Thoughts and Things

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than 50 years, and extends across a wide spectrum of fields?from French studies, modernism, realist fiction, and psychoanalytic criticism, to film theory and queer theory (a field Bersani could be said to have invented). In Thoughts and Things Bersani emerges as a thinker of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, i.e., he emerges as a philosopher of the first order. In this elegant series of essays, he posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). His exemplary texts range from Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) to Claire Denis (the French filmmaker whose masterpiece is Beau Travail). But he then asks whether a fissure of being between the subject and the world might simply be masking a more fundamental oneness, arguably a oneness intrinsic to our being in and with the world. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources from Dsecartes to cosmology, Sufi mysticism, and neo-Platonism. Cosmos and individual, past and present merge in the idea that our bodies contain atoms from stars that exploded millions of years ago: res cogitans and res extensa, for Bersani, are united in the oneness of cosmic being. This little book, in its sensitive treatment of films and literary texts, succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. It is a new departure for Bersani, and will be devoured by his growing body of devoted readers.

Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including ?Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press.