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RICHARD KLEIN
gotten sense of the arbitrary might promote . . . a continuous
reVIsIon of fictions always acknowledged as tentative and experi–
mental.
Bersani lets us read behind these sober lines a new political manifesto,
one that escapes the limitations of Marxism
andstructurali~m,
and
posits an even more radical revolution of the human subject, whose
ideologically conscious avant-garde, we are led to believe, would be the
party of literary critics!
It is easy to be ironic at the expense of this new politics. It
appears, on the surface, to
be
more than slightly mad. But Bersani,
always alert to his own most extreme implications, anticipates the
charge and in frequent passages with Laingian undertones defends
madness, more exaotly, polemicizes against the automatic gesture by
which our culture defends itself against the loss of fixed identities.
It
is when Bersani begins rto sketch the configuration of this new
historical subject, when he sets the terms in which we can think its
possibility, ,that one begUns to suspect rt:hat Bersani is not nearly mad
enough.
From the beginning of his book, Bersani acknowledges his debt
to the critical-philosophical developments in France with which Barthes
has been associated. Like Barthes, he views his cJ1ltical activity within
a political framework. Like BaJ1thes, he sees himself engaged in the
critique of "bourgeois"ideology, or even more broadly, in the critique of
the whole tradition of Western metaphysics that subtends our culture.
And like him, Bersani seeks to liberate us from the tyranny of meaning,
from "£ixed significance" and "secure interpretations" without falling
prey to .the hollow aestheticism of "aJ1t for al1t's sake."
Just as Barthes insists on the polysemous character of the sign,
the structural inability of the signified to resume and
to
fix the com–
plexity and multiplicity of ,the signifier, so Bersani, by analogy, resists
the notion tha:t a work of literature can be reduced to the expression
of a biographical, intentional center, or, extrapolating further, that a
coherent, fixed identity can
be
deduced from the multiple manifesta–
tions of personality. The history of modernity, from Balzac to Beckett,
becomes in his hands the history of literature's constant, though often
unwitting, postulation of a radical disconrttinuity between the self and
language, between the manifestations of self and what we long to con–
sider
its
center, the "true" self. Some writers (like Flaubert and
Beckett) have seen the disjunction very acutely but have opted for an
ineffable self that lies behind language whose presence is revealed in its
absence from language. Others - Bersani lumps together McLuhan, Der-
