The Best of All Possible Bersanis

The Best of All Possible BersanisA review of Mikko Tuhkanen, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani Tom Roach (bio) Tuhkanen, Mikko. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. State U of New York P, 2018. Early in Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire's classic send-up of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's metaphysics (or perversions thereof), the windbag philosopher Doctor Pangloss explains the "sufficient reason" for his syphilitic condition. Responding to the naïve Candide's inquiry, "Isn't the devil at the root of it?" the good doctor declares: "Certainly not.... It is indispensable in this best of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting the West Indies, had not caught this disease...we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal" (30). Even as his nose rots away and his teeth blacken, the incorrigibly optimistic Pangloss clings to a belief in the pre-established harmony of this "best of all possible worlds." In Voltaire's rendering of a distorted Leibnizian worldview, everything—natural disasters, the Inquisition, grotesque bodily suffering, you name it—is for the best. The world has never been, and will never be, better; needing no improvement, things are, and will forever be...hopeless. As I read Mikko Tuhkanen's masterful survey of Leo Bersani's oeuvre, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani, Voltaire served as a mooring post. His critique of totalizing and totalitarian idealisms dragged me kicking and screaming back to Earth. This is a compliment to both Tuhkanen and, as if he needs it, Voltaire. Tuhkanen so convincingly traces Bersani's philosophical roots to Leibniz that I found myself drifting into the metaphysical stratosphere, enthralled by the seamlessness and clarity of the author's holistic vision of Bersani's "onto-ethics/aesthetics." Yet even in my intellectual revelry, Voltaire's materialist ethics—grounded in labor and what we might now call sustainability (Candide's final words are "we must go work in the garden" (144))—nipped at me like a gadfly, prompting rude reminders of the historical atrocities informed by various speculative idealisms. In short, reading Tuhkanen's original and virtuosic take on Bersani's work was an intellectual high: it swept me up, it thrilled me, and I learned a great deal. At the same time, closing its covers felt like a cocaine crash; after soaring at such great heights, the rock-kicking solidity of terra firma hit hard. "It has remained infrequently noted," Tuhkanen writes, "that Bersani is not only a thinker of the ethical potential of solipsism and masochism—of 'the antisocial'—but also, always, a speculative ontologist who wants us to find ways of training ourselves in other modes of being-in-the-world than self-annihilation" (164). This sentence, appearing in the final pages of The Essentialist Villain, distills Tuhkanen's thesis: although Bersani may be best known for his contributions to queer theory—especially for the so-called antisocial thesis introduced in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (1987) and developed in Homos (1995)—he is first and foremost a philosopher, and he should be read as such. Tuhkanen's inclusion of the word "always" is also telling. He argues that, since the publication in 1965 of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art, Bersani has been formulating his singular onto-ethics/aesthetics. The philosopher himself more or less verifies this claim. In his 2013 preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust, Bersani writes, "all the later work is, in some ways, already included in the first study" (x-xi). Tuhkanen's task, then, is to illuminate the often-obscured philosophical roots of Bersani's intellectual trajectory and to track the conceptual consistency across his fifty-plus years of scholarship. Although Bersani's scholarly interests range promiscuously from Assyrian art to astronomy to bareback porn, Tuhkanen finds a continuous thread, often hiding in plain sight, woven through Bersani's diverse studies. That thread is Leibniz's monadology. Bersani, then, has worked from the get-go to flesh out what Tuhkanen describes as "homomonadology," a speculative Leibnizian metaphysics predicated on an indivisible yet internally variegated essence. This essence is immanent and originary; it simultaneously manifests and re-manifests in the aesthetic experience. It is concretized in art

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