A Conversation between Dreamers on Intimacy

For centuries, the subjects of sex, love, and intimacy have perplexed and intrigued the best minds of their times. Now, at the beginning of the 21^st century, we are offered a very different perspective on intimacy by two co-authors of a rather disturbing book that challenges all of our assumptions about love, connection, attachment, and relationship: Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Respectively, they are a professor emeritus of French at the University of California-Berkeley, author of numerous articles and books, including The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art and Homos, and a psychoanalyst, visiting professor in the English Department of York University (England), general editor of Penguin Modern Classics Freud Translations, and author of many books including Monogamy. The authors conceived of the book as a work in progress based upon their separate thoughts on the subject and a dialogue conducted over a 20-year period. Bersani wrote the first three chapters and Phillips “then responded immediately” to his colleague’s ideas with his own thoughts and questions. The authors decided to leave in “the loose ends” so as not to lose momentum. The result is a volume based upon the authors’ musings and unproven idiosyncratic theories, giving it the quality of a conversation between Bersani and Phillips, and of an e-mail exchange that morphed into a book. Their electronic “free association” is the root of the problem with this book, since the authors seem to think that stream-of-consciousness, free-association writing is tantamount to the presentation of a real theory.

Bersani and Phillips’ challenge to psychoanalysis is that it “has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy, the saboteur, of this personal intimacy considered to be the source and medium of personal development.” Furthermore, “psychoanalysis tells us, in short, that our lives depend on our recognition that other people—those vital others that we love and de-

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sire—are separate from us, are ‘beyond our control’ as we say, despite the fact that this very acknowledgement is itself productive of so much violence.” Controversially, the raison d’etre for the book is that “difference is the one thing we (humans) cannot bear” and so “the dialogue of this book is a working out of a new story about intimacy, a story that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past.”

These authors reject the traditional psychoanalytic view of the need to overcome narcissism and the need for the individual to recognize and accept the otherness and difference of the other in order to achieve intimacy. They have concluded that we are incapable of coming to terms with difference and that this older analytic model does not work because “difference” is unacceptable to us and that our inability to deal with the other must ultimately lead to interpersonal and societal violence.

In his three chapters, Bersani interrogates traditional notions of intimacy and attempts to present his vision of non-normative intimacies. In the chapter, “The It in the I,” he begins with a quote by Phillips: “Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.” As an example of this he cites the 2003 film, Intimate Strangers, directed by Patrice Leconte, in which a tax accountant is mistakenly thought to be a therapist by a woman who enters the wrong office and tells her whole story. Even after she finds out that he is not an analyst, she continues to confide in the accountant with beneficial results for both parties.

Bersani then goes on to “talk” (this is a most conversational book) about the Henry James short story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” He portrays the relationship between Mary Bertram and John Marcher as a further example of non-normative intimacy. They do not live together or marry. They are bonded through talking, much like the characters in the Leconte film.

The discussion of both the film and the short story gives value to the idea of the existence of a “virtual relationship” that is not necessarily concretized in sexuality exists in a place of the pos-

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sible. It is an effective alternative to the sturm and drang of traditional, normative forms of relationships. This virtual intimacy is termed, “impersonal narcissism.” This intimacy is freed from the demands of the ego and so allows one to be truly present for another.

In subsequent chapters, Bersani elaborates on the theory of “impersonal narcissism.” He focuses his discussion on the possibility of relationships that disrupt and defy identity and the tyranny of the ego. In chapter two, “Shame on You,” Bersani discusses the practice of bare-backing—unprotected anal sex between gay men—to describe an intimacy that rejects the personal. Although horrified by these practices, Bersani is drawn to the radicalism of the behavior.

In a further assault on the destructiveness of the ego, Bersani discusses the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s war on terror as examples of how aggression both thrills and gratifies the ego. In chapter three, “The Power of Evil and The Power of Love,” he offers a reading on Socratic love as discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus. Bersani interprets Socratic love as a way to divest oneself of the investments of the ego and as a perspective that allows for a recognition of the other.

In Phillips’ only chapter, “On a More Impersonal Note,” he takes up where Bersani leaves off. He raises more questions about impersonal narcissism and begins to explore the intertwining of love and violence. He wants to believe that impersonal narcissism would encourage love without the tendency to violence. From his writing, it is obvious that Phillips greatly admires Bersani’s project. They both want to believe, “if we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissism, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized, or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.” Furthermore, “naturally, each subject’s type of being is not reflected in everyone else…the experience of belonging to a family of singularity without national, ethnic, racial, or gendered borders might make

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us sensitive to the ontological status of difference itself as what I (Bersani) called the non-threatening supplement to sameness.” In the concluding chapter, Bersani offers more arguments for the efficacy of the theory of impersonal narcissism, which is, “to love the other’s potential self is a form of self love, a recognition that the partners in this intimacy already share a certain type of being (a sharing acknowledged by love).” He goes on to suggest that we need to rethink how we dialogue, educate, and organize cultural institutions as well as how we teach children “never to see the world outside the family, as something from which the family ‘protects’ us.”

What are we to make of the musings of Bersani and Phillips? Is the idea of impersonal narcissism utopian? How does this all fit in with psychoanalysis? Freud was not a utopian thinker. As a student of Freud, I am sure that Bersani and Phillips learned that Freud advised that there is no way out of the inevitable dialectic of separateness/merging; love/hate; eros/thanatos.

They argue that one can free desire from destructive impulses and that we can love without having to possess and defend against the loss of the loved one. They want to believe that this will result in the end of violence on personal, interpersonal, and societal levels. The road to this utopia is via a “shattering” of the narrow concerns of the ego. Through a surrender, a melting of the self, a jouissance, we will create new subjectivities and intimacies.

If we look at the violence in the world today, where competing ideologies are calling for the individual to surrender for the good of the group, the nation, or the “ism,” one questions how “impersonal narcissism” can work within this concrete reality. After all, we can lose the self in destruction as well as in love. Intimacies is a book for dreamers. The questions raised are important; however, the suggested solutions are at very best debatable.

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