Unlovable Oneness

John Paul Ricco (bio)

Abstract

This essay highlights the centrality of the concept of “incongruity” in Leo Bersani’s thinking of ethical relation. It is structured by the incongruous coupling of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, especially Blue Black (2000), as it considers the ethical value of going along with the unwatchable and unreadable (e.g., gender and sexual violence), and with monochromatic abstraction in the context of race. According to Bersani, incongruity is the syntax of undivided being. By looking at ungrammatical literary syntax (McBride) and chromatic oneness (Kelly), the essay argues for ethical alignments absent of predication or congruity as it affirms an antisocial aesthetics of incongruous oneness as opposed to the often-murderous fixation on identity and difference.

I. Incongruous Couples

“The vagina is a logical defect in nature.” Readers of this article will likely recognize this quotation as the opening sentence of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s essay, “Merde alors,” originally published in the journal October 13 (1980), and then republished as the first chapter of what was to be Bersani’s last single-authored book, Receptive Bodies (2018).¹ The sentence can be read as a statement about something taken to be unlovable, and it can perhaps be read as a statement that is hard to love. As the essay’s opening sentence, it also might be taken as a deliberate provocation that raises the question of why its reader would continue to read on. This is not accidental, since the essay is about why we look, watch, and at times stare; and more specifically, why we look, watch, and at times stare at what is unwatchable—what is not to be looked at, let alone stared at. In addition to being about what we might call the visual drive, and the at times questionable lures that attract it, these are also questions about duration (keeping on looking), and repetition (looking at something again and again). That is, these are questions about the duration and repetition of visual attention and fascination, especially fraught when the object of fascination is a representation of intolerable sex, art, violence—or, as we will see, the combination of all three in literature. The kind of visual attention and fascination that concerns the authors entails a paradoxical active passivity and passive activity that is captured by the word “willing,” as in “willing to go along with,” to be receptive, to submit to, to be complicit in, and to give oneself over or up to. Specifically, to that which is morally questionable, and what in the context of this essay, I am calling the unlovable.²

For Bersani, the seductive and the intolerable (like receptiveness and repulsion—again, as in sex or aesthetics), are more than intimately connected. Further, in their non-dialectical rapport, the seductive and the intolerable are operative at the same time, and thus wholly irredeemable. “The seductive and intolerable image” that appears in Bersani’s famed essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) “of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” is, as Joseph Litvak has recently argued, “intolerable because it is seductive,” and, we add, seductive because it is intolerable (Bersani, Is the Rectum 18; Litvak 232). So too, with the scenes of rimming in Genet’s last novel, Funeral Rites, that Bersani discusses in Homos, and with the sadism of Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the subject of his and Dutoit’s essay, “Merde alors.”

We can take Bersani and Dutoit to be arguing that as willing spectators of such scenes of violence as those represented in Salò, we approximate the never-saying-no that is the unconscious. And that in our willingness not to say no to the unwatchable (in our willingness to go along with it, and thereby to repeat it, inaccurately), we say yes to what is impossible to know or to render in art or language. As Bersani will later define it,

the unconscious never is; it is perhaps an essentially unthinkable, intrinsically unrealizable reserve of human being—a dimension of virtuality rather than of psychic depth—from which we connect to the world, not as subject to object, but as a continuation of a specific syntax of being.

(Is the Rectum 147–48)

It is by going along with the unwatchable, as the drawing from this reserve that is the non-repressed unconscious, that we move—non-volitionally—into a limitless realm of reformulations and recategorizations that Bersani and Dutoit in 1980 name “aestheticism” and that Bersani later describes as “a specific syntax of being,” “choreographed being,” and at other times, simply as “thinking.”³ As the authors write, we “never tire of being spectators; but it is the very limitlessness of our aestheticism which constitutes the moral perspective on sadism in Salò” (Bersani, Receptive 14).

In this essay I am proceeding in a manner similar to the way Bersani composed his arguments, namely by the incongruous juxtaposition of authors, artists, texts, and works.⁴ This method is especially evident in the book he co-authored with Dutoit, The Forms of Violence—itself an elaboration of the argument they present five years earlier in “Merde alors”—that brings together Assyrian sculptural reliefs, Marcel Proust, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory; and in their article, “The Pregnant Critic,” which brings together Beckett, Rembrandt, Diotima of Plato’s Symposium, and that in its attention to Ellsworth Kelly, will be of central interest in part three of my discussion.⁵

Here, my main incongruous coupling is Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), and Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black (2000), a painted aluminum work commissioned as a permanent installation for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. A novel about sexual abuse, violence, and rape, and a work of monochromatic abstract art—regardless of their contemporaneity—would seem to have very little, if anything, in common with each other. Yet it is the very incongruity of their pairing, as well as the incongruous logic by which each of the works operates, that I am interested in exploring within the context of this journal issue. For the incongruous is another name for the antisocial and its afterlives.

In the case of McBride, we are confronted with the afterlife of the modernist literary form, narrative, the novel, and most importantly, syntax. With Kelly, it is the afterlife of modernist abstract art and specifically the monochrome. The “unlovable” is there in McBride’s subject matter and a literary style that is the impoverishment of syntactical logic (congruence), and in Kelly’s chromatic refusal of what Benjamin Buchloh has recently described (in relation to artist Gerhard Richter) as the compensatory gratification of chromatic satisfaction, resolution, or reconciliation, that is, congruence (Molesworth). Like the Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Alain Resnais of Bersani and Dutoit’s Arts of Impoverishment, Eimear McBride and Ellsworth Kelly are artists who create works that would seem as though they do not want to be read or seen, works that in that precise sense might be understood as unlovable. However, in this essay, I will argue for the ethical virtue of going along with what is unlovable and explore how art provides us with a training in how to do so.

