The Best of All Possible Bersanis

Tom Roach (bio)
Bryant University

A review of Tuhkanen, Mikko. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. State U of New York P, 2018.

Early in Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire’s classic send-up of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysics (or perversions thereof), the windbag philosopher Doctor Pangloss explains the “sufficient reason” for his syphilitic condition. Responding to the naïve Candide’s inquiry, “Isn’t the devil at the root of it?” the good doctor declares: “Certainly not.… It is indispensable in this best of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting the West Indies, had not caught this disease…we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal” (30). Even as his nose rots away and his teeth blacken, the incorrigibly optimistic Pangloss clings to a belief in the pre-established harmony of this “best of all possible worlds.” In Voltaire’s rendering of a distorted Leibnizian worldview, everything—natural disasters, the Inquisition, grotesque bodily suffering, you name it—is for the best. The world has never been, and will never be, better; needing no improvement, things are, and will forever be…hopeless.

As I read Mikko Tuhkanen’s masterful survey of Leo Bersani’s oeuvre, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani, Voltaire served as a mooring post. His critique of totalizing and totalitarian idealisms dragged me kicking and screaming back to Earth. This is a compliment to both Tuhkanen and, as if he needs it, Voltaire. Tuhkanen so convincingly traces Bersani’s philosophical roots to Leibniz that I found myself drifting into the metaphysical stratosphere, enthralled by the seamlessness and clarity of the author’s holistic vision of Bersani’s “onto-ethics/aesthetics.” Yet even in my intellectual revelry, Voltaire’s materialist ethics—grounded in labor and what we might now call sustainability (Candide‘s final words are “we must go work in the garden” (144))—nipped at me like a gadfly, prompting rude reminders of the historical atrocities informed by various speculative idealisms. In short, reading Tuhkanen’s original and virtuosic take on Bersani’s work was an intellectual high: it swept me up, it thrilled me, and I learned a great deal. At the same time, closing its covers felt like a cocaine crash; after soaring at such great heights, the rock-kicking solidity of terra firma hit hard.

“It has remained infrequently noted,” Tuhkanen writes, “that Bersani is not only a thinker of the ethical potential of solipsism and masochism—of ‘the antisocial’—but also, always, a speculative ontologist who wants us to find ways of training ourselves in other modes of being-in-the-world than self-annihilation” (164). This sentence, appearing in the final pages of The Essentialist Villain, distills Tuhkanen’s thesis: although Bersani may be best known for his contributions to queer theory—especially for the so-called antisocial thesis introduced in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and developed in Homos (1995)—he is first and foremost a philosopher, and he should be read as such. Tuhkanen’s inclusion of the word “always” is also telling. He argues that, since the publication in 1965 of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art, Bersani has been formulating his singular onto-ethics/aesthetics. The philosopher himself more or less verifies this claim. In his 2013 preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust, Bersani writes, “all the later work is, in some ways, already included in the first study” (x-xi). Tuhkanen’s task, then, is to illuminate the often-obscured philosophical roots of Bersani’s intellectual trajectory and to track the conceptual consistency across his fifty-plus years of scholarship. Although Bersani’s scholarly interests range promiscuously from Assyrian art to astronomy to bareback porn, Tuhkanen finds a continuous thread, often hiding in plain sight, woven through Bersani’s diverse studies. That thread is Leibniz’s monadology.

Bersani, then, has worked from the get-go to flesh out what Tuhkanen describes as “homomonadology,” a speculative Leibnizian metaphysics predicated on an indivisible yet internally variegated essence. This essence is immanent and originary; it simultaneously manifests and re-manifests in the aesthetic experience. It is concretized in art, for instance, and sensualized in queer forms of sociability. In a Leibnizian-cum-Bersanian ontology, being is self-sufficient fullness. As a consequence, desire does not originate in lack, and progress does not depend on assimilating difference. “One way to describe Bersani’s entire oeuvre,” Tuhkanen notes, “is to say that it seeks other modes of our moving-in-the-world than that compelled by an originary lack” (5). According to Tuhkanen, homomonadology affords Bersani the conceptual framework to think beyond the dialectical sturm und drang of an anthropocentric psychoanalytic ethics grounded in lack. Homomonadology leaves in its wake a sadistic ethics of intersubjectivity and a masochistic ethics of self-shattering. What emerges is the Bersanian ethical subject: one that develops according to the rhythms of an impersonal, expansive narcissism, one that wants for nothing. In this onto-ethics, being moves from a centripetal retreat to a centrifugal extension to (re)connect with corresponding forms, a horizontal “drift of related forms towards each other in an immanent aesthetic field” (162). Through aesthetic encounters that diminish the power of the voracious ego (cruising, cloning, art), the subject becomes attuned to the connectedness—the “allness”—of the universe. Put succinctly, Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics rests not on the alluring enigma of difference (i.e., the Other), but rather on the appeal of an essential sameness that “tempts the subject with nothing that he does not already, in some form, have” (157).

