Intimacies

by Leo Bersani, Adam Phillips

Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here present a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination—though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential.
            In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across a variety of contexts. To test the hypothesis that the essence of the analytic exchange is intimate talk without sex, they compare Patrice Leconte’s film about an accountant mistaken for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers , with Henry James’s classic novella The Beast in the Jungle . A discussion of the radical practice of barebacking—unprotected anal sex between gay men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the personal. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror enter the scene as the conversation turns to the way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. Finally, in a reading of Socrates’ theory of love from Plato’s Phaedrus , Bersani and Phillips call for a new form of intimacy which they term “impersonal narcissism”: a divestiture of the ego and a recognition of one’s non-psychological potential self in others. This revolutionary way of relating to the world, they contend, could lead to a new human freedom by mitigating the horrifying violence we blithely accept as part of human nature.
            Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Theory, Essays, Queer

134 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

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

[Charlie Kruse]

unbelievable.

Bersani is truly goated. An undeniable writer who knows enough Freud to twist through the dense inconsistencies of his writing. Each piece is incredible, the essay on sociality and barebacking, the essay on the evil mindsets of imperial violence. Bersani is at once intensely philologic and speculative, taking psychoanalytic strains and pulling them like a zither player, making more discordant and complicated harmonies than any other writer of psychoanalysis. NEED a bersani reading group.

[Anthony]

Gosh dang it. This was amazing.

I’m currently toying with the idea for applying for PhD programs for English. It doesn’t quite make sense for an English teacher to have a doctorate but then again, I didn’t think logically when I became an English teacher with that salary.

Phillips! Bersani! How do we relate to one another? What are the problems and possibilities of human intimacy ? Using psychoanalytic thought, these two writers navigate the terrain of Freud, Lacan and Socrates’s with an instrument tuned to the possibility of relationships that defy identity and undo personality.

Every chapter feels like being a spectator of something amazing happening. The essays take clear stances and use psychoanalytic thought to make them run tackling the Invasion of Iraq, unsafe queer sex, Socrates theory of love & Dahmer.

I mean - how much better can this get? I was giddy reading this entire thing which I think says something deeply disturbing in me but that’s a topic for another time. A wonderfully written dialogue between two writers who exercise their curiosity in their unique voices.

[federico]

Immensely stimulating. There’s so much to consider in here. I found the dialogue a bit challenging to parse in its totality as someone with a very limited and self-educated grasp of Freudian concepts (and Lacanian ones). Still, I got so much out of this.

The barebacking essay is even more fascinating to think on in this now post-PrEP (and PEP) world, as is the curiosity about a mass psychological disposition toward/away from the Other and the violence of that disposition in this Trumpian world. Bersani, even when describing the limits and positing alternatives to the psychoanalytic process, clearly reveals himself to be ahead of his time. RIP

What to make of this more recent bend in academic writing away from psychoanalysis? Could it be we are finding Freud’s concepts limiting or stale, could we be ready to embrace alternate expressions and understandings of psyche? Maybe I am. Somebody come up a something quick

[Joe Sweeney]

Bersani had the right ideas

[Baris Balcioglu]

I officially became a member of a book club for the first time and we will read psychoanalysis and literature. We voted between two books. I voted for this thinking that it would be more down to earth than the other option, monogamy by Philips. I don’t understand Philips since the 1990’s. I admit that 30 years ago I just read a couple of pages of his book on why children get bored. Then I may have read one or two of his books more recently. This book helped me understand that psychoanalysis has its own language. Be it in Turkish or English, the words may be familiar to you but what they mean altogether is completely mysterious. Once in a while a good literary sentence gets you. So you think that there is some depth that you can’t fathom. I didn’t know who Bersani was and I learned that he was gay in the second chapter. This makes my reading a little bit biased. He must have been repressed. Then the first chapter, we tell everything to our analyst but we don’t sleep with them, was he trying to say that he loved some of his friends? When I was reading it thinking that he was an analyst himself I thought maybe he had crushes on his patients. The Henry James story mentioned is also along those lines. I couldn’t understand why a woman and a man would stay as friends when the society was thinking that they sere a couple. During our session I learned that HJ was also gay. The second chapter on barebacking was found the most interesting part in the meeting. We still couldn’t understand the explanations. I finished the rest of the book after the discussion. In the third chapter on evil I didn’t understand how it came to socratic love. But it seems we love ourselves in others? Loving someone else as he or she is is impossible? Socratic anecdotes were fun but only when interpreted to us. I don’t remember liking it (except for his defense) when I read it. It is good to recall how freud made use of his knowledge of antiquity while establishing his science. I get the impression that he is still the one in the field. These are, narcissism etc., things that we vaguely recall from freud. Such readings give a stimulus to read further to understand why we have some masochistic traits, what shame means etc. I didn’t again understand Philips’ response in the fourth chapter. We’ll see where this endeavor will take me to.

