Virtual Presents, Future Strangers: The Art of Recategorization in the Work of Leo Bersani and Juan Pablo Echeverri

Tom Roach (bio)

Abstract

This essay argues that Bersani’s attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledge production spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically, Bersani’s late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkers and concepts that reveals thought’s virtual potential, affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an immanentist conception of being. After exploring Bersani’s theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, I turn to the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to offer a dialogic example of recategorization as aesthetic practice.

In a series of questions that begins the final section of “‘Ardent Masturbation’ (Descartes, Freud, Proust, et al.),” Leo Bersani asks a curious question, an ontological speculation masquerading as an epistemological inquiry: “Can thought be caressed into knowledge?” (54). Bersani asks this question after positing a spatial link between the essay’s titular thinkers. To properly think, all three more or less announce, it is necessary to shut the door to the world and retreat to a space of solitude. Indeed, in “what might broadly be called modernity” the necessary condition for a philosophical knowledge of the self is a separation from the social: “autonomous self-reflection” can only occur within an “extraordinarily active solitariness” (42, 46). Solitude is essential to modern epistemology because the world is conceived as hostile to thought. The will to self-knowledge is a similarly aggressive force. The modern epistemologist whips thought into shape first by excluding an antagonistic world, and then by making the world’s foreignness familiar via appropriation and incorporation. Cartesian epistemological autonomy is, to pick up on this special issue’s theme, profoundly antisocial: the subject assimilates the world into itself—makes it familiar, self-identical—and calls it “knowledge.”¹

This essay demonstrates how Bersani’s attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledge production spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically, Bersani’s late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkers and concepts that reveals thought’s virtual potential, affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an alternative to subject/object dualism. After exploring Bersani’s theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, discovering along the way a conceptual resonance in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as a practical resonance in Michel Foucault’s late interview style, I turn to the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to offer a dialogic example of recategorization as aesthetic practice. Echeverri’s work takes Bersani’s practice of recategorization to the point of subjective implosion: a mise en abyme of inaccurate self-replication and substitution that reconceives the self as fungible opacity. Ultimately, Bersani and Echeverri encourage us to ignore the desire to make the unknown known and to make the foreign familiar. Instead, they invite us to enjoy the pleasures of perpetual unfulfillment and to sync with forces and partners that valorize the becoming of being.

In “Ardent Masturbation,” Bersani wonders whether all knowledge production is necessarily antisocial in the Cartesian fashion: self-protective, self-placatory, even self-creative (Cogito ergo sum).² The essay’s title is lifted from Freud’s “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” in which Freud argues, according to Bersani, that onanism for such men is: a) a defensive response to being excluded from the parental dyad; b) a fantasy of mastering that dyad and the inhospitable world it represents; and c) a fantasy of parentless self-generation, perhaps the ultimate kiss-off to mom and dad. For Bersani, the term is a metaphor for the titular thinkers’ philosophical practice. The hegemonic, masturbatory model of knowledge production in modern epistemology likewise traffics in defensiveness, attempted mastery, and the immaculate conception of a (divided) self. Bersani devotes the final pages of the essay, and arguably much of his career, to seeking alternatives to this model. In asking whether thought can “caress” knowledge into being, he cheekily alludes to masturbation, but this time the sensual activity is of a different variety. Bersani seeks not only a different method for producing knowledge but also a different form of knowledge altogether: one with a syntax that is not epistemological but aesthetic and sensual; one that emerges from a correspondence between thought and thinker but belongs to neither; one that seeks not to capture the unknown but to articulate, and then articulate differently, the known unthought; one modeled not on an ego-gratifying masturbation wherein knowledge is the coaxed orgasm of thought, but, rather, a mutually caressive, mutually transformative exchange between thought and thinker, thinker and things.³ This is to say that in seeking alternatives to the dominant mode of knowledge production in modernity Bersani simultaneously seeks a non-Cartesian/non-Freudian/non-Proustian form of being.

Sort of. The thing with these three thinkers is that they say more than they know, so there is always more to say about them. In Bersani’s hands, these thinkers unwittingly and repeatedly undermine their own conceptual dualisms and antagonisms.⁴ Bersani returns to their work time and again to discover the conceptual pathways their slip-ups might reveal. Unlike, say Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault who definitively turn their backs on at least two of the titular thinkers, Bersani is, at minimum, ambivalent about letting them go. Seeing that he offers them second, third, and fourth chances, he seems committed to making the relationship work. Descartes, for example, might be the daddy of masturbatory self-analysis, the godlike creator of a world inimical to thought, but, from another perspective, he also “initiates and sustains a kind of intellectual sociability that could be thought of as superseding the solitary concentration that led to his certainties about being and the conditions of knowledge” (“Ardent” 56). Descartes’s dialogic gesture of sharing his meditations in writing, of reaching out and confiding in us, bursts, according to Bersani, his monadic bubble. In Samuel Beckett’s work, which Bersani discusses in relation to Descartes, language, even the nonsensical blather that dribbles from Beckett’s characters’ mouths, exists solely for the sake of creating an indefinitely disconnected relation wherein intersubjective fusion is always forestalled, failed. By reading Descartes through a Beckettian lens, Bersani transforms him into someone worth keeping around—at least as blathering company.

Similarly, Bersani spends a good third of “‘Ardent Masturbation'” analyzing Freud’s “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” and not because he is interested per se in the neurotic men of its title, who are attracted to married yet promiscuous women. Rather, Bersani digs into Freud’s work here for at least three reasons: First, the essay is an extreme, bordering on absurd, example of the masturbatory form of knowledge production that links these three thinkers; second, Freud posits masturbation as a universal paradigm of sexual desire—all desire is desire of the self, that is, narcissistic;⁵ and, third, Freud’s argumentat here is so illogical that the essay demolishes its own claims and “performs the blockages, the mergings, the incoherence inherent in the ‘discipline’ Freud invented” (53). This latter point, that the text performatively reveals the cracks in the armor of the psychoanalytic enterprise, is an indication of Bersani’s aforementioned ambivalence about leaving Freud behind. Because psychoanalytic theory “immobilizes the human subject in its persuasive demonstration of an irreducible, politically unfixable antagonism between external reality and the structures of desire” (Bersani, Homos 124), it may not be the nonmasturbatory mode of thinking Bersani seeks—but it’s at least honest enough to expose, however unwittingly, its limits.

