Leo Bersani’s Speculative Aesthetics

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisting one another, also continuously repeat, re-find one another. The viability of our being-in-the-world depends on a certain continuity in our exchanges with an otherness never wholly differentiated from ourselves. The perception of correspondences and analogies is the preliminary step to the discovery as well as the creation of new correspondences and analogies.–Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies

Original thought cannot be “criticized”; one can only move with—which is to say, be moved by—it, only yield to its rhythm or fascination. “Critical” approaches not only assume that an object is available for recognition, that extant criteria suffice for its translation, they also embrace the reactive ethos whose hegemony in nineteenth-century historiography Friedrich Nietzsche traced to the insidious influence of Hegelian dialectics (“On the Utility” 142-43). Forsaking all critical postures, all ambition to rub against thought’s grain, reading happens, and happens only, when readers approach a text “without reserve, without trying to criticize it” (Wright 238). Leo Bersani suggests that another name for an “unreserved” readerly attitude is “speculativeness.” All thought worthy of the name speculates: its operation coincides with the self-reflexivity indicated by the term’s etymological history (Lat. speculārī, speculum). In this, Bersani commits to an unpopular position: notwithstanding the recently re-emergent tradition that runs via Alfred North Whitehead to contemporary “speculative realists,” claims for the efficacy of speculations have not fared well since Immanuel Kant dismissed synthetic a priori propositions in metaphysics and Karl Marx designated speculative thought, exemplified by Hegel, as the constitutive error of Western philosophy.

The term “speculation” and its derivatives recur in Bersani’s texts with striking frequency. When, in a recent interview, Bersani was asked if this repetition signals his work’s affiliation with what is called “speculative philosophy,” he expressed hesitation and doubt: “That I’m not sure of,” he grumbled and changed the subject (“Rigorously” 292). The wager of the present essay is that, a little uncannily, Bersani’s oeuvre, unfolding over the last half century, contributes to this philosophical history and is itself speculative. This kinship is uncanny because, as the interview response suggests, Bersani himself is not fully aware of (nor, it is important to add, does he care about) the implications of his participation in this genealogy. While he consistently indicates that the only thought worth committing to is always “speculative,” he is not attuned to this term’s full resonance in the history of philosophy (a deafness shared, I happen to know, by the interviewer who posed the question).

The recent book Receptive Bodies (2018) contains some of Bersani’s most explicit statements about the nature of “speculative” thinking. Bersani proposes that “essayistic writing”—a style with which he identifies his own work—constitutes “a way of writing that wanders, inconclusively,” one that, as he rephrases, “moves speculatively” (Receptive 126, 128). Speculative writing demands that one is “thinking rigorously, but with an unemphatic, even somewhat relaxed rigor” (Receptive 126); it is marked by “the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking, and of inconclusive being” (Receptive 128). Bersani asks, “why not simply welcome the pleasure in repeatedly failing to conclude—in our thinking, in our writing, in our sexuality?” (Receptive 127-28). Why not, that is, yield to our becoming as speculative beings? While these ideas are given the most explicit attention in Receptive Bodies, they are not new in Bersani’s work. In a characteristic moment in 1995, for example, Bersani encourages us to “speculate” about a work of art beyond what the text “seems to authorize” (Homos 117); in 1990, he speaks of “the risky movement of speculative thought, of thought unanchored, set loose from all evidential ‘land’ securities” (Culture 151); and, in 1981, he finds in Stéphane Mallarmé’s work a mode of thought marked by—we will come back to this—”speculative restlessness” (Death 42-43, 44). It is particularly in Freud that Bersani identifies the speculative artistry that he comes to promote as his own method of thinking: in several texts over the decades, he wants to attune us to the “speculative movement” (“Subject” 7), “speculative procedures” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Violence 120), and “speculative mobility” (Is the Rectum 126) characteristic of Freud’s—and Freudian—thought.

Bersani’s interest in “speculativeness” from the mid-1970s until Receptive Bodies suggests that this concept, all but abandoned after Marx as a self-serving bourgeois alibi, has unfulfilled potential. Yet terms such as “inconclusive,” “unanchored,” and “restless,” which Bersani deploys in Receptive Bodies, fail to fully describe “speculative” thinking. This becomes particularly evident when we situate the concept in the history of a philosophy about which he, probably sincerely, claims to be uninformed. In this context, the speculative mind is not merely an “anchorless” observer who “swerves” from one object to another without a predetermined goal, not merely a “wandering” spirit released from teleology to endless, disseminative play. Rather, the speculative thought that Bersani elaborates, and which he identifies as his own mode of thinking, is driven by what Hegel, the speculative philosopher par excellence, calls the “self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual life” (Hegel, Science 35): speculations unfold according to an “immanent rhythm” (Phenomenology §58 [36]), follow a “self-constructing path” (Science 10). When Bersani reads various works of art as experimentations with the possibility of “true singleness” (Future 181), or of “an identity wholly independent of relational definitions” (Bersani and Dutoit, Arts 51), he is testing the viability of what Hegel would call “the speculative proposition” (der spekulative Satz). In this, he parts company with most of his contemporaries, especially those influenced by Jacques Derrida. In their variously slanted critiques, Marx and Derrida finished off, so it has seemed, speculative philosophizing in its Hegelian mode. “The concept of speculation,” as Werner Becker modestly proposes, “has seen better days” (1368); “speculation,” writes Walter Cerf, has become “a bad word” (xi). Bersani’s ability to deploy and develop the concept in various contexts since the mid-1970s depends on his lack of investment in philosophy’s disciplinary conceptuality. His and Derrida’s contemporaneous readings of speculative thought, overlapping mostly in their commentaries on Freud but also on Mallarmé, at once synchronize and diverge in ways that will allow us to identify the peculiarities of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics.

This essay makes a case for “speculation” as one of Bersani’s most important “crypto-concepts.” The phrase is Jean Laplanche’s: it designates a concept that, “although it forms the object of no individual article or specific presentation, plays an important role in the structure of the system” (Laplanche, “So-Called” 458). While Bersani hardly ever directly addresses the question of “speculation”—the passages in Receptive Bodies constitute his lengthiest elaboration—the concept emerges early on as something of an organizing principle in his onto-ethics/aesthetics. I will trace the idea in his texts from its first appearance in the mid-1970s to its implicit presence in his first substantial discussions of Hegel’s work some forty years later.