Indeed, in reading McBride’s novel and looking at Kelly’s wall panels, there is a certain experience of susceptibility, receptivity, passivity, and absorption, yet in a way that is non-mimetic. These works are not reliant upon predication or social determination—and their logics of equivalence and unification—and therefore operate separate from the reproductive/reflective realist point of view, including via narrative, and the terms of identity (performatively iterative or otherwise). Just as with my incongruous juxtaposition of the two works, they themselves point to incommensurable relations mobilized through impersonal and anonymous forms. That is, in the unnamed narrator and all the other characters of McBride’s story, and in the impersonal names of Kelly’s colors, these works operate outside the symbolic order of meaning (congruence), including the figural, and social recognition.⁶ In McBride we discover a syntactical oneness, and in Kelly a chromatic oneness, both of which are unlovable and therefore worthy of going along with.

Finally, by considering works focused on gendered female subjectivity and, as we will see, reading them in terms of racial subjectivity, we have the opportunity to engage with forms of subjectivity that Bersani’s work rarely discusses, and yet to which his work holds great potential. Thus, through my reading of the novel, we move from Bersani and Dutoit on Pasolini and sadism to McBride and masochism. While in relation to the wall panels, we move from Bersani and Dutoit’s reappraisal of their own initial reading of Kelly’s monochromes to artist Glenn Ligon’s aesthetic recategorization of black and blue via Kelly’s work in St. Louis.

II. On the Ethical Virtue of Going Along With What Is Unlovable

In their essay on Pasolini’s Salò, Bersani and Dutoit give two reasons to watch the unwatchable when they write:

It is important to note that both reasons entail finding oneself as a viewer inaccurately replicated, either in the work of art and its representations of violence, or in the world, as part of an infinite series of other places and forms in which we discover our sameness as pre-existing through our reception by and refracting of ourselves by those forms. Yet importantly, as the authors stress, we cannot detach ourselves from our implication in the world’s violence; and artistic representations of violence are the non-violent formal means of registering this implication. In turn, as they also argue, any delusional self-exoneration from the economy of sex, pleasure, pain, and ontological shattering is the ground for the ongoing sanctioning of violence against others.

In the current censorious climate in which we are constantly encountering assertions that certain things are off limits and should not be spoken of or represented due to their sexual, violent, or sexually violent content, Bersani and Dutoit’s argument is more necessary and important than ever, since it provides the best reasons to stay with the unlovable as presented in art, film, and literature.⁷ One of the principal reasons is that doing so is to refuse and defy what has been deemed “the order of nature” and the ways in which this purported natural order of things renders certain things abnormal, monstrous, or defects of nature. This tradition goes at least as far back as Ovid and the myth of Pygmalion, the latter of whom creates a statue of a female figure not simply to satisfy an erotic desire of idealized femininity but as an aesthetic means of substituting and compensating for his conception of the feminine as disgusting, as unlovable. And so, we read in Charles Martin’s translation: “Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid indecency, and, dismayed by the numerous defects of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion” (qtd. in Schwartz).

In Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, the libertine Duke echoes the words of Ovid/Pygmalion on the order of nature when he commands the female sex slaves to “offer your fronts very little to our sight; remember that this loathsome part, which only the alienation of her wits could have permitted Nature to create, is always the one we find most repugnant” (qtd. in Bersani, Receptive 1). This repugnance is the case because, as Bersani and Dutoit explain, “[t]he most intense Sadean—and sadistic—sexuality depends on symmetry, and with women, Sade’s men enjoy the diminished pleasures of asymmetrical sex” (Receptive 2). This is because, as the authors further explain, non-diminished sadistic pleasure (and, evil) is pleasure doubled when its pain is inflicted on someone identical to the sadist.

Sadism is the finding of pleasure and enjoyment in the reproduction in the other of the pain and suffering of one’s own originary (masochistic) shattering. This definition is based upon a familiar and widely accepted psychoanalytic postulate understood to be axiomatic about the role of sexuality in hominization. Namely, that out of a shattering precipitated by sexual stimulation the human being is (traumatically) born, such that every human being is a masochistic subject that seeks and desires this shattering, since it is the force that provides that subject with a sense of itself as being in the world. This “perversion” is essential, ontologically ineradicable, and thus one of the ineradicable principles of human being. As I imagine Oliver Davis and Tim Dean would be inclined to put it, human being is deplorable.⁸

Bersani said that his famous first sentences often occurred as “a kind of mental lightning effect” of being struck by a formulation of thinking in language that, as evident in the next two examples, was often about the unlovable: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it,” or “Nobody wants to be called a homosexual.”⁹ Yet it is precisely such seemingly unlovable sentences about the unlovable that cause him to be attached to them and “to develop a terrible feeling of fidelity” to them, “as if the book or essay has to be written because I’ve been hit, or infected, by that sentence (to adopt a term used by E. M. Forster, who described the writing of A Passage to India as a ‘voluntary surrender to infection'” (Bersani, “Broken” 415). In other words, Bersani, he who is struck by these opening sentences as they come to mind as though from outside himself, submits to them, and by going along with them, including in their famously counter-intuitive logic, is authored by them and needs to craft an argument faithful to their conceptual power.

My sense is that something similar describes the experience of novelist Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Written over the course of six months in the spring and summer of 2004 when she was twenty-seven years old, the novel (her first) would not be published until 2014, after years of rejections by editors and presses. Since then, it has garnered many awards, the highest praise from critics and readers, and is widely considered a masterpiece of modern literature, notable for its depictions of sexual violence and its inimitable style. My interest is in the relation between this violence and this style.

A Girl is the story of the “masochistic self-debasement” that a young girl in 1980s Ireland undergoes primarily as a kind of retribution for the numerous setbacks and assaults that her slightly older brother endures as a brain cancer survivor, living with learning and other disabilities, and with a slim chance of living beyond his young adulthood, given that the brain tumor was never fully excised or remedied. Critic David Collard has described the girl’s decisions and actions this way: “The girl rages against the dying of her brother’s light, her sense of imminent loss feeding her sexual abjection. She adopts a complex set of behaviors to negotiate her rage, confusion, and exploitation, seeking out forms of yearning abjection that amount to self-harm” (222).

