LEO BERSANI was an American academic, born on this date (d: 2022), known for his contributions to French literary criticism and queer theory. He was known for his 1987 essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" and his 1995 book Homos.
Bersani was born in the Bronx. He studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1952 with a bachelor’s in Romance languages, and with a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1958. He taught at Wellesley College and Rutgers University before joining University of California, Berkeley in 1972, where he'd remain for the rest of his career, assuming emeritus status in 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. He met Sam Geraci in 1992. They married in 2014.
Male homosexuality is not the mirror image of heterosexuality, he argued, but something radically different, lacking many of the patriarchal inequalities that he said defined straight life.
“Far from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving relationship,” he wrote, “gay men should ceaselessly lament the practical necessity, now, of such relations, should resist being drawn into mimicking the unrelenting warfare between men and women.”
He followed nearly a decade later, with “Homos” (1995), a book-length critique of the emerging field of queer theory, and in particular of its leading figure, Judith Butler.
He taught that the whole point of being a homosexual man is that you disrupted the experience of possession, ownership, fidelity, consistency, safety, and you allowed sexuality to be what it really is, which is disruptive, disorienting, shattering, limit-violating and boundary-breaking.
An early and avid proponent of the post-structuralist theories coming from France in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Bersani was particularly taken with the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault, who became a close friend, and whom he brought to Berkeley as a visiting professor.
Like Dr. Bersani, Mr. Foucault critiqued what he called “the will to know,” to grasp the interiority of a subject and assert power over it, and instead looked for nonaggressive, noninvasive ways of engaging with other people — akin, he said, to the way one might look at a painting in a gallery.
“Foucault asked the question, ‘Why can’t we live our lives like a work of art?’ and Leo was just fascinated by that,” John Paul Ricco, an art historian at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.
Dr. Bersani’s later work, starting in the late 1990s, was especially taken with this project of showing that we can encounter something — an artwork, another person, the world itself — without dominating it, or even understanding it.
“He was an absolutely brilliant reader at taking what seemed to be the knots, or the impenetrability, or the downright insanity of a piece of writing, and just saying, ‘Hey, guys, that’s the point,’” Dr. Rose said.
Though Dr. Bersani trained as a literary scholar, his last works focused on art and film, from assessments of Assyrian palace reliefs to the work of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. He took emeritus status in 1996 but continued to teach and write; he published his final book, “Receptive Bodies,” in 2018.
Despite the apparent disjunction between Dr. Bersani’s literary criticism and his work on gay identity, there are themes running through both. He found in gay life a living instance of the sort of “swerve” and aesthetic frivolity that he called for in art and literature; for example, he praised gay bath houses for the casual sexual encounters they encouraged.
“He was interested in sort of lighter ways of sharing the world,” Dr. Tuhkanen said. “Just moving along and sharing rhythms and having anonymous sex where we don’t need to have knowledge of the other person, but we can share a kind of bodily moment and a pleasurable moment. And maybe have a chat afterward.”
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