*Apologies for cross-posting*

Dear listmembers,

There are TWO spaces available for the "Reading Leo Bersani: A Retrospective" seminar which will take place at University College Dublin on June 12th-June 14th (seminar details below). Places will be allocated to those interested on a *irst come first served*basis. In case of any withdrawals between now and the seminar those who miss out will be placed on a waiting list. 

To register we will need the following:

(a) name and affiliation (if applicable)
(b) postal address for the reading pack
(c) a short bio note for inclusion in the seminar pack
(d) flight details if you are traveling from outside Dublin

Michael O'Rourke.


Reading Leo Bersani: A Retrospective
Three-Day Intensive, Interdisciplinary Seminar
Friday 12, Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 June 2009

As Part of The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research 2009 in Collaboration with the MA in Gender Writing/Graduate Education and Research Programme in Gender, Culture and History, School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin.

Seminar Description:
This three-day intensive seminar will be devoted to discussing the influential thinker Leo Bersani whose work spans half a century and which helped to define the fields of lesbian and gay studies and what later came to be called queer theory. His vast, in many ways unclassifiable, oeuvre has traversed and blurred the boundaries of the disciplines of modern French literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, film theory, aesthetics, masculinity studies and sexuality studies. This seminar will seek to open up and illuminate the connections and relations Bersani's writings have forged among and between these disciplines (and others).

Day one (Friday 12 June) will be devoted to ‘Reading Bersani Retrospectively’ and will focus on four main themes: identity, desire, relationality and aesthetics. Two trigger papers will be read in advance of each session which will be discussion-based and chaired by an expert facilitator. The readings chosen cover a small but representative sample of Bersani’s writings and it is hoped that the thematic focus will allow for an engaged discussion of some distinct (yet overlapping) unifying features which have animated, and continue to animate, Bersani's work.

Day two (Saturday 13 June) will be devoted to ‘Getting Intimate with Leo"’and will see Professor Bersani present from his new and ongoing work followed by a discussion with seminar delegates. After the lecture there will be a screening of Intimate Strangers, directed by Patrice Leconte (2004), which Bersani discusses in chapter one of his recent book Intimacies (co-authored with Adam Phillips).

Day three (Sunday 14 June) will centre on ‘Reading Intimacies’ and will be grouped into three sections each taking one chapter from Intimacies as its focus: self (chapter 1), sex (chapter 2) and ethics (chapter 3). Each session will be chaired by an expert facilitator and will feature short responses to the book from a wide variety of disciplinary locations. Professor Bersani will participate in this discussion of his book. The emphasis in all three seminars will be on discussion.

Required Reading:
There are a number of required texts for this seminar: copies of the trigger papers for day 1 of the seminar (Friday 12 June) will be provided in a reading pack in advance however delegates must source a copy of Intimacies by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008 themselves. This book will be the focus of the third day of the seminar. Please note: reading packs can only be sent to people who confirm their attendance at the seminar by registering in advance.

The Author:
Leo Bersani is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. His many books include: Intimacies (with A. Phillips, Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); Caravaggio's Secrets (with U. Dutoit, MIT Press, 1998); Caravaggio (with U. Dutoit, British Film Institute, 1999); Forming Couples: Godard's Contempt (with U. Dutoit, Legenda/European Humanities Research Centre, 2003); Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (with U. Dutoit, British Film Institute, 2004); Homos (Harvard University Press, 1995); Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko and Resnais (with U. Dutoit, Harvard University Press, 1993); The Culture of Redemption (Harvard University Press, 1990); The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (Columbia University Press, 1986); The Forms of Violence (with U. Dutoit, Schocken Books, 1985); The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Baudelaire and Freud (UC Press, 1979); A Future for Astyanax
(Little, Brown, 1976); Balzac to Beckett (Oxford University Press, 1970); and Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (Oxford University Press, 1965).


Seminar Schedule: 

DAY 1, FRIDAY 12 JUNE: READING BERSANI RETROSPECTIVELY



9-9.30: Opening remarks and introductions



9.30-10.45: Session 1 - Identity

Trigger Papers:

'Erotic Assumptions: Narcissism and Sublimation in Freud' in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990) 29-46.


'Persons in Pieces' in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1976) 286-315.



10.45-11.15: Tea and Coffee Break



11.15-12.30: Session 2 - Desire

Trigger papers: 

'Desire and Death' in Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 67-89.



'One Big Soul (The Thin Red Line)' (co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit) in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004): 124-78.



12.30-1.30: Lunch



1.30-2.45: Session 3 - Relationality

Trigger papers: 

'Sociability and Cruising', Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious (2002): 9-23.


'Against Monogamy', The Oxford Literary Review 20:1/2 (1998): 3-21.



2.45-3.15: Tea and Coffee Break



3.15-4.30: Session 4 - Aesthetics

Trigger papers:

'Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject', Critical Inquiry 32:2 (Winter 2006): 161-174.


'Sexuality and Aesthetics' in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 29-50.





DAY 2, SATURDAY 13 JUNE: GETTING INTIMATE WITH LEO



10.30-11: Opening remarks and introductions



11-1: Session 5 - Lecture by Professor Bersani, followed by discussion



1-2: Lunch



2-4: Session 6 - Screening of Intimate Strangers, directed by Patrice Leconte (2004)





DAY 3, SUNDAY 14 JUNE: READING INTIMACIES



9.30-10: Opening remarks and introductions



10-12: Session 7 - Self 

Reading: ‘The It in the I’ (Intimacies, chapter 1)



12-1: Tea and Coffee Break



1-3: Session 8 - Sex 

Reading: ‘Shame on You’ (Intimacies, chapter 2)



3-3.30: Lunch



3.30-5.30: Session 9 - Ethics

Reading: ‘The Power of Evil and the Power of Love’ (Intimacies, chapter 3)



5.30 Thanks and closing remarks




Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).


Description:
Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here present a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination—though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential.


In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across a variety of contexts. To test the hypothesis that the essence of the analytic exchange is intimate talk without sex, they compare Patrice Leconte’s film about an accountant mistaken for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers, with Henry James’s classic novella The Beast in the Jungle. A discussion of the radical practice of barebacking—unprotected anal sex between gay men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the personal. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror enter the scene as the conversation turns to the way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. Finally, in a reading of Socrates’s theory of love from Plato’s Phaedrus, Bersani and Phillips call for a new form of intimacy which they term 'impersonal narcissism': a divestiture of the ego and a recognition of one’s non-psychological potential self in others. This
revolutionary way of relating to the world, they contend, could lead to a new human freedom by mitigating the horrifying violence we blithely accept as part of human nature.


Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.


Table of Contents:

Preface (Phillips)
1 The It in the I (Bersani)

2 Shame on You (Bersani)

3 The Power of Evil and the Power of Love (Bersani)

4 ‘On a More Impersonal Note’ (Phillips)

Conclusion (Bersani)