Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays

by Leo Bersani

Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory—his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.

 

Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and although Foucault rejected psychoanalysis, Bersani contends that by considering his ideas alongside Freud’s, one gains a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another. For Bersani, art represents a crucial guide for conceiving new ways of connecting to the world, and so, in many of these essays, he stresses the importance of aesthetics, analyzing works by Genet, Caravaggio, Proust, Almodóvar, and Godard.

 

Documenting over two decades in the life of one of the best minds working in the humanities today, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays is a unique opportunity to explore the fruitful career of a formidable intellect.

Genres: Queer, Philosophy, Theory, Essays, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer Studies

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2009

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

[Gerhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

'In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” I suggest that the struggle against homophobia is doomed to failure if we ignore the psychic yearnings and anxieties that sustain homophobia. For many heterosexual men (the major source of homophobic persecution), homophobia has been a displaced, more “acceptable” form of misogyny.'

RTF.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

really good argument on the relationship b/w sex and power, pretty key in understanding sado/masochism studies and important to read in its original text rather than just others' summaries. hilarious read with a lot of polemical statements (sometimes hilarious in a way that can compensate for me disagreeing with him), good take on the stakes of queer assimilation and the de-sexualization of queerness. he really likes foucault
BUT bersani disagrees so much with judith butler it's annoying--he really does not buy into parody, subversion and gender insubordination. this is a real quote: "gays and lesbians play subversively--a word I've come to distrust, since it doesn't seem to mean much more than engaging in naughty parodies--with normative identities" (41), which he argues, only functions to contribute to gay assimilation. this seems to rely on an originary myth of heteronormativity that doesn't seem to fully tarry with butler's argument that heteronormativity may very well be constituted by opposition to homosexuality, and that it is not productive to imagine one as oppositional byproduct of the other.
also, he claims to be writing about all kinds of homosexuals/sometimes queer people but in practice is v gay male centric even when critiquing the centricity of gay men (like so many queer theorists tho tbh). he can be v essentialist and gender binary- seriously buys into and riffs on the idea of the perpetual "war of the sexes" which relies on originary myths. iffy with race/racism, often seems to take up black and white as umbrella terms for social power.

[Ai Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I intitially got this book for the title essay, but I'm really glad I read it all, because in some ways, it expands and makes legible what I found so frustrating about the first essay. (I will say, I've been ranking queer theorists--as much as Bersani resists that label--by how they make me feel; so far, it's Edelman makes me feel both stupid and angry, but Bersani makes me feel stupid but not angry.) I really think the rest of the book fleshes out what Bersani tries to say in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" which is good because to me, that essay feels massively unfinished. I will also say that it might really help your understanding of the book if you have a firmer grasp than I do on psychoanalytic theory (which is to say, any grasp at all.) I will probably be revisiting this again (I've already read the title essay three times, trying to understand it,) and am looking for people to talk with about it!

[Lars Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bij vlagen werpt Bersani relevante vragen en observaties op die (zoveel jaar na dato) nog steeds van toepassing zijn op het huidige queer discours. Niettemin zijn deze ideeën vaak verstopt onder een dikke laag Freud analyse. De essays zijn daardoor (onnodig) taai en repetitief van stof.

[Javier Ormeno · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not an academic review. I got this book sleeping on the shelf for a couple of months I was doing other academic work. The title, that in a Freudian slip I always recall as "Is the Anus a Tomb?", was suggestive as an allegorical interpretation opposing vagina as a cave where life comes to being.

Maybe because of this lapse of time I was disappointed by the analysis of the first essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?". I spent too long imagining a Jungian/Mythological explanation. The book abounds on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis mixed with pop culture insight. For lovers of movies, the article "Aggression, Gay Shame, and Almodovar's Art" is highly advisable. I enjoyed "The Will to Know" which brings some embodied insight into self-knowledge, in opposition with Cartesian theories of knowledge. "Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetics of Subject" contributes to the same position.

Not exactly my piece of cake but interesting to read.

