17.2-3.freccero daddys girl

'DGG\V*LUOCarla Freccero

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 17, Numbers2-3, 2011, pp. 349-355 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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C r i t i c a l B o n d s

DaDDys Girl

Carla Freccero on Leo Bersani

What still links democratization . . . to fraternization cannot always

necessarily be reduced to patriarchy in which the brothers begin by

dreaming of its demise. Patriarchy never stops beginning with this

dream. This demise continues endlessly to haunt its principle.

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship

This short appreciation of Leo Bersanis work was originally offered in response to a paper he delivered on the first afternoon of the three- day Queer Bonds

conference. The paper was titled Father Knows Best and included a reading of

Claire Deniss amazing film Beau Travail (1999).1 The respondents task is always

an awkward one the form dictates that one must do more than appreciate, as I

would like to have done, the elegance and clarity of a given intervention, its sur-

prising turns and satisfying conclusions. One must also ask questions, perhaps

even suggest a difference of opinion if a reading has been proffered. And when a

talk is called Father Knows Best, this girl knows shes in trouble. Happily, in

Bersanis paper, it was not really a question of father knowing at all; there isnt a

knower in that sense as Bersani points out, Beau Travail is psychoanalytic pre-

cisely in the ways that it is neither psychological nor characterological. And more,

Bersani argued against familial knowledge as a form of relationality. Still, this

daughter trembled at the thought of responding to Father Knows Best, given that

she has the name of to contend with and that shes had her own preoccupations

with father figures in representation.2 Indeed, the violent filial drama pseudo-

enacted in Deniss film is one that, in the history of Western literature, depends

on the disappearance or erasure of feminine difference within the family. From

GLQ 17:23

DOI 10.1215/10642684-1163436

2011 by Duke University Press

350 GlQ: a JOUrNal OF lEsBiaN aND Gay sTUDiEs

the story of Cain and Abel, to Jacques Derridas description of fraternit, frater-

nal rivalry for the fathers love occludes the feminine or consigns her (as in Ren

Girards examination of mimetic desire) to the role of pretextual object.3 But these

two staged scenes, the film and this call- response, manifestly queer the bonds of

kinship, for the supposed sadistic- voyeuristic gaze of the cinematic apparatus is a

female gaze, its object(s) male, while the utterer of father knows best is a queer

daddy indeed.4

Elaborating, in part, on his work with Ulysse Dutoit in Arts of Impoverish-

ment, with Adam Phillips in Intimacies, and, indeed, on much of the work he has

undertaken since Homos, Bersani, in Father Knows Best, asks what alternatives

there might be to a relationality guided by an ideology of difference (4), what he

outlines as the legacy of Cartesian dualism in the history of the Western subject,

a dualism that, in his view, is also taken up by some psychoanalytic formulations

of subject- object relations.5 One alternative is what Bersani calls similitude, a

sense of the affective correspondences between self and the world not predicated

on sadistic epistemophilia. Another is what he and Phillips call impersonal inti-

macy, an affective proximity that does not at least not necessarily depend on

knowing the other. In answer to the question is there a nonsadistic type of move-

ment? (1), by which I understand a kind of movement in and toward the world that

may be aggressive, but is not destructive (of the other and of the world) a move-

ment that does not, in other words, harbor murderous impulses Bersani, in this

essay, turns to a reading of Deniss film about a group of legionnaires stationed

in the Republic of Djibouti, a former French African colony. Both movement

and impersonal are key terms here; for whatever else the film is or is about, it

is intensely focused on movement as both mimetic and nonmimetic, and as both

fight and dance. And though the men go through the motions (literally) of a kind

of homosocial intimacy, from bodily embrace to shared domesticities, it is and

this is the films achievement impersonal. In Bersanis characteristic reading,

where tragically fixated content gives way to gorgeously mobile form, the film

does not depend on isnt even really interested in who they are, if by who

we mean their individual psychology, their personal history or identity.6

It is as though Denis desiccates the allegory of Herman Melvilles Billy

Budd along with its watery landscape. Master sergeant Galoup conceives an envi-

ous hatred for the new recruit Sentain, who has, it seems, caught the attention of

