from Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” October, Vol. 82 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 3-16:
Leo Bersani: … I am interested in a pleasure in losing or dissolving the self that is in no way equated with loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is a kind of spatial, anonymous narcissism…
…This is the move Ulysse [Dutoit] and I trace in Caravaggio’s painting: from the teasingly enigmatic eroticism of the portraits of boys to the nonsexual sensuality of physical contacts, extensions, and correspondences, from a problem of knowledge (and interiority) to a kind of cartography of the subject, a tracing of spatial connectedness.
Kaja Silverman: …what interests me is the move you make beyond the categories we conventionally use to think the relational — categories like bodies and psyches. So I’m still very fascinated with that period of your and Ulysse Dutoit’s writing that extends from The Culture of Redemption, through Arts of Impoverishment, to Homos. Think, for instance, of the following formulation in Homos: “His sexual preference,” you write of a protagonist in Gide, “is without psychic content; there are no complexes, no repressed conflicts, no developmental explanations; only the chaste promiscuity of form repeatedly reaching out to find itself beyond itself.” With a sentence like this, you help us rethink the relational in terms of design. You remind us that the ego is in fact a form, although we don’t usually think about it that way… There is a lot to be gained in thinking about the ego in formal terms. First, it’s de-anthropomorphizing. It permits us to begin conceptualizing relationality outside the usual human categories, which have become very reduced in recent years through the insistence upon race, class, gender, etc. It helps us to understand that what we are at the level of the ego may be a much more complex issue than we are accustomed to imagining…
…Leo Bersani: … it becomes extremely important — for all of us, though it may be more available to homosexuals — to imagine the possibility of nonidentitarian community… And this is what the Genet scene on the rooftop and the correspondence of forms have in common: a peculiar notion of nonidentitarian sameness. Each man fucking the other replicates himself in the other, and they both replicate themselves outside, but there’s no identity there. In the same way, the formal correspondences that Ulysse and I talk about in our three books are not identical — it’s a kind of sameness that’s not identity. Inaccurate replication, nonidentitarian sameness: it corresponds to homosexual sex — not necessarily as practiced (very often the difference between sexes is reconstituted and played out between two men or two women), but the homosexual as category, as sameness in which the relation to difference would be a non-threatening supplement to sameness. At his or her best, the homosexual is a failed subject, one that needs its identity to be cloned, or inaccurately replicated, outside of it. This is the strength, not the weakness, of homosexuality, for a nihilistic civilization has been built on the foundation of a (factitious) inviolable subject. This is so important because I think the only way we can love the other or the external world is to find ourselves somehow in it. Only then can there be a nonviolent relation to the external world that doesn’t seek to exterminate difference. In this sense, “the homosexual” might be a model for this kind of communication of forms.
Tim Dean: This sounds like a version of a question raised in Homos: how desire gets attached to persons.
Leo Bersani: What we usually mean by desire between persons (something we understand psychologically, and therefore something quite different from the scenes in Genet and Gide I discuss in Homos) is by no means the model for the correspondences that interest us. In fact, the human itself has no ontological priority here…
…Identity-boundaries are violated not only as a masochistic phenomenon, but also as an effect of reaching toward one’s own “form” elsewhere. This self-dissolution is also self-accretion; it is self-incremental…
…If we still have “secrets,” they are now secrets not of interiority but rather of untraceable spatial disseminations…