Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman

John Paul Ricco (bio)

Why the antisocial? Given the pervasiveness of social media and constant reminders in the wake of COVID isolation and social-distancing policies and in the midst of “the loneliness epidemic” that human beings are innately social and communal creatures, the proposition of the antisocial, let alone any prospect of its relevance today, would seem to be implausible and improbable. So why would one want to take up the notion of the antisocial and its afterlives (in the plural) now? Good reasons might lie in the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare state, the privileging of the entrepreneurial individual in neoliberal political economy, the rise of anti-democracy movements and authoritarianism, and weekly mass shootings—all easily labelled as “antisocial.” But also because of the great amount and diversity of political action against sexual violence, gender discrimination and segregation, the assault on the very being of trans-subjects, the fight for reproductive rights and other forms of bodily autonomy, state and police violence, and the insistence within the polity that Black Lives Matter. In other words, all those activities whereby the political entails the fundamental questioning of the way in which the social is currently constituted (as discriminating, marginalizing, and inequitable), and whereby the social’s configuration is radically re-imagined according to principles of justice for all.

Looking back nearly twenty years to Robert Caserio’s framing of “the antisocial thesis in queer theory” for the conference roundtable debate he organized at the MLA conference in 2005—and specifically his identification of Leo Bersani’s book Homos as the Ur-text of that thesis, published ten years earlier (1995)—we note that a different yet historically related set of political attitudes motivated both Bersani’s critique of the social as it was known and Caserio’s interest in returning to that critique ten years later: the politics of respectability that had come to dominate gay and lesbian politics in the 1990s, a trend that shows no signs of subsiding (“Love is love!”). Meaning that Bersani’s and Caserio’s targets were the gay and lesbian policymakers of various stripes wanting to prove themselves and the cohort in whose name they spoke to be worthy and exemplary citizens and indeed patriots of the state (especially in, but not limited to the context of, the United States). In his 1997 lecture, “Gay Betrayals,” (a double-edged title that should be read as referring to both those gays and lesbians who betrayed the radical queer tradition by pursuing assimilationist politics, and to those queers who betrayed identity politics and the state-sanctioned sociality for which that politics works) Bersani scathingly takes aim at “micro-politicians”: self-fashioned good citizens campaigning to become members of the most powerful institutions of state-based imperial, colonial, and capitalist power (military, church, marriage, and the family).¹ This was a politics driven by a desire no longer to be excluded but to belong and to be included, to willingly subscribe to the liberal utopianism of “anticipatory progress” and its pastoralizing promises of reparation and redemption, and to do one’s part in advancing the future of this illusion and reproduction of the social, going so far as to fully inscribe oneself into the bio-political economy via biological reproduction. With the political goal seemingly to have been to render oneself indistinguishable from others (straights), Bersani was not mistaken to think that what this politics of recognition and respectability amongst gays and lesbians would inevitably lead to was exactly what hetero-patriarchy and the Christian conversative radical right wing in the States was simultaneously plotting: the eradication not only of homosexuality but also of homosexuals.

It is undeniable that the political context of Homos and of the antisocial thesis has been entirely forgotten in the many critiques of either that book or that thesis over the past nearly three decades. Accused of being ahistorical, it is Bersani who has suffered from a degree of ahistoricism that should give us pause, especially as we contemplate many of the prevailing and dominant theoretical discourses today—including queer theory and its recent variants—oriented around the symbolic, the affirmation of identity, and the valorization of the personal, at the expense of the social, political, and economic (actual material conditions and structures; exploitation and not only discrimination). Indeed, if respectable and reparative politics is considered the best way forward, then one is forced to ask how it is that gay and lesbian micro-politicians and policymakers then and now are not partly responsible for the current attacks on women, trans* people, the disabled, the poor, the racialized, the Indigenous, and other minorities, given their focus on local, identity-based struggles that inevitably generate others as unassimilated remainders. While many scholars over the past nearly thirty years have criticized Bersani for what they have taken to be his neglect of the real constraints under which many racialized minority subjects live, it was Bersani as early as 1987 who explicitly expressed his resistance to the very institutions that continue to be the principal agents of the subjugation of racialized minorities and of the very desire of gays and lesbians to become respectable members and stewards of these same institutions.

