Cr i t i c a l Bo n d sDADDYS GIRLCarla Freccero on Leo BersaniWhat still links democratization . . . to fraternization cannot always necessarily be reduced to patriarchy in which the brothers begin by dreaming of its demise. Patriarchy never stops beginning with this dream. This demise continues endlessly to haunt its principle. Jacques Derrida, Politics of FriendshipThis short appreciation of Leo Bersanis work was originally offered in response toapaperhedeliveredontherstafternoonofthethree- dayQueerBonds conference. The paper was titled Father Knows Best and included a reading of Claire Deniss amazing lm Beau Travail (1999).1 The respondents task is always an awkward one the form dictates that one must do more than appreciate, as I would like to have done, the elegance and clarity of a given intervention, its sur-prising turns and satisfying conclusions. One must also ask questions, perhaps even suggest a difference of opinion if a reading has been proffered. And when a talk is called Father Knows Best, this girl knows shes in trouble. Happily, in Bersanis paper, it was not really a question of father knowing at all; there isnt a knower in that sense as Bersani points out, Beau Travail is psychoanalytic pre-cisely in the ways that it is neither psychological nor characterological. And more, Bersani argued against familial knowledge as a form of relationality. Still, this daughter trembled at the thought of responding to Father Knows Best, given that she has the name of to contend with and that shes had her own preoccupations with father gures in representation.2 Indeed, the violent lial drama pseudo- enacted in Deniss lm is one that, in the history of Western literature, depends on the disappearance or erasure of feminine difference within the family. From GLQ 17:23DOI 10.1215/10642684-1163436 2011 by Duke University Press 350GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIESthe story of Cain and Abel, to Jacques Derridas description of fraternit, frater-nal rivalry for the fathers love occludes the feminine or consigns her (as in Ren Girards examination of mimetic desire) to the role of pretextual object.3 But these two staged scenes, the lm and this call- response, manifestly queer the bonds of kinship, for the supposed sadistic- voyeuristic gaze of the cinematic apparatus is a female gaze, its object(s) male, while the utterer of father knows best is a queer daddy indeed.4Elaborating, in part, on his work with Ulysse Dutoit in Arts of Impoverish-ment, with Adam Phillips in Intimacies, and, indeed, on much of the work he has undertaken since Homos, Bersani, in Father Knows Best, asks what alternatives there might be to a relationality guided by an ideology of difference (4), what he outlines as the legacy of Cartesian dualism in the history of the Western subject, a dualism that, in his view, is also taken up by some psychoanalytic formulations ofsubject- object relations.5 One alternativeis what Bersani calls similitude, a sense of the affective correspondences between self and the world not predicated on sadistic epistemophilia. Another is what he and Phillips call impersonal inti-macy, an affective proximity that does not at least not necessarily depend on knowing the other. In answer to the question is there a nonsadistic type of move-ment? (1), by which I understand a kind of movement in and toward the world that may be aggressive, but is not destructive (of the other and of the world) a move-ment that does not, in other words, harbor murderous impulses Bersani, in this essay, turns to a reading of Deniss lm about a group of legionnaires stationed in the Republic of Djibouti, a former French African colony. Both movement and impersonal are key terms here; for whatever else the lm is or is about, it is intensely focused on movement as both mimetic and nonmimetic, and as both ght and dance. And though the men go through the motions (literally) of a kind of homosocial intimacy, from bodily embrace to shared domesticities, it is and this is the lms achievement impersonal. In Bersanis characteristic reading, where tragically xated content gives way to gorgeously mobile form, the lm does not depend on isnt even really interested in who they are, if by who we mean their individual psychology, their personal history or identity.6It is as though Denis desiccates the allegory of Herman Melvilles Billy Budd along with its watery landscape. Master sergeant Galoup conceives an envi-ous hatred for the new recruit Sentain, who has, it seems, caught the attention of the father of this brotherhood, the commander Bruno Forestier. In Billy Budd, it is the prelapsarian innocence and goodness of the young sailor that stirs up Claggarts elementally evil rage and destructivity. In Beau Travail a distanced retrospectivevoice- overnarrationrecords,almostmonotonally,afamilialnar-DADDYS GIRLON LEO BERSANI351rative of fratricidal rivalry for the fathers love (6), although little in what we see because it is so balletically choreographed conveys the dramatic tension thisdescriptionmightotherwiseimply,oritdoessoinakindofslowmotion, using the cameras almost unbearable concentration and focus on the surface of facesandbodies.AsBersaniremarks,Anenergeticchoreographystiesthe movements of desire before they can become psychic designs (10). What fasci-nates him in the lm is this strange juxtaposition of the violence and destructivity of desire which visually seems to lack movement in the lm and a move-ment from which desire is absent (8), the carefully controlled and aestheticized dances of partly clothed classically beautiful male bodies in intimate yet imper-sonal proximity.On the one hand, then, psychoanalytically, Beau Travail comments on the drive, what Bersani calls the violence of desire in search of an object (7). The violenceofBeauTravailisthemovementofthetrashcan[Galoupstermfor the cause of his desire] to know and master itself. But there is nothing to know, nothing to master (8), he writes. There is only one psyche here; its desire requires an object, its destructivity is a desire to know and master. Galoup, Bersani com-ments eloquently and disturbingly, is engaged in a rageful pursuit