Because Bersani’s references to speculation in Receptive Bodies tend to gloss over the concept’s most distinctive characteristic, what follows seeks to take up and continue the movement of his thought beyond its explicitly articulated forms. Bersani’s work is organized around what Hegel, speaking of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, calls “the speculative kernel [das Spekulative]” (Faith 186; W 2.429),¹ a kernel that coalesces originally in Bersani’s early engagement with Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s studies on Hegelian philosophy. Derrida and Nancy are relatively recent contributors to the long history of speculative thought, which I outline briefly in the first section of this essay. Kant, Hegel, and Marx are often cited as turning points in this history, thinkers at odds with each other in whose work the tenability of modern speculative thinking is debated. Such debates, I argue, carry over to Bersani’s work, where their philosophical stakes are met with a certain playful disinvestment. This loosening of the grip of philosophical conceptuality is typical of Bersani; as he reminds us, he is not “a professional philosopher” but a reader of literature and other works of art (“Rigorously” 289). With its insistent attention to the echoes of his philosophical contemporaries in his work, this essay risks anchoring his “floaty” ideas to the “land securities” of conceptual histories. Yet my aim is to trace the strange coincidence of frivolity and consistency through which the idea of “speculativeness” is transformed in Bersani’s texts across five decades. At stake is the question of “rigor” in speculativeness: What is the precise meaning of this modifier? How does one speculate rigorously? Toward the end of the essay, I propose that to fully gauge what Bersani means by the term, we should read it in the context of the revised Platonism that he first gleans from Charles Baudelaire’s and Marcel Proust’s aesthetics and that will morph into what I will call his theory—an onto-ethics/aesthetics—of “speculative narcissism.”

Becoming Speculative

The famous impermeability of Hegel’s system to critique—the fact that all attacks are found to have been anticipated by the Master²—is a feature of his philosophy’s “speculativeness.” For Hegel, we must forge a thought that evolves not by overcoming external obstacles but by actualizing its own immanent logic; we must, in other words, become speculative thinkers, moving from reflection to speculation, from “subjective” to “absolute” idealism. Hegel reasserts the importance of speculativeness to philosophy—a speculativeness yet to be thought—after what he considered its wrongheaded dismissal by Kant.³

Hegel saw a revolutionary potential in critical philosophy. As he writes in 1801, “the authentic principle of speculation [is] boldly expressed” in the transcendental deduction of the categories (Difference 81). Kantian thought, as elaborated in the Critique of Judgment, allows for speculativeness in the form of “intuitive understanding” and “inner purposiveness” (Encyclopaedia §55 [102]).⁴ Yet, for Hegel, Kant’s attempt to disrupt philosophy’s self-indulgent delusions had stalled from the start. Kant failed to precipitate speculativeness because, having hypothesized the existence of intuitive knowledge, he ruled it out as a possibility: operating in concepts and sensible intuitions, human intellect is “discursive” instead. Because Kant assumes that the “discursive” intellect of human cognition cannot access “the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute” (Hegel, Faith 62), he ends up constructing a series of dualisms around which his philosophy operates: sense/intellect, intuition/concept, discursive/intuitive, appearance/in-itself. For our context, the most important of these dualisms is that of “knower and known [Erkennendes und Erkanntes]” (Difference 164; W 2.105). If reason “make[s] itself reflection by opposing itself to the object absolutely,” the “supreme task” of speculation is to “suspend the separation of subject and object in their identity” (Difference 164, 177).

The concept of speculation—and particularly its actualization in speculative propositions⁵—highlights the aspects for which Hegelian philosophy is both celebrated and dismissed: on the one hand, its rigorous immanentism; on the other, its totalizing, perhaps totalitarian, ambitions. Hegel’s revolutionary insistence that dialectical movement is fueled by the instability inherent in being has been enabling to generations of political and cultural theorists; its legacies can be detected, for example, in the founding principle of late-twentieth-century Cultural Studies, according to which any system’s internal contradictions precipitate the “subversion” of its norms. Yet critics, often following Marx’s lead, have also seen in speculative philosophy an insidious effort to undo all the otherness with which predicative events might challenge the subject’s autonomy. In Marx and Engels’s influential summary, Hegelian thought exemplifies “the illusions of German speculative philosophy” insofar as it has been disastrously “abstract” and, as such, a natural ally to the market “speculators” who, by obfuscating the material conditions of economy, benefit from exploitative systems (German 171). In the form of “speculative philosophy of law,” Hegelianism affirms some of Western philosophy’s worst habits in that it supplies nothing but “abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state” (Marx, “Contribution” 181). As the term’s etymology tells us—abstrahere and abstractus suggest the “incorporeal” and the “secluded” (OED)—the Hegelian subject gazes at the world from the heights of disembodied solitude. Thus, the speculative subject evinces the spirit of the despotic monarch who contemplates the world “enthroned in sublime solitude” (Marx, “Critique” 328). In this way, the Hegelian mind betrays the revolution that was supposed to have unseated all such imperious rulers. Subsequent critics have echoed Marx in proposing that “totalizing history” such as Hegel’s “leads to a totalitarian political philosophy” (Roth 54); Hegel is frequently evoked as philosophy’s “totalitarian bogeyman” (Pippin 5).

With its totalizations, and perhaps totalitarianism, the Hegelian system suffers, in Fredric Jameson’s recent diagnosis, from a narcissistic disorder, “the narcissism of the Absolute” (131). In speculative philosophy, the self and the world have always already coincided; nothing exists that is not in an a priori relation with the subject. Like the narcissist, the speculative philosopher, enraptured by his mirror image, dissolves all otherness into sameness. The Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer similarly identifies in Hegelianism a perfect example of “modern narcissism,” driven by the error that Martin Luther called the human incurvatus in se, the subject’s speculative turning upon itself, away from revelation. For Bayer, we hubristically assume to reach divinity by reason, deducing its otherness from what we see in this world’s mirrors. Yet God, Bayer writes, “is not our mirror-image; God does not allow himself to be the object of human speculation” (312). Heedless of Luther’s warning against the speculative orientation, Western tradition proceeded on its speculative way, ending up with Hegelian idealism: “With great style, the Western concept of the movement of self-consciousness as a ‘complete return of Mind to itself’ reaches its apex in Hegel’s thought. Even theologians have not been able to extricate themselves from the fascination of the thought of the speculative mind that is in love with its own mirror reflection” (Bayer 304). The Hegelian subject, something of an aesthete in its “stylishness,” is frozen in an adoring posture in front of Narcissus’s instrument, deaf to the call of love that issues from beyond the fascinating mirror.