Curiously, reparative reading and writing as it is often executed today is actually quite paranoid in that the intended goal of the sought-after reparations is part of a process of fervently scrutinizing the presence of harm and wounding, and potentially (or actually) finding the latter everywhere. In his essay for this volume, Bobby Benedicto speaks to this, rightly estimating that reparative reading is the dominant (indeed hegemonic) strand in queer theory and especially in queer of color critique. What to say about this hegemony? One might point out that this paranoia is not unlike those who engage in ideology critique (Marxists, Žižek), for whom objects are not only not enigmatic, unknowable, internally divided, or indeterminate, but are implicitly taken to be fully knowable and capable of being rendered or proven to be whole. These are thinkers for whom their relation to their objects is free of skepticism and suspicion, but also of alterity. To reference Robyn Wiegman’s book Object Lessons, for this camp there are no lessons to be learned from their objects, because such learning—indeed, any learning—would entail encountering objects as things other than the reflection of what one already knows and readily identifies with and identifies as—in other words, to regard one’s objects as neither disturbing nor threatening one’s will to know. But the effect of learning should not be the domestication of objects, nor the affirmation that those objects are wholly coherent, existing somehow without internal division, separation, and without remainder or an outside. That would truly be a bad education! To construe objects as evidence of “the fixed self-identity of things” will always be the work of the sovereign critic, wielding mastery over their objects, as things that cannot disturb their epistemological and decidedly disciplinary project (Edelman, “Antagonism” 822). About the reparative project we can say, paraphrasing Bersani, that the only result of self-non-erasure (or non-self-separation) … is self-non-erasure. Meaning, the inscription of oneself as an “inviolable unified subject” (Bersani as quoted by Benedicto). But with Derrida’s concept of “the trace” in mind, we note that an inscription is always a division, and there is no inscription without erasure. Indeed, erasure is the force and source for the possibility of any inscription.

To gain a further sense of this, we turn to Anne Cheng and her recent comments on some of the important lessons provided by Bersani’s work:

Much of how I think about the psychical and material afterlives of American racism is indebted to Leo’s ways of thinking: how the social speaks in the voice of the personal; how the fantasy of the subject is exerted by authority as well as by those marginalized; how our eagerness for redemption and cure blinds us to the ongoing life of injury.

(Chaudhary and Cheng)

Indeed, it is curious that critiques of the antisocial and queer negativity unwittingly have had the presumably unattended and utterly bewildering effect of turning the minority subject into the figural embodiment of the metaphysically transcendent ego, that is, the absolutely sovereign subject.

As Benedicto points out, the historical context of the AIDS crisis is typically elided or forgotten in the ongoing critiques of the antisocial thesis. For Bersani, AIDS was not only a matter of epidemiological but of ontological autoimmunity. In AIDS, Bersani saw autoimmunity’s revelation of the lack of any coherent self, prior to the threatening (contaminating, infecting) protection of the self by the self. What the autoimmune disease demonstrated was the fact that the self is always at odds with itself, not just immunologically but ontologically. Or, more accurately, it enabled a positing of the ontological as (auto-)immunological—and what we might describe as the immemorial ontological precedence of the posthumous (Düttmann). At the height of the AIDS crisis in 1987, the same year that ACT-UP NY was founded, in a special issue of the journal October, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, Bersani daringly identified AIDS as the very resource for the radical deconstruction of the sovereign subject, and specifically portrayed the jouissance of anal sex amongst gay men as the erotically ecstatic form of the subject’s inherent autoimmune suicidality. In recent de-negating moves—that is, in self-non-erasure—it is this ontological autoimmunity that is negated. But since autoimmunity is the very means by which the bio-immunological subject lives on and stands the chance of surviving (or not), what remains in the absence of this is not a living being but the figure of mastery over finitude—which is effectively death. If there is a “heroics” of “opting out,” it is here, in this utopian dream of life beyond finitude (Ruti).

