PARTISAN REVIEW
299
rida, Foucault, the group of
Tel Quel-
discard tJhe notion of the self
entirely and seek "to codify and live by the laws inherent to the im–
personal structures of myth, of media, of language."
If
the gestures of
the first group, he argues, lead to something like Oriental mysticism
(a self beyond the self), the second, "insofar as they demonstrart:e the
limitations which our mstruments of expression impose on efforts of
self-renewal and social renewal, are particularly congenial to political
conservatism...." The charge, gratuitously made and wholly unsup–
pomed, is a grave disservice <to Bersani's own critical talent.
It
obscures
the degree to which the best of those French wr,iters are careful to
distinguish between what we might quickly call the ontic and the
ontological level of philosophical inquiry. The effollts of Derrida,
Foucault, and Lacan (whose absence, like Freud's, from Bersaru's
index is surprising) not to abandon, but to situate the possibility of the
self deserve a more p (lJtient reading than BeIlSani has given them.
Bersani seeks to escape the dichotomy but at the same time to
resist these "false" alternatives. His deconstruction of the traditional
opposition between a true self and a manifest self begins by violently
reversing the hierarchy implicit in the polarity. Where Barthes tends to
maintain the tension between terms, Bersani rejects the notion of a
profound self, of a fixed identlity, of "an immobile, permanently
recognizable image of the self' in favor of a "superficial" self, "one
unconstrained in its acts by a profound idemity," one that "enaot(s)
the self along such a variety of surfaces that it <tends to disappear in
~ts
own enriching diffusions."
But what appears to be a simple reversal of the polarity is in fact
a new synthesis, a third term. For in order to avoid the trap of
postul(lJting a mystical self beyond the self, or of acquiescing in the
"political conservatism" th(lJt (lJtJtends its radical loss, Bersani's "super–
ficial" self must be self-revising and, yet, in some way, self-identical.
It must be both surface and depth, present yet constantly self-renewing,
transcendental and yet empirical, universal but also singular. But that
new synthesis is at least as old as Kant and in a different form as old
as Aristotle. Bersani has reconstructed behind his own back, as it were,
the configuI'altion of what we are accustomed to call the imagination–
the synthetic, third term
par excellence.
One need hardly recall the
yeoman service that category has performed in the history of Anglo–
American criticism in saving literature from servility to the real on the
one hand, from phantasmagorical chaos on the other.
It
continues to
operate with all its old efficacy under the guise of the most radical
modernity, as ".immediate experience," or "the performing self," or
