tied to a resolutely interlocutory ethics-to his generous thinking-with (with Sade, Proust, Freud, Laplanche, Deleuze, Foucault, Beckett, Dumont; with art by way of doing theory and with theory by way of making a kind of art). Mikko Tuhkanen honors this half-century-long project by taking Bersani as his interlocutor to explore the ambivalences, tensions, irresolvable questions, but also rhythms, fascinations, and, yes, seductions of twentieth-century continental theory. Tuhkanen is a worthy Beatrice, guiding us through the paradisiacal riches of Bersani's beautiful, rigorous, and gloriously destabilizing readings.” —Eugenie Brinkema, author of The Forms of the Affects

“This illuminating overview is both a lucid introduction to Leo Bersani's thought and a bold reinterpretation of it. Highlighting the patterns that have shaped Bersani's rich and complex work across the span of his long career, Tuhkanen provides a new framework for understanding his influential ideas about sex and sexuality in relation to his equally compelling insights about aesthetics, ontology, and ethics.” —Brian Glavey, Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina, USA