the father of this brotherhood, the commander Bruno Forestier. In Billy Budd,

it is the prelapsarian innocence and goodness of the young sailor that stirs up

Claggarts elementally evil rage and destructivity. In Beau Travail a distanced

retrospective voice- over narration records, almost monotonally, a familial nar-

DaDDys GirlON lEO BErsaNi 351

rative of fratricidal rivalry for the fathers love (6), although little in what we

see because it is so balletically choreographed conveys the dramatic tension

this description might otherwise imply, or it does so in a kind of slow motion,

using the cameras almost unbearable concentration and focus on the surface of

faces and bodies. As Bersani remarks, An energetic choreography stifles the

movements of desire before they can become psychic designs (10). What fasci-

nates him in the film is this strange juxtaposition of the violence and destructivity

of desire which visually seems to lack movement in the film and a move-

ment from which desire is absent (8), the carefully controlled and aestheticized

dances of partly clothed classically beautiful male bodies in intimate yet imper-

sonal proximity.

On the one hand, then, psychoanalytically, Beau Travail comments on the

drive, what Bersani calls the violence of desire in search of an object (7). The

violence of Beau Travail is the movement of the trash can [Galoups term for

the cause of his desire] to know and master itself. But there is nothing to know,

nothing to master (8), he writes. There is only one psyche here; its desire requires

an object, its destructivity is a desire to know and master. Galoup, Bersani com-

ments eloquently and disturbingly, is engaged in a rageful pursuit of being, of

an otherness (which may be nothing but a void) that is constitutive of subjectivity

itself (8). The object is a matter of indifference; it is, in an important way, mean-

ingless beyond the singularity of desiring. In this context Bersani reads the weird

and wonderful final dancing scene as a form of jouissance, from its (perhaps merely

fantasized) beginning as an awkward series of spasmodic movements before the

mirrored walls of a deserted nightclub dance floor, to its increasing frenzy and

the sinister delight of the dancer- character- Galoup- turned- actor Denis Lavant,

who, after rolling across the floor, abruptly stands up and exits the frame. This is,

for Bersani, Deniss provocation to stand up and simply leave the family tragedy

by which Western culture has been oppressed at least since Oedipuss parricide

(12), that is to say, the normativizing and supposedly civilizing symbolic regula-

tions of desire and the drive. The injunction he reads in Deniss ending leave

the violence of a desire for the father and the son, a violence that transforms broth-

erhood into fratricide (12) leads Bersani to join in exalted collaboration with

the children refusing the family game imposed on them by their determination

to remain orphans (12).

But what is the moral of the story, and can it go in this direction? Doesnt

Galoups strange sort of apotheosis (from character to actor, from depressed to

jouissant) depend, in some way, on the fratricidal drama he has, in however much

an alienated (and ultimately failed) fashion, enacted? Must the departure from


the family nevertheless detour through its murderous romances? Could we read

Deniss masterpiece as commenting instead on how we (Ill get to the status of

that we in a moment) continue to be bound by the familial narratives that make

for kinds of bondedness (bonds and bondage), despite a desire to be orphans? The

murderous jealousy and revenge Galoup acts out that turn out, for the film, to be

mythic in character rather than socially real still seem to require to be acted

out for the film to make sense, even in its break away from those romances. Could

we not then see represented in the film the ghostly pasts of the deadly family (not

to mention national) romances that inform, shape, and ultimately haunt even these

orphaned sons of a nation? If the pursuit of being here is rageful, does it matter

where that rage comes from?

David Kurnick makes the point, in relation to Bersanis pattern of looking

to the side of the dire thematizations in his archives in favor of their stunningly

inventive formalism, that we could also read this story in the other direction,

approaching form and content in the reverse order (402), so that the thematic

aspects of the text comment, instead, on the form. In thus reversing the (progres-

sivist) temporality of Bersanis readings, Kurnick queers them by focusing on the

antiredemptive content that still seems to subtend forms ascetic redemptions.