As close friend and fellow author Elizabeth McCracken relates in an anecdote about her first encounter with McBride’s book manuscript:

I knew she’d been working on a book—she called it her beast—and when she was finished she’d asked me to read it. I took it nervously, because I wanted to love it and yet I knew there is no guarantee you will feel the same way about someone’s fiction that you do about the person. I knew nothing at all about it. And for the first page and a half I thought, Oh dear, no, too self-conscious, what a shame. Then about halfway down the second page my brain figured it out and the book had me, and I realized that the prose was the opposite of self-conscious: it just took my self-conscious brain that long to give itself over to the language.

(Collard 22)

Giving oneself “over to the language” is as much, if not more, about the writing being the force that renders one submissive, as it is the result of some subjective agency in the reader. As Collard puts it, as we go along and continue to read the novel, “the book begins to read us.”

My question is: why do we go along with this and allow it to happen? Why do we stay with a story of relentless sexual, physical, and emotional violence? To think further about this, let us turn to the following passage from the novel:

One-word sentences; the elimination of all commas; the truncated and non-syntactical syntax (“Wonders what this is but I’m”); epizeuxis or the simple repetition of the same word or phrase, as in “Beautiful beautiful” (again, without a separating comma or other form of punctuation); the constant repetition of first- and third-person pronouns: “His. He rip me open and hurt because I say though I don’t want, he beg;” the ungrammatical use of tenses (“he rip me;” “he beg”); and the repeating of phrases such as “I say,” appearing three times in this short excerpt. Each of these rhetorical devices constitute a non-descriptive, non-immobilizing, and non-isolating presentation of the rape of the young girl by her uncle. Reading this passage, one feels immersed in the emergent encounter between language, experience, and thought, and, at times, the relation between language and thought prior to articulate speech—what I have elsewhere theorized as “fore-speech” (Ricco, “Drool”).¹⁰ In this way, McBride turns the writing of literature into the impossible project of narrativizing an un-narrativizable (i.e., unlovable) psyche.¹¹

Less than statements about what is unlovable, or even fully formed unlovable statements, in McBride’s writing it is language itself that proves to be unlovable. The one-word sentences suggest that this is the potential or condition of any word, even the most seemingly simple or innocuous: “whatever,” “want,” “his,” or “I.”¹² Yet at the same time, this is also an acknowledgement and opening to sense prior to language (the unconscious, psyche, but also soma—the body): a zone of non-knowledge for which language proves to be curiously inadequate—what Bersani described as “the nonlinguistic biology of human life” (Freudian 40). It is the acknowledgement, indeed the willing reception, of a force that runs through, under, and to the side of history, consciousness, knowledge, language, narrative, and art—at once before and beyond us, but never of us.¹³ It is a force that drives and that stills. It is unspeakable, unwatchable, unreadable. And when we give ourselves over to it, as readers of literature, we avail ourselves to the force of de-realized, mobile being.¹⁴

As Bersani goes on to argue in his book The Freudian Body,

The stuttering, truncated, and at times gasping rhythms (or more properly: arrhythmias) of McBride’s novel are the persistent allowance of, to quote Bersani again, “the unreadable pressures [and pleasures] to infiltrate the readable, thus creating a type of readability at odds with how we have been taught to read [and write] while also accounting for that which, in the human psychic structure, is anterior to all readable accounting for” (Receptive 71). The literary outcome—of which McBride’s novel is exemplary—is what Bersani describes as “a striking concordance between a ‘system’ of untheorizable psychic respiration and the system of language” (“Broken” 417). McBride herself has spoken of an “antisocial literary adventure” that is played out through “basic active vocabulary” (Collard 140; 135).

There is violence when narrative and the having and telling of a story is made compulsory. This is especially the case when the story that is forcibly elicited is about sexual violence or rape, or, as Laura Mulvey and Clair Wills have each pointed out, is a story about sadism or abortion.¹⁵ As Bersani and Dutoit argue: “Narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence. Narratives create violence as an isolated, identifiable topic or subject [a fully formed thing] … Violence is thus reduced to the level of a plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and eliminated” (Receptive 9). Such pacifying power is its own immobilizing form of violence, and “a major trouble with this is that the immobilizing of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment.” The authors end this part of their discussion by stating, “All critiques of violence, to the extent that they conceive of it in terms of scenes which can be privileged, may therefore promote the very explosions they are designed to expose or forestall” (Receptive 10).

By sticking with and continuing to read (and endure) what is unlovable, rather than critique it, we at the same time give ourselves over to what in language inevitably succumbs to unreadability. In this passivity and receptivity, we actively withdraw from the negativizing impulses of narrativity and mastery and the self-assertive campaigns of seriousness, and instead discover an aesthetic connectedness to others: a resonance and rapport that occurs even at the minimal syntactical level of the otherwise annihilating one-word sentence—indeed, in the very syntactical impoverishment of the monosyllabic as sentence. McBride’s is that form of writing which demolishes its own syntax, and in so doing does not betray but remains loyal to the masochistic violence that is presented in the story. It syntactically goes along with this violence, yet in ways that are not mimetically descriptive, and hence do not provide the comforting, mediating distance that comes with such descriptive mimesis.¹⁶

In the case of A Girl, the non-spectacular non-mimetic representation of sexual commotion makes the literary language something entirely other than the replication of sadomasochistic sexuality’s destruction. Neither McBride nor, through her writing, her readers adopt what Bersani and Dutoit describe as the sympathetic appropriation of the other’s violent commotion—a kind of self-imposed masochism—the requirement of which, is fascism. In other words, if one calls for such sympathetic appropriation of the other’s violent commotion, one is at the same time calling for the fascist society of masters and slaves (Receptive 5–6). This is the position of the uncle in the story, who, to paraphrase Bersani and Dutoit, uses violence to make the victim (the girl) give birth to sexuality in the torturer (the uncle himself).