For Bersani, a certain critical humility was the antidote to what he termed “critical imperialism” (Death vii), and it is the former in contrast to the latter that enables us to understand what he means when, in the “Rectum” essay, he speaks of a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (Is the Rectum 24). Meaning, within the context of his discussion, a deflating of the “coordinated and strong physical organism” according to the “strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control” (24). For as we recall now, but is often overlooked or forgotten, Bersani immediately goes on to define phallocentrism in a wholly novel way. “Phallocentrism,” he writes, “is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women” (24). Which he in turn further qualifies by stressing, “I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (24). Neither pastoralizing, nor passive, nor indulging in the fantasy of nonaggressiveness, the humiliated self is the humbling humility of the lessened, non-self-aggrandized subject. For Bersani, the self is not the ethical ideal but instead the site of a certain dehumanization and debasement that transforms the self into a non-agential receptive body, ex-appropriated from its position of power and self-asserting wholeness, and thereby being the access to the inhuman that lies, in its powerlessness, deep in the human and that the (phallocentric) human so often (violently) seeks to disavow.² Such humiliating debasement and deplorableness is what respectability politics seeks to extinguish.

In the opening of a recent review essay, Gary Younge recalls a 1987 performance by Maya Angelou where she speaks of the ethics of a minoritized subject’s willingly humiliating self-debasement as an act of love conferred upon subsequent generations. “When any human being is willing to allow herself or himself to be seen at the most debased level, most demeaned, most dehumanized level—thinking that by doing so he or she can ensure the survival of yet another human being, that is love. Albeit bitter, brutal, painful, that too is love” (qtd. in Younge, 28). Her example is drawn from the history of race in the US: “You all know that Black Americans for centuries were obliged to laugh when they weren’t tickled and to scratch when they didn’t itch. And those gestures have come down to us as Uncle Tomming.” But as she goes on to say, “I don’t know about any of you, but I wouldn’t be here this evening had those people not been successful in the humiliating employment of those humiliating ploys” (qtd. in Younge, 28). It is in this way that Angelou provides us with yet another sense of the afterlives of the antisocial.

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Returning briefly to the debate (and for a time the controversy) over the antisocial thesis, I think the entire thing might have been preempted or called off if a different kind of attention was paid to the way in which Bersani opens Homos. For while the first sentence of the prologue to the book, “No one wants to be called a homosexual,” is often cited, what just as often has been overlooked and rarely commented on is the fact that the prologue bears the title, cast in quotation marks, “‘We.'” In the immeasurable distance between that title and that opening line lies the crux of the argument that Bersani will go on to elaborate. That argument speaks to the undesirability of identity, regardless of whether bestowed by homophobia or self-asserted, and at the same time speaks (as briefly noted above) to the betrayal of identity, a betrayal here sited in the homosexual subject and that subject’s capacity—precisely in the singularity of it being “a homo”—to be the detachment of the prefix from the root of the word (sexuality). And thereby to become the site for the revelation of a degree of sameness (homoness) that is universally shared, and that in its betrayal of “heteroized” sociality (read: difference-structured, including in the form of heterosexuality and heteronormativity) has the potential to enable us to imagine and speculate on the logic by which a “we” can be envisioned and experienced.

Bersani’s project, in other words, was less the resignification of gay male desire (as though this was all a matter of theorization as performative semiotic reiteration) than the recategorization of homosexuality as (or by way of) homoness (sameness). In this way, the homo– no longer refers to nor is reducible to homosexuality. Instead, homo points to a degree or a form of sameness shared between two or more persons or things—incongruously or inaccurately—and thus homo no longer functions as a predicate of an actuality, but rather is the speculation via “the intellectual imagination” of an as-yet-to-be-realized virtuality (Bersani, “Gay Betrayals” 43). Which is also not “utopic ambivalence” since it is not ambivalent about any possible reparation, redemption, or conclusion. As Bersani states in “Gay Betrayals,” “The homosexual, perhaps even the homosexual category (what I have called ‘homoness’) rather than as a person … might be the model for correspondences of being that are by no means limited to relations among persons” (43).3 We will return to the nonhuman and inhuman intimated in the above quote, but for now we wish to point out that Bersani’s recategorization of homo effectively frees it from the imperative of categorization. Homo suddenly becomes the predicate that relieves us—”we”—of predication. For Bersani, the singularity and specificity (not the fixed identity) of the homosexual and of gay male desire is its evacuation of subjective substantiality and seriousness, which is not to be confused with self-erasure. In other words, de-specifying is the specificity of the homo, thus making the homo curiously queer.