[Cody Stetzel]

This book was illuminating in parts, and scattered in others. I think importantly each chapter did have nuggets to glean and listen to; however, as a holistic project I think this work suffers from trying to be tied all together.

[Lars Meijer]

‘Impersonal intimicacy asks of us what is the most inconceivable thing: to believe in the future without needing to personalize it.’

[Mina-Louise]

Intense and often surprising.

[Evan]

Leo Bersani, I apologize. I didn't know you moved like this.

[Willem Pije]

Uneven, but Bersani on the unconscious as a 'well of potentiality', and Adam Phillips on shame and guilt made it more then worth it.

[SzeligaW]

Bersani and Phillip’s “Intimacies” is a peek into a conversation between two noted authors on the topics of love and intimacy. While I enjoy the writing of both authors, the layout and flow of ideas in this book seem scattered. Part of this feeling of scattered flow comes from the arrangement of the book as a broader conversation, with each chapter, a long soliloquy. This is part of the difficulty; many chapters (sides of the conversation) begin strongly in one direction but quickly diverge and begin to range widely. Rarely does the initial impetus for the discussion tie in neatly with where the chapter (side of the conversation) ends. While this format is much like a real-life conversation, where neither partner may have a long-term plan for argumentation (or, if they do, can not enact it), in book form, much is lost. The arc of the conversation is often difficult to follow, and oblique references are often made which then lead the conversation in a seemingly random direction. While this book does contain interesting seeds of ideas (perhaps for Plantin’?), a less experimental construction and editing may have helped to present these ideas in a more complete and organized format.

[David]

Just when I thought I was getting out of psychoanalysis . . . this pulls me back in.

[Sam]

it’s always a whacky little time to hang out with bersani and phillips. favorite quote: “we live our lives forward but we desire backwards.”

[Jinu Engels]

Didn’t finish. I think I’m gonna have to try re-reading this when I’ve got a clearer head. It was hard to force myself to learn about this psychoanalytic thought without being already interested in it.

[Milo R.]

(3.5)

[Anna Sosnina]

Wow, finally something original.

[غبار]

i liked the phillips essay a lot more than the bersani bits.

[Jordan]

Bersani nation rise up!

[Shaun]

Bersani’s writing is very intellectual, seems well formulated and sometimes extremely political which didn’t resonate with me. I was just here for Adam Phillips.

[gwen]

Thoughtful and productive. Also, quite pleasant and readable. Bersani’s connection of the Phaedrus to Freud is really really really good. Really really good.

[Violeta]

great. love the account of impersonal narcissism.

[Aaron Schuschu]

Bersani gets called out on his morbidness and concedes

[Caroline]

I read this on the floor of St. Mark's Books after a workshop in 2010 then again and still loved this most:

"I’m thinking of the way what presumably takes place in a Jamesian fiction is reduced to mere hypotheses about it in all those sentences beginning with 'It was as if…' Also, the omnipresent, Jamesian pluperfect makes of the conventional narrative past nothing more than an empty perspective on what presumably took place within that past; it pushes all taking place further back, into an unspecified beforeness. Or the taking place is projected in the other direction towards a future in which it is absorbed into a character’s retrospective reflection on it.

James’s characters are repeatedly taking the full measure of things (things inseparable from the appreciative consciousness in which they are embedded) “afterwards”; what James says of his heroine in The Wings of the Dove could be said of nearly all his centers: “Milly was forever seeing things afterwards." (20-21)

[Tobias Wiggins]

Brilliant.

[Erdem Tasdelen]

This seemed more promising than what it turned out to be.

[Yitzchok]

The second chapter is bizarre and interesting. The rest was terrible.