[Regi · Rating 2 out of 5]

After running into this essay as a wide eyed baby gay, I dove deep into the rest of Bersani’s work. I now consider him one of my favorite critics if not my absolute favorite. So why the rating? After revisiting these essays in 2020 the antiblackness & ciscentrism really jumps out! I was expecting some white gay banter but this time around I found it unbearable. I want to think this gay icon has learned how racist and ignorant his views were. Hopefully Bersani gets around to apologizing and updating this book that brought him so much fame and money.

Although not quite an alternative but if you are looking for more reading on the HIV crisis I’d recommend the second half of Sontag’s “Aids and it’s Metaphors”.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read the title essay of this book, but it was absolutely mind blowing. This is real protest writing, and Bersani takes no prisoners; his observations are startlingly honest and totally irreverent to any ideology of gender, class, or sexuality. I found his conclusion a bit lacking after the vitriol of the first 19 pages, even a bit weak, but I think I need to re-read it.

I'm not super familiar with queer theory, but this essay feels like essential reading for gay men.

[roro · Rating 3 out of 5]

totally fascinating. lots that i resonated with in here—& i can’t help but always be intrigued by psychoanalytical approaches to bottoming. huge foucault guy here. also his polemical style can be really funny at times which i really appreciate in an academic. agree with many critics here about the weirdness of how he discusses race, but alas. white gay guys & such

[Julien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in 1987 during the peak of the AIDS crisis, Bersani investigates the homicidal threats underlying much of the anti-gay rhetoric in the coverage of HIV and AIDS at the time. Not only does Bersani note how the coverage of HIV, which addresses itself to an audience presumed straight and HIV-free, is much more interested in testing for and containing the disease, rather than caring for those suffering from AIDS and researching cures for it. Identifying “how a public health crisis has been treated like an unprecedented threat” (198), Bersani also quotes several ludicrous accounts from supposed authorities (like doctors) whose portrayal of the “gay lifestyle” which they link to HIV and AIDS is ridiculous—in one of the article’s epigraphs, for example, John Hopkins Medical School Professor Opendra Narayan claims that “these people have sex twenty to thirty times an hour” (197).
However, the turn that Bersani makes in his argument from this is startling. From here, he starts with the premise that the big secret about sex is that “most people don’t like it” (197). Informed by thinkers as diverse as Andrea Dworkin and Michel Foucault, Bersani zeroes in on the fundamental problem associated with the penetrative acts associated with HIV transmission: “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (212). He ties the stigma of anal penetration to both misogyny as well as more specific stigmas against prostitution in the early twentieth century. First, he comments on the larger discussion of the effect of gay stereotype “styles” on the heterosexual world. Calling into question the very valence of camp, Bersani notes that “if you’re out to make someone you turn off the camp” (208). Disagreeing with those who claim that gay “leather queen” styles cause insecurity in the heterosexual males it is parodying, Bersani instead argues that “nothing forces them to see any relation between the gay-macho style and their image of their own masculinity” (207). Further, he identifies that the hyperfemininity of drag queen performances “is both a way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that probably afflicts every male…and could also paradoxically be thought of as helping to deconstruct the image for women themselves” (208), though he admits that the “mindless, asexual, and hysterically bitchy” character of such performances most likely would provoke “a violently antimimetic reaction in any female spectator” (208).
In his discussion of the connection to prostitution, he notes the similarities between the imagined insatiability of the sexual appetites of gay men and prostitutes. Like the rate of an orgasm every two minutes imagined in the epigraph, they are “reminiscent of male fantasies about women’s multiple orgasms” (211). The promiscuity assumed in both populations is targeted in both populations as “the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated act”; this focus allows those in power to “‘legitimate’ a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this fantasy, far from increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infection” (211).
After considering the work of both anti-sex feminists such as Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as well as the investigation of sexuality, especially in the realm of S&M, of Michel Foucault, Bersani comes to an important conclusion:
the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition. It replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence. If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate, the phallicizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole. For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power….It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other. (218).
Bersani thinks that we should focus on this shattering as a key aspect of sexuality: what if stopped thinking of the so-called “passive” role in sex as demeaning, but rather that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (222). Ultimately, “if the rectum is a grave in which the masculine ideal…of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death” (222).
Bersani’s identification of misogyny at the heart of the anti-gay hysteria as well as his call to arms to re-think the sex act itself seems to anticipate Sedgwicks’ Epistemology of the Closet and quite a bit of subsequent queer theory. Reimagining and rethinking the meanings of the sites of sexuality is key theme in queer theory, which owes a lot to this essay.