of being, of an otherness (which may be nothing but a void) that is constitutive of subjectivity itself (8). The object is a matter of indifference; it is, in an important way, mean-ingless beyond the singularity of desiring. In this context Bersani reads the weird and wonderful nal dancing scene as a form of jouissance, from its (perhaps merely fantasized) beginning as an awkward series of spasmodic movements before the mirrored walls of a deserted nightclub dance oor, to its increasing frenzy and thesinisterdelightofthedancer- character- Galoup- turned- actorDenisLavant, who, after rolling across the oor, abruptly stands up and exits the frame. This is, for Bersani, Deniss provocation to stand up and simply leave the family tragedy by which Western culture has been oppressed at least since Oedipuss parricide (12), that is to say, the normativizing and supposedly civilizing symbolic regula-tions of desire and the drive. The injunction he reads in Deniss ending leave the violence of a desire for the father and the son, a violence that transforms broth-erhood into fratricide (12) leads Bersani to join in exalted collaboration with the children refusing the family game imposed on them by their determination to remain orphans (12).But what is the moral of the story, and can it go in this direction? Doesnt Galoupsstrangesortofapotheosis(fromcharactertoactor,fromdepressedto jouissant) depend, in some way, on the fratricidal drama he has, in however much an alienated (and ultimately failed) fashion, enacted? Must the departure from 352GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIESthe family nevertheless detour through its murderous romances? Could we read Deniss masterpiece as commenting instead on how we (Ill get to the status of that we in a moment) continue to be bound by the familial narratives that make for kinds of bondedness (bonds and bondage), despite a desire to be orphans? The murderous jealousy and revenge Galoup acts out that turn out, for the lm, to be mythic in character rather than socially real still seem to require to be acted out for the lm to make sense, even in its break away from those romances. Could we not then see represented in the lm the ghostly pasts of the deadly family (not to mention national) romances that inform, shape, and ultimately haunt even these orphaned sons of a nation? If the pursuit of being here is rageful, does it matter where that rage comes from?David Kurnick makes the point, in relation to Bersanis pattern of looking to the side of the dire thematizations in his archives in favor of their stunningly inventive formalism, that we could also read this story in the other direction, approaching form and content in the reverse order (402), so that the thematic aspects of the text comment, instead, on the form. In thus reversing the (progres-sivist) temporality of Bersanis readings, Kurnick queers them by focusing on the antiredemptivecontentthatstillseemstosubtendformsasceticredemptions. Iwouldoffer,instead,agurethatIhaveusedelsewheretospeakofhowthe past be it mythical, historical, collective, or individual persists in the frag-ments and formalisms of the present/future: haunting.7 Bersanis ceaseless effort to confront subjectivitys enmeshment in the world and fashion of it alternatives to destructivity has led me repeatedly to discern how a subject can both acknowl-edge the trauma of historicity and open itself to another way of responding.8 In Bersanis reading of Deniss lm, this can only take the form of an affective break (between form and content). To articulate those alternatives, to gure them, is also a formal experiment, as all of Bersanis work shows. But and perhaps this then constitutes the mark of my (identitarian) difference there is something of the matter, the bodies, that persists.Bersani comments that Denis multiplies witnesses to the collective psy-chic rebirth (12) that her lm implicitly calls for. These witnesses are, for him, thegroupsofAfricansstandingnearby(and,atvariouspointsintime,car-ingfor,rescuing,orsuccoringthegroupofforeigners)andtheimmenseland-scape that surrounds them. Denis even situates herself in the African people and landscape, as the alienated and distancing gaze that looks on at this reen-acted drama among (white, Western) men. Maybe thats a joke about Freuds dark continent, woman- Africa- landscape rescripted as a(n) (equally impenetrable) sub-jectivity. I dont know whether she can do this, despite her previous political DADDYS GIRLON LEO BERSANI353track record and her childhood in Africa; it is a risky political gamble for (even a female, nonhegemonic) Western subject to forge analogies dare we call them similitudes, a kind of impersonal intimacy? from such a freighted ideological history. But, given that track record, and the powerfully objectifying and distanc-ing effect of the camera work, which favors a stationary camera and long shots, I cannot think the story asks us to identify with (or only with) this male homoso-cial remnant of a French Foreign Legion this very strange stranger, the lgion trangre forged as a tool to transform foreigners into French imperial and colo-nial secret weapons.But, yes, the lm also asks its audience to identify with this male homo-sociality, and maybe mystify it a little, too, as the lm mysties (and thus also reinstates the clich of) innocent or benevolent or helpful African people at the margins of this violence. The impersonal intimacy crafted in Beau Travail is then, also, it seems to me, the intimacy of a complicity with all kinds of fraterni-ties and paternities (what Derrida calls the fratriarchie), and it is an intimacy haunted by that complicity.9 Yet it seems to offer a kind of reparative love rather than violent and destructive repudiation, which would, of course, compulsively yet again repeat the parricidal or fratricidal drama. Perhaps, then, the witnessing to a rebirth that Bersani notices and to which he adds his voice is what Phil-lips, commenting on Bersanis discussion of impersonal narcissism, calls moth-ering:Theimpersonalityofmothering,onemightsay,istheprecursor,the precondition of an impersonal narcissism.10 This queer daddy is also, as it