Fascination

Abstract

Bersanian fascination is not merely a fleeting affective state. It is, rather, a mode of inquiry and a form of being. If Bersani is initially fascinated with the antisocial nature of sexual desire, he later becomes enthralled with a notion of fascinated witnessing that reveals an ontological enmeshment. This essay homes in on a passage in Homos that presages an important pivot in Bersani’s intellectual trajectory: a pivot from a dialectical conception of a subjectivity forever alienated and at odds with external reality to an immanentist understanding of a subject always already connected to the world. Through an act of betrayal, Bersani leaves behind a Freudo-Proustian conception of desire as lack and embraces a concept of desire so radically exclusionary that it lacks nothing. Betrayal affords Bersani the opportunity to conceive of an ethical response to an inherently exclusionary sexual desire: an implicated, indiscriminate fascination with the world’s appearances, indifferent to the psychology of desire.