Leo Bersani

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA. He is the author of The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018) and The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2009). He is also the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014), as well as the co-editor, with E. L. McCallum, of Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011) and The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014).

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.

• AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction Part I Wanting Being 1. The Psychoanalytic Subject 2. What Is an Individual? (A Deleuzean Query) 3. Performativity and Speculative Politics 4. The Antisocial Thesis Part II The Correspondence Thesis 5. Whither Narcissus? 6. Saving Frivolity, or, On Sociability and Spandrels 7. The Virtual Unconscious Part III . . . But Is It Art? 8. Fascinating Rhythm 9. Leo Bersani’s Speculative AestheticsWorks Cited Index