A Conversation with Leo Bersani

Hal Foster: I thought we could begin with the topos of failure. It is a primary subject of your recent work: a critique of redemptive practices in The Culture of Redemption [1990]; an argument for impotent aesthetics in the recent book coauthored with Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment [1993]; an analysis of failed subjectivity in Homos [1995]. But it is a principal method as well: for example, in The Freudian Body [1986] you focus on the points in Freud where his thought breaks down, and these you regard as the most provocative, even the most productive (if that is not too un-Bersanian a value). In what ways is failure a method for you, and how does it differ, say, from a dialectical concern with contradiction or a deconstructive concern with aporia? Leo Bersani: That's an interesting way to begin, even though it sounds inauspicious. My interest in failure has, I guess, been fairly constant. It's there in the early books, too, when I talked (optimistically) about mobility and immobility of desire in Baudelaire [Baudelaire and Freud (1977)], as well as in several French novelists in Balzac to Beckett/Center and Circumference in French Fiction [1970]. The latter explored the notion of a circumferential expansiveness of the self against a fixed anchoring of the self. A Future for Astyanax [1976] strikes me as the most coherent statement of this early position, of this version of the argument against the immobile, centered, self-contained subject. Failure first played an explicit role in The Freudian Body, where it really concerns a collapse of the text. This was not like deconstructive readings that tend to reconstruct texts according to rhetorically determined thematics that run counter to what authors seem to think they're writing about. (This led, incidentally, to a generation of graduate students who relentlessly proved that they were smarter than Rousseau, Wordsworth, James, Melville, etc.) In The Freudian Body, I was interested in the text simply going to pieces, and also in the way collapse itself is thematized in the idea of selfshattering (which I drew from Jean Laplanche). My interest in failure then continued in various ways-a culture without redemptive power, certain failures in art and writing, homosexuality as a beneficent crisis of selfhood,