Leo Bersani > Quotes

“It is indeed strange that we find it so difficult to welcome...the blissful nature of the loss of the power of selfhood—a power it was, in any case, always an illusion to think we possessed.”
― Leo Bersani, Intimacies

“Those who rule us have brilliantly applied the maxim that the best defense against truth is the unswerving repetition of lies.”
― Leo Bersani, Intimacies

“power aims to produce subjects defined (and, correlatively, made visible and controlled) by particular desires.”
― Leo Bersani, Intimacies

“Sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart.”
― Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays

“The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical idea, it is a sanction for violence. If sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence. Gay men's 'obsession' with sex, far from being denied, should be celebrated--not because of its communal virtues, not because of its subversive potential for parodies of machismo, not because it offers a model of genuine pluralism to a society that at once celebrates and punishes pluralism, but rather because it never stops re-presenting the internallized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of sacrifice. Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.”
― Leo Bersani, [Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays] [By: Bersani, Leo] [December, 2009]

“Are communitarian identities necessary, or even desirable? Does sociality depend on such identities? To what extent do antagonistic confrontations between different communities derive not merely from particular historical and sociological conditions but, more profoundly, from the very value attributed to communitarian identities? Doesn’t this valorizing of particular communitarian - and cultural - identities in turn privilege difference over sameness in human relations, thus condemning the social to repeated efforts to overcome the trauma of difference as well as to a dependence on such weak cohesive virtues as a mere tolerance for diversity?”
― Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays

“Cliché is, in a sense, the purest art of intelligibility; it tempts us with the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas, of obscuring the arbitrary nature of imagination with an appearance of necessity.”
― Leo Bersani

“The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence.”
― Leo Bersani, [Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays] [By: Bersani, Leo] [December, 2009]

“Sociality in Genet is something like a series of ejaculatory relays of the self through others, and an explosively narcissistic view of community that is, however, identical to a generous outpouring of the self. This homo-narcissism breaks down ego boundaries instead of reinforcing them. The renunciation of the couple's oval-like intimacy may be the precondition for a community in which relationality is a function of sameness rather than of hierarchical or antagonistic differences, a community in which we might be indifferent to difference, in which difference, instead of being the valued term, would be the nonthreatening supplement of sameness.

This would involve a kind of opportunistic appropriation on our part of some of the very categories that have been imposed on us. In particular...we might welcome the identification of homosexuality with sameness by insisting on the radical potential in that identification: the potential for our having a privileged role in demonstrating how a sort of impersonal narcissism can break down the defensive formation of the self-congratulatory ego, a breaking down that must take place if a fundamental restructuring of the social is ever to take place.”
― Leo Bersani, [Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays] [By: Bersani, Leo] [December, 2009]