BOOKS
SELF-DECENTERED
BAUDELAIRE AND FREUD. By Leo Bersanl.
University of Cal ifornia
Press. $7.95.
Li ke
A Fu lure for Aslyanax,
Leo Bersani 's new book is a t
once an act of literary criticism and an exercise in ideolog ica l specu la–
tion . As with a good dea l of contemporary French criti cism , I fin d
myse lf divided between my gratitude for the fertility o f Bersani 's
method of reading Baudelaire and my mistrust o f the values imp li ed or
assumed by the method.
Contemporary litera ture, Bersani reminds us, has celebra ted "mar–
gi na l or partial selves, or to put in ano ther way, a di sseminated
scattered self which resists all efforts to make a unifying structure of
fragmented desire." He reads Baudelaire as a poe t who is torn between
the modernist idea o f a "decentered " self and the more traditi ona l idea
o f a coherent, "socia ll y-defined time-bound " se lf. Bersani turns thi s
tension in to a dialectic which is intended no t onl y to illumina te the
work o f Baudelaire but to tes t the claims of ri va l conceptions o f the se lf.
A di sconcerting fea ture of Bersani 's argument (perhap s refl ective o f its
content ) is the slipperiness, the instability of his language: "ma rg inal"
or "partia l" unproblematica ll y changes to "di ssemina ted " and "sca t–
tered." Is fragmented des ire parti al, broken, or fru stra ted? Why are
"decentered " and " time-bound " alterna tives? More fundamen ta ll y is
the d issemina ted self anything more than an oxymoron , since
self
would seem to presuppose a unity, a center?
Against wha t he takes to be the conventiona l use of psychoana lytic
criticism, which immobilizes the writer " in certa in fixed desires or
sexual scenarios," Bersani affirms a psychoanalytic reading " in terms
of the mobility o f fantasy, of its po tential for explos ive di splacements."
T he release from a purposive unity into fragmentariness is aes theti–
ca ll y p roductive. Unity for Bersani 's Baudelaire is an opac ity tha t must
be sha ttered for the arti st to be open to reality. Thus tha t vas t emp tiness
which "would fain reduce the ea rth to ruin / ... g ladl y swa ll ow the
world in one gaping yawn " ("Ennui ") is cunning ly compared by