Homoness is less-ness, and it is precisely by virtue of this less-ness that it acquires its universal relevance for all, where less-ness is understood to be less than any subject, figure, personality, character, or citizen. This also designates homoness as other than the many forms of modern subjectivity: the Cartesian, psychological, Proustian, epistemological, willful, sovereign, and sadistic subject. We might say that the homo is less than and thus “all than,” and functions as the signature of “the ‘homo’ in us all” (Bersani, Homos 10). The less-ness of homoness is also what is less than the socially congruent, recognizable, relational, legible, and included. Hence, it marks, as Bersani famously put it, “a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality” (Homos 7). Homoness is anti-communal, anti-egalitarian, anti-nurturing, anti-loving, and, indeed, antisocial.

And yet, as Tim Dean has pointed out, Bersani’s project unfolds according to two decisive steps (“Sex”). The first, briefly described above, involves an experience of non-relation via sex or the aesthetic, a self-subtraction and less-ness; and the second immediately following upon the first step, is the opening of new relational modes. In other words, first, the homo is posited in its non-relational singularity, and second, sameness is affirmed as coming from out of the evacuation of any residual traces of identity-difference that might remain in homo. It is at this point that we can begin to absorb one of Bersani’s most arresting and indeed beautiful adages: “lessness is the condition of allness” (Bersani and Dutoit, Forms 165). As Bersani also defined it, homoness is “a kind of universal solidarity not of identities but of positionings and configurations in space, a solidarity that ignores even the apparently most intractable identity-difference: between the human and the nonhuman” (“Gay Betrayals” 44). In his essay in this volume, Tom Roach explores the infinite reciprocity and multiplicity of sameness/homoness, focusing on the work of the artist Juan Pablo Echeverri, and its recategorizations of portraiture and self-portraiture.

One of the reasons for the intractability of the difference between the human and the nonhuman is perhaps the degree to which the nonhuman, in the specific sense of the inhuman, inheres and persists in the human. We are well aware of how—historically, culturally, and politically—that essential inhumanity, universally shared by all members of humanity to the extent that they are human, has been displaced on to certain humans in particular. Accompanying this is a history and long philosophical tradition, operating in resistance to this dehumanizing and minoritizing politics. One form that this resistance has taken is based on the argument for the need to never lose sight of this ineradicable and irreducible inhuman-ness in the human.4 Jacqueline Rose has recently noted that, “In the thought of philosopher Simone Weil, it is only by admitting the limits of the human that we will stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power, as if we owned the world we live in.” Rose then goes on to say, “Perhaps, then, if those limits were acknowledged, the world would look less murderous” (14). And indeed, at times such resisters as Bersani and Weil have advocated that in its relation to itself, each subject cultivate a rapport with it, driven by an ethical sense of the ontological and not the sociological status of the inhuman. For those subjects inscribed as inhuman, the same move of resistance applies. This has been theoretically articulated in different ways by so-called antisocial theorists, and it is important not to lose sight of these distinctions.