Like the unlovable yet deeply loving narrator, McBride’s work demonstrates the degree to which language is a half-formed thing. This is what we find lovable about language or at least why we might be willing to go along with it. For us to be in language is, then, also to find ourselves unlovable, and as such, we become attuned to that which is “unfixable in the human,” a shared existential condition that renders each of us a half-formed thing. In that half-formedness we stand the chance of connecting with others, not through the “representation of alienated commotion” that is sadism (Receptive 3) but through an aesthetic stillness in which, by being limitlessly fascinated and going along with the work of art, we are stopped in our tracks—not fixed but transfixed by something other than sexual, narrative, or moral climax, namely, the promiscuous mobilization and inaccurate replication of linguistic forms. Like Pasolini, Bersani, and McBride, we should not be afraid to be unlovable.

III. Chromatic Oneness

Incongruity represents a crucial problem for a theory of perception because, by its very nature, its perception represents a violation of expectation.

—Bruner and Postman

The notion of a divided self needs to be eclipsed for there to be any chance of an ethical rapport with others—human and nonhuman—and with the world. This is one of the fundamental propositions at the heart of Leo Bersani’s work, a starting point for his radical dismantling of Western philosophy’s thinking on the individual subject from Plato to Descartes, Freud to Levinas and Lacan (and many others between and beyond). However, Bersani contests this tradition’s presupposition of the divided self, not by resorting to a notion of wholeness or uniformity but in terms of incongruous oneness, which is, at the same time, not actualized completion but unfinished virtuality.¹⁷ Pursuing Bersani’s notion of incongruity as the logic, syntax, and rhythm of the undivided self and the potentiality of a oneness of being, we find an articulation of incongruity, virtuality, freedom, and non-predicated being in the following sentence: “Incongruity institutes virtualities that have no intrinsic reason to be actualized. This retreat from the actual creates a freedom that might be defined as a kind of being to which no predicate can be attached” (Bersani, Thoughts 66).

Neither split and incoherent nor autonomous and complete, the Bersanian subject is that form or mode of being for which even “incongruous” is not a predicate, given that the term is meant to name a relational movement that is open to virtualities and to similitudes outside of and beyond the self. Likeness or sameness is here not based on a single predicate shared amongst different entities, as in certain notions of the common, but instead likeness obtains in similar forms of movement and stillness that inaugurate impersonal correspondences with others and the world.¹⁸ It is due to the lack of congruence to itself and others—what Bersani, via Samuel Beckett, refers to as “lessness”—that the self has a greater potential to be like and relate to other things (Bersani, Is the Rectum 166). This is at once the self’s source of freedom and its sense of oneness with the world. It is precisely because being is without proper fit with the world, all the while not being divided from it, that a subject comes to enjoy the pleasure of finding itself not only in the world but mobilized and inaccurately replicated through it.¹⁹

For Bersani, such oneness is inevitably not without its exclusions, and yet he also affirms that such exclusions—precisely in their “anti-communitarian impulses”—might inaugurate new forms of relation. He writes,

Any perspective, direct or vicarious, would be to some extent exclusionary. Rather than deny or apologize for such exclusion, we might more profitably acknowledge them and then try to see the unexpected ways in which an unavoidably limited ‘I’ or ‘we’ also speaks outside its particular perspective. My “we” … is constantly crossing over into the territory of other “we’s.”

(Homos 8–9)

This constant crossing over is not assimilation or communion but rather the discovery of oneself already inaccurately replicated in the world. Nonetheless, while it might sound strange, I argue that Bersani’s inaccurate replication is a means or mode of conversion. Not in the sense of becoming something other than who or what one is, but of being converted to self via the discovery of formal and hence impersonal correspondences with other people and things with which one resonates but does not imitate or resemble, nor with which one identifies. Following this logic of likeness, in being like others one is more like oneself. This is conversion not via the logic of difference (i.e., of changing) but of sameness.²⁰

The likeness borne by incongruity is what is meant by the aesthetic, as it provides the syntax for thinking undivided being, a form of thinking that is neither that of philosophical abstraction, metaphysical speculation, or epistemological discursive language, but empirical sense and perception. This is because sense operates via the incongruous—because things in the world and our sense of them are not divided from the world, but are immanent to it, yet in ways that are not congruous (mastered and known) but incongruous (received and sensed).²¹

Bersani’s aesthetics of inaccurate replication (including in the specific form of the monochrome) is not about changing, but instead staying the same through conversion—it is about becoming more intensely what one is, via infinite correspondences of form or color, and through vibratory resonances with other bodies, places, and things in the world. Less than an image, incongruous affinities and aesthetic configurations are co-terminus (neither precedes the other), and likeness is the motor of their co-immanence. As Bersani and Adam Phillips have both argued, art is the principle means by which we partake in these ontological reconfigurations of forms. As Phillips puts it in his book On Wanting to Change, “the ingenuity of conversion was [is] in its enigmatic transformations … in conversion we are at our most artful” (24).

o

In 2017, artist Glenn Ligon curated an exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundations in St. Louis titled Blue Black. The title of the show was derived from the eponymous work by Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Black (2000; fig. 1).²² As Ligon describes it in his curatorial statement, “[t]he exhibition was conceived as a meander through blue and black, a meditation on the formal, political, and metaphysical ways the colors have been used, and an attempt to reveal the conversations artists have set up between them.” While interested in the politics of color, including in forms of racialization and racial identity, Ligon was also entering into an extended dialogue with Kelly’s career-long exploration of the impersonality and anonymity of color, in which color is not something artistically chosen or made, but exists, chromatically, as already-made.²³