[0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Merleau-Ponty, but gay.

Despite Bersani's reputation as the founder of the "anti-social turn" in queer theory, every essay here attempts to express a conception of love as an ethical commitment to overcoming the ontological difference between subject and object .

What if the indiscernability between activity and passivity in ___perceiving/fucking___ revealed, beneath the social antagonisms that undergird the projects of Freudian psychoanalysis & identitarian political projects, a more primordial correspondence between body and world, where inside & outside, past & present, and self & other are not mutually opposed, but intertwined variants of Being's never-ending process of self-relation?

Bersani follows Freud further than Freud was willing to go in his claim that gay love is, at its core, narcissistic, since the lover sees the beloved as similar to themselves. Mature object-love, by contrast, is for Freud premised upon sexual difference between self and other. But rather than object, as many queer theorists do, that Freud's conceptualization of homosexuality is pathological, Bersani celebrates it for proposing an expansive concept of narcissism which offers a way out of the political deadlocks of psychoanalytic conflict theory, in which self and other are pitted in an endless war against each other.

Drawing upon Heideggerian ontology and analyses of Proust, Genet, and Godard, Bersani proposes, beneath the narcissism of an imaginary ego that constructs itself in an accordance with the ideological demands of the Symbolic in an attempt to achieve a false sense of mastery and avoid the pain of object-loss, a more primordial relation to the world which he calls "homo-narcissism." Like the primary narcissism which Freud associates with oceanic feeling, homo-narcissism is pre-personal, anonymous, ontological rather than phenomenological, passively constituted by the world rather than actively constituting it, and at home in the world rather than alienated from it, ; but unlike Freud's conception of primary narcissism, in which differences between self and other are collapsed into a monism, homo-narcissism maintains that Being is composed of self-dispersing, self-differentiating replications. Homo-narcissism, then, by aiming at the destruction of the ego in order to return to a transindividual field of being, ultimately aims for the expansion of the self through worldly others. Otherness is no longer seen as threatening to the self, but is instead its necessary complement. Beneath a lacking, alienated ego attempting (and failing) to master a world of hostile objects, we find a surplus of more-than-human Being overflowing with a voracious desire for itself.

Psychoanalysis, as an ethical practice, ought not to aim at building up egos, but at dissolving them. The ego, as Lacan said, is the symptom par excellence. It is composed of libidinal drive energy that has become organized in accordance with prevailing social norms, which is to say that it is composed of the same (previously) disorganized libido that it now deems "other" from itself and feels itself threatened by. To practice of psychoanalysis consists in a painful coming to terms with the otherness that inheres in oneself, the otherness that oneself is and has mistakenly believed oneself to not be--an otherness that at once motivates and undoes the ego's attempt at self-identity. If we admit, with Freud, that "the ego is not the master in its own house," then it is a small step to admit that it is not the master in the house of Being, either--that the irreducible opposition between self and other, which for Freud produces the discontent within civilization, is in fact premised upon an originary forgetting of their sameness. What follows, then, is a way of relating to others that neither denies them their fundamental alterity, nor reifies it into an unbridgeable chasm that separates isolated subjectivities. We create others and the world from our own fantasies, from our own flesh, it's true, but the flesh of our fantasies, our flesh, is equally drawn from others and from the world. What we love in others reveals to us something fundamental about ourselves , but the self here is an impersonal, worldly self ("no one," to quote Merleau-Ponty), a self outside of our conscious sense of who we are, a self beyond the restricted narcissism of the ego and its others. This is a self that rides the crest of Being--not in a mystical oneness with Being that would erase all difference and conflict, but a self that echoes and expresses Being's many forms.