For Edelman, it is a matter of refusing one’s subjugating figuration and social identity (woman, trans*, black, queer) by zeroing it out, affirming the difference of the zero from the one, where the latter signifies a conception of the unified human subject not riven by the inhuman or any form of negativity (Edelman, Bad Education). Edelman’s argument finds parallels in the work Frank B. Wilderson III, Calvin Warren, amongst others, and their theorizing of afropessimism and Black nihilism, respectively. For Bersani, as we have seen, it is a matter not of refusing but of discovering what of the figured social subject in its difference corresponds to the inhuman as not only universal but also as bearing qualities of sameness rather than difference, and thereby affirming a oneness (not a zero). Yet as I explore in my essay in this volume, Bersanian oneness can only be described as incongruous since this sense is the pleasure of finding inaccurate replications and correspondences of forms amongst humans and nonhumans. And then there are many thinkers working today such as Stephen Best, Eugenie Brinkema, Nicholas De Villiers, Kevin Quashie, Alexander Garcia Düttmann, William Haver, Jacques Khalip, and our contributors,5 whose work on the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of “queer unbelonging” (Caserio 819) is articulated in terms of an essential anonymity that persists within identities and names (and figures), and that effectively amounts to a kind of queer neutrality in that anonymity is beholden to the language of neither difference nor sameness. As the thinker of the neutral Maurice Blanchot said, the anonymous translates as “not one,” to which we might add that the “not-one” is not a zero (or a two, either). In the work of the group of theorists just mentioned, this idea of ethical existence as not-one has been phrased, for instance, as “name no one man or name” (Ricco), “none like us” (Best), and “being-not-one or being at odds with AIDS” (Düttmann). The differences between zero, oneness, and not-one point to the range of the antisocial thesis’s precipitants and to a calculable sense shared amongst all three strands, of the incalculable in thinking existence beyond the constraints of the social.

_______

Because of Bersani’s reading of Foucault and the latter’s questioning of the liberatory status granted to sex in the discourse of sexuality (Bersani, “Why Sex?”), and because of his ongoing collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, Bersani moves in his project on universal sameness deliberately away from sex and sexuality and fully toward aesthetics and art.⁶ It is through the aesthetic correspondence of forms, a notion that he derives from Baudelaire and that is present in his work as early as 1977 (if not earlier), that Bersani finds the kind of inaccurate replications that he believes to be the forms by which each individual subject has a sense of already being in the world. From such correspondences, he has said, comes the sense that one is born into the world in which one is—non-identically—already there.

The aesthetic becomes for Bersani the recategorization of sex and sexuality. As such, it is even more depersonalized than the homo that he tried on as a category in the years from around 1987 and its “Rectum” essay and in his seminal book Homos (1995). One can track Bersani’s recategorization of sameness as a rhythmic weaving in and out of (homo)sexuality across the extent of his career: homosexuality as antisocial sameness (Proust, 1965); sameness unrelated to (homo)sexuality (Mallarmé, 1985); homosexuality as antisocial sameness (Homos, 1995); and sameness other than in terms of (homo)sexuality but as inaccurate replication or recategorization (essays and books from 1997–2018). These later works are to a large extent reprisals of his theorization in the (under-read) Mallarmé book, where, for instance, he speaks of “the force of a shimmering sameness” moving through the poems (7).⁷ This outline affirms Bersani’s own sense of method, about which he was apt to say that each of his conceptualizations is the registration of a future recategorization.

Indeed, in essays and lectures written and published in the late-1990s and early 2000s—”Gay Betrayals” (1997), “Against Monogamy” (1998), “Sociality and Sexuality” (2000), and “Sociability and Cruising” (2002)—Bersani begins to revise the argument he made in Homos.⁸ By 2004 with “Fr-oucault and the End of Sex,” and then two years later with “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject” (2006), Bersani moves even further from sex to art, from sexuality to aesthetics.⁹ As briefly noted above, in his article from 2010, “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence,” Tim Dean charts this turn of emphasis toward the aesthetic in Bersani’s work, casting Homos as the major transitional work from anti-relational literature and sex to newly relational art and aesthetics. While doing so, Dean also notes how difficult it has been for queer theorists (evidently himself included) to recognize and engage with it: “Queer theorists take sexual variance in stride; we have a harder time dealing with art” (387).