The previous quotation, which might be read as Bersani hammering the final nail in Freud’s coffin, appears in Homos, a book published sixteen years before the essay under consideration. In the subsequent chapter of Thoughts and Things, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” published two years after “‘Ardent Masturbation,'” Bersani resurrects the very thinkers that one might logically assume are resting in peace (Descartes, Freud, and Proust). In Bersani’s final essay collection, Receptive Bodies, Freud is referenced on thirty-four of that book’s one-hundred-twenty-eight pages (Descartes, nine; Proust, six). All of which leads me to ask: Am I the only reader who experienced confusion, if not frustration, when Freud repeatedly reared his head in Bersani’s work after Homos? Because the stunning concluding chapter of that book is, at least in part, a eulogy for a Freudian “sexuality of profundity” (123)—not to mention a calling out of psychoanalytic ideological critique as “inescapably conservative” (124) and hence politically moribund—is my frustration justified, or at least shared? I, for one, was thrilled to see Georg Simmel appear as a new interlocutor in the first paragraph of 2002’s “Cruising and Sociability.” But Freud soon arrives, crashes the party, and dominates a conversation that up to that point had been pleasantly flighty and promiscuously chatty. In the years since, I may or may not have screamed, “Let Freud go! Look elsewhere!” more than once to the Bersani-in-my-head. Now in 2024, as we approach the two-year anniversary of Bersani’s death and assess the “afterlife” of a concept with which he is (rather unfortunately) associated, it seems salient to ask: Why did Bersani continuously loop back to thinkers that might no longer have served his intellectual project? If, after Homos, that intellectual project evolved into an exploration of nonmasturbatory forms of knowledge production and nondestructive ways of being in, and with, the world, why did he not turn directly to the work of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty, whom he names in the concluding section of “‘Ardent Masturbation'” as the philosophers who “propose versions of being as mobilized and continuously modified through exchanges that collapse the subject-object dualism” (56)? Are Bersani’s repeated returns to the work of Descartes, Freud, Proust, et al. motivated by a Berlantian cruel optimism that promises a definitive clarification of their conceptual enigmas? Or are they a Beckettian experiment in failing better, a discursive performance of an “indefinitely postponed … unprecedented climax” (57)? Indeed, are these frustrating and frustrated reengagements the means by which Bersani caresses thought into knowledge?

Thankfully, I’m not the only one with questions of this sort. In the interview, “Rigorously Speculating,” Mikko Tuhkanen asks Bersani about his recurring engagements with certain thinkers. Bersani’s answer to a query about the preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art is telling:

I think it’s a good analysis of Proust, but in a way it could be, to use a term that’s become important to me, recategorized—and in a way this is precisely what I have been doing in my subsequent work. The subsequent psychoanalytic references add to the original reading, enrich it in a way, and also make it a little more precise, or more expansive. It’s as if later versions of certain thoughts keep spiraling out with new additions. It’s a strange relation of undoing but not quite undoing what you’ve thought; it’s supplementing, it’s additive in a way. … People have said to me, ‘You already said that twenty years ago.’ Well, fine. That simply means that it was an important idea and it’s remained an important idea but I found ways to recategorize it, to play with it in a different way, adding something, changing something. I think that’s all very important.

(294)

Aside from making me feel sheepish about being one of those people who snootily critique Bersani for repeating himself, this passage—specifically, the concept of recategorization—illuminates Bersani’s method of caressing thought into knowledge and, quite relatedly, hints at both the movement and the temporality of thought and being.⁶

Recategorization is neither revision nor critique; it is the becoming of a concept, the unfolding and reemergence of an intuition in a form that is essentially the same but slightly unfamiliar. The inherent difference of a concept becomes accessible over time; in this sense, concepts are future strangers. This strangeness is precisely their potential: their inherent incompleteness that unfolds into an open-ended problematic, their potential to renew their potential, to repotentiate. One should not treat these guests as “food for thought” to be consumed, digested, excreted, and flushed. Rather, concepts are deserving of our hospitality and humility; they are to be treated as welcome foreigners and granted permanent residency. Distinguishing critique from Bersani’s speculative approach to knowledge, Tuhkanen writes: “In contrast to a ‘speculative’ approach, a ‘critique’ assumes that the reader has ‘understood’—and, consequently, finished with—the text, precisely the attitude of epistemological annihilation, typical to Western modernity, that Bersani seeks to displace” (Speculative 16). Recategorization is one feature of Bersani’s speculative approach, his attempt to produce a nonmasturbatory, nonappropriative method of knowledge production. In employing it, he demonstrates that the relationship between thought and thinker is not defined by dominance and submission, or even competition, but hospitality.

Bersani is not alone on his quest to find alternatives to “the attitude of epistemological annihilation” copped by Descartes and other modern dialecticians. In What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari likewise seek alternatives to what Tuhkanen calls the “epistemophilic regime” (Speculative 43). Their pursuit entails an examination of a thinker’s “conceptual personae,” which they define as the “true agents of enunciation” through which the thinker thinks—”the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae” (Deleuze and Guattari 65). These conceptual figures determine the form of knowledge produced, the relation between thought and thinker, and, ultimately, the limits of the thinkable within any system of thought. Unlike Bersani, who is quite generous in his rendering of Descartes’s method, Deleuze and Guattari dismissively identify the conceptual persona of Descartes’s cogito as The Idiot, “the private thinker [who] forms a concept with innate forces that everyone possesses on their own account by right (‘I think’)” (62). Unlike Bersani, they summarily turn their backs on Descartes and look elsewhere. Their first consideration of non-idiotic personae is The Friend, the etymological bedrock of Greek philosophers: “the friends of wisdom, those who seek wisdom but do not formally possess it” (3). They ponder the usefulness of the Greek friend as a figure for thought, but soon realize that, like Bersani’s solitary masturbator, it carries a lot of baggage: the Greeks “violently force” it into a relationship with Platonic Essence, and, later, wisdom and truth (3); they compel it into competition in the agon, wherein friends become rivals and claimants; they even coerce it into the conceptual blueprint of cities and societies (democracy, for example) (4). Is this too much to ask of The Friend? Has Greek philosophy overburdened and exhausted The Friend? Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari speculate, the only way to invigorate The Friend is to “recategorize” it. Although they do not use Bersani’s term, their discussion of what might need to happen in order for The Friend to become viable again as a conceptual persona for thought bears resemblance to Bersani’s method:

Unless we are led back to the “Friend,” but after an ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe, and so in yet another new sense, in a mutual distress, a mutual weariness that forms a new right of thought (Socrates becomes Jewish). Not two friends who communicate and recall the past together but, on the contrary, who suffer an amnesia or aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. Personae proliferate and branch off, jostle one another and replace each other.⁷

(71)

Only by branching off in new directions and jostling with other versions of itself can The Friend repotentiate and revivify. Like Freudian and Proustian problematics in Bersani’s work, The Friend must return as an inaccurate replication of itself in order to be viable for philosophy again.