In ways that most of his texts don’t quite explicate, this philosophical history resonates in Bersani. Before Receptive Bodies, the concept emerges in its most elaborated—although still implicit, “cryptic”—form in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1985). In this study, “speculativeness” is symptomized in the “theoretical collapse” that for Bersani marks the “authenticity of Freud’s work,” the articulation of what he calls, with some hesitation, “psychoanalytic truth” (Freudian 3, 10). Freud is at his most original when his theorizations fail to offer us knowledge about the object of his investigation and, instead, take on—recapitulate—the fate of the human subject whom he seeks to theorize. By “recapitulation,” I mean to evoke the law of “theoretico-genesis” with which Laplanche, referring to Ernst Haeckel, describes the peculiar way in which Freud’s texts systematically repeat (rather than describe) the human subject’s errancy and aporias.⁶ Instead of an authoritative description of the subject’s coming-into-being, Freud’s texts, as if contracting the traumatized condition of the object, begin to exhibit “a type of blocked thought, of speculative repetition” (Freudian 5), a stuttering with which the Freudian text performs the human subject’s inability to speak of the unassimilated catastrophe of its origination.

The crypto-concept occurs in its embryonic form in the conclusion to the 1976 study, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, amidst a commentary on recent tendencies in literary scholarship. Bersani suggests that, rather than producing “knowledge” about literary texts, critics performatively replicate art’s operations in ways that render their work all but indistinguishable from literature: “the critic follows his writer so closely that he begins to duplicate the latter’s achievement” (Future 311).

Bersani is alluding to the emergence of the kind of theorizing exemplified by Blanchot, Barthes, and Derrida, whose recently published Glas (1974) he calls “a fascinating attempt to move toward authentically new shapes of ‘critical’ discourse” (Future 333n4). He describes this “new” kind of scholarship as follows: “While criticism continues to lean on other texts, it also now seems to be making a claim for the esthetic appeal of its own procedures; the myth of criticism as a transparent explication of literature is abandoned” (Future 311-12, emphasis added). Because this passage comes from the concluding section of a chapter in which Bersani has, for the first time, taken on Laplanche’s analysis of Freud—an influence that is to be formative for all of his subsequent work—the phrase “leaning on” demands some attention. Describing the critic’s relationship to the artwork, he borrows the locution silently, and perhaps unconsciously, from Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). In this study, Laplanche points to “leaning on” (Anlehnung, anlehnen) as one of the repetitive phrases whose centrality—whose status as “crypto-concepts”—in Freud’s work has gone all but unnoticed. On several occasions, Freud uses the word (which James Strachey translates as “anaclisis”)⁷ to designate the way that the human-specific aptitude he calls “the drive” attaches itself to “nature” (or “the vital function”), whose satisfactions have proven to be inaccessible to the prematurely individuated being that is the infant. As Laplanche writes, Anlehnung in Freud designates “the fact that emergent sexuality attaches itself to and leans on [s’étaye] another process which is both similar and profoundly divergent: the sexual drive leans upon a nonsexual, vital function” (Life 16, translation modified; Vie 31).

If the drive “leans on” the vital function, this means that human life is saved by its ability to use parasitically that which it cannot directly plug into. To illuminate this with a false cognate, it is in the “other-place” (para-site) of the drive that life is conserved by a kind of forgery or vampirization. The drive takes over the vital function, thereby at once preserving and perverting it—which is to say, preserving it by perverting it. Let us call this takeover an act of “supplementation”; to do so is to render obvious the echoes, in Laplanche, of some of his contemporaries’ commentaries on Freud. Influenced by—but also influencing—Derrida’s analyses of the temporality of human ontology that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, Laplanche suggests that the relationship between the vital function and its parasite is, as Derrida would say, undecidable. It is only in the parasite-supplement that the “original” becomes observable, a dynamic that, as we know by now, renders “the origin” an aporetic notion.

Anlehnung is the mechanism by which not only the human subject goes astray, but also the Freudian text replicates the subject’s errancy. Before he follows Laplanche in observing this dynamic in Freud, Bersani proposes that we conceptualize the relation between literary criticism and the literary text as analogous to the après-coup continuity of “the vital function” in “the drive,” of absented nature in the human subject. He suggests that the “cut” between art and scholarship should be similarly cultivated into undecidability: the critic must “lean on” the artwork; criticism is to parasite art. We can no longer consider the two entities as separated by an ontological gulf across which scholarly discourse is supposed to build an epistemological bridge. The criticism that “leans on” its object does not produce “knowledge”; rather, it joins its object in replicating, or synchronizing with, the activity we call “art.” With its “blocked thought” and “speculative repetition,” criticism loses its status as an explicative appendix to the literary text. Instead of mastering the object, it joins the artwork—as Freud joins the human subject—in a moment of “theoretical collapse.” To deploy a Deleuzean formulation for this dynamic, criticism becomes-art: the clear-cut identities of scholarship and art unravel as both discourses gravitate toward one another, as their “molecules” mix to the extent that their “molar” identities begin to give way, opening “a passage between categories that undermines both poles of opposition” (Bogue 20). Because of this unraveling, we must read the Freudian text as a work of art: Freud fails to produce scientific knowledge about the human subject and, instead, rescues his object from its indecipherability by compulsively repeating, in the “theoretical collapse,” its destiny of failure.

Admittedly, the coordination of the sentence in the passage from A Future for Astyanax makes the reference to Anlehnung an ambivalent one. While Bersani primarily contrasts criticism’s continued leaning on literary works to the aestheticization that modern scholarship undergoes in parasiting art, a strictly Freudian-Laplanchean argument would emphasize a necessary causality between “leaning” and “imitation”: the critical text, or the drive, takes on the characteristics of the literary text, or the vital function, because of, rather than despite, its being propped onto the latter. By insisting on the ambiguity of Bersani’s sentence, my commentary glosses the passage from a retrospective position: I read the text as it would be rewritten upon our return to it after encountering Bersani’s subsequent work. If this practice needs defending, we can not only point out its coincidence with the method that Bersani variously calls “recategorization”—and with which he identifies his own readerly practice—but also note that our retrospective reading allows us to see in Anlehnung a version of what will emerge, around this time, as the concept of “speculativeness” in his work. What Bersani says about modern criticism’s indistinguishability from art anticipates—but only by the twinkling of an eye—his characterization of the unraveling of Freud’s discourse by the gravitational pull of the failed being that is the human subject. In both cases, commentary responds to its ostensible object by yielding to a raving ventriloquism: it allows—cannot but allow—the undoing of its coherent formulations at the assault of, or seduction by, the text’s unrepresentable complexity.