The aesthetic is also where Bersani finds the inhuman: the material-sensuous registration of an irreducible alterity, self-separation, and outside that cannot be assimilated, an ex-centricity that is the radical displacement from the anthropocentric. Wholly impersonal and animate in its inanimateness, the aesthetic is the part that is not a part of any whole. It is what incompletes—being in its essential, finite singularity unfinished—and in doing so gestures or hints at the dark centre of thoughts and things, that which is in us but not of us. Therefore, the importance of the aesthetic lies not only in the way it matches the vicissitudes of queer eros (a connection drawn by Caserio based upon his reading of Tim Dean’s important book, Beyond Sexuality) but also due to the way that the aesthetic has been conceived by Bersani and others as the creative resistance (Deleuze) to the traits characterizing neoliberalism, respectability politics, and reproductive futurity.¹⁰ Indeed, for some of us, the aesthetic names that mode of ethical-cultural practice that is without policy or program, and is never about laying down the law. Precarious in its relation to immortality and any afterlife, and unbecoming and impoverished in its sensorial sensuousness, thus providing no final satisfaction or resolution as in classical notions of beauty, the aesthetic bears the inhuman and inanimate within it. It is the realm of imagined, virtual, and speculative thought; it is impossible to detach either from erasure or disappearance in its very inscription and appearance; and it is—without any need to invoke “art for art’s sake”—workless, inoperative, and a means without end. Harboring no secret interiority, for Bersani in particular the aesthetic is one of our principal means of affirming the infinite correspondences of the mobility of forms in the world, about which there will never be a time when all correspondences will have been discovered. In its infinite digression from any telos, the aesthetic institutes an “unmappable extensibility” (Bersani and Dutoit, Carravagio’s Secrets 89–90).

Like George Orwell’s argument in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” for Bersani the move is from (aesthetic) appeasement not to surrender or opting out but to resistance. This is the argument that he and Dutoit lay out in their early essay “Merde alors” (1980). In their discussion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò and his inexact replication of Sade’s text, the authors argue that “it is the very limitlessness of our aestheticism which constitutes the moral perspective on sadism in Salò” (14). As they immediately go on to elaborate: “The saving frivolity with which we simply go on looking [what I am calling non-hypocritical “aesthetic appeasement”] creates a consciousness of looking as, first, part of our inescapable implication in the world’s violence and, second, a promiscuous mobility thanks to which our mimetic appropriations of the world are constantly being continued elsewhere and therefore do not require the satisfyingly climactic destruction of any part of the world” [non-sadistic resistance] (14). Meaning, they conceptualize resistance not via the logic of congruity (identity, exact reproduction, as in the historical cases of communism and socialism, and the political economy of common equivalence or commensurable value) but via the logic of incongruity (impersonal, inaccurate reproduction, as in the communism of in-equivalence theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy). Such a political project is not utopian, because it operates by way of the inconclusive (means without end). The future is not queer, because it must be allowed to remain without predicates if it (the future and those who will inhabit it) is not to be pre-emptively appropriated now, by one’s being all-too confident that one knows who will be there and how they will live there. In other words, the future will remain free to the extent that it remains free of predicates—queer or otherwise.

As Jacqueline Rose has recently written,

Freedom of thought … is the ability to track by means of thought the more hidden, painful and scandalous aspects of human life in a world which has turned … even more dangerous and cruel than it was before. … Thought can be revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, but in so far as it goes beyond the world as known and seen [i.e., is aesthetic in its thinking], it is always the enemy of domination. Like love, thinking [and art] is “corrosive” for the social order.

(26)

In other words, as I have been arguing, there is something essentially and critically antisocial about love, thinking, and art. In her essay for this volume, Robyn Wiegman turns to these questions, foregrounding the distinction between “queer thinking” and “queer theory” (or “theorizing,” thus installing the grammatical parallel) in relation to Bersani’s work (and thought) and the field more generally. As we know, right up until his last books, Bersani devoted a great deal of time to conceptualizing what he understood by “thought” and “thinking.”

