Intimacies by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Chicago and London:  The university of Chicago Press, 2008;  125 pp.

Intimacies , coauthored by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, develops several notions of an impersonal narcissism that would eliminate the aggressions of the ego invariably released whenever confronting otherness. Bersani's chapters enlist the theory of ego-shattering, one he first put forth in 1986 in The Freudian Body, to examine modes of talking and radical homosexual practices, while Phillips's reflections on those chapters appeal more directly to a psychoanalytic theory of formative relations to otherness. Taken together, Bersani's chapters and Phillips's responses to them build on an understanding of the unconscious that puts in question its nature, particularly of what Lacan studied as jouissance and the Real, and Freud analyzed as the death drive.

Bersani's first example of impersonal narcissism describes intimate talk purportedly beyond passion and sexual goals. Central to such a narcissistic relation is speech that enhances a mutual support of a kind of virtuality of the self that Bersani shows to be operating in The Beast in the Jungle, a 1903 novella by Henry James. The story is composed almost entirely of a series of conversations. May Bartram and John Marcher talk over a span of years, never articulating their desires nor their relationship; they meet and go places together, but nothing seems to happen to them. Bersani shows that James's perspective in his writing — his hypothetical statements, manipulation of past and future tenses, and undefined reference to “it” — extract his characters from “any specified time,” transferring “them to a before or an after in which they are de-realized in the form of anticipations or retrogressions” (p. 23). What does happen, then, is a long, suspended love, in which the “It in the I transforms subjecthood from psychic density into pure potentiality, the unrealized being” (p. 25) of the subjects' waiting. Talk would seem to