Bersani deploys our keyword as he continues his proscriptive commentary on modern literary criticism. He writes that, as result of the reader’s infection by the text, “[t]he play of criticism becomes visible. And we discover that the pleasures of conceptual experimentation, of dismissible speculation, are the specific pleasures of critical form” (Future 312). The reader’s leaning on the artwork makes the work of criticism a speculative endeavor, participating in the play that Derrida identifies with dissemination.⁸ In Bersani’s subsequent work, Freud becomes the exemplary speculative reader. While this argument emerges most forcefully in The Freudian Body, the connection is made initially in “The Subject of Power” (1977). In this review essay of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir and La volonté de savoir, Bersani seeks to assess psychoanalytic theory’s role as a part of—but also, possibly, beyond—the apparatus of disciplinary modernity. He suggests that, if there is a psychoanalytic theory that jams the dispositif—a possibility refused by Foucault—it will be given to us in Freud’s “speculations.” He credits “French theory” for drawing our attention to this “speculative Freud.” “At its best,” he writes,

the recent discovery of “French Freud” has been an effort to locate in Freud himself those speculative developments which wreak havoc with his own systematizations, which return in his later work as supplementary disruptive movements that trivialize those “central” theoretical certainties … responsible for the politicizing of psychoanalysis within a reactionary pouvoir-savoir complex. (“Subject” 7)

The most important source for the idea of “speculativeness” in psychoanalytic theorizing is Derrida’s commentary on Freud. This source is not primarily “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the essay by Derrida included in French Freud, the 1972 special issue of Yale French Studies to which Bersani alludes in “The Subject of Power”;⁹ it is, rather, Derrida’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in “To Speculate—on ‘Freud.'”¹⁰ In this essay, Derrida tracks “the singular drifting” of Freud’s thought, exemplified by “the essential impossibility of holding onto any thesis within it, any posited conclusion of the scientific or philosophical type, of the theoretical type in general” (“To Speculate” 261). Derrida picks up the term from Freud. What the latter calls his “speculations” (he uses the term repeatedly in in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) are related to speculative trends in the history of philosophy: they consist of conjectures that, as Kant and others would have it, exceed what can be known through and observed in experience. Freud thus seems to be giving in to the kind of thinking from which, as he tells his biographer Ernest Jones, he had rigorously sought to extricate himself in his early career. If in his younger years he had “felt a strong attraction towards speculation and ruthlessly checked it” (qtd. in Jones, Life and Works, vol. 1, 32), in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he cannot but become a “speculative” thinker, indulge in “speculative assumptions” (Beyond 275). It is this yielding that marks his originality for Bersani.

For Derrida, Freud’s speculations must be distinguished from the speculative idealism exemplified by Hegel. Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle follows “the singular path of speculation,” but “[t]he speculation which is in question in [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] cannot purely and simply refer to the speculative of the Hegelian type, at least in its dominant determination” (“To Speculate” 268, 277). Before his commentary on Freud’s speculations, Derrida had discussed Hegel’s philosophy in terms of what he called, in Dissemination (1972), its “speculative production” (20) and, in Glas, “the untiring desire of speculative dialectics” (260). The movement that Hegel assigns to the world, and that his own thinking is to exemplify, entails a circle where “Absolute knowledge is present at the zero point of the philosophical exposition” (Dissemination 20), an immediacy that would allow “no more discrepancy between production and exposition, only a presentation of the concept itself, in its own words, in its own voice, in its logos” (30-31). Rendering “presentation” in italics, Derrida suggests that Hegel, in his quest to elevate thinking to the speculative level, betrays his desire for an appearing where something like the an-sich would be heard speaking in its presentness and self-determinacy, in the voice (Stimme) of its Selbstbestimmung, without its adulteration into writing. If Hegel wanted to rescue speculative thought from the pedestrian strictures of Kantian “understanding,” Derrida’s ambition is to replace “the speculative” with “the disseminative”: “dissemination interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning [un après-coup du sens]” (Dissemination 21; La dissémination 27). Deconstructive reading reveals the legerdemain of speculative philosophy: the ostensible origin is produced by smoke and mirrors, the trick of Nachträglichkeit.

Contrasting dialectics to psychoanalysis, Derrida suggests that Freud’s meditation on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle renders readable aspects of speculative thought that are more obfuscated in the work of his philosophical predecessors. Unlike the latter, Freud is charmingly forthcoming about the fact that his attempts at drawing a metapsychological map of the human subject often amount to nothing more than creative guesswork. For Derrida, this is not a failing in Freudian theory, but its generative principle. As described in “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,'” psychoanalytic theory’s speculative movement thus approximates the dynamic that Derrida calls “dissemination,” “différance,” and “play.”

What Bersani calls the “theoretical collapse” of Freud’s thinking echoes Derrida’s description of the “disseminative” principle of speculation that organizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Bersani discerns in Freud’s metapsychological work an effort to speak of that which is strictly unrepresentable in the ontological experience of becoming-human. In the repeated moments of “theoretical collapse,” Freud’s text gives up on scientific discourse and begins not to describe but to recapitulate the object of his investigation. This is, Bersani suggests, Freud’s revolutionary practice: in his writing, he joins—synchronizes with—the human subject in its aporetic movement. It is from this perspective, explicated in The Freudian Body, that his evocation of “leaning” in the concluding chapter of A Future for Astyanax should be read as a translation of Freud’s Anlehnung. Like the literary critic who begins to replicate the artwork’s “play,” instead of accurately describing the literary text, and hence rendering it “knowable,” Freud performs the subject’s inability to speak about the devastation that constitutes its coming-into-being. Even though Freud seeks epistemological mastery over the object, he cannot but “lean” too close, thereby taking on, or symptomizing, that which ails the human subject. Like the subject, whose constitution coincides with its ébranlement—its masochistic shattering under the assault of overwhelming stimuli—Freud is unable to address his object in the terms that, at least since the Cartesian revolution, modern thought has stipulated as necessary for scientific discourse; instead, he becomes the artful critic who renders himself susceptible to “the pleasures of conceptual experimentation, of dismissible speculation,” characteristic of the literary text (Future 312). Getting too close, he becomes fascinated by that which he wants to submit to his analysis; investigating his object, he is compelled to repeat what he sees in the occult mirror. Similarly, the critic, ensnared by the doppelgänger in the mirror of art, begins to recapitulate its movements, to participate in the artwork’s “conceptual experimentation,” driven by a pleasure that is identical to all conceptuality’s dissipation.

