Bersani and Phillips write in dialogue, two voices testing each other rather than one argument advancing. They begin from psychoanalysis and its account of intimacy, then turn against the assumption that self-knowledge deepens closeness and that narcissism is a danger to be corrected. Across readings of Henry James, Patrice Leconte's film, Plato's Phaedrus, and the practice of barebacking, they ask what an intimacy that refuses the personal might look like.
The central proposal is what they call impersonal narcissism: a loosening of the ego that finds an unindividuated, non-psychological self reflected in others. On this account aggression follows from the defense of a bounded identity, so relinquishing that identity carries an ethical stake, not only an erotic one.
For a clinician the value lies in how it reframes the analytic relationship, treating impersonal talk and the surrender of self-mastery as something other than resistance, and questioning what the work of knowing a patient is for.
About the authors
Leo Bersani
Leo Bersani (1931 to 2022) was an American literary critic and theorist who spent his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as professor of French, chaired the department, and became professor emeritus in 1996. He wrote on French literature, psychoanalysis, sexuality and aesthetics, with books including Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, The Freudian Body and The Culture of Redemption. His 1987 essay 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' made him a central figure in queer studies.
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British psychoanalyst and essayist working within the psychoanalytic tradition. He served as principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, he has written many books, among them On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, and Becoming Freud, and is known for essays that bring psychoanalytic thinking to a general readership.
Details
- 2008
- University of Chicago Press
- University of Chicago Press
- 134
- 9780226043456