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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