Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.  Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.

Thoughts and Things posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being—of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us.  He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, Thoughts and Things will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

""Thoughts and Things accomplishes more in its pages than some full bookshelves in my office. This is an original and intellectually consequential book that will become, like multiple past books by Bersani, a classic.”" - Princeton University

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“Bersani offers essays dealing with the metaphysical question of relations: of authors to their readers, of authors to other authors, of the mind to the body, of citizens to the state, of gender to personal identity, and so on. . . . Decidedly non-analytic in its approach, Bersani’s argument rests principally on analyses of films and literary works: Claire Denis’s film Beau travail, Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers, Pierre Bergounioux’s book La Casse, to name just three. It is certainly an interesting approach to a traditional problem, perhaps not an approach that will appeal to Anglo-American philosophers but one that will likely interest Continental philosophers and those working in film theory, gender studies, and related disciplines in English studies. Recommended.”

"“The six essays in this collection are suffused with an urgent sense of discovering more to say about familiar subjects: Descartes, Freud, Proust, literature, film, queer theory.”
 
“Throughout his career, Bersani has shown us ways to resist structures that oppress and to discover modes of relatedness to the world around us…. He is concerned with the tendency of social structures to classify, to create legitimate and non-legitimate groups, because these structures derive power from our willingness to accept the identities they impose upon us.”
 
“The energy in these essays derives from Bersani’s attempts to imagine escapes from dualistic thinking and restrictive structures.”" - Gay and Lesbian Review