#bersaniposting

[jouissanceangel]

i am never not thinking about this stunning paragraph from leo bersani’s “sociality and sexuality”

[jouissanceangel]

“Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.”

- Adam Phillips, quoted in Intimacies, by himself and Leo Bersani

[jouissanceangel]

Mikko Tuhkanen, “Homonomadology: Leo Bersani’s Essentialism”

[jouissanceangel]

“The public discourse about homosexuals since the AIDS crisis began has a startling resemblance (which Watney notes in passing) to the representation of female prostitutes in the nineteenth century ‘as contaminated vessels, conveyancing 'female' venereal diseases to 'innocent' men’ (pp. 33-34). Some more light is retroactively thrown on those representations by the association of gay men's murderousness with what might be called the specific sexual heroics of their promiscuity. The accounts of Professor Narayan and Judge Wallach of gay men having sex twenty to thirty times a night, or once a minute, are much less descriptive of even the most promiscuous male sexuality than they are reminiscent of male fantasies about women's multiple orgasms. The Victorian representation of prostitutes may explicitly criminalize what is merely a consequence of a more profound or original guilt. Promiscuity is the social correlative of a sexuality physiologically grounded in the menacing phenomenon of the nonclimactic climax. Prostitutes publicize (indeed, sell) the inherent aptitude of women for uninterrupted sex. Conversely, the similarities between representations of female prostitutes and male homosexuals should help us to specify the exact form of sexual behavior being targeted, in representations of AIDS, as the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated act. This is of course anal sex (with the potential for multiple orgasms having spread from the insertee to the inserter, who, in any case, may always switch roles and be the insertee for ten or fifteen of those thirty nightly encounters), and we must of course take into account the widespread confusion in heterosexual and homosexual men between fantasies of anal and vaginal sex. The realities of syphilis in the nineteenth century and of AIDS today ‘legitimate’ a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this fantasy, far from merely increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infection. Women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction. This is an image with extraordinary power; and if the good citizens of Arcadia, Florida, could chase from their midst an average, law-abiding family, it is, I would suggest, because in looking at three hemophiliac children they may have seen -- that is, unconsciously represented -- the infinite seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” - Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? (emphases mine)

[jouissanceangel]

“If the alternative to this aping of the dominant culture's ideal of dominance is not the renunciation of power itself, the question is whether we can imagine relations of power structured differently. The reversibility of roles in S/M does allow everyone to get his or her moment in the exalted position of Masculinity (and, if everyone can be a bottom, no one owns the top or dominant position), but this can be a relatively mild challenge to social hierarchies of power. Everyone gets a chance to put his or her boot in someone else's face — but why not question the value of putting on boots for that purpose in the first place? Yes, in S/M roles are reversible; yes, in S/M enslavement is consensual; yes, as Califia puts it, S/M is “power unconnected to privilege." But this doesn't mean that privilege is contested; rather, you get to enjoy its prerogatives even if you’re not one of the privileged. A woman gets to treat a man, or another woman, with the same brutal authority a man has exercised over her; a black man can savor the humiliation of his white trick, thus sharing the pleasure enjoyed by whites in more acceptable social contexts. Furthermore, socially sanctioned positions of power are fortifed by the covert and always temporary changes of position offered by an underground culture. The transformation of the brutal, all-powerful corporate executive (by day) into the whimpering, panty-clad servant of a pitiless dominatrix (by night) is nothing more than a comparatively invigorating release of tension. The concession to a secret and potentially enervating need to shed the master's exhausting responsibilities and to enjoy briefly the irresponsibility of total powerlessness allows for a comfortable return to a position of mastery and oppression the morning after, when all that "other side" has been, at least for a time, whipped out of the executive's system.

These truths are dressed up by defenders of S/M with a lot of talk about how loving the S/M community is. Unlike nasty patriarchal society, this community only inflicts torture on people who say they want to be tortured. And the victim is always in control: he or she can stop the scene at will, unlike the victims of society's self-righteous wars. This difference is of course important. The practice of S/M depends on a mutual respect generally absent from the relations between the powerful and the weak, underprivileged, or enslaved in society. S/M is nonetheless profoundly conservative in that its imagination of pleasure is almost entirely defined by the dominant culture to which it thinks of itself as giving “a stinging slap in the face." It is true that those who exercise power generally don't admit to the excitement they derive from such exercises. To recognize this excitement may challenge the hypocrisy of authority, but it certainly doesn't challenge authority itself. On the contrary: it reveals the unshakable foundation on which power is built. Its exercise, S/M'ers never stop telling us, is thrilling, and it can be just as thrilling for the victim as for the victimizer. - Leo Bersani, Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“gender trouble… is in fact a universal condition: [it speaks to] the impossibility of representing sexuality, an impossibility that implicitly subverts the fixity of all identitarian claims” - leo bersani, cover blurb for patricia gherovici’s “transgender psychoanalysis: a lacanian perspective on sexual difference”

[jouissanceangel]

“Psychoanalysis challenges us to imagine a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject — or, in other words, to dissociate masochism from the death drive.” - Leo Bersani, from “The Gay Daddy,” in Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“Societies defined by those pleasures [dominance and submission] both disguise and reroute the satisfactions, but their superficially self-preservative subterfuges can hardly liberate them from the aegis of the death drive. S/M lifts a social repression in laying bare the reality behind the subterfuges, but in its open embrace of the structures themselves and its undisguised appetite for the ecstasy they promise, it is fully complicit with a culture of death.” - Leo Bersani, “The Gay Daddy,” in Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“There are some glorious precedents for thinking of homosexuality as truly disruptive — as a force not limited to the modest goals of tolerance for diverse lifestyles, but in fact mandating the politically unacceptable and politically indispensable choice of an outlaw existence.” - Leo Bersani, “The Gay Absence,” in Homos

[jouissanceangel]

Leo Bersani, Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“I was not alone in being astonished by the prominence of shower rooms in the erotic imagination of heterosexual American males. Fear on the battlefield is apparently mild compared to the terror of being “looked at” (and you know what that means for most males). Men who refuse to believe that women mean it when they say no have now begun to express a visceral sympathy for the sexually besieged woman. […]

In this strange scenario, the potential gay attacker becomes the male intruder on female privacy, and the ‘original’ straight man is metamorphosed, through another man’s imagined sexual attention, into the offended, harassed, or even violated woman. Men’s sympathy for the women they harass can go no further. ” - Leo Bersani, Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“Homophobic America seems to have an insatiable appetite for our presence. As a result, the social project inherent in the 19th-century invention of ‘the homosexual’ can perhaps now be realized: visiblity is a precondition of surveillance, disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender-cleansing.” - Leo Bersani, Homos

[jouissanceangel]

“An authentic gay male political identity therefore implies a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse, but also against those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those (in large part culturally invented and elaborated) male bodies that we carry within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement.” - Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?

[jouissanceangel]

“MacKinnon and Dworkin are really making a claim for the realism of pornography. That is, whether or not we think of it as constitutive (rather than merely reflective) of an eroticizing of the violence of inequality, pornography would be the most accurate description and the most effective promotion of that inequality. Pornography can’t be dismissed as less significant socially than other more pervasive expressions of gender inequality (such as the abominable and innumerable TV ads in which, as part of the sales pitch for cough medicine and bran cereals, women are portrayed as slaves to the normal functioning of their men’s bronchial tubes and large intestines), because only pornography tells us why the bran ad is effective: the slavishness of women is erotically thrilling.”

- Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?