Overview

Leo Bersani s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness. Thoughts and Things posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, Thoughts and Things will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

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9781322394862

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Reviews

Thoughts and Thing s is a thrilling meditation on the relational--on what connects authors to readers, authors to themselves, the actual to the virtual, the mind to the body, the drive to the stars, and our systems of thought to the universe. Embedded in this meditation are brilliant readings of a number of individual books, essays and films, ranging from Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers and Claire Denis's Beau Travail, to Sigmund Freud's 'A Special Kind of Object Choice, ' and Lawrence Krauss's Universe from Nothing. Thoughts and Things also offers a provocative account of 'conception.' It is Leo Bersani's best book--to date. --Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press.

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