To take just one example of many, in The Death of Stephane Mallarmé Bersani defines thought as the suspension and at times near exclusion and extinguishing of external reality (8–9). And that it is this extinguishing in the sense of the putting out of a fire or more generally, a light, that there is, for Bersani, an illuminating of the world. In ways that resonate with a philosophical tradition extending from Aristotle to Agamben, for Bersani it is darkness that makes light visible; darkness is the light of the night, the light that the night is—that nocturnal illumination.11 For Bersani, this extinguishing of external reality included social reality and the persons, personalities, and characters that are the social’s principal subjects and figures.12 Thought is a non-redemptive, moving away, withdrawing, and a departing (including from “the world”)—non-salvific salutation and bidding adieu. Mikko Tuhkanen picks up on this thread in his montage-essay on Pet Shop Boys and leaving, which resonates with Bersani’s own thinking on the eroticization of consciousness’s rapport with nothingness (Mallarmé 76)—that is, the impossible, the negative, the disappeared, unbecoming.In 2021, I published a short essay titled, “Hope, or Pandora in the Time of the Pandemic,” that drew on Calvin Warren’s paean for spiritual hope, distinct from political hope. Following Warren, Black nihilism blackens the world, or using a neologism coined by curator and writer Karina Griffith, it “endarkens” it, which might also be how it “defines” the world. This means that Black nihilism finds its power and legitimacy in its own pure potential which, following Agamben, is also the potential not-to. The spiritual hope of Black nihilism lies in the utter refusal to participate in the cruel optimism of biopolitical futurity that keeps promising a better life, one day, “just wait and see.”In the end, and most importantly, the effort of trying to maintain an abiding and antisocial rapport with negativity, the inhuman, and the irreparable, is a commitment to non-mastery and non-sovereignty, and the renunciation of the will to know and the violence that accompanies such epistemological desires. It is what Sam See describes as “the pleasure of ignorance” and by which he comes to define love as “unredeeming and unredeemable” (196), which is essentially to point to what in love is unlovable (antisocial), meaning incapable of being possessed or every fully known. The title of my essay for this volume, “Unlovable Oneness,” at once names: the unlovability of any idea of unified coherence that would be the betrayal of the lovable; what enables a sense of oneness as precisely incongruity and thus lovable; and affirms such incongruous oneness to be the impossibility of community. Ultimately, it is by way of the unlovable that we arrive at a sense of oneness as not-one, meaning as always multiple in its singularity, and unfinished in its resolution never to resolve into a “superior finality” (Bersani, Future 127). As See argues, this failure to conclude—whether in art’s impoverishment, sex’s consummate lack of consummation, or love’s unlovableness—is the traitorous condition by which art, sex, and love do not fail us.13 And as See goes on to suggest, in affirming the unlovability of our objects, we affirm the impossibility of them ever being totally loved, as we also come to discover that this irreducible antisociality is what we most love about them.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Visual Studies, and Art History at the University of Toronto, where he is Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He is a theorist working at the juncture of contemporary art, queer theory, and philosophy, noted for his work on aesthetics and ethics; sexuality and intimacy; and eco-deconstruction. Ricco has coedited special issues of Parallax and Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and most recently, a special issue of differences on Leo Bersani. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (both University of Chicago Press) and has just completed the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” titled Queer Finitude.

Footnotes

I want to thank the contributors to this issue, each of whom offers a critically new perspective on the anti-social thesis and Leo Bersani’s work in relation to it. And thanks to Eyal Amiran and Mathias Nilges, Editors of Postmodern Culture, and to Managing Editor Annie Moore. I especially want to acknowledge what a great pleasure it has been to collaborate with Austin Svedjan. Our many conversations over the past two years, including during a week-long writing retreat in July 2023 when we worked on developing our respective Introductions, will be remembered as the highlights of this editorial project and partnership, which began in summer 2022 and I am thrilled to see come to fruition now in June 2024.

1. “Gay Betrayals” was originally presented as a talk with the French title, “Trahisons gay,” at “Les études gay et lesbiennes,” a colloquium organized by Didier Eribon and held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 23 and 27, 1997. The proceedings of the colloquium were then edited by Eribon and published by the Pompidou in 1998. The English version of Bersani’s essay was first published in his collection of essays Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (2010). The French title of Bersani’s paper might be a play on Magritte’s La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) of 1929, more familiarly known by the sentence that appears within it, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), the work about which Foucault published an eponymous essay in 1973.