The monochrome is a form of chromatic oneness, of color undivided from itself.²⁴ And yet, the monochromatic is not a uniformity of color, but instead perceptually operates via a non-identitarian and non-enigmatic sameness. Kelly’s vertically oriented Blue Black consists of two symmetrically arranged monochromatic blocks of color, one blue (on the top) and one black (on the bottom). As Jean-Luc Nancy states, color is not autonomous, but “is a form that needs something other than itself in order to exist” (54). As he goes on to say, “to distinguish one color from another, you need rupture, which is drawing in the general sense, that is to say the line” (54). The rupture of which Nancy speaks is the moment of incongruity, of a chromatic variance or shift that occurs from one color to another. It is the line that (non)divides blue and black, yet a line that is only traced as the incongruous conjuncture of that blue and that black form. “Color needs line in order to exist, but on the other hand, there is nothing visible without color. A colorless line is no longer a line” (54). The chromatic line is made from out of that shared edge, “belonging” to both and to neither blue and / nor black at once, there where the two colors are opened to the outside.²⁵ For as Nancy goes on to say, “[c]olor is an expression in the most literal sense: it’s the pressure outwards, a summons to the outside” (54). Through the incongruous juxtaposition of blue and black, Kelly and Ligon are chromatically and incongruously drawn together and co-exposed.

A color’s identity is demoted through the intensity of its monochromatic saturation, where the color begins to vibrate and resonate and comes to correspond with other colors, forms, surfaces, and things. It is in this way that, somewhat ironically, the monochrome is the lessening of color’s difference through the heightening of chromatic saturation and intensity, thereby resonating with the outside, becoming more than what it is and inaugurating an “aesthetic solidarity” via the chromatic (Tuhkanen, Speculative 74). The same incongruity of color is evident in Kelly’s other monochromatic diptychs and polyptychs, by which blocks of undivided color are brought together—noncompositionally, which is also to say, non-congruently. I want to suggest that here, too, we encounter the relation that Bersani sketched out, one of unfinished virtuality rather than actualized completion.

In Colors for a Large Wall (1951; fig. 2), one of Kelly’s earliest and now most iconic works, the monochromatic colors of each of the sixty-four square canvas panels are already made, having been found by the artist while living in Paris, in the form of the pads of colored construction paper familiar to French schoolchildren. For Kelly, these already-made colors only need to be impersonally replicated and need not be composed but incongruously configured. Yet this replication of color was inevitably inaccurate, accounting in this way for the singular intensity, density, and texture of any color—which is also to say, its plurality. As Nancy observes, “[t]he importance of texture can be understood if one tries for example to transfer the green of a tree leaf to a sheet of paper or a piece of cloth. On a different surface, the green changes its aspect, its gleam, its flesh” (54).²⁶

Note that these quotations of Jean-Luc Nancy on color derive from the series of conversations he had with Adèle van Reeth on the topic of “jouissance” or “coming,” and that this is one of the first signals of the unfinished virtuality of color, color’s event, movement, and vibrational intensity. Indeed, Nancy will say that “there is a rhythm of colors presented in painting. A painter’s palette [for Kelly, the colors found on it are impersonal and already unmade] expresses his [sic] rhythmic relationship to colors” (53). Color is the chromatic movement of a shared rhythm between bodies and surfaces, light and dark. Bersani and Dutoit see this rhythmic relationship as extending to the viewer or spectator and the latter’s body and presence in relation to the painting. Thus, as I have suggested above, this rhythmic rapport is shared between Ellsworth Kelly and Glenn Ligon, and between Kelly’s Blue Black and each of the other singular instantiations of that configuration of colors, in an exhibition, Blue Black, that in its “oneness” was articulated through the logic of incongruity: of blues, of blacks, and of each work in the exhibition with the others.

This is key for Bersani’s thinking against “immobilizing knowledge,” and stable, immobile aesthetic forms, including what he and Dutoit refer to as “a myth of blocked fusions … an art [that] legitimizes a comfortable belief that the movements constitutive of existence in real space … can be stopped” (Arts 102). In this respect, Kelly’s monochromes operate as forces of mobilization and resistance of empirical forms and bodies, the somatic attunement to others and the world that defines incongruous being in all its unfinished potential. As the authors argue, Mark Rothko (and, I suggest, Ellsworth Kelly) subverts the foreground-background distinction of pictorial composition through “the reduction of differences in hues” (Arts 106)—in Kelly’s case, specifically blues. This is a non-contrasting aesthetics of color; in other words, it verges on chromatic oneness or likeness as opposed to difference. In this de-differentiation of color lie “the conditions of uncertain readability that make problematic the tracing of boundaries in the space outside of art” (108)—a compositional ambiguity of things in space (i.e., aesthetic correspondence)—that affirms what the authors refer to as “the world’s uncertain visibility” (217, n.10).

Undoing the frame, Rothko and Kelly both undo the spaces of the presumed subject and its division from the world. Instead, as Bersani and Dutoit argue, the artists present the preparatory conditions to the making of a visible subject but not the visible subject itself (Arts 105). The painting or in Kelly’s case the wall sculpture, would then be the trace of this fore-scene, the coming-to-appear that otherwise, as the very transiting and transience of existence, eludes us. “[Rothko’s] art—perhaps like all art—renders concrete a coming-to-appear that, in our perception of appearances outside of art, we are always too late to perceive” (121).²⁷ Art is a primary instantiation of potentiality as always bearing the force of impotentiality, that is, that being need not be, and that in its being and becoming, being is always already unbecoming, thereby affirming the irreducible and ineradicable contingency and indeterminacy of existence. Bersani and Dutoit observe that “[p]erhaps only in art is the contingency of contingency materialized. Only in art do we see the contingent forms that map space almost not being traced” (121).