For Bersani, this speculative permeation of the subject and the object, the thinking and the thought, constitutes an “estheticizing movement” (Freudian 11). In its repeated undoing into incoherence, the Freudian text, originally aiming for scientific validity, becomes an aesthetic work. It is at this moment that psychoanalysis turns into a foreign body infesting the apparatus of modernity, begins to disrupt the “pouvoir-savoir complex” (“Subject” 7). Departing from Foucault’s assessment of Freudian sexology, Bersani suggests that beyond psychoanalysis as disciplinary discourse there is psychoanalysis as an aesthetics. In its repetition of—its parasitic leaning on—human ontology, “the speculative psychoanalytic text,” “particular[ly] the speculative works of Freud,” becomes “the critical artistic text of our time” (Freudian 111). Witnessing it in Freud, we should regard “this estheticizing movement not only as a ‘coming-into-form’ but also as a subversion of forms, indeed even as a kind of political resistance to the formal seductions of all coercive discourses” (Freudian 11-12). For Bersani, the Freudian text is one model that we can heed in our apprenticeship of unlearning the psychologized mode of being-in-the-world. Like Freud, we can become aesthetic subjects. This dynamic of speculative aesthetics, of the work’s becoming-art as exemplified by literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory, occupies the ethical center of his thinking.

Toward Speculative Narcissism

When Bersani, in his 1970s and 1980s texts, writes of psychoanalytic thought as a “speculative” endeavor, he does not, like Derrida, distinguish Freud’s speculations from Hegel’s. Indeed, he hardly mentions Hegel at all, most immediately because the master of German Idealism is not the presence in his scholarly field that he is in Derrida’s. We should nevertheless observe the appearance of an implicit Hegelianism in The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982), implanted there, I suggest, as an echo Bersani picks up from some of his colleagues. Commenting on the French symbolist poet’s oeuvre, Bersani writes that his “subversion of literature” becomes visible above all in “the speculative restlessness with which Mallarmé moves among different theoretical positions” (Death 45, 42-43, emphasis added). The author’s “restlessness” is symptomized not only, as Bersani notes here, in his inability or unwillingness to settle on a coherent account of contemporary poetry, but also in his habit of shuttling between various projects and genres of writing: instead of producing le Livre—the “Great Work” that he sometimes claimed to be preparing for—Mallarmé wrote prose poems, fashion journalism, Easter egg inscriptions, and doggerel on outhouse walls. Instead of psychologizing the author’s procrastination like Freud did Leonardo da Vinci’s, Bersani suggests that we should regard this slipperiness as his most innovative commentary on literature: “speculative restlessness,” he continues, repeating the phrase a second time, “is perhaps the major ‘statement’ of Mallarmé’s theoretical writing” (Death 44). Indeed, it is in such agitated disquiet that one finds a text’s literary specificity: “literature’s peculiar nature may have to do with a certain type of restlessness or moving away from its own statements” (Death 45). As exemplified by Mallarmé’s practice, literature is constitutively speculative in its genre-defying agitations.

The term “restlessness” evokes the Unruhigkeit that Hegel assigns to spirit’s becoming. With it, Hegel indicates the movement that results from being’s noncoincidence with itself: being is riven by an internal gap that unbalances the system into its forward-leaning tilt, forcing the spirit’s sojourn toward speculativeness: “Spirit is indeed never at rest [nie in Ruhe],” Hegel writes in the Phenomenology, “but always engaged in moving forward” (§11 [6]; W 3.18); life is characterized by its “sheer unrest [reinen Unruhe]” (§46 [27]; W 3.46). In the Mallarmé study, Bersani borrows the concept of restlessness not directly from Hegel, but from his philosopher contemporaries. Apart from Derrida, the most important of these may be Jean-Luc Nancy who, in his 1973 close-readerly account of Hegel’s theorization of “speculative language” and “speculative words,” writes of “the very restlessness [inquiétude] of the speculative” (Nancy, Speculative 78, brackets in translation). Although Bersani nowhere mentions The Speculative Remark, his language indicates at the very least a shared intellectual context with Nancy. When, speaking in this common language, he later alludes to the “interpretive restlessness” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms viii) and the “troubled, speculative mobility” (Freudian 19) characteristic of psychoanalytic theory, he implies that we read Mallarmé’s and Freud’s texts as mutually resonant moments in a genealogy of onto-ethical experimentation. The connection is made explicit in The Freudian Body, where he assigns speculativeness to both Freud—noting the “extraordinary speculative mobility” of his thought (Freudian 81)—and Mallarmé (whose “speculative restlessness” is now rephrased as “speculative turbulence” [Freudian 25]).

The first substantial occurrence of Hegel under his proper name takes place relatively late in Bersani’s work. Here, too, Bersani remains uninterested in parsing the differences between Hegel and Freud as thinkers of the speculative. Critiquing the notion of the divided subject in Thoughts and Things (2015)—for him, this concept, which many have considered to have been enabled by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, merely reinvents the dualisms typical to Cartesian modernity—he makes a brief detour through the Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hegel, as we have noted, is frequently trotted out as the proponent of the narcissistic subject whose centrality to Western philosophy contemporary thinkers have sought to displace, Bersani implies that we may have missed some of its potential. If various formulations of the divided subject leave unaddressed, or indeed bolster, what Bersani claims is the most consequential aspect of the episteme—the self/other separation that the subject at once cherishes and rages against—Hegel suggests to us that “thinking has its otherness within itself” (Thoughts 68). Bersani’s reference is to §55 in the English-language edition of the Phenomenology, where Hegel defines thinking as the activity of the self-determined concept that entails all its predicates—that is, the speculative subject. While existence (Dasein) in its movement (Bewegung) seems at first to be prompted “by an alien power [durch eine fremde Gewalt],” it soon appears that “having its otherness within itself [daß sie ihr Anderssein selbst an ihr hat], and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and self-differentiating thought, it is its own inwardness, it is the pure Notion” (§55 [34]; W 3.54). For theorists of the divided subject, such passages in Hegel symptomize his philosophy’s totalizing or narcissistic character. As Derrida argues in Glas, Hegel’s monadic subject relates to its object in “consuming destruction,” assimilating otherness into the sameness of its becoming (65).

Yet it is precisely the Hegelian subject’s voracious intimacy with otherness, Anderssein, that appeals to Bersani. For him, the notion of otherness that informs theorizations of the divided subject assumes a division between the subject and the other, even if this split is now located within the self (Thoughts 68). As exemplified by the Laplanchean subject, whose becoming is the endless work of translating the other’s enigmatic dispatches, the division coincides with the production of knowledge as an attempt to bridge the gap. Bersani discerns in Hegel an effort to think beyond this constitutive split, whether external or internal, of the subject and the object, the knower and the known. Speculative logic, as he writes, gives us “an otherness inherent in the same, in the self-identical” (Thoughts 68). Because the knower and the known (Erkennendes und Erkanntes) are speculatively identified, there is nothing to “know”: no epistemophilic pressure drives the individualized subject toward itself in the other.