Michel Foucault also accompanies Bersani in his quest for anti-epistemophilic methods and knowledges. Foucault, however, uses the interview format to recategorize his previous ideas. As I have previously argued, rather than allowing interlocutors to interpellate him into a dialogic exchange of critique and defense, point and counterpoint, Foucault opts to extend his ideas in new directions in his late interviews.⁸ Refusing to remain locked within the discursive rules of Socratic dialogue, he strategically disengages from dialectical exchange and steers the conversation toward new conceptual developments. One can see here the outline of a larger political project beyond dialectics—a strategy that couples exodus with invention, defection with creation. Foucault betrays the conventions of intersubjective dialogue to open up a space for both new conceptual forms and new ways of relating. His interview strategy thus syncs with Bersani’s practice of recategorization. Bersani revisits concepts and thinkers because they “keep spiraling out with new additions,” not because he feels compelled to correct, defend, or have the final word on his previous analyses. That “final word” is itself a teleological fantasy; Bersani’s conclusions are infinitely forestalled because open-ended problematics are unsublatable within a dialectical schematic. Like Foucault, Bersani chooses to let his ideas swerve from a determinate course so that they might repotentiate and reveal themselves as future strangers.⁹

Put another way, Bersani’s recategorized concepts exist alongside earlier articulations as actualizations of a concept’s virtuality. A theory of virtuality is pivotal in Bersani’s late work because it affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an alternative to subject/object dualism. In “Re-perusal, Registered,” he describes the nondialectical movement and anticausal temporality of thought as follows: “positing the futurity of our past thinking breaks down the temporality we usually assign to mental life and points to the oneness, the persisting presentness, of all thought” (275). The temporal order “we usually assign to mental life” is that of a detective narrative, wherein intellectual discoveries lead to an unshakeable truth.¹⁰ The skilled sleuth who pores over clues that eventually solve the crime wrangles the time of thought into a teleological trajectory. Thought is useful here insofar as it serves the telos: everything in this narrative points toward the big reveal, the synthesis of intellectual labor. The tense of this cognitive quest is the future perfect: each clue’s meaning only makes sense in retrospect, in the time of the “will have been,” when connections between clues are discovered.¹¹ The final truth, then, sublates and hence annihilates each intellectual discovery; similarly, the time of intellectual labor condenses into a single, futural moment. By insisting on the “persisting presentness” of thought, Bersani by contrast posits a nonnarrative temporality for mental life, wherein ideas occur as singular events inassimilable to a dialectical schematic. Rather than developing along a tidy chronological trajectory of cause and effect, thoughts emerge and move in a more haphazard, itinerant form.¹² In Bersani’s words,

the spiraling of mental time into ever widening plateaus of experience at once repeated and revised establishes a continuity between past and present wholly unlike the discontinuous suppressions of present time by the temporal hallucinations of involuntary memory. Nothing is lost but nothing is ever the same. Each present is an inaccurate replication—or, as I now like to call it, a re-categorizing—of all our pasts.

(Marcel Proust xi-xii)

Because there is temporal continuity in the psyche, thought comprises reconfigured pasts emerging in the present—the virtual present is simultaneously the future stranger. Because thought is inherently different to itself, it can never be fully realized: thought advances in a series toward a climax that never comes. If the unconscious of thought is persistently present in the psyche, then the big reveal is indefinitely forestalled; the virtual potential of a concept is a pressure continually exerted over time and through various articulations. Recategorization respects and enacts the unstoppable becoming of the virtual. It illuminates an aspect of a concept that was always already there: an unnoticed yet ever-present inherent difference. Once again, in Bersani’s words, recategorization “moves the argument forward by inaccurately replicating it” (Thoughts 73).¹³

In this psychic topography, however, a forward advance is indistinguishable from a backward loop. Unconscious virtuality presents thought with a syntax different from an epistemophilic will to know. If the latter operates according to an imperialistic set of rules urging us to “dig deep” in order to “gain” knowledge (by making it personal property) and eliminate foreignness (by making it familiar), the former adheres to aesthetic guidelines that encourage speculation, experimentation, and the creation of open-ended problematics. The knowledge emergent in Cartesian epistemological pursuits is an entrapment of thought, a deadening of its potential. Thinking in the speculative mode honors thought’s virtual unconscious: its inherent difference, its restless becoming. Virtuality is comprehensible as a syntax of the psyche only if the unconscious is perceived as both unknowable and, in Christopher Bollas’s phrasing, as consisting of “unthought knowns” (qtd. in Tuhkanen, Speculative 193). Bersani urges us to understand the unconscious “not as a reservoir of repressed representations and impulses that aim to block the realization of our conscious projects but … as the original reservoir of psychic virtualities” (Thoughts 67). Put differently, the unconscious has been misrecognized as a threatening and antagonistic other, when in fact it might be nothing to fear: it is not a storehouse of repressed memories and traumas, but the virtual presentness of thought. In this rendering of the unconscious, the psychoanalytic will to know, the desire to scour the depths of the unconscious to unearth its ever-elusive secrets, is the real monster.