This is what the Rothko paintings in the Houston chapel perform, according to Bersani and Dutoit: the disappearance that is the source of the coming and becoming, that is, being’s infinite finitude. The aesthetic is a violation of the force of finitude, disappearance, and extinction. There are those (Rothko, Rauschenberg, González-Torres, to name a few) who take this force as their medium and technique and who have created works that are not aesthetics of disappearance or extinction but disappeared aesthetics and extinction aesthetics (as I have previously theorized), wherein not only visual perception but even the aesthetic is demonstrated to be irrelevant. One is left not with a fragment, or perhaps even a gesture or vestige, but the separated spacing that supports and refuses every gesture and vestige, or perhaps affirms what any gesture or vestige might be. As Henri Bergson says, “the very permanence of … form is only the outline of a movement” (qtd. in Ingold and Simonetti 19).

As we are aware, dark colors recede (retreat, move back and away from) and bright colors advance (approach and move forward) toward the viewer, due to the ways in which the human eye perceives and processes color (Bersani and Dutoit, Arts 94). In the works of Rothko and Kelly, this rhythmic back-and-forth of color is the mobility of forms (116), where colors and works float, making it difficult to locate “where forms have ‘stopped'” (111). Floating monochromatic colors are non-volitional in their vibratory movement toward multiple directions they “have not yet taken”: “They float because they have not ‘chosen’ the direction in which they will move” (111), and thus they are without end or goal. Having already noted the vibrational intensity of Kelly’s colors, I quote at length from Arts of Impoverishment on the undivided path of this non-directional movement:

The monochrome, in the vibratory intensity of its floating chromatic oneness, harkens back to a cosmic myth of the origin of light and color and form, “of space as nothing but undifferentiated light or the unadulterated intensity of a single color” (Arts 119). In the closing of intervals that otherwise structure distinctions and differences, there is nothing left to see, and no longer any place to which one is headed. There is, instead, a sense of oneness that may be the elimination of time and space, as we have come to metaphysically understand these conditions. As the authors describe: “Struck blind and immobilized: in the unbounded communications of universal identity, to be anywhere is to be already everywhere, and movement itself becomes superfluous when being is characterized by unconstrained mobility” (140). This immobility or stillness is what Bersani has named “spirit” or in at least one case, “spirituality” (143).

The sameness or likeness of Kelly’s Blue Black is partly due to the nearness of monochromatic color, of the monochrome as chromatic nearness—and oneness—that, as Plotinus defined nearness, stands apart qualitatively without interval. Bersani, Dutoit, Kelly, and Ligon occupy the same non-relational space (that is, non-divided, non-differentiated), a space of refraction (or diffraction, or perhaps simply “fraction” but not reflection). In Kelly’s Blue Black and Ligon’s exhibition, blue and black are affirmed as mutual intensifications of each other: so black that it’s blue, and so blue that it’s black. Chromatic saturation yields to chromatic indifferentiation, or what Moten has theorized as “blur.”³⁰

This is an aesthetic intuition shared with Barry Jenkins and what his film Moonlight (2016) does with black and blue in the context of rethinking race and racialization; identity and anonymity; temporality and sexuality.³¹ For me, as for Bersani, this proximity in which colors are cast as “almost identical” makes it “difficult to give a narrative account of that relation,” such that we can say that blue and black (Kelly’s, Ligon’s, Jenkins’s, and Bersani’s), are “related by nearly reflecting each other; they have no story to tell other than that of an inaccurate replication” (Arts 118). In my recent essay on Jenkins’s remarkable film, I discuss blue and black in terms of race, cosmology, masculinity, sexuality, and the (incongruous) chromatics of the kairos moment—that time and temporality when black becomes blue. The experience of the latter’s finitude is of a potentially infinite endurance, keyed to that transience and potential loss, neither to mourning nor melancholia, but rather to a different (non-psychological) ethical-aesthetic mode of being black, being blue. Blue black: where color is the light of darkness, as in the moonlight of Jenkins’ film, or Moten’s “deep midnight of category’s beyond,” or the twilight in a poem from Terrance Hayes’s collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which reads, in part,

Probably twilight makes blackness
Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin
Of a black man matches the dark blue skin
of his son the way one twilight matches another.

The sonnet opens with “probably,” which is then repeated four more times, with the last iteration being the one quoted above. A cadence of likelihood and uncertainty in the present tense marks the rhythm of the poem, which is equally interrupted by the past tense of “something happened” with the subject of each such event left unnamed, perhaps because, as the poem tells us, “The names alive are like the names / In graves.” Instead, the repeated acknowledgement that something happened is borne by the names of American cities:

The poem attests to the non-redemptive double valence of twilight, the crepuscular, that, as we read at the very opening of the poem, “probably … makes blackness dangerous / Darkness. …” and toward the end the poem, as quoted above, probably makes darkness not a predicate of blackness, but makes blackness as darkness, a gate. With the doubling of the word “matches,” we realize that it is through the incongruity of a chromatic likeness, “dark blue skin,” that a mobile space of passage—perhaps an exit, perhaps aporetic (or both at once)—is probable or likely. Yet clearly Hayes is getting us to think about how the generational inheritance of racialized violence that move across and is mapped “almost everywhere” might stop.

Curiously and importantly, this might call for a momentary cessation of movement, including of vision. This is a new kind of immobility of perception: not via the forced inscription of distinct boundaries and differences but “by the discovery of an unmodulated sameness that makes mobility superfluous” (Arts 120), and that might lead to “blocked vision,” the title of Bersani and Dutoit’s chapter on Rothko. For as the authors state, “[i]n a world where everything repeats itself”—that is, in a world of unlovable oneness—”there is perhaps no need to see” (137). Until that happens, we remain in a world full of commotion, generated by desires for congruent visions, images, and colors of difference.

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.

Notes

1. “Merde alors” was first published in October 13, 1980, pp. 22–35, and then republished twice, first in Stanford Italian Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1982, pp. 82–95, and then nearly forty years after its original appearance in Receptive Bodies. All references to this essay will be to the final republished version in Receptive Bodies. I thank Eleanor Kaufman for the reference to the 1982 publication; and I want to thank both her and J. D. Rhodes for their incredibly insightful engagements with this material. See Kaufman; and Rhodes.

