Hand

Abstract

This essay remarks how a missing “hand” in Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption illuminates more than a rhetorical strategy; with it, Bersani undermines the problem of “incongruent counterparts” made famous by Kant. While Bersani’s “hand” replies most plainly to the logic of hands in Melanie Klein’s “Early Analysis,” as Bersani reads Proust with Klein, it ultimately offers its most powerful gesture in an antiredemptive comparative literary method in which association, rather than a historical or otherwise redemptive justification, undergirds literary-critical argument. With his severed hand, Bersani also offers an unlikely counterpart to Freud’s uncanny.