The speculative practice of recategorization likewise enacts a key Bersanian ontological claim: that the divided self, the sine qua non of masturbatory self-analysis, including Freudian psychoanalysis, is actually an immanentist conception of being misrecognized. Recategorization as a critical method—and, importantly, as an aesthetic practice, a way of life—is attuned to the temporality and mobility of thought and being. Put succinctly, it is attuned to ontology: the thought of being. Bersani gives shape to this time and movement with the figure of the spiral: “we might think of mental time as a spiraling movement rather than a linear trajectory that leaves its past behind. … [M]oving forward is indistinguishable from a relooping movement backward” (69). By relooping, thoughts develop serially and extensibly: they are inaccurately replicated as they wreathe forward and backward toward new connections. The unconscious past puts pressure on present consciousness to unmoor thought from itself, to open up a space for it to become something different. In this sense, the virtual is the present’s present: a gift that keeps on giving, a mutual caress between psychic temporalities, an inexhaustible intangibility impossible to capture or possess. The past, indeed, is never erased, as Freud contends, but it is also not repressed. It is looped back into the present as virtual becoming. This looping is not an eruptive twist on a narrative trajectory that moves toward climax, but a looping between temporalities that fit incongruously within each other. The syntax of the movement between past and present, and between the unconscious and consciousness, is, in John Paul Ricco’s words, an “incongruous oneness.”¹⁴ Incongruity here is crucial to thought’s becoming because it unglues established knowledge from its potential; incongruity creates a space of freedom to become whatever. “Having ceased to be,” Bersani writes, “thought will ceaselessly begin to be. The present contains the virtualized future of our past” (75). Recategorization is thinking in the aesthetic mode because it is a sculpting and re-sculpting of thought’s potential. It is likewise, according to Tuhkanen, anamnetic: “a going-back-over, a return to something in the unactualized past that does not let go, something that demands one to revisit the missed scene of origination” (Speculative 206). If the epistemophilic syntax orients the thinker to march militantly toward the world to territorialize and conquer it by means of knowledge, the syntax of virtuality orients the thinker to waltz with the world and its inhabitants, to sync with forces and partners that valorize the becoming of being between them. To return to the quotation that begins this essay, when the thinker learns to caress thought into knowledge, their connection to the world takes the form of a mutual caress of potentiality.

“Quoting ourselves,” Bersani remarks in “Staring,” the final essay in his final essay collection, “far from being an enslavement to our past, creates what may be the only free relation we can have to our past: the freedom of continually repeating its intrinsic inconclusiveness” (Receptive 126). Immediately following this statement, Bersani quotes himself. He reiterates a few of his essays’ hallmark opening zingers (the most provocative, perhaps, the first sentence of “Merde Alors,” co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit: “The vagina is a logical defect in nature.” [128]) to set the stage for another recategorization. Bersani’s incendiary, sometimes outlandish, introductory sentences, become, in their recategorized form, empty seductions. By calling an inordinate amount of attention to themselves, they “defeat from the very start, our impatient wish to move ahead toward de-problematizing conclusions” (128). These opening zingers are simply too outrageous to be declarations for “serious” knowledge pursuits—those that seek conclusive truths, those for which knowledge is property. Rather, Bersani’s openers are self-contained, diversionary pleasures. They provoke an intellectual tension that never resolves; they flamboyantly introduce an argumentative enigma that turns out to be a red herring. Or, in Bersani’s words: “They caressingly dismiss the reader’s conceptual receptiveness” (128; my emphasis). As it turns out, at least in this late recategorization of his thought, Bersani has long been, most likely before he even knew it, inviting us to caress thought into knowledge with him. Through first sentences that suck all the air out of a text, he lovingly yet teasingly lures readers into his anti-epistemophilic practice of critical swerving. He explains that these sentences are likewise “pauses” that serve as “models for occasional restful stops in the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking and of inconclusive being” (128). As self-contained and satisfying art objects in and of themselves, they invite us to ignore the desire to make the unknown known, to solve the mystery. As aesthetic diversions that fail to lead us toward a climax, they invite us, instead, to enjoy the pleasures of perpetual unfulfillment.

Recategorization as a critical practice allows thought to undo and reorient itself as it progresses serially toward indefinitely forestalled conclusions. It is thus an additive process of unbecoming and metamorphosis that expresses an inexhaustibly renewable exchange between the past and present, between the unconscious and consciousness, and, ultimately, between being and becoming. At the risk of literalizing Bersani’s critical method, I turn now to the work of Colombian artist Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) to speculate about recategorization as an aesthetic practice, a mode of being. Echeverri’s work, particularly his signature piece, miss fotojapón, instantiates Bersani’s critical practice as photographic spectacle. Comprised of thousands of 4×5cm passport-size self-portraits taken daily between the years 1998 and 2022, miss fotojapón represents the self as a series of inaccurately replicated forms looping haphazardly between temporalities (fig. 1).

Fig 1. Juan Pablo Echeverri, miss fotojapón, 1998-2022 (selection), passport photos, inkjet prints, 4 × 5 cm each. © Juan Pablo Echeverri. Courtesy of the Juan Pablo Echeverri Estate. https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com

Echeverri describes the motivation for the project as follows:

I was around 17 at the time [1995] and had just started experimenting with my appearance with different piercings and hairstyles; I thought it would be nice to have some documentation of these experiments for the future. As a way of accompanying my written diary with images, I began to sporadically visit the photo booth around 1995. The more I physically changed, the more I wanted to take pictures; and the more pictures I took, the more I instigated these changes. This cycle eventually resulted in me taking a photograph on a daily basis beginning in June 2000.

(“All”)

“Foto Japon” is the brand name of the photobooth Echeverri frequented in his adolescence. The titular “miss” is, perhaps, then, a cheeky, gender-bending reference to the artist himself (as in, “I am Miss Fotojapón”). Unabashedly even confrontationally queer-identified both in life and art, Echeverri frequently plays with gender expression in his work.¹⁵ That “miss,” however, might also be interpreted as an experience of longing, “(I) miss Fotojapón.” Given that the series is a collection of passport photos, and that the nation “Japan” is in its title, “miss” could signify an ache for a once- or never-visited nation, even a desire to escape one’s native country. In this sense, “missing” might also be a retroactive longing for a period in the artist’s adolescence when a photobooth afforded an opportunity for self-experimentation: a “safe space” away from the social in which new selves are nurtured. One way or another, the photobooth, although initially used as a tool to document experiments in self-styling, becomes the instigator for continual self-experimentation. The line between life and art eventually becomes indistinguishable; Echeverri poses for a camera that records extant appearances and shapes future ones. Self-transformation and journalistic documentation merge here into a life practice. When the portraits are viewed in a grid-like formation, Echeverri’s preferred way of exhibiting the piece, the variability in self-appearance is dizzying; indeed, it is difficult to comprehend that the vast, superficial differences among the sublime number of represented selves cohere in one individual.