2. An early version of this essay was written as a short paper for “Unlovable,” the thirtieth annual Comparative Literature Conference, organized by graduate students at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, 24–25 March 2023. I want to thank Ben Koonar, William Hunt, and Julian Stuart, the student organizers, for the invitation to participate on the faculty roundtable, and to my copanelists and colleagues Barbara Havercroft and Haytham Bahoora, and members of the audience, for their questions and comments.

3. For a discussion of Christopher Bollas’s notion of non-repressed consciousness, in the context of Bersani’s engagement with Bollas, see: Tuhkanen, Speculative, 191ff.

4. For further discussion of the concept of incongruity in Bersani’s work, see my recent article, “Incongruity.” Some of that discussion will, by necessity, re-enter my discussion here.

5. For another stunning example of Bersani’s incongruous method, see his essay, “Force in Progress,” in Receptive Bodies, where he reads alongside each other, an anecdote told by analyst Susanne Hommel about an incident during her analysis with Jacques Lacan, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, Kimberly Pierce’s film, Boys Don’t Cry, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

6. For a discussion of the role that the figure/figural (specifically in the work of Lee Edelman) and social recognition (specifically in the work of Judith Butler) has played in queer theory, see Tuhkanen, Speculative. For a theory of ethical-aesthetic sociality of the un-named, including the anonymity that lies in any name, see Ricco, “Commerce”

7. For a recent critical engagement with the censorious moralizing that pervades much of the contemporary political climate and its impact on the creation and reception of art, see Greenwell. While making a strong case for the ethical—indeed in his language “moral”—virtue of filth and that which is sexually discomforting, repellent, and offensive, Greenwell ultimately finds, as in his previous criticism and literary work, a form of theological—specifically apophatic—redemption in abjection, at various points speaking of the latter as “beatitudinal,” and being certain of filth’s literary figurations and syntactical configurations as “a formula for sainthood.”

8. As sexual creatures, “gay men make visible, and what straight spectators find so fascinating” [compelling and appalling, seductive and intolerable, at once] as Tuhkanen explains, “is the undoing of subjecthood itself, subjecthood that functions as the object and anchor for exercises of power” (Speculative 86). Paraphrasing Bersani’s argument in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Tuhkanen further explains that “behind homophobia is people’s terror and revulsion at the avidity with which (some) gay men submit to this jouissance, the deadly loss of control—la petite mort—that seduces us as a reminder of our aporetic origins”—this, opposite the destructive sociality of straight desire (141). For a rousing polemic on the deplorability of sex, see Davis and Dean.

9. “In the course of rather passively reflecting on some recognizably ‘significant’ topic (intimacy, the history of knowledge and of subjectivity, the relation between having sex and being social), I am often struck—it’s a kind of mental lightning effect—with what I know has to be the first sentence of my next piece of writing” (Bersani, “Broken” 415).

10. In an email interview with David Collard in 2013, McBride at one point speaks of “the moment just before language becomes formatted” (About 135).

11. In a talk given on June 26, 2014, Jacqueline Rose describes McBride’s novel as crafted not around “trauma as unspeakable,” but rather as “traumatized speech with no exit” (qtd. in Collard 221). And to quote Bersani and Dutoit, we might say that, through ungrammatical, truncated, and elliptical syntax, A Girl “keeps us from focusing directly on narrative centers of violence” (Receptive 10). Finally, my point about the unnarrativizable is meant to echo Bersani’s estimation of the value of psychoanalysis. He writes, “Psychoanalysis insists on speaking what can’t be spoken, on theorizing an inherently untheorizable bodily psyche” (Receptive 29).

12. Replacing “moments” with “words” in the following quotation, we can read Bersani’s critical estimation of the distinction of Robert Wilson and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early work as equally applicable to McBride’s novel: “[n]o one moment in Wilson’s work seem[s] designed to be more dramatic or more significant than other moments” (Bersani, Future 281).

13. I want to acknowledge Mikko Tuhkanen’s recent attention to the disposition of “to the side” as it appears and functions in Bersani’s work, and Jacques Khalip for his formulation pertaining to that which is not or “never for us”—itself of an echo of Franz Kafka’s oft-cited comment that “there is hope, but not for us.”

14. In his review of the novel, Joshua Cohen writes about this tension between mobility and immobility: “McBride opposes her narrator’s unbridled fluency, which is her vitality, to the myriad forces—the family, nuns, priests and men, many men—that would arrest it into clauses, laws, rules and diagnoses, and it’s this opposition that provides the cohering drama.”

15. Laura Mulvey notes that “Sadism demands a story” (Tuhkanen, Speculative 178), while Wills writes: “A woman wanting an abortion has to be able to provide a legible narrative, to tell a good story” (20); and “You have to have a good story … even if that story is attenuated to almost nothing” (20–22).

16. Bersani and Dutoit write, “It is as if fascinated adherence … [is] finally, identical to a certain detachment” (Receptive 13). This is a “subversive passivity,” a “vertiginous passivity” [or receptivity or registration] and “non-imitative recognition” (Receptive 12, 13).

17. These sentences are also the opening to my essay, “Incongruity.”.

18. The opposite of this are personal correspondences, sovereign reflections, and reinforcements of the ego in its appropriating mastery of others and the world.

19. Bersani and Dutoit write that there is “a joke in nature itself, the joke of a frequent bad fit between the repertory of forms and the repertory of identities” (Forms 57).

20. To clarify, this is not personal narcissism but what Bersani and Adam Phillips theorize as homo-or impersonal narcissism that involves sameness “becoming more like itself” (Intimacies 82–86).