I would offer, instead, a figure that I have used elsewhere to speak of how the

past be it mythical, historical, collective, or individual persists in the frag-

ments and formalisms of the present/future: haunting.7 Bersanis ceaseless effort

to confront subjectivitys enmeshment in the world and fashion of it alternatives

to destructivity has led me repeatedly to discern how a subject can both acknowl-

edge the trauma of historicity and open itself to another way of responding.8 In

Bersanis reading of Deniss film, this can only take the form of an affective break

(between form and content). To articulate those alternatives, to figure them, is also

a formal experiment, as all of Bersanis work shows. But and perhaps this then

constitutes the mark of my (identitarian) difference there is something of the

matter, the bodies, that persists.

Bersani comments that Denis multiplies witnesses to the collective psy-

chic rebirth (12) that her film implicitly calls for. These witnesses are, for him,

the groups of Africans standing nearby (and, at various points in time, car-

ing for, rescuing, or succoring the group of foreigners) and the immense land-

scape that surrounds them. Denis even situates herself in the African people

and landscape, as the alienated and distancing gaze that looks on at this reen-

acted drama among (white, Western) men. Maybe thats a joke about Freuds dark

continent, woman- Africa- landscape rescripted as a(n) (equally impenetrable) sub-

jectivity. I dont know whether she can do this, despite her previous political


track record and her childhood in Africa; it is a risky political gamble for (even

a female, nonhegemonic) Western subject to forge analogies dare we call them

similitudes, a kind of impersonal intimacy? from such a freighted ideological

history. But, given that track record, and the powerfully objectifying and distanc-

ing effect of the camera work, which favors a stationary camera and long shots, I

cannot think the story asks us to identify with (or only with) this male homoso-

cial remnant of a French Foreign Legion this very strange stranger, the lgion

trangre forged as a tool to transform foreigners into French imperial and colo-

nial secret weapons.

But, yes, the film also asks its audience to identify with this male homo-

sociality, and maybe mystify it a little, too, as the film mystifies (and thus also

reinstates the clich of) innocent or benevolent or helpful African people at

the margins of this violence. The impersonal intimacy crafted in Beau Travail is

then, also, it seems to me, the intimacy of a complicity with all kinds of fraterni-

ties and paternities (what Derrida calls the fratriarchie), and it is an intimacy

haunted by that complicity.9 Yet it seems to offer a kind of reparative love rather

than violent and destructive repudiation, which would, of course, compulsively

yet again repeat the parricidal or fratricidal drama. Perhaps, then, the witnessing

to a rebirth that Bersani notices and to which he adds his voice is what Phil-

lips, commenting on Bersanis discussion of impersonal narcissism, calls moth-

ering: The impersonality of mothering, one might say, is the precursor, the

precondition of an impersonal narcissism.10 This queer daddy is also, as it turns

out, a queer mom.

If Bersanis project is to find, in the aesthetic, alternatives to assumptions

about a fundamental, ineradicable antagonism between the human subject and

the world (1), or, in other terms, to find an alternative to the epistemological pas-

sion . . . reformulated as the passion to appropriate the object and the destruction

of difference (2), I want, finally, to ask about the dualism of subject- object rela-

tions he posits as a grounding (psychoanalytic) assumption of worldly relations. If

subjectivity is always already, or from the very first, a kind of intersubjectivity, and

not only the egos consolidations of a defensive boundary around something like a

self, might we not find alternatives to the subject- object, or subject- subject agon

that eventually emerges and that has not yet, apparently, exhausted itself? Could

other subjectivities emerge (have they already?) from the potentially promising

intersubjectivity that Freud posits as constitutive of becoming- subject in The Ego

and the Id, and would these emergences necessarily require depersonalization?