But what type of subject is represented here? Although miss fotojapón is a daily documentation of Echeverri’s changing visage, the photographic subject of this series does not develop along a traditional life trajectory: there is no cause and effect and no climax, only self-extensions spiraling between past, present, and future. In a statement that can only be described as cosmically narcissistic, Echeverri writes: “I like to refer to the fantasies that surround ‘being,’ stretching the idea of the ‘self’ and creating a universe in which I am the common denominator” (“All”). The artist’s initial desire to use photography to preserve memory is, in the end, thwarted. In the grid, the past is not quarantined as a deadened known but instead reloops into future versions of a self. A moustache here emerges in a new form there, a facial piercing shifts from eyebrow to ear. This serialized self unbecomes and transforms as it spirals through time and multiplies. Although obvious differences appear in the aging face, moving forward in time seems indistinguishable from moving backward. Each version of this self is a singular event, each stacked side by side, piling up horizontally and vertically, in a nonteleological, nonlinear chronology. Newer selves are neither replacements of nor improvements on previous versions; they are simply different installments of a self contained in the virtual future of its past. Moreover, akin to Bersani’s practice of quoting himself to the point that his ideas no longer resemble themselves, Echeverri’s cosmically narcissistic project of self-reproduction repeats the self to death: there is no “there” beneath the superficial repetition of self-stylization, no psychological interiority to reveal. The self’s inherent otherness prevents any final selfactualization, or any discovery of a “true self.” Instead, incongruous selves perpetually fail to cohere in a psychological subject. By recategorizing the psychological subject as a series of superficial, aesthetic transformations, Echeverri offers a dizzying demonstration of being’s indefinite unfinishedness. Amid this sea of superficial difference, however, three consistencies emerge: Echeverri’s blank stare, his solitude, and the photographic genre itself—the passport photo.

Like Bersani’s opening zingers, which shock but swerve, Echeverri’s numerous, spectacular self-stylings are also empty seductions. The artist’s wide-ranging looks certainly steal the spotlight, beckoning viewers to reflect, perhaps “philosophically,” on the mutability of self-identity or the multitudes contained within, but his look itself—that is, his facial expression—remains consistently affectless and inscrutable. In each photo Echeverri stares directly at the viewer with a gaze simultaneously wide-eyed and bored, confrontational and passive, fearful and confident—a deer in the headlights impossibly blasé and defiant. Likewise, his consistently pursed lips, concealing teeth and resisting both smiles and frowns, express little emotion: is he melancholy or giggly, earnest or mocking? Given that each photo in this series appears to have been taken in isolation—in a photo booth that momentarily separates the subject from the world—Echeverri’s uniformly impenetrable facial expressions bespeak the ambivalence of antisocial self-exclusion. The photographic genre Echeverri employs to document his solitude distills this ambivalence. The passport photo might signal freedom, agency, global mobility, the means of access to new opportunities and adventures; it also might be a reminder of our arbitrary imprisonment in a national identity, a reminder of the chance social determinants that immobilize and abrade, or evidence of our stuckness in a body and place we did not choose. If Echeverri dreams of a cosmopolitan life beyond the borders of his homeland, his visage does not betray such hopes. Instead, he projects a neutral blankness: an inexpressive enigma that teases psychological depth. Frustratingly, however, these self-portraits do not illuminate the secrets of any psyche. Between the emphasis on subjective surfaces (hair, skin, accessories) and the refusal to welcome us in via the eyes (those “windows of the soul”) or any other expressive entry point, Echeverri seduces us only to betray us; he gives us nothing because there is nothing except solitude. miss photojapón is Echeverri’s aesthetic experiment in antisociality born in a queer solitude self-imposed, socially determined, and existential.¹⁶ Although we might be wowed by the artist’s impressive achievements in self-styling, the multidimensional aloneness that pervades each portrait, not to mention the almost monastic discipline it took to produce the series, is, in the end, most compelling. Echeverri’s daily practice of self-exclusion creates a space not only for new aesthetic forms (various self-representations) but also for new forms of connection. The aesthetic, and ascetic, practice of self-isolation, experimentation, and documentation in miss fotojapón arguably affords the artist an opportunity to speculate about new relational modes in his other projects, specifically, his 2016series, futuroSEXtraños (fig. 2)

Fig 2. Juan Pablo Echeverri, futuroSEXtraños, 2016, 60 inkjet prints, wood frames, each 41.9 × 41.9 cm. © Juan Pablo Echeverri. Courtesy of the Juan Pablo Echeverri Estate. https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com/

“For me,” Bersani states, “solitude has always been a precondition for rethinking relationality” (“Rigorously” 282). Unlike an epistemophilic antisociality, the solitary “ardent masturbation” that results in de-problematized “truth,” aesthetic experiments in antisociality can jar us into conceiving of new forms of connectedness. Best exemplified, chez Bersani, in the work of Genet and Beckett, such experiments “might begin not actually to define new relations, but it opens up a space for them—as if we were being compelled to think with parts of the brain that, you might say, haven’t been thought with previously” (281). In a less neurological register, John Paul Ricco also details the benefits of antisocial, aesthetic experiments in queer solitude: an “ecstatic pleasure” emerging at “the juncture of the profanity and perversity of ‘being alone’ … and the non-redemptive negativity of ‘being left out'” (“Queer Solitude” 144). These benefits include being “returned to your desires in all their radicality … unencumbered by the goal of self-actualization and the need to feel included” as well as “the restoration of curiosity, questioning, and thinking—yet in non-paranoid and non-reparative ways, because, again, one is not obsessed with feeling included” (145). Embracing solitude and affirming exclusion allows us to experience an impersonal mode of being that has no stake in self-identity. Only by breaking with all familiar connections might we conceive of new ones; only by affirming the “essential solipsism of sex” (145), as Ricco puts it, can we create intimacies worthy of the designation “ethical.”