For Bersani, this reconfiguration of the subject-object dynamic is enabled by Hegelian speculativeness. In this, he departs from Derrida’s reading of Hegel, according to which the speculative subject consumes all otherness. Both note that the Hegelian being finds narcissistically that everything in the world (all possible predicates) always already inheres in its being, yet diverge in their assessments of this characteristic. We begin to detail the different emphases given to this aspect by Derrida and Bersani when we note that the latter returns a second time to Hegel in Thoughts and Things when he links Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) to the “Lesser Logic.” As he has done many times before, he draws our attention to Freud’s argument about the persistence of the past in memory: “in mental life,” Freud writes, “nothing which has once been formed can perish” (Civilization 256). Freud’s claim about the imperishability of the past suggests to Bersani a mode of becoming that entails what he calls “recategorization”: thought returns to that which has been in order to tease out what remains dormant in the familiar, to sound, once again, what Proust calls our lives’ “fundamental notes” (591).

For Bersani, this constitutes a creative process in which what appears is actualized for the first time. As Freud notes in his discussion of the case of Emma in 1895 (“Project” 353-56), the emergence of sexuality—the moment of hominization—is marked by a nachträglich, and thereby constitutive, return to the scene of the missed injury, an idea that he repeats in postulating the famous “diphasic” arrival of sexual life (Three 158-59; “Outline” 384). In a letter he sends to Wilhelm Fliess the following year, he suggests that this structure of traumatized memory is characteristic of human development in general: airing what he calls, importantly for us, his “latest bit of speculation,” he proposes that psychic life consists of the continual “rearrangement” or “retranscription” of memory traces and that, consequently, “memory is present not once but several times over” (Freud, Complete 207). If, as Freud writes, his theory of sexuality’s emergence is speculative, Laplanche might propose that, typical to his “theoretico-genetic” genius, this is because the subject’s return to the missed scene of trauma obeys a speculative logic, one that Freud cannot but repeat in his own theorizing. Despite what he tells Ernest Jones, he has always been a speculative thinker.

For Bersani, the notion of memory’s “retranscription” offers an example of the profound agreement between Freud and Proust. Freud’s theory of memory coincides with the spiraling-deepening movement typified not only by Proust’s account of involuntary memory but also by the very structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, the novel’s unfolding as a series of creative echoes of the Combray section. In the preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (2013 [1965]), Bersani renders this connection explicit, proposing that Freud’s claim in Civilization and Its Discontents for the permanence of memory traces, and the consequent structure of repetition in psychic life, is illustrated by the novel’s “ever widening concentric circles of drama and analysis” in which its opening section is inaccurately repeated (xi). Across his work, Bersani explicitly or implicitly suggests that we find this account inaccurately replicated in various contexts, including in Charles Baudelaire’s theory of aesthetic idealization (Baudelaire; Culture 83-86), Lawrence Krauss’s cosmological speculations (Thoughts ch. 5), Christopher Bollas’s rethinking of the unconscious as the “syntax” of the subject’s being-in-the-world (Receptive 54; “Rigorously” 285-86), and, most recently, Peter Sloterdijk’s account of the human subject’s “constitutive greeting” into the world (Receptive 94-104). All of these examples can themselves be described as recategorizations of Plato’s theory of anamnesis, which Bersani considers most extensively (but without naming it as such) in his reading of Phaedrus in Intimacies (Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies 77-87; see also Thoughts 84-85). The theory of anamnesis—of the past’s speculative repetitions—emerges as one of Bersani’s oeuvre’s “fundamental notes.”

In Thoughts and Things, this repeating idea of repeating ideas finds a new frame of reference in Hegel. Bersani rounds off his discussion of Civilization and Its Discontents by describing Freud’s account of the past’s persistence, as well as Freud’s own hesitations regarding—his rejection of and return to—this theory, with a turn of phrase whose Hegelianism we immediately recognize: Freud postulates, and then rhetorically performs (thus, once again, “leaning on” his subject), that the past is “at once negate[d] and preserve[d]” in the present (Thoughts 74). If this Aufhebung requires that we posit the “oneness of past and present,” Hegel also gives us language to describe what for Bersani are the typically modern conceptualizations of “the divided self” and the subject/object (or res cogitans/res extensa) dualism: “The type of negation that authorizes what Hegel calls ‘the mere “Either-or” of understanding’ institutes that discontinuity in mental life that leads to such notions as the divided self and the distinction between the present and a lost but intact and retrievable past” (Thoughts 74). In contradistinction to the temporality of the nachträglich weaving of the past into the present, the logic of “either-or” operates on oppositions between which the understanding endlessly toggles.

Intriguingly, Bersani neglects to observe that, in the passage to which he alludes, Hegel’s point is about the inability of the understanding to come to grips with language’s speculative character. In the same paragraph, Hegel, not for the first time, singles out “aufheben” as a speculative verb par excellence, that is, a word that accommodates contradictory, indeed mutually exclusive meanings. He writes in the concluding sentence of the Zusatz, which Bersani partially quotes: “This double usage of language, which gives to the same word a positive and negative meaning, is not an accident, and gives no ground for reproaching language as a cause of confusion. We should rather recognise in it the speculative spirit of our language rising above the mere ‘Either-or’ of understanding” (Logic §96 [180]). One might expect Bersani to pick up on Hegel’s term not only because of its repeated emergence, since the 1970s, in his own work, but also because Jean-Luc Nancy, in a book on whose influence in his early work I hypothesize above, provides an extended commentary on the corresponding passage from the Science of Logic devoted to the speculative strangeness of aufheben.¹¹ That Hegel is feigning surprise when he exclaims how “remarkable” it is “that language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings” (Science 82) is suggested by the fact that such words in fact evince the truth of speculative idealism: concepts that we may have taken as radically incompatible move in synchrony, occupy the same vehicle. Like the speculative proposition, speculative words demonstrate for Hegel the folly—Kant’s—of thinking being dualistically. In the speculative proposition, otherness, in the form of predicative difference, is enfolded into the (grammatical) subject. Speculative words reveal that, as Freud would say, strangeness is already in the home.