21. Being is incongruous. This has tremendous political and ethical implications, as when it comes to incongruous gender presentation; inter-racial couplings and racially “mixed” social subjects; serodiscordant sexual relations; differently abled bodies; the alliances of solidarity and coalition politics; and various things that prove not to be “mutually exclusive.” As the afterlife of the antisocial, incongruous sociality is exemplified by the dissatisfaction with assimilationist and separatist politics, and the liberal desire to be (for) inclusion; while also averse to the identical equivalencies advanced by mainstream gay and lesbian politics (“love is love”). Theoretically, and on an ecological register, incongruous ethics is opposite New Materialist congruences of the human and the nonhuman and the ontological flattening of categories.

22. We note that when more than one color appears in the title of a Kelly work, the names of the colors are not divided or separated by any punctuation marks such as a comma. This is yet another indication of incongruous chromatic oneness. This also corresponds to the complete lack of commas in McBride’s novel. In turn, the monosyllabic names of colors in Kelly’s titles are like the many monosyllabic words that populate McBride’s novel.

23. Because of Kelly’s aesthetic of impersonal or anonymous and already-made or found color and geometric abstraction, I see his works as being even better suited to Bersani’s aesthetics than Rothko. Following on Bersani’s deployment of Baudelaire’s non-Platonic notion of idealization, we can say that Kelly’s colors are idealized in the sense of opening onto an infinite series of aesthetic correspondences that exceed any predication or identity category, via incongruity, virtuality, and the unfinished.

24. In a recent review of Yve-Alain Bois’s art historical memoir, An Oblique Autobiography (2022), Hal Foster notes that “For Bois one modernist solution was to ‘abolish composition by suppressing division per se (the monochrome) or by adjusting this division so that it became an index of the surface in question (modular grid; symmetry; deductive structure; adequation of figure and field.'”

25. Following Fred Moten, we can say that this line of incongruity that marks the non-division of blue and black (what he will theorize as “blur”) is “to the side of compositional line” and “a way of making space against the edge of color” (227, 228).

26. To this comment by Nancy we can add Bersani and Dutoit’s own definition of the color green which is, they write, “never given [it’s not a primary color] but is the result of a process: not only of a blending of blue and yellow but also of a periodically renewed maturation in nature … Green is a color that becomes” (Arts 110).

27. As Ingold and Simonetti put it in their reading of Lucretius, “We mortals perceive the resultant forms, but not the movement that gives rise to them. That is why, as Lucretius explains, despite the veritable commotion of its material constituents, ‘the universe itself seems to be standing still'” (18). Here we might glimpse Bersani’s own thinking on stillness and mobility, and the distinction that he posits between matter that moves and spirit that is still. Yet in the case of the latter, this is a spiritual stillness opposite the immobilizing force of difference, instead of being a stillness that enables a sense of the infinite becoming of being as precisely the source, condition, and impossible-to-fully-experience force of existence. It is this force that stills us, just as it also propels us. In their work, artists present the simultaneity of this tension.

28. Train Landscape (1953) was inspired by a train trip that Kelly took in the fall of 1953 from Paris to Zurich, during which he discovered, in part thanks to the movement of the train through the countryside, an abstraction of empirical nature into three possible horizontal bands. The latter were then translated into the three panels of Train Landscape, based upon a series of tripartite diagrams that Kelly sketched in his notebook while on the way to Zurich, looking out the train window. What we might imagine Kelly saw and then was able to replicate, was a shift from movement to stillness, specifically what might be described as a monochromatic stillness (of the landscape as one moves through it), that in the form of the painting of sameness, likeness, or chromatic oneness does seem to imply the ultimate irrelevance of movement—a point I take up at the end of my essay.

29. This would seem to be in implicit contrast to Zeno’s paradox and its understanding that “the trajectory of a solid body, like an arrow in flight, can be resolved into an infinite series of fixed points” thereby famously raising the question, “how can it move at all?” (Ingold and Simonetti 22). What Zeno did not account for is the possibility that any moment might be the instant of a movement, and that there is momentum in each moment. For my own theorization of the momentum of the kairos moment, see “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight.”

Whereas Zeno abolishes motion via his observation of fixed points in space, Bersani hints at the abolishing of motion via the observation of the absence of spatial intervals or divisions. Yet like my own insistence (in the “Moonlight” essay) on there being momentum (or perhaps movement, or not) in any single moment, Bersani too, argues that the moment is vibratory and that in this shimmering vibration coheres a non-differentiated space of sameness or likeness—an incongruous relation that cannot be defined in terms of identity or any other form of predication.

30. In terms of the othering by racial categorization, something similar happened in Ligon’s curatorial project in St. Louis, as is represented in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist (1902): the inaccurate replication of forms, surfaces, and colors that serve impersonal desires between various racialized and non-racialized bodies. For Bersani’s discussion of the Gide novel, see Homos; and for a discussion of Bersani’s treatment, see Tuhkanen, Speculative 161ff. Just as Bersani thinks homosexuality without sexuality; here I want to think about color without racialization.

31. Anonymity (the name of no one name) is the nameless condition in which the many (name no one) is found in the one (the singular). Everything is like everything else, and epistemological discourse and naming point to an original moment (impossible to access) when any one thing did not have a name or was known by that name, but instead was simply an un-named existent. In our everyday experience, we encounter other things as existing without knowing what they are or their proper name (think of birding, or cruising).

In making this reference, we note that as a very young boy, and partly as a diversion from the speech impediment that he had developed, Ellsworth Kelly was introduced to birdwatching and this remained a favorite activity throughout his life. Birdwatching, and in particular the identification of species, relies upon the skill of discerning shapes and colors, something that is difficult to do oftentimes, from one bird to the next. For my earlier writing on the ethics and aesthetics of anonymity see: Chapter 1 “Name No One Man,” and Chapter 2 “Name No One Name,” in Ricco, John Paul. The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014; and Ricco, John Paul. “The Commerce of Anonymity.” Qui Parle 26, no. 1 (June 2017): 101–42.

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