In futuroSEXtraños, Echeverri highlights sex as a site of strangeness and estrangement: the future becomes stranger via sex; lovers become strangers on account of sex; the self becomes a future stranger through sex. If Bersani seeks methods to caress thought into knowledge, to gently coax speculations into open-ended problematics that reveal their inherent strangeness over time, Echeverri implies in this series that sex makes us future strangers to ourselves and others, that sex, moreover, reveals strangers that have been, perhaps, always already there. futuroSEXtraños comprises sixty inkjet prints, each featuring a silhouetted bust of a recognizable Western cultural type: a football player, a prom queen, a metal head, a beatnik. The model for each of these figures is the artist himself, a fact which prompts some initial questions: are the figures depicted in the grid the “future strangers” that emerge within the self because of sex? Does sex prompt a recategorization of the self, an opportunity to reveal the self as a series of strangers? Given the artist’s cosmically narcissistic desire to create “a universe in which I am the common denominator,” are these figures the “unknown knowns” of the artist’s psyche, a representation of a self that is inherently different to itself? If so, how do these diverse strangers relate to one another within a subjective unity? According to Echeverri, the series was inspired by “the template images that social media use, where a silhouette appears in a square or circle, suggesting users to share their own image to ‘identify’ themselves” (“Artist’s Statement”). Exhibited in a grid-like formation, the silhouettes mimic the user interface of, for example, Grindr: the app for men-seeking-men (m4m) that set the design template for geosocial dating and hookup apps. In his artist statement for the series, Echeverri notes that the work concerns the blind trust we put in others during the virtual cruise and, more generally, the cutthroat relational norms of mediated intimacies: “how we can go from being ‘in a Relationship’ with someone to be unable to access their lives after being blocked and deleted by them, finding only these silhouettes that mean we’re not allowed in these people’s lives anymore” (“Artist’s Statement”). In this sense, hookup apps themselves are gathering spaces for future strangers. Such apps provoke intense sexual desires, fantasies, and emotional connections that, for the most part, vanish into thin air. Users narcissistically project fantasies of the ideal partner/lover onto desired others who, unable to compete with such fantasies, inevitably disappoint. Once the fantasy dissipates (due to the general fleetingness of social media connection, the consummation of desire, or even, more simply, forgetfulness or boredom) the two again become strangers. The illusion of intersubjective fusion is shattered by the disconnected connectedness inherent to these media and, ultimately, by the essential solipsism of sexual desire itself.

And yet, amid their estrangement these diverse subjective forms connect; they mis-fit together in a grid that formally emphasizes their sameness. However different their look (hair, pose, accessories), the grid gathers them into an aesthetic collection that creates likenesses and correspondences between seemingly incompatible types. Although the distinctness of the individual silhouettes is noteworthy, the grid flattens these figures into an arrangement emphasizing similitude. In this collection, sameness is the structuring framework through which difference manifests. Diverse cultural types are made generically uniform by the silhouette, but they refuse to be identical: they are alike in form and singular in content. Not unlike Warhol’s famous soup cans, these avatars are essentially the same but superficially unique. And yet, even this “uniqueness” is superfluous: the superficial spectacle of commodified individuality reduces, finally, to blankness. Formal similitude dissolves individuality and cultural stereotype effaces psychological interiority. These unique yet generic types are invariably hollowed out; they are flattened and essentially interchangeable with another. Put another way, Echeverri’s grid of blank, clichéd cultural types visualizes a community founded in fungibility. As I have argued elsewhere, fungibility is a relational model that defies intersubjective, psychological, sexual, and neoliberal relational norms.¹⁷ An ethics of fungibility deemphasizes psychic interiority: diverse subjective types correspond at the level of likeness because they renounce self-ownership. These types mingle impersonally, interchangeably, seeking not to solve the enigma of the other nor to incorporate a threatening otherness into the self. Rather, they seek in the other the unknown knowns of the self—or, using Echeverri’s words, they seek the opportunity to become a future stranger to oneself.

By committing to an antisocial, arguably masturbatory practice of photographic self-reproduction, Echeverri visualizes a recategorized self born in queer solitude—a self that reveals strange, inherent features as it loops between temporalities. This self loses and transforms itself in serialization: it unbecomes, regroups, and inaccurately replicates in a movement of unfinished virtuality. In the process of self-recategorization, all sense of propriety is lost; indeed, self-recategorization is anathema to ownership because it de-subjectifies and de-privatizes the subject in generic serialization. “If we were ever to create a community in which property relations are not the defining factor,” Bersani speculates, “we have to first reconceive erotics” (Homos 128). Echeverri’s ascetic practice of self-recategorization in miss photojapón is the precondition for his positing of a radically impersonal mode of erotic relationality in futuroSEXtraños—his attempt to envision an erotics and a community contemptuous of property relations. In the essential solipsism of sex, in its ontologically disconnected connectedness, Echeverri locates an anti-intersubjective ethics of fungibility. In his community of diverse types—each singular and clichéd, precious and insignificant—blank forms correspond in a dance of fungible equivalence. Difference here is nothing to fear; it is folded into the likeness of form (the rectangle, the silhouette) and the geometry of assemblage (the grid). The grid determines the mode of interaction between its rectangular constituents: a oneness (at the most literal level, the one body of the artist himself) is disseminated into bounded frames that hold their content (subjective forms) at a remove. “The triangle,” Michael Snediker writes, “is a shape of melodrama to the extent that we are trained to think of its geometry in terms of competing vertices and angles; the rectangle’s corners, by contrast, ask us to think not of rivalry but of parallel surfaces and lines. … A triangle graphically corresponds to imagined hostilities whereas a rectangle waits to be filled” (174). Echeverri’s contiguous rectangles neither compete with, nor complement, each other: they are filled with fungible content, they connect at the point of separation (the line, the frame), they replicate inaccurately, differently. Separation here diagrams connection; formal correspondence traces the design of extensivity. In this community, for which “unity” is purely formal, the self finds its own blankness in nonidentical others—a blankness that is counterintuitively the fullness of its being. In the impersonal mingling of hollowed-out types, in the solipsism of sex, the self is recategorized as a future stranger. There is nothing to take away from this encounter and no knowledge to capture in this self-caress. It is merely, miraculously, a virtual present in the serial relay of ontological unbecoming and regrouping; it is merely, miraculously, the virtual present in a psychic temporality that loops haphazardly until movement, at last, stills.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (SUNY Press, 2012) and Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (SUNY Press, 2021). Recent publications include an essay in differences on Leo Bersani’s concept of fascination and a chapter in Political Philosophies of Aging, Dying, and Death (Taylor and Francis, 2021) on the political function of death in the work of Michel Foucault.

