Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

I want to suggest that in order to imagine "a mode of life" that would, as Foucault put it, "yield a culture and an ethics"1 we might momentarily bracket some of the work that has been done in recent years and respond as if we had just heard Foucault's challenge for the first time. Let's start again, which means taking a foundational approach to the question of relationality. Our thinking about new ways of being together has been predominantly reactive, against established relational modes. Thus the criticism of hierarchical relational structures--that posit difference in terms of superiority and inferiority, of dominant groups and oppressed groups--has led not to a questioning of the prioritizing of difference itself as a foundational relational structure but rather to praiseworthy but somewhat ineffective pleas for the respect of difference and diversity. Predictably, the strongest work done so far has been critical histories of hegemonies, histories that also frequently propose certain transgressive reversals or antithetical reformulations of hegemonic categories. In Homos, I contrasted this with an admittedly utopic form of revolt--one I located principally in Genet--that would seek to escape transgressive relationality itself and might contest given categories and values by failing to relate to them either adaptively or transgressively. But how do we get to such a "place"?

[...]

Because the representation of the birth of relations requires a figure of nonrelationality, the danger inherent in any such representation is the erasure of figurality itself. Nothing is more haunting in the work of artists otherwise so different from one another as Turner and Rothko than their reduction of the canvas to the wholly undifferentiated origins of the canvas's work. In the nearly unpunctuated whiteness of Turner's late paintings, in the blankets of dark sameness on the panels of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, we come as close as we can to suffering the truly rare privilege of seeing nothing--as if the lines of movement in space that art represents could, as it were, be ontologically illuminated only as they almost disappear within a representation of their emergence from nothing. If art is the principal site/sight (both place and view) of being as emergence into connectedness, then the metaphysical dimension of the aesthetic--which may also be its aesthetically distinguishing dimension--is an erosion of aesthetic form. Origination is designated by figures of its perhaps not taking place; the coming-to-be of relationality, which is our birth into being, can only be retroactively enacted, and it is enacted largely as a rubbing out of formal relations. Perhaps traditional associations of art with form-giving or form-revealing activities is at least partly a denial of such formal disappearance in art. If art celebrates an originating extensibility of all objects and creatures into space--and therefore our connectedness to the universe--it does so by also inscribing within connectedness the possibility of its not happening. Relationality is itself related to its own absence. Emphatically present forms designate nonaesthetic functions and registers of being. Brutally authoritative interventions in space--presences secure in their legitimation--violate the ecological ethic for which art trains us.

The notion of an immobility before relations is a heuristic device designed to help us see the invisible rhythms of appearance and disappearance in all being. There is a further question: why extend at all? Why do objects and living beings even begin to move? Again, there is no beginning of movement; nonetheless, relational movement requires an account of a foundational motor--in the case of human subjects, a fundamental motivation for all movement. I mean "requires" in the sense that all particular motivations of all particular movements share a founding structure of desire, by which I mean a structure that accounts for the will to be in all things. Somewhat unexpectedly, psychoanalysis, which has presented itself as the most finely elaborated theory of desire in the history of human thought, will not be of much help here. It has elaborated extremely tendentious accounts of desire, accounts that make of the world we live in a place inherently alien to any subject's desire. Psychoanalysis has conceptualized desire as the mistaken reaction to a loss; it has been unable to think desire as the confirmation of a community of being.

1. Michel Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life," interview by R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet, and J. Le Bitoux, trans. John Johnston, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1997), p. 138.

Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of Homos (1995), and Caravaggio's Secrets and Caravaggio/Jarman (with U. Dutoit, 1998, 1999).