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In Thoughts and Things, Bersani juxtaposes Jean Genet's novel, Our Lady of the Flowers with some of Pierre Bourdieu's thinking about how naming works. Bersani finds in Genet's novel a moment of unnamability that is, for him, a challenge to the legitimating naming power of the state and that justifies favoring a psychoanalytic framework over Bourdieu's, whatever the power of Bourdieu's thinking about naming and about structures of domination. This article challenges Bersani's reading of Genet's novel, which is more sociological that Bersani allows for. It also challenges Bersani's understanding of Bourdieu's thinking about naming and the state.

This article proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a much younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. My contention is that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared with Andréa to be a misfit one — one that we can to a certain degree recognize in practice but that we have no easy discourse or category to capture and/or to denote. Misfit sexualities, I argue, exist mostly in context, in interaction, in the relations between texts and the interactive processes that produce them. To attempt to contextualize a work such as The Malady of Death in this way is not to rely on or to take up any literary theory or practice of intertextuality. Rather it involves attempting to reconstruct something of the social world (mainly a part of "literary" Paris from the 1950s through the 1980s) in which such a work intervened, and attempting to understand the particular cultural concepts for understanding various ideologies and practices of sexuality it invoked, and in which it was implicated.

michael lucey teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He is the author of Gide's Bent Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford University Press,1995), as well as of a forthcoming book, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2002). His current book project is titled Never Say "I": Speaking for Queer Sexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Language of the Tribe -- part 1 A World of Insult -- 1 The Shock of Insult -- 2 The Flight to the City -- 3 Friendship as a Way of Life -- 4 Sexuality and Professions -- 5 Family and ''Melancholy'' -- 6 The City and Conservative Discourse -- 7 To Tell or Not to Tell -- 8 Heterosexual Interpellation -- 9 The Subjected ''Soul'' -- 10 Caricature and Collective Insult -- 11 Inversions -- 12 On Sodomy -- 13 Subjectivity and Private Life -- 14 Existence Precedes Essence -- 15 Unrealizable Identity -- 16 Perturbations -- 17 The Individual and the Group -- part 2 Specters of Wilde -- 1 How ''Arrogant Pederasts'' Come into Being -- 2 An Unspeakable Vice -- 3 A Nation of Artists -- 4 Philosopher and Lover -- 5 Moral Contamination -- 6 The Truth of Masks -- 7 The Greeks against the Psychiatrists -- 8 The Democracy of Comrades -- 9 Margot-la-boulangère and the Baronne-aux-épingles -- 10 From Momentary Pleasures to Social Reform -- 11 The Will to Disturb -- 12 The ''Preoccupation with Homosexuality'' -- part 3 Michel Foucault's Heterotopias -- 1 Much More Beauty -- 2 From Night to the Light of Day -- 3 The Impulse to Escape -- 4 Homosexuality and Unreason -- 5 The Birth of Perversion -- 6 The Third Sex -- 7 Producing Subjects -- 8 Philosophy in the Closet -- 9 When Two Guys Hold Hands -- 10 Resistance and Counterdiscourse -- 11 Becoming Gay -- 12 Among Men -- 13 Making Di√erences -- Addendum: Hannah Arendt and ''Defamed Groups'' -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index