As if echoing the diagnoses that, ironically (Jameson) or not (Bayer), assign the Hegelian subject a narcissistic pathology, Bersani theorizes “narcissism” as an important vehicle for disorganizing the modern episteme. If, apart from Bayer, narcissism has been designated the modern ailment par excellence by the likes of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, James Baldwin, David Riesman, and Christopher Lasch,¹² Bersani proposes that it is here, at ground zero of the modern subject’s pathological failure to encounter its others, that we can radically challenge our episteme’s assumptions. Bersani is after what we might call a theory of “speculative narcissism.” Notably, his rethinking of the subject’s self-love begins precisely at the moment when the thought of “the speculative” emerges in his work, that is, in the concluding chapter of A Future for Astyanax. Here, as I observed above, Bersani proposes that scholarship begin to move with (as Laplanche would say, to lean on) the art object, to replicate its styles of being. Scholarship, in other words, should engage in “the pleasures of … dismissible speculation” (Future 312). In the same chapter, Bersani draws our attention to a novelistic scene that exemplifies the pleasures of a speculative, and speculatively narcissistic, orientation. In his discussion of Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954), which takes its cues from Laplanche and includes the first mention of the theory of “shattering” in his work, he briefly reflects on the male protagonist René’s homo-attraction to an older man, Sir Stephen, a desire whose contemplative “calmness” Bersani contrasts to the intensive pleasures that the novel’s sadists experience in witnessing their bottoms’ suffering. While the observation is something of a tangent in the analysis, this is an important moment insofar as it shows that, from the beginning of his engagement with psychoanalysis, Bersani supplements the psychoanalytic theory of the self’s undoing in masochistic jouissance (the sadists’ ébranlement) with a mode of pleasure in which the subject, rather than intensively imploding, can unravel differently, through an “untroubled nonsexual adoration” of his likenesses outside his self (Future 295). In a brief 2010 text, Bersani suggests that it is only in his later work that he has complicated “the Laplanchian notion of ébranlement, of sexual shattering” by coupling it with “another, less dramatic, … version of ego disidentification,” what he defines here as “the milder sensual pleasure of discovering our inaccurate self-replications in the world, the aesthetically pleasing correspondences between the world and multiple aspects of our subjecthood” (“Broken” 415). Yet the emergence of this mode is strictly coincident with ébranlement theory. It is first outlined in Bersani’s depiction of the way that René “worship[s Sir Stephen] without curiosity,” that is, without the epistemophilic paranoia that marks the Proustian subject’s efforts “to penetrate the secret of someone else’s mysteriously different ‘formula’ for sexual excitement” (Future 294). Writing twenty years after A Future for Astyanax, Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit might be describing René’s homo-narcissistic contemplation of Sir Stephen when they assert: “A nonantagonistic relation to difference depends on [an] inaccurate replication of the self in difference, on our recognizing that we are already out there. Self-love initiates the love of others; the love of the same does not erase difference when it takes place as a dismissal of the prejudicial opposition between sameness and difference” (Caravaggio 72).

If, for Hegel, “[t]he principle of speculation is the identity of subject and object” (Difference 80), René’s narcissism constitutes a speculative orientation insofar as it radically modifies the subject’s relationship to the world. Rather than Marcel’s anguished curiosity about the enigma of the other’s desire, his attraction to Sir Stephen is informed by the recognition of his imbrication in the other. It is speculatively narcissistic. While the scenes of sadomasochistic jouissance—in which the subject identifies with the other’s pain—are organized around radical otherness (most often figured in the unbridgeable gap of sexual difference, the “tragic” principle in Réage’s work, as Bersani writes [Future 301]), René’s pleasure issues from his recognition of the sameness of his self and the other. Speculative critics too should find in art not an object of mysterious otherness whose riddles they, Marcel-like, need to solve; rather, they attune to the object’s immanent rhythm, yield to their capture by a (nonparanoid) fascination with its “other sameness” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being 120). The subject’s speculative entwinement with the world deactivates “knowledge” as the mechanism of accessing otherness, typical to Cartesian modernity. In speculative aesthetics, as Bersani writes with Dutoit, “there is nothing ‘to know,’ only the consciousness of the movement in which we participate” (Caravaggio’s 72). The speculative reader is moved not by epistemophilia but by the aesthetic pleasures of shared rhythms.

Receptive Bodies is not the first time Bersani affirms his adoption of “speculation” as his own mode of thinking. In an endnote to The Freudian Body, he says that even when his subject is not Freud, his writing is “informed by a certain type of psychoanalytic speculation” (Freudian 118n2). In the foreword to The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé, he similarly writes that, in his commentary on the poet, he will be indulging in “the pleasure of taking a few speculative risks” (Death ix).¹³ Here, as in A Future for Astyanax, speculation is evoked as a work of “pleasure” (Future 312). The “pleasure” of speculations is different from—yet related to—the pleasure associated with the notion that has to a large extent informed the reception of Bersani’s work: ébranlement, the experience of the self’s “plunging” into an “antisocial” sexual jouissance (Is the Rectum 30, 93). While this—the “antisocial thesis”—has often been cited as Bersani’s contribution to queer theory, the speculative mode of pleasure has received considerably less attention, despite its role, in the form of “homoness,” as the central idea presented in Homos (1995). Like René’s speculative narcissism, the pleasure of homoness is that of sociability: it is an attunement where the subject meets the world in correspondence or solidarity, where the self is discovered to have always already entailed the world’s predicative difference.

Bersani declares toward the end of Receptive Bodies that “epistemes change” (Receptive 124). If we are to disentangle ourselves from the ethical disaster of modern epistemophilia and precipitate a new episteme by “discover[ing] a new relation to the world” (Is the Rectum 160), we need to train ourselves in modes of homoness and speculative narcissism. Our deprogramming will require an “ascetic” practice, a term with which Bersani indicates the affinity of his thinking with that of later Foucault. It is an aesthetic program, aiming at what Foucault, too, calls “an aesthetics of existence” (History vol. 2, 253). Bersani suggests that we glimpse a model for our reorientation in the speculative moments that, like the intensive pleasures Freud considered the enemy of civilizational work, “convulse” his intellectual practice (Freud, Civilization 267). As Bersani puts it, in an echo of Martin Heidegger, “psychoanalysis … like art … might train us to see our prior presence in the world, to see, as bizarre as this may sound, that, ontologically, the world cares for us” (Is the Rectum 152-53). When he uses “apprenticeship” as a synonym for “ascesis” (we need an “apprenticeship for a relationality founded on sameness rather than difference” [Is the Rectum 44]), he implicitly proposes a connection between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze: the term enters his vocabulary through his early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), and then in A Future for Astyanax, with Deleuze’s account of Marcel’s “apprenticeship” in reading the world’s signs.¹⁴