Footnotes

I am grateful to Grace Lavery for piquing my interest in Bersani’s (Jamesian) concept of “re-perusal” in her conference presentation, “Prolapse,” at “The Afterlives of the Antisocial” symposium at UC, Irvine, on September 30, 2022. Thanks also to Mikko Tuhkanen for using his encyclopedic knowledge of Bersani oeuvre to help me locate Bersani’s varied articulations of reperusal and recategorization. Finally, I am enormously grateful to Diego Echeverri, Claudia Muñoz de Echeverri, and Marcela Echeverri for permitting me to reprint Juan Pablo Echeverri’s art and for locating Echeverri’s artist’s statement on futuroSEXtraños. I am likewise grateful to Claudia Liliana Salamanca Sanchez, Lucía Parias Rojas, and Paola Rico for putting me in touch with the artist’s estate. I dedicate this essay to the life and work of Leo Bersani (1931-2022) and Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022), both of whom have inspired me in countless ways, many of which I have yet to grasp.

1. I am using the word “antisocial” here to designate a form of self-imposed isolation that disconnects the subject from a world conceived of as hostile to thought and the self. In “Against Prefaces,” the sardonic anti-preface to Thoughts and Things, Bersani designates this type of antisociality a “conquering autonomy toward which the Cartesian subject aspires” (xi). An epistemological antisociality should be distinguished from artistic experiments in antisociality in Genet, Beckett, and Todd Haynes’s Safe, to use the examples Bersani references in “Rigorously Speculating,” an interview with Mikko Tuhkanen (Bersani, “Rigorously” 280). An aesthetic encounter with antisociality “might begin not actually to define new relations, but it opens up a space for them—as if we were being compelled to think with parts of the brain that, you might say, haven’t been thought with previously” (281). Bersani is interested in artistic renderings of antisociality, as opposed to epistemological ones, because the former might jar us into thinking about new forms of connectedness—forms that bear no resemblance to familiar relational models. Regarding the “antisocial thesis,” the “afterlife” of which we are presumedly elaborating here, Bersani makes clear that he is not necessarily interested in, to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Žižek, tarrying with the negative: “Already in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is trying to adapt the idea of ‘correspondences of form’ to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness.” He adds that his application of the idea of correspondences of form to homosexuality is “somewhat unfortunate” because it is “too literal and too arbitrary” (280). This might be one reason Bersani reemphasizes the correspondence of forms in aesthetic encounters in much of his post-Homos writing (in Forms of Being, for example). Finally, Bersani is more nuanced in his rendering of the Cartesian will-to-knowledge than I am painting him to be here. In “Re-perusal, Registered,” for example, he writes: “The Cartesian prioritizing of knowledge is not a simple will to know; the very pursuit of knowledge is stalled, or at least complicated, by the mind revealing itself as a secret object to itself” (275).

2. In “Rigorously Speculating,” Bersani tells Mikko Tuhkanen that the essay concerns “the epistemological hegemony in our culture … [and] the priority given to epistemology in modern philosophy.” He continues: “And I think that’s what Foucault is arguing against when he talks about ‘the Cartesian moment’: it’s a moment when ‘knowledge’ replaces ‘being,’ to put it very schematically. In intimate relations, this knowledge is connected to everything that’s important in both Proust and Freud” (284). Later in the interview, when discussing the idea of aesthetic virtuality, he remarks: “I mean, the negative words in all of this are ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ obviously …” (286).

3. Here I am glossing Mikko Tuhkanen’s analysis of the virtual unconscious in Bersani’s work, which I discuss in detail later in the essay. Moreover, the term “known unthought” is a riff on Christopher Bollas’s “unthought knowns,” also encountered in Tuhkanen’s work and also discussed in detail later in the essay. See Tuhkanen, Speculative 193-200.

4. In “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Bersani provides an example of Freud’s knack for undoing his own claims. Bersani finds evidence of the virtual unconscious in Freud’s repeated failures to pictorialize the relationship between past and present in the psyche. To illustrate that the psychic past is never erased, Freud makes an analogy to Rome, noting how it too contains its past in (alongside) its present. This analogy hits a brick wall (for reasons that are not necessary to detail here), so Freud seeks another pictorial analogy in human aging and development. This one too fails to capture the relationship between the psychic past and present, prompting Freud to concede that he cannot illustrate his claim through pictorial representation. Bersani writes:

Realizing that the comparison with Rome is leading him astray, Freud renounces it (but, typically, doesn’t erase it), concluding that psychic time can’t be represented in pictorial terms. But, as we have seen, the analogy does in fact work, just not in the way Freud intended. Interestingly, though it is ostensibly abandoned, the analogy seems to have a force of its own, redirecting the argument rather than merely illustrating it. It moves the argument forward by inaccurately replicating it.

(73)

I discuss the movement of inaccurate replication in thought in the context of recategorization below.

5. Bersani summarizes this point succinctly in “Rigorously Speculating”: “Fundamentally, in Proust and Freud, desire is narcissistic” (284).

6. I am indebted to Mikko Tuhkanen for helping me understand the centrality of recategorization to Bersani’s work. See his elaborations of recategorization in Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction, especially, “Introduction” and “The Virtual Unconscious.”

7. I unpack this quotation in Friendship as a Way of Life:

The problem for philosophy in modernity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that the classical claimant/rival conception of friendship can no longer be the conceptual persona of thought, for two reasons: First, powerful rivals have emerged in the forces of advertising and marketing—the new “idea men” of our time—transforming friendship’s relation to thought and putting philosophy to work in the service of capital; second, after the “inexpressible catastrophe” of modernity (in historical terms, the atrocities committed under totalitarianism, the Holocaust, Stalinism; in philosophical terms, the Heideggerian mistake of confusing the Nazis for the Greeks), the friend as conceptual persona of philosophy has changed irrevocably. Homosocialized, commodified, and rendered fascistic, classical conceptions of friendship have become disgraceful and untrustworthy.

