From: Chris Jones <ccjones-AT-turboweb.net.au>
Subject: Bersani on Genet & Beckett
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 16:06:06 +1100



Have you read Leo Bersani's _Homo_? 

Notes:  from _Sociality and Sexuality_ , Critical Inquiry_ 26 Bersani takes 
up Foucault's relationality-- "Homosexuality is not a form of desire but 
something desireable." To lay out diagonal lines [to queer it] to put into 
practice "new relational modes."

[ Bersani quote] In _Homos_ I contrasted this this with an admittedly uptopic 
form of revolt-- one I located principally in Genet-- that would seek to 
escape transgressive relationality itself and might contest given categories 
and values by failing to relate to them either adaptively or transgressively. 
I would like to move back from Genet's confident performance of 
antirelationality in _Funeral Rites_ and hypothesise a genealogy of the 
relational... more specifically a certain threshold of entry into the 
relational.

[Bersani quote] This is the enabling assumption of much of Beckett's 
fiction-- of _Company_ for example, in which a life that is nearly over 
remembers itself essentially by remembering (which is to say by inventing) 
its relational origin.

[the Bersani paper can be found at: http://www.silvantomkins.org/schedule.htm]