Search Results

“... Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice. Millan notes in his ...”

“... and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which conveys ‘psychoanalytic truth’ in ‘moments of theoretical collapse’ which, by a kind of self-undoing, become ‘literary’. It is ‘by virtue of this very ...”

“... have sought to explore. This problematising approach to questions of sexual definition is what Leo Bersani vehemently rejects in his elegant and infuriating new book. Bersani accuses practitioners of lesbian and gay studies (myself not excepted) of ‘de-gaying’ gayness. He seems to intend at least two ...”

“... a great deal to do with his disreputable and desperate life, traced in part from police records. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, who turned to Caravaggio from studies of Beckett, Rothko and Resnais, assure us that ‘he truly was – even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well ...”

“... to account for people’s horror of sexuality. In his great essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ Leo Bersani remarked that the big secret about sex was that most people don’t like it. The big secret about sex isn’t quite that most people don’t like it, it’s that most people don’t like it because they are with people they aren’t really ...”

“... all the killing in war, which the film portrays ‘without qualification’, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in Forms of Being (2004), ‘as a massive manifestation of human evil, and the only question asked about it is how it got into the world. Any historical answer to the question is simply ignored.’ But to ignore history and see ...”

“... he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.’ Leo Bersani broadens Rieff’s and Trilling’s point when he says: ‘Psychoanalytic theory has made the notion of fantasy so richly programmatic that we should no longer be able to take for granted the distinction between art and life.’ To say with ...”

“... alleged pretentiousness with which they took on the burdens of history and cultural renewal – Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption is an example of this attack – profess to find the masterpieces of Modernism rotten with humanism. Bersani’s essay on Ulysses is a case much in point: he denounces Joyce for ...”

“... it has minds of its own).’ But the fullest and strangest development of such thinking appears in Leo Bersani’s brilliant introduction to Civilisation and Its Discontents. Here we learn that ‘the real and profound subject’ of the book is aggression, and that aggression can’t, in the end, be separated either from sex or from society: The explicit ...”