turns out, a queer mom.If Bersanis project is to nd, in the aesthetic, alternatives to assumptions about a fundamental, ineradicable antagonism between the human subject and the world (1), or, in other terms, to nd an alternative to the epistemological pas-sion . . . reformulated as the passion to appropriate the object and the destruction of difference (2), I want, nally, to ask about the dualism of subject- object rela-tions he posits as a grounding (psychoanalytic) assumption of worldly relations. If subjectivity is always already, or from the very rst, a kind of intersubjectivity, and not only the egos consolidations of a defensive boundary around something like a self, might we not nd alternatives to the subject- object, or subject-subject agon that eventually emerges and that has not yet, apparently, exhausted itself? Could other subjectivities emerge (have they already?) from the potentially promising intersubjectivity that Freud posits as constitutive of becoming- subject in The Ego and the Id, and would these emergences necessarily require depersonalization? Might the disruption of branlement entail, rather, a vibratory or resonant subver-sion that would not need to shatter, that would disperse, yes, but less calamitously? 354GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIESKaja Silverman answers that, in effect, this is Bersanis quest, to move through the subject- object structurings of ego and world toward that other place where one can accept the relational eld of world and self.11I am not saying that other ways of thinking about subjectivity that draw on queer and feminist genealogies would necessarily solve the problems atten-dant on familial inheritance, just as Michel Foucaults alternative arrangements of bodies and pleasures do not promise liberation.12 They are not, in other words, utopic. But alternative models of relationality symbiosis, symbiogenesis, assem-blages, companion species, being- with may offer some less- scripted forms of intimacy made up of differences and resemblances undetermined in advance.13 It is a question whether or not they remain properly psychoanalytic conceptualiza-tions of subjectivity and relationality. But it is also the case that Bersanis guiding question in this paper Is there a nonsadistic type of movement? and some of his work since also seem to question, in favor of a kind of formal phenomenol-ogy, the adequacy of the received psychoanalytic edice built on dualistic tradi-tionsofsubjectivityinthehistoryofWesternhumanism.14IfItracktheplace of the articulating subject in Beau Travail I nd it everywhere: in the cinematic apparatus, in the represented landscape, in the bodies of the legionnaires and the people of Djibouti, in the crusted salt of the Red Sea and the immensity of the mountains and ocean. Might such a posthuman model of distributed and material subjectivities offer an elsewhere to the familial agon that insists that father knows best, without, in turn, producing orphans?Notes1. See Leo Bersani, Father Knows Best, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol. 29, no. 4 (2010): 92 104. Page notations from Bersanis essay are from the manuscript version of the talk.2. Im referring to my rst book, which was also a revision of my doctoral dissertation, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1991).3. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997);RenGirard,ViolenceandtheSacred,trans.PatrickGregory(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).4. Incitingthesadistic- voyeuristiccinematicgaze,ImreferringtoLauraMulveys Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 18.5. LeoBersaniandUlysseDutoit,ArtsofImpoverishment:Beckett,Rothko,Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bersani and Adam Phillips, Inti-DADDYS GIRLON LEO BERSANI355macies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).6. The quotations are drawn from an insightful essay by David Kurnick, Embarrass-ment and the Forms of Redemption, PMLA 125 (2010): 398 403. The original sen-tence is: The copresence of tragically xated content and gorgeously mobile form is characteristic of the privileged objects of Bersanis analytic attention (401).7. Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See especially chapter 5, Queer Spectrality, where I describe Jean de Lrys New World subjectivity a willingness to be haunted through a phrase of Bersanis that has, for years, continued to preoccupy me: Can a masochistic surrender operate as effective (even powerful) resistance to coercive designs? (Homos, 99).8. The term is Judith Butlers; see Burning Acts: Injurious Speech, in Deconstruction Is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 149 80.9. The fratriarchy may include cousins and sisters but, as we will see, including may also come to mean neutralizing (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, viii).10. Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, 104.11. Kaja Silverman, Looking with Leo, PMLA 125 (2010): 410 13. I am inuenced here by Silvermans extended and brilliant experiment with producing a nondestruc-tive relationality through Freuds Ego and the Id in The Bodily Ego, in The Thresh-old of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9 37.12. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).13. Symbiogenesis comes from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002); assemblages in this sense is from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capital-ism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); companion species is from Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, Humans, and Signicant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003); and being- with came to me rst through Vinciane Despret, The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo- zoo- genesis, Body and Society 10, nos. 2 3 (2004): 111 34; Jacques Derrida uses it similarly in The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 14. See both Bersanis response to his interlocutors in Broken Connections, PMLA 125 (2010): 414 15, and Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Rohmers Salon, Film Quar-terly 63, no. 1 (2009): 23 35.