I can't stop thinking about Severin and I think it is significant that she has become the most significant, the most written about, the most talked about, figure of the theme week. I can't stop pondering her because she is so difficult to get, so difficult to get a hold on. And I'm stuck. Which makes me want to keep asking questions about her, of her. And my failure to fully understand her keeps me going. So I'll have another (probably unsuccessful) go at this.

Since reading Robert's commentary on the queer "aesthetics of existence" I've been revisiting Leo Bersani and (his writings on) Foucault to try to make sense of Severin. In an early essay "Erotic Assumptions" Bersani writes that "the sexual always involves a turning away from the other". This sounds like a good description of Severin's stance at the end of (perhaps all the way through Shortbus). But the later Bersani (both with and without Ulysse Dutoit) seems to offer a more promising understanding of Severin's character and her (non?)solipsistic auto-eroticism. Despite claims that Bersani's position on the self-shattered subject has shifted from early claims about ego dissolution (taken up from the Laplanchean idea of ebranlement) to a gentler formulation of ego disidentification premised on what he calls "the milder sensual pleasure of discovering our inaccurate self-replications in the world, the aesthetically pleasing correspondences between the world and multiple partial aspects of our subjecthood", I am not so sure that there is a rupture in the arc of his writing. Before coming back to why Bersani sees these inaccurate self-replications as "aesthetically pleasing" I would like to demonstrate the absolute consistency of his thought relating to sexuality and sexual self-shattering (and in turn that this consistency explains Severin's apparently contradictory sexual character). There are no breaks in Bersani's formulations of things any more than, I would argue, there is any inconsistency in Severin's refusal to capitulate to what Cynthia calls "compulsory sexuality" throughout the course of the film, whether she is with others (trust fund boy, Sofia) or alone.

In his work, but this is especially evident in intimacies (co-authored with Adam Phillips) Bersani imagines a non-identitarian sameness, a way of being-with the other, where, as I have already said, we are inaccurately replicated. The lover replicates himself in the other and they both replicate themselves outside but there is no being and no identity in their intimacy-small i intimacy, small b being. The self-shattered subject in this impersonally narcissistic field is non-ipso-phallic, non-inviolable and this is important because, for Bersani, the power of love depends on our loving the lover/other and the external world without mastering it, by finding (or refinding in the Freudian sense) ourselves somehow in it/them.  The mobility of “Persons in Pieces” we see in his later work is a gravitation towards one’s own “form” elsewhere in order to open oneself up to the possibility of a whole new series of relationships to the other, to the world, a “congested connectedness” (“Beauty’s Light”), relationships which are in the first instance “aesthetic”. In the non-suicidal self-immolation Bersani charts an impersonal aesthetic where everything connects within and to the wholeness of being, where the subjects need to project herself on the world is not entirely necessary-“we correspond to the world in ways that don’t necessitate or imply the world’s suppression” (“Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject”).This “ontological passivity” or “ontological floating”, simply letting the world be, our ceaseless receptivity to the world, depends on a "pure love", where subjectivity is divested at the same time as our claims on the world. Both self and world “lose their customary borders” as Michael Snediker has so eloquently put it.

In an essay on Bersani, Tim Dean has made sense of the ways in which shattering effects don't always cluster around sexuality but also attach to the aesthetic (and in constitutive ways). Dean stumbles across--and it does give one pause--a remarkable passage in Freud's (re-finding again) essay on "Infantile Sexuality" where he writes about "the sexually exciting effect of many emotions which are in themselves unpleasurable" but can be traced to an "imaginary world, in a book or in a play". Dean glosses this startling claim by saying that "not only does Freud claim that sexuality may be provoked by objects that are unrecognizable as either oedipally derived or, indeed, erotic in any way: he claims further that it may be provoked by objects--or, more precisely experiences--that are recognizably aesthetic". 

Bersani sees an intimate connection between this idea and the work on aesthetics he has been undertaking with Dutoit and his attempts to describe "the rhythms of the body and that which is foreign to the body". In the closing scenes of Shortbus we see Severin three times (clutching an object I can't quite identify: is it a cane?). On the first occasion she enthusiastically bangs on the cymbals of one of the drumming musicians. On the second she shrieks joyously in a solipsistic moment of auto-erotic jouissance. On the final occasion she seems to voyeuristically participate in/with the throbbing crowd of bodies which surrounds her solitary seated body. She finds herself inaccurately replicated in the world around her without mastering it and by objects which are not "recognizably erotic" or recognizably sexual. Severin doesn't have a broken attachment to the world but rather exhibits a striking correspondence between her own psychic rhythms and the objects which are foreign to her (divided or split, as Kris says) subjectivity. This is what Bersani (and Dutoit) mean, I think, by the "correspondence of forms".

MOR.