by Jon Lackman | 6 July 2010 | Theory
In an article titled “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence” in the March 2010 PMLA, Tim Dean writes:
Leo Bersani’s contributions to queer theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”) Bersani’s writing on sexuality has disrupted the conceptual coordinates of queer theory, a field that officially welcomes the disruptive. What has made Bersani hard to assimilate is less his psychoanalytic emphasis on the ineluctable masochism of sexuality (a principal reason for the aversion to sex) than his insistent conceptualization of sexuality in aesthetic terms … [H]is earlier work claimed that art has effects on the human subject akin to those of sexuality, while his later writing proposes a specifically aesthetic subjectivity—rather than the sexual kind—as the preferred basis for relating to the world beyond the self.
(By the way, Leo Bersani is the keynote speaker at a University of Chicago graduate conference this October 21-22. He was the subject of a three-day seminar in 2009.)