This conceptual commitment to sameness makes Bersani anomalous in contemporary cultural studies. The philosophy of difference has dominated leftist critical thought since World War II, arguably as a response to fascist attempts to eradicate difference tout court. As a result, those invested in or working to revivify nondialectical, immanentist philosophical traditions (Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Antonio Negri) have frequently been sidelined if not skewered. Bersani’s quasi-outlier status in queer theory and cultural studies can therefore be attributed, in part, to his adherence to an “outsider,” non-Hegelian ontological tradition. Other thinkers associated with the antisocial turn in queer theory—even Lee Edelman, who champions the deadening role that queerness plays in the psychoanalytic dialectic of becoming—more often than not remain beholden to a Hegelian logic, be it Freudian, Laplanchian, Derridean, or Marxist. Bersani’s interventions thus cut deep because they refuse to invest in both difference and différance. When he declares that the goal of Homos (1995) is to “lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference” (7), Bersani is proposing not only a workaround to a divisive identity politics and an insipid multiculturalism; he is also announcing his allegiance to a nondialectical philosophical tradition that many at the time deemed fantastical, if not fascistic.

The Essentialist Villain is in the main an intellectual biography. With a refreshing emphasis on Bersani’s underexplored early scholarship, Tuhkanen works through Bersani’s oeuvre more or less chronologically to trace the philosopher’s intellectual development. Encounters with various thinkers clarify Bersani’s singular vision: Proust, Sigmund Freud (specifically, Jean LaPlanche’s reading of Freud), and, most surprisingly, Deleuze are identified as Bersani’s Holy Trinity. Although direct references to Deleuze are infrequent in Bersani’s scholarship, Tuhkanen claims that Deleuzean thought helped Bersani “locate[] in monadism the potentiality for an ontology of unrelated, singular beings” (30).

Tuhkanen is at his best when connecting the conceptual dots between Bersani and his interlocutors. With rigor and accessibility, a rare combination, he lucidly explains the key ideas of Bersani and many more. The subtitles of each chapter read in fact like a greatest hits of Continental philosophy and modernist aesthetics: Chapter One, “Homomonadology: Proust-Deleuze-Beckett-Blanchot”; Chapter Three, “Rethinking Redemption: Benjamin-Baudelaire-Nietzsche.” In each chapter, Tuhkanen reveals the sub-titular thinkers’ importance to Bersani’s philosophy. And while this setup might seem tedious—”Walter Benjamin argues x and Bersani rejects it because y“—it is a joy to behold the ease with which Tuhkanen explicates difficult theory. It is likewise a thrill to witness the fluency he demonstrates in the Western literary, artistic, and philosophical canon. Tuhkanen’s sophisticated genealogy of Bersanian queer theory is especially revelatory. He makes such a convincing case that Beckett’s ascetics and Baudelaire’s aesthetics are indispensable to Bersanian queer theory that I initially felt embarrassed that I hadn’t previously grasped this connection. In the end, I am grateful to Tuhkanen for helping me “re-categorize” my understanding; re-categorization is a crucial component of the Bersanian method, wherein thought undoes and recalibrates itself with unexpected additions. In my case, decades-old ideas about work I am quite familiar with opened onto new horizons. The Essentialist Villain not only made me long to read Bersani’s massive oeuvre from start to finish; it also ensured that I will never read him the same way again.

