Thoughts and Things

About this book

Leo Bersanis career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsincluding 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 beingof 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.