Bersani: "External reality may at first present itself as an affective menace, but psychoanalysis--like art, although in a more discursive mode--might train us to see our prior presence in the world, to se, as bizarre as this may sound, that, ontologically, the world cares for us. Finally...it is part of the complexity of a human destiny that we may fail to find that care sufficiently satisfying, and so we will undoubtedly never stop insisting--if only intermittently--that the jouissance of an illusion of suppressing otherness can surpass the pleasure of finding ourselves harbored within it" (153).

"Ideally conducted, analysis can lead to the dissolution of the self--that is, to the loss of the very grounds of self-knowledge...Seen in this way, psychoanalytic treatment would not be primarily a subject-object relation in which the analyst helps the analysand to excavate and to know the secrets or drives that have brought him or her to treatment. Rather, it would be an exercise in the depersonalization of both analyst and analysand, in the creation of a new, third subjectivitiy to which no individual name can be attached, a subjectivity in which the two find themselves corresponding--co-responding--in the transindividual being which, they have discovered, 'belongs' to neither of them, but which they share...We call such an exchange an experience of impersonal intimacy...Love is perhaps always--as both Plato and Freud suggest--a phenomenon of memory, but what is rememebered in the expansive narcissism of an impersonal intimacy is not some truth we know about the self, but rather, as [Adam] Phillips says in Intimacies , 'a process of becoming,' or, in other terms, evolving affinities of being. The subject's need to know the other, rather than being valued as our highest relational aspiration, should be seen, as Phillips writes of the relationship between mother and child, as 'a defence against what is unknowningly evolving, as potential, between them.' This potentiality is originally initiated by the mother's 'aesthetic of handling' and repeated but also modified and recategorized in the splintered, nonassignable subjectivity between analyst and analysand" (161-2).

[Myla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book posits important contributions for Queer theory & S&M Studies but one has to be well acquainted with Freud, Foucault, & Lacan (😩) to really understand it. It made me giggle that Bersani, in the final interview of the book, says that he is “moving away” from psychoanalysis. It made me giggle because of how much, throughout the rest of the book, Bersani depends on scaffolding of understand gleaned from knowledge of psychoanalysis to complete his arguments.

I finished this book nearly a week ago and delayed in writing the review immediately in hopes that I would have something of substance to contribute about some of the essays. Alas, they were so complicated that I think I would have to read this again in order to glean a better understanding. 3/5 because I think that there is something really interesting here, it just takes a lot of time and energy to unearth what he is saying (and more importantly what he is meaning).

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ali Gali assigned this reading last week for the 'Desire Reading Group'. Right before I learned that Bersani died today, I sent Ali a screenshot of a tweet saying:

"Since people are asking, here's the tweet that got Marjorie Tylor Greene permanently suspended (from Twitter): I think one of the more granular points of 'is the rectum a grave?' that has been neglected over time is that the aesthetics of heteropatriarchy embodied by gay men are not parodic in their own right but they *are* a crucial part of the self that is shattered through jouissance"

Marjorie Taylor Greene probably knows five words in that sentence. RIP Bersani

[Joey Mopsink · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF just because I don't know nearly enough about psychoanalysis to understand what the hell he was say half the time. Title essay was very good, though his approach to race therein feels dated if not outright racist.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Famously difficult to read. Killer opening line. Understood more than I expected for a queer theory text, but still very dense. I wish there was a more accessible breakdown between the relationship between HIV/AIDS and homosexuality to pornography, especially in regards to violence.

[andrew]

queer rage

[hania]

(only read the title essay)

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 3 out of 5]

the eponymous essay is a 10/10 classic piece of queer theory.

the rest of the essays in the collection are borderline unreadable, first-principles psychoanalysis.

[Jared]

Challenging but interesting.

[aerialxav]

Title essay

[Iason Marinopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read the essay.

Bersani say it can be and that's great, actually.

Low-key life-changing essay.

[Nicole]

very cool title essay - hoping to return to the rest of this book at some point

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only was going to re-read title essay but was entranced by these essays and interviews. I will need my own copy because the library is already calling this one back. I feel like all my floundering around in Freudian texts found a purpose with Bersani's ideas.