Which makes me, not unlike Voltaire, skeptical. As mentioned, Tuhkanen works hard to prove that the philosophical tradition Bersani is most indebted to is Leibniz’s. Although Bersani barely mentions Leibniz in his work, Tuhkanen asserts that the monad is the “crypto-concept” animating Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. Ulysse Dutoit may have been Bersani’s actual partner in writing the stunning Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998) and Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), among other books, but Leibniz, according to Tuhkanen, has been Bersani’s silent partner from the beginning. Indeed, in Tuhkanen’s hands Bersani’s oeuvre becomes almost a Leibnizian harmonious whole: each text is a monad offering a new perspective on a logical, legible universe; with each new Bersani publication, a connected totality comes into clearer focus. While some may view Bersani’s late-career re-categorizations of Freud and Proust as significant ruptures or productive discontinuities in the philosopher’s progression, Tuhkanen assures us in a somewhat Panglossian manner that everything is in its right place: recategorizations merely permit Bersani’s latent Leibnizianism to blossom (even “in his encounter with psychoanalysis, Bersani continues his conceptualization of monadism as a form of singularity” (61)). Everything Bersani touches, then, turns to monads. Put less snidely: although I wholeheartedly agree that Bersani should be celebrated and read as an important contemporary philosopher, Tuhkanen seems overinvested in tethering Bersani to Leibniz, and shaping Bersani’s oeuvre into a coherent Leibnizian whole. Almost like an auteur theorist revealing the signature stylistic features and hidden consistencies in a “genius” director’s films, Tuhkanen retroactively pins on Bersani an unconscious intentionality. As any good psychoanalyst can tell you, we always say more than we know, but at times I get the sense that Tuhkanen might be forcing Bersani to speak a language he is not wholly fluent in—or to which he is perhaps indifferent.

Granted, one task of the intellectual biographer is to situate a thinker in a scholarly context—that is, to reveal his or her dialogues with other thinkers, even if unwitting. However, Bersani’s supposedly secret, sotto voce conversations (especially with Benjamin, Deleuze, and, yes, Leibniz) sometimes seem more important to Tuhkanen than the direct engagements with the thinkers Bersani actually wrote about. For instance, although Bersani has spilled much ink over Foucault (see “The Gay Daddy” chapter in Homos, for starters), Tuhkanen claims that Deleuze is more important to Bersani’s edification. This claim makes sense only if the goal is to bind Bersani to Leibniz. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze wrote an entire book about Leibniz: The Fold is a meditation on monadology. To prove Bersani is Leibnizian at heart, Tuhkanen seems to exaggerate Deleuze’s influence and marginalize Foucault’s. Indeed, I’m not unconvinced that Tuhkanen’s fixation on the Leibniz-Deleuze-Bersani link is a Panglossian investment in ignoring material reality—literally, page upon page of Bersani’s writing on Foucault, among others—in order to make a theory stick. Further (and my Candide allusions end here), if Bersani is known for anything, it is for calling bullshit on trendy, under-interrogated theories: Judith Butler’s performativity, for one. In this sense Bersani is more like Voltaire, who has zero tolerance for sophistry, than the arguably sophistic Leibniz. Bersani’s wit—often distilled in brilliant opening salvos, such as “Rectum’s,” “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”—as well as his materialism—the fact that he grounds his onto-ethics in material practices—are likewise more Voltairean than Leibnizian. Although homomonadology is an original and rewarding interpretation of Bersani’s work, it fails to capture the Voltairean wit, skepticism, restlessness, and anti-salvationist down-to-earth-ness that are essential characteristics of Bersani’s scholarly persona.

But these are minor quibbles: Tuhkanen’s unpacking of Bersani’s influences, interlocutors, and his oeuvre itself does more than merely serve the purpose of argument. The book fills a lacuna in contemporary philosophy and opens up thrilling new possibilities for Bersanian queer theory. In the age of the neoliberal academy—when liberal arts departments are shuttered either because they are perceived as irrelevant to the accumulation of “real world” business skill sets, or because they are deemed inefficient due to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of measuring their course outcomes—at a time, moreover, when scholarly hoaxers seeking to de-legitimize queer and feminist scholarship prompt a crisis in the humanities at large,¹ a book like The Essentialist Villain is the new fuck you: its very existence is a proud middle finger to institutions, administrators, and academic con artists that work to make all knowledge production data-driven, measurable, business-friendly, sound-bitable, and “scientific.” The Essentialist Villain reminds us that solid, unorthodox, rigorous, and most importantly, speculative intellectual work is not only valuable in its own right, but is more necessary than ever.

Footnotes

1. I am referring here to Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who posed as women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS) scholars and submitted twenty fake articles to various journals in an attempt to prove that WGSS scholarship is “based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances” (qtd. in Schuessler).

Works Cited

• Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995.
• —. Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 2010.
• —. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. Second Edition. Oxford UP, 2013.
• Schuessler, Jennifer. “Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html. Accessed 11 March 2019.
• Voltaire. Candide, or Optimism. Translated by John Butt, Penguin, 1947.