As my epigraphs suggest, such moments also indicate the unexplored affinity of his thinking with onto-ethical models like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, according to whom our lives constitute an “apprenticeship” in the rapport of being (403). For Bersani, as for Emerson, the movement of our thinking agrees with, or replicates, “the universal circularity of being” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being 170). He continues this thought in Receptive Bodies: “We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisting one another, also continuously repeat, re-find one another” (Receptive 49, emphasis added). As much as he associates À la recherche du temps perdu‘s “ever widening concentric circles of drama and analysis” with Freud’s argument about the imperishability of mental events (Preface xi-xii), the term “re-finding” in Receptive Bodies evokes Freud’s theory of the subject’s uncanny discovery of the earliest object in love: “The finding of an object,” Freud writes, “is in fact a refinding of it” (Three 145). Bersani invites us to read the moments in Civilization and Its Discontents and the Three Essays as Freudian versions of anamnesis, the Platonic concept whose long history, as I have suggested here, intersects with German Idealism in the Hegelian speculative subject.¹⁵ When Bersani writes in 2008 that, in Plato and Freud, “love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination” (Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies 81), he is recalling—perhaps without conscious memory—his own argument, thirty years earlier, about René’s “fascinated worship” of Sir Stephen (Future 295). What he calls “fascination” in Intimacies is different from the “paranoid fascination” with which the enigmatic other captures the Proustian and the Laplanchean subjects.¹⁶ Equally a fascination, anamnestic love operates as the subject’s enthrallment with a re-found object, but an object that—as Deleuze suggests of Proust’s involuntary memory and Bersani of Baudelaire’s idealization—is thereby “created.” In it, the subject loves the other not as the source of hidden knowledge about his self, but aesthetically, as a repetition, perhaps an amplification, of his likeness. It is an ethics of “inaccurate replications” rather than one of radical differences, an ethics that, counteracting our “intractable” hatred of otherness, may yet enable “[t]he viability of our being-in-the-world” (Receptive 49). This can take place if we cultivate the flash of anamnestic recollection where the subject re-finds its others in the world, like the lover who discovers that she already—to use language we must unlearn—”knows” the beloved in the mirror.

Footnotes

1. The German originals for Hegel are from Werke, edited by Moldenhauer and Michel.

2. See Foucault, “Discourse” 235-36; and Butler, Subjects 183-84.

3. My overview of Hegel’s reading of Kant draws from McCumber; and Sedgwick. For condensed introductions to the history of “the speculative” in philosophy, see Becker; and Ebbersmeyer.

4. Throughout, I quote from The Encyclopaedia Logic, the 1991 translation of Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss (the Lesser Logic) by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris; references are indicated parenthetically as Encyclopaedia. Bersani quotes from William Wallace’s 1892 translation, The Logic of Hegel. When discussing Bersani’s quotations, I will use this edition, parenthetically referred to as Logic.

5. On the speculative proposition in Hegel, see Gasché ch. 3; Nancy, Speculative; and Malabou ch. 12.

6. On the law of “theoretico-genesis” see Laplanche, Life 2, 9, 87; “Unfinished” 81-82; New 167n22. John Fletcher claims that Laplanche’s suggestion must be understood as a “parody” (3).

7. See Laplanche’s commentary on the concept’s translation in Life 15-16; and in Laplanche and Pontalis 29-30.

8. See Derrida, Dissemination 93, 127-28, and 156-71; Of Grammatology 7, 42, 50, 57-59, 71, 259-60, and 266; and “Structure” 292.

9. Bersani notes the journal issue’s importance also in FA 9, 319n4.

10. Bersani refers to Derrida’s essay in Freudian 56, 66. While “To Speculate—On ‘Freud'” will see its first publication as part of La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà in 1980, a section of the essay is published in 1978 in Etudes Freudiennes (and translated, in the same year, as “Speculations—on Freud” in Oxford Literary Review). As Derrida notes, the essay is an extract from the seminar La vie la mort, held at École normale supérieure in 1975 (“Legs” 88); it also shares its title with a seminar that he gives in 1977-78 at Yale (Jacques Derrida Papers Box 61, Folder 14; see the catalogue available at https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf3q2nb26c/ [53]).

11. For Hegel’s original, see Science 81-82. Nancy, too, draws our attention to Hegel’s discussion of speculative words in the Encyclopedia; see Nancy, Speculative 56.

12. On Horkheimer and Adorno’s (and, more generally, the Frankfurt School’s) account of the role of (homosexual) narcissism in the psychopathology of fascism, see Hewitt ch. 2. On Riesman, Lasch, and other American commentators, see Lunbeck. A study of the role of narcissism in Baldwin’s account of diasporic modernity has yet to be written.

13. “Freud,” Bersani continues in The Culture of Redemption (1990), “has determined more than anyone else of the ways in which I read art,” particularly “the experience of having followed the modes of theoretical failure and even collapse in his work, the processes by which arguments are at once elaborated and disformulated” (Culture 44). Whether its subject is Freud or not, Bersani’s own thinking, in other words, remains—as he writes in 2008—”highly speculative” (Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies 121).

14. See Deleuze esp. ch. 3. For Bersani’s discussion of Deleuze’s study, see Balzac 234-35 and Future 256. He evokes the concept in Future 314; for later uses, see Death 3; Homos 6; Is the Rectum 69; and Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s 69.

15. More precisely, as Ernst Bloch argues, we find Hegel’s version of anamnesis in his concept of Erinnerung, the mode of memory that operates by the past’s “inwardization” (Er-innerung). If Bloch is critical of the ramifications of Hegel’s anamnestic model of becoming for theorizing of futurity, Derrida sees in Erinnerung a continuation of the tradition in classical metaphysics that thinks the self/other relation in terms of the subject’s consumption and assimilation of the object. He suggests that Erinnerung belongs to the long line of Western philosophy’s “‘tropes of cannibalism'” (“Interview” [with Birnbaum and Olsson] n. pag.); its mechanism, as he puts it in Glas, is to achieve the “holocaust” of all otherness, a “[p]ure consuming destruction” (242-43, 238). While he never mentions Hegel’s theory of Erinnerung, Bersani would recognize in it another moment in the genealogy of anamnestic, “speculative” memory that he has mobilized in Baudelaire, Proust, Freud, Sloterdijk, and others.

16. On “paranoid fascination,” see Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s 38, 42, 95; Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being 37; and Bersani, Is the Rectum 92, 177, 178, 180.

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