2. I am, of course, referring to the well-known statement Bersani makes in “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “The self is a practical convenience. Promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (30).

3. Following Edelman’s question as to whether “politics [is] the fantasy, when you break it down, of breaking down figures of fantasy?” (Berlant and Edelman 87), we might also ask if politics might be the configuration of breaking down the fantasy of figures.

4. See, most notably, Lyotard.

5. We can also list scholars outside of queer theory working on various forms of social unbelonging, such as Eleanor Kaufman, David Clark, Daniel Tiffany, and Rei Terada, to name a few.

6. The collaboration between Bersani and Dutoit began in the late 1970s and first appeared in print with the publication of the essay “Merde alors” in October, and it would then go on to include three books that bracket the publication of Homos (1995): Arts of Impoverishment (1993); Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998); and Caravaggio (1999) on Derek Jarman’s eponymous film. These publication dates also imply that Bersani was working on Homos around the same time he was working on the first two “art books” he would publish with Dutoit as co-author.

7. Indeed, many of the themes, concerns, terms, and concepts, associated with Bersani’s later work appear in his book on Mallarmé. These include: “masturbatory attention” (16); inaccurate replication; aesthetic impoverishment; anti-performativity (23); non-profundity; the burying of coherent subjectivity; being without secrets; correlations to the universe; frivolousness (46); virtuality; and self-shattering (65).

8. All these essays are collected in Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.

9. This turn is contemporaneous with the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (beginning with Society Must Be Defended, 2003), which also take up the issue of the “will to know” within a history of truth, subjectivity, and notions and regimes of the care of the self and an aesthetics of existence. We are aware that Bersani was deeply interested in the late Foucault and came to be one of the scholars who most thoroughly took up his colleague and friend’s unfinished project of thinking “new relational modes,” organized through “bodies and pleasures” rather than social categories and identities. Of particular note, are the last lectures on “Subjectivity and Truth” (1981), where Foucault speaks about the birth of desire in late-Roman ethics. There he focuses not on the repression of desire but rather its emergence via its extraction or “unearthing” at the very root of, yet now distinct from, the bloc of aphrodisia (viz. pleasure, sex) via technologies of the self that in the sidelining of sexual acts, bodies, and pleasures created a new form: the subject of desire. Here we see not only reasons for the split between Foucault and Deleuze over pleasure and desire, respectively, but also the difference between Foucault and Judith Butler, and the subsequent influence that the latter’s work will have in shaping the field of queer theory. For as we recall, in 1984 (the year Foucault died) Butler will write her dissertation on “Subjects of Desire” (published in 1987).

10. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality; Ricco, Logic; and Ricco, Decision.

11. This brief discussion is a nod to the cosmological turn that Bersani’s thinking took in the last decade of his career, as he became increasingly interested in theories concerning such things as the origins of the universe emerging from astronomy and astrophysics. The darkness that we are speaking of here correlates with the quasars or super black holes that are at the center of each galaxy in the universe. It also correlates with the so-called “dark matter” that is believed to constitute 27 percent of the universe (with only 4.9 percent of the universe being ordinary matter); and to “dark energy” which makes up the other roughly 68 percent of the universe, and that NASA scientist Jane Rigby has described as “this weird repulsive force that is making the universe expand ever faster and faster.” For the statistics cited here, see Overbye.

12. We might find a resonance between Bersani’s observations here on perceiving darkness, and Karl Marx’s idea of seeing the future in a glass darkly, “so as” Terry Eagleton recently explains, “not to make a fetish of it.”

13. In an article in homage to the reading and writing practices of his former colleague, Caleb Smith relays that “Inside the front cover of each book from Sam’s library, a bookplate had been placed. ‘From the library of Sam See,’ it said, then quoted two lines by Sappho, in H.D.’s translation: ‘yet to sing love, / love must first shatter us.'”

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