Suchergebnisse

Homomonadology: Proust, Deleuze, Beckett, Blanchot -- Wanting being: Freud, Laplanche -- Rethinking redemption: Benjamin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche -- Simultaneity and sociability: Benjamin, Beckett, Simmel -- Narcissus, a cosmology: Luther, Freud, Plato, speculative astronomy

Intro -- The American Optic -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: "Richard, Jacques -- Jacques, Richard" -- 1. A [B]igger's Place:The "Racial" Subject in the White Symbolic Order -- 2. The Grimace of the Real: Of Paranoid Knowledge and Black(face) Magic -- 3. Unforeseeable Tragedies: Symbolic Change in Wright, Fanon, and Lacan -- 4. The Optical Trade: Through Southern Spectacles -- 5. Avian Alienation: Writing and Flying in Wright and Lacan -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- VV -- W -- Y -- Z.

Can we appear in the world otherwise than seduced by the promise of its suffering? Persistently returning to this question, Leo Bersani seeks the potential for the human subject's nonsadistic reinitiation. He does this by visiting the "ontological laboratories" of Baudelaire, Freud, and Caravaggio, among others. This essay threads the work of this experimentation across his texts, assessing the appeal and anguish of the summons to the undoing—a before—of life's actualized forms.

"Homomonadology" outlines the emergence and elaboration of Leo Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics over the past half a century, focusing particularly on his interest in the shared references to Leibnizian metaphysics in twentieth-century philosophical and literary texts. The essay begins by detailing Bersani's early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), with Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, as well as Gilles Deleuze's and Maurice Blanchot's commentaries on the two writers. Having borrowed Deleuze's description of Proust as a "Leibnizian," Bersani moves from the Proustian to the Beckettian text, organizing his reading in such later texts as Arts of Impoverishment (1993, cowritten with Ulysse Dutoit) around Beckett's allusions to monadology. "Homomonadology" argues that the concept of the Leibnizian monad allows Bersani to articulate an onto-ethics of singularity and correspondences, of nonrelatedness and unity, in a way that comes to inform his post-1980s work on queer theory and queer ethics. It is Bersani's commitment to ontology that renders his work, despite its influence on a number of fields, something of an anomaly in the contemporary critical field. With his varied sources—Deleuze, Proust, and Beckett among the most important—Bersani becomes, as he puts it in an interview, "an essentialist villain" in scholarly fields often driven by constructivist, antiessentialist imperatives.

Introduction. Becoming unbecoming: untimely mediations / E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen -- Queer aesthetics / Claire Colebrook -- Sedgwick's twisted temporalities, "or even just reading and writing" -- Jane Gallop -- Bareback time / Tim Dean -- No second chances / David Marriott -- Nostalgia for an age yet to come: Velvet Goldmine's queer archive / Dana Luciano -- Happy futures, perhaps / Sara Ahmed -- Close reading the present: Eudora Welty's queer politics / Lloyd Pratt -- "My spirit's posthumeity" and the sleeper's outflung hand: queer transmission in Absalom, absalom! / Kevin Ohi -- Stein un Zeit / E.L. McCallum -- Mestiza metaphysics / Mikko Tuhkanen -- Return from the future: James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography / Valerie Rohy -- Still here: choreography, temporality, AIDS / Steven Bruhm -- Keeping time with lesbians on ecstasy / Judith Halberstam -- Rhythm / Kathryn Bond Stockton