Might the disruption of branlement entail, rather, a vibratory or resonant subver-

sion that would not need to shatter, that would disperse, yes, but less calamitously?


Kaja Silverman answers that, in effect, this is Bersanis quest, to move through the

subject- object structurings of ego and world toward that other place where one can

accept the relational field of world and self.11

I am not saying that other ways of thinking about subjectivity that draw

on queer and feminist genealogies would necessarily solve the problems atten-

dant on familial inheritance, just as Michel Foucaults alternative arrangements of

bodies and pleasures do not promise liberation.12 They are not, in other words,

utopic. But alternative models of relationality symbiosis, symbiogenesis, assem-

blages, companion species, being- with may offer some less- scripted forms of

intimacy made up of differences and resemblances undetermined in advance.13 It

is a question whether or not they remain properly psychoanalytic conceptualiza-

tions of subjectivity and relationality. But it is also the case that Bersanis guiding

question in this paper Is there a nonsadistic type of movement? and some

of his work since also seem to question, in favor of a kind of formal phenomenol-

ogy, the adequacy of the received psychoanalytic edifice built on dualistic tradi-

tions of subjectivity in the history of Western humanism.14 If I track the place

of the articulating subject in Beau Travail I find it everywhere: in the cinematic

apparatus, in the represented landscape, in the bodies of the legionnaires and the

people of Djibouti, in the crusted salt of the Red Sea and the immensity of the

mountains and ocean. Might such a posthuman model of distributed and material

subjectivities offer an elsewhere to the familial agon that insists that father knows

best, without, in turn, producing orphans?

Notes

1. See Leo Bersani, Father Knows Best, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol. 29, no. 4

(2010): 92 104. Page notations from Bersanis essay are from the manuscript version

of the talk.

2. Im referring to my first book, which was also a revision of my doctoral dissertation,

Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1991).

3. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso,

1997); Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

4. In citing the sadistic- voyeuristic cinematic gaze, Im referring to Laura Mulveys

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 18.

5. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bersani and Adam Phillips, Inti-


macies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Bersani, Homos (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

6. The quotations are drawn from an insightful essay by David Kurnick, Embarrass-

ment and the Forms of Redemption, PMLA 125 (2010): 398 403. The original sen-

tence is: The copresence of tragically fixated content and gorgeously mobile form is

characteristic of the privileged objects of Bersanis analytic attention (401).

7. Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

See especially chapter 5, Queer Spectrality, where I describe Jean de Lrys New

World subjectivity a willingness to be haunted through a phrase of Bersanis

that has, for years, continued to preoccupy me: Can a masochistic surrender operate

as effective (even powerful) resistance to coercive designs? (Homos, 99).

8. The term is Judith Butlers; see Burning Acts: Injurious Speech, in Deconstruction

Is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New

York University Press, 1995), 149 80.

9. The fratriarchy may include cousins and sisters but, as we will see, including may

also come to mean neutralizing (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, viii).

10. Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 104.

11. Kaja Silverman, Looking with Leo, PMLA 125 (2010): 410 13. I am influenced

here by Silvermans extended and brilliant experiment with producing a nondestruc-

tive relationality through Freuds Ego and the Id in The Bodily Ego, in The Thresh-

old of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9 37.

12. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

13. Symbiogenesis comes from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes:

A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002); assemblages in

this sense is from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capital-

ism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1987); companion species is from Donna Haraway, The Companion Species

Manifesto: Dogs, Humans, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm,

2003); and being- with came to me first through Vinciane Despret, The Body We

Care For: Figures of Anthropo- zoo- genesis, Body and Society 10, nos. 2 3 (2004):

111 34; Jacques Derrida uses it similarly in The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans.

David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

14. See both Bersanis response to his interlocutors in Broken Connections, PMLA 125

(2010): 414 15, and Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Rohmers Salon, Film Quar-

terly 63, no. 1 (2009): 23 35.

17.2-3.freccero daddys girl

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