(60-1)

8. See Roach, Friendship (87). For examples of Foucault’s “recategorizing” practice in interviews, see “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” and “Sex Power, and the Politics of Identity” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume One: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (141-156; 163-174).

9. Mikko Tuhkanen names Bersani’s critical method a “method of swerving” and proposes that this method, not the investigations into sexuality, makes Bersani a queer theorist: “As opposed to criticism aiming at the ‘annihilating elucidation’ of the object, what we have here is the kind of tortuous movement that the term’s etymology—from the Latin torquere—suggests: a digressive, transversal dance of desire that is not impelled by the need to assimilate an established choreography but moves for the mere pleasure of soliciting company, of crossing a line” (Queer 16). This critical method, per Tuhkanen, also implies an anti-intersubjective, queer ethics. Swerving is “a name he [Bersani] gives to the possibility of a nonsadistic, nonannihilative relation to otherness, the possibility that our fascinations remain with the purely enigmatic, that they not turn into paranoid investigations of the other’s secret jouissance” (14).

10. Mikko Tuhkanen also uses the detective genre to narrativize the constitution of the Laplanchean psychoanalytic subject. The enigmatic call of the Other entices this subject, who feels compelled to decipher the mysterious messages. The subject believes the Other contains secrets that are crucial to the subject’s self-understanding, even, paranoically, that the Other has “stolen” something from the subject (castrated the subject) that must be repossessed. Tuhkanen writes: “The castrated being’s relation to the world is that of a detective trying to solve the crime of which he is the victim. It is my awakening to the theft—the sense that something (I do not exactly know what) has been taken from me—that renders me a subject and everyone else a potential criminal. My startled coming-to-consciousness of my privation constitutes my subjectivation” (Speculative 215). In this rendering, the subject’s relationship to the Other is “marked by aggrievance, aggression, and suspicion” (215); its relationship to the world is “epistemophilic” because knowing, understanding—and hence destroying—the world’s mysteries is this subject’s primary motivation, its raison d’être (216).

11. Continuing with the detective genre analogy, Tuhkanen argues that the future perfect “orients the story’s disjointed materials into a narrative whose denouement, as in a good murder mystery, reveals the function of the seemingly random clues—including the red herrings—that have puzzled the reader” (Queer 11).

12. Tuhkanen notes that Bersani claims that drives, thoughts, and attention spans have a “natural tendency to swerve” (Queer 14). Bersani’s critical method of swerving—a method that seeks not to solve a text’s riddle or discover its “true” meaning—requires a digressive attention span that wanders promiscuously over a text’s surface and cares little for any significance that might lie “behind” or “beneath” it. For Tuhkanen, this critical method opens onto an ethical practice: a “swerving” connection to Otherness Bersani designates “sociability.” According to Tuhkanen,

The swerving movement of nonannihilative desire reformulates the subject’s relation to otherness in terms of what Bersani frequently calls “sociability,” a mode of connectedness among whose practitioners he counts Mallarmé, James, Almodóvar, Socrates, Foucault, Beckett, and cruisy gay men. When Bersani writes that sociability is ‘a form of relationality uncontamined by desire’ (IRG 45), the term ‘desire’ indexes the annihilative, totalizing movement of Hegelian becoming and its attempted reformulation by Laplanche as the enigmatic signifier. Sociability is nondesiring insofar as it is not a response, or a corrective, to a perceived lack as (a) being’s essence.

(16)

13. Specifically, this is a reference to Freud’s “recategorization” of his pictorial representations of the relationship between past and present. See note five for details.

14. I am grateful to John Paul Ricco for this insight. His conference presentation, “Incongruity,” at “The Afterlives of the Antisocial” symposium at UC, Irvine, alerted me to the importance of incongruity to Bersani’s conception of thought and being. See Ricco’s essay, “Incongruity,” in the special issue of differences, “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani.

15. See, for example, Ojo de Loca (2006), diva’s Life (2006-07), and boYOs (2009), all available at the artist’s website, juanpabloecheverri.com.

16. I borrow the term “queer solitude” from John Paul Ricco, whose essay, “Queer Solitude: Dean Sameshima’s being alone,” I discuss in the following paragraph.

17. My 2021 book, Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era, attempts to tease out the ethical potential of fungibility. futuroSEXtraños is the cover image for that book.

Works Cited

• Bersani, Leo. “Cruising and Sociability.” Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 45-62.
• –––. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995.
• –––. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2013.
• –––. “Merde Alors.” Receptive Bodies, U of Chicago P, 2018, pp. 1-19.
• –––. Receptive Bodies. U of Chicago P, 2018.
• –––. “Re-Perusal, Registered.” The Henry James Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2011, pp. 274-80.
• –––. “Rigorously Speculating: An Interview with Leo Bersani.” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, edited by Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY P, 2014, pp. 279-96.
• –––. Thoughts and Things. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. Bloomsbury, 2004.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III, Columbia UP, 1994.
• Echeverri, Juan Pablo. “All of My Work Has Been Self-Portraits for the Last 22 Years.” Juan Pablo Echeverri, https://www.juanpabloecheverri.com/artiststatement.
• –––. “Artist’s Statement for futuroSEXtraños.” EVA International, 14 April 2018–8 July 2018, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland.
• Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley, et al., The New Press, 1997.
• Lavery, Grace. “Prolapse.” The Afterlives of the Antisocial Conference, 30 September 2022, University of California, Irvine, CA.
• Ricco, John Paul. “Incongruity.” The Afterlives of the Antisocial Conference, 30 September 2022, University of California, Irvine, CA.
• Ricco, John Paul. “Incongruity.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 156–64.
• –––. “Queer Solitude: Dean Sameshima’s being alone.” A/R art-recherche, no. 4, 2021, pp. 144-45.
• Roach, Tom. Friendship As a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement. SUNY P, 2012.
• –––. Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY P, 2021.
• Snediker, Michael. “Is the Rectangle a Grave?” Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, edited by Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY P, 2014, pp. 169-90.
• Tuhkanen, Mikko. Leo Bersani: A Speculative Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• –––, editor. Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond. SUNY P, 2014.