Thoughts and Things

by Leo Bersani

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields―including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.  Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.

Thoughts and Things  posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being―of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us.  He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent,  Thoughts and Things  will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

128 pages, Hardcover

First published November 27, 2014

About the author

Leo Bersani is an American literary theorist and Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He also taught at Wellesley College and Rutgers University.

Reviews

[Zoonanism · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Freudian meditations in this work, as they almost always tend to be, are ludicrous. But the Cartesian and Proustian meditations which Bersani employs in discussion of films, novels, and limits of relation formation by human subjects, have some charm.

[Justin Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

"How can we become unnamable?"(16)
"a male being out of the reach of a theatrics of maleness" (17)
"The process of identification classification is of course also one of legitimization" (20)
"How to resist the naming that confers legitimacy?" (24)