Bøker av Leo Bersani

In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made 'gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.' Mired in micropolitics, for Bersani, queer activism had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as 'Gay Betrayals', Bersani's intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through 'antimonogamous promiscuity'.  Building on extensive artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani's polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality comes into view. A series of statuesque figures are caught as they feel the outlines of existing power structures, try out new strategies of inclusivity and, ultimately, wrestle with the blurred lineaments of identity and community.

Features two intellectuals who engage in a dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. In this book, their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination. It explores new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

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. This book is of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

Charts the connections that the author has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. This book considers the author's ideas alongside Freud's and helps gain a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another.

This book explores a fundamental paradox within Mallarme work as a whole.

Addresses homosexuality in modern culture. This text discusses queer theory, Foucault and psychoanalysis, the politics of sadomasochism, and the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust and Genet.

In each of the films discussed in this study - "Le Mepris", "All About My Mother", "The Thin Red Line" - something extraordinary is proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.