Assyrians

Abstract

This essay argues that Leo Bersani’s immersion in a discipline of reading theoretical and psychoanalytic texts and literature with close critical attention effectively writes out his observations from an epistemology of being gay. His attention to visual materials is similarly acute and detailed, and the observed and the read fragment interfere with each other in a virtuosic demonstration of criticism that is both involved and detached. In this process, his writing refuses any illusion of the possibility of theoretical coherence as a purpose of his text. Rather, Bersani’s writing produces new queer knowledge as a collateral effect of who he was.