Accompanying Images: Leo Bersani and Cinematic Fascination

Abstract:During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator's active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his passive receptiveness to the world's nonsignifying forms. Bersani proposes that these modes of cinematic fascination exemplify regimes of modern subjectivation, the ways in which we are taught to become who we are in our encounters with the world.