Leo Bersani

Sociability and Cruising

The author analyses and interprets Georg Simmels essay, The Sociology of Sociability and Sigmund Freuds Group Psychlogy and the Analysis of the Ego.

Rohmer's Salon

Eric Rohmers films are repeatedly concerned with love affairs and matchmaking schemes, and they feature social occasions during which much of the talk concerns intimacy and romance. However, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, they also explore alternatives to such eroticism and such conversation——especially strange and nonsexual connections between characters and their environment.

“I Can Dream, Can't I?”

A fairly eminent colleague recently described to me his recurrent dream: Having been invited to lecture at a university in an unidentified city, he has chosen to stay at a downtown hotel a few miles from campus. The lecture has been scheduled for 4 PM, and at about 3:45, still in his hotel room, he suddenly realizes that he has only fifteen minutes to get to the building where his academic audience has, he assumes, begun to gather. In a panic, he rushes outside and tries to hail a taxi. In some versions of the dream, there is no taxi to be had; in other versions, his cab gets stuck in heavy city traffic; in still others, the taxi runs out of gas and he must, desperately, search for another one. Or, in the most peculiar twist in this minor nocturnal epic of a failure to reach an assigned destination, the taxi driver makes a detour into a rural setting adjacent to the city where he stops to visit his aged parents, who cordially invite my exasperated friend in for coffee and cake. In the next frame he has, somehow, arrived at the lecture hall, which is—perhaps the dreamwork’s compensation for his harrowing journey—packed with students and faculty. But, it turns out, my friend has brought the wrong lecture, and—although he is to be introduced in a few moments—another colleague offers to rush back to the hotel and bring the right one. This is especially embarrassing since my friend is aware of having something of a reputation on the university lecture circuit for not having the lecture he is expected to give and for having to improvise, awkwardly, with none of the verbal elegance and eloquence for which his talks had been appreciated. In another dream, which my friend and colleague thinks of as analogous to the one just described, he is in an apartment in Rome—where he often goes for research purposes for one or two months—on the day of his

“Ardent Masturbation” (Descartes, Freud, and Others)

What is the status of ontological certainty in the work of Rene Descartes? A long tradition in Cartesian scholarship has taken that certainty for granted— even while frequently attacking the grounds of Descartes’s apparently secure assurance of being. In the third of the seven sets of Objections solicited by Descartes himself and published in the same volume as the first and second editions of the Meditations in 1641 and 1642, Thomas Hobbes (who had fled to France for political reasons in 1640) writes: “All philosophers make a distinction between a subject and its faculties and acts, i.e. between a subject and its properties and its essences.” But Descartes, he objects, “is identifying the thing which understands with intellection, which is an act of that which understands.” I think, Descartes argues, therefore I am a thinking thing (a res cogitans); “I might just as well say,” Hobbes comments, “I am walking, therefore I am a walk.”1 Closer to us, Martin Heidegger, in the critique of traditional ontological presuppositions that opens Being and Time, accuses Descartes of leaving “undetermined . . . the kind of Being which belongs to the res cogitans, or—more precisely—the meaning of the Being of the ‘sum.’” Descartes came to suppose, according to Heidegger, that the certainty inherent in the cogito “exempted him from raising the question of the meaning of the Being which this entity possesses.”2

Psychoanalysis and the aesthetic subject

Psychoanalytically conceived, the world interests us, seduces us, even dazzles us to the degree that it contains us – whether it be as a projection, an identification or an original loss. Can the work of art, contrary to these psychoanalytic assumptions, deploy signs of the subject in the world that are not signs of projective identifications or of an object-destroying jouissance, signs of what I call correspondences of being within a universal solidarity of being? This question is addressed through a discussion of Pierre Michon’s novel, La Grande Beune, which can help us to redefine fantasy, the unconscious and the subject’s relation to the world.