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Sexy Painting: Caravaggio's Come-ons

Caravaggio, the gay painter of sexy young boys? The reality is more complex. In Caravaggio's Secrets (October Books/MIT Press, 1998), Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit explore the relationship between the impressions of sexual enticement and withholding conveyed by the work of this Baroque painter, comparing it to modern devel­opments in the notion of connectedness and community. Here, Leo Bersani discusses these ideas on the occasion of the book's translation into French (Les Secrets du Caravage, Editions EPEL).

What was it that got you interested in Caravaggio?

I think that it was the ambiguity of Caravaggio's portraits of those enticing young boys that was the immediately intriguing thing. As I'm sure you know, these paintings have often been described as homoerotic, which, for some critics, was enough to confirm the painter's own homosexu­ality. Now, it seemed to us that not only is it impos­sible to reduce the eroticism of those portraits to a (homo)sexual identity, but also, and above all, that they are the model for a certain kind of inti­macy that Caravaggio represents but that he also attempted to get beyond. For us, his art connects—by anticipation, if one can say that—with certain contemporary efforts to reformulate intimacy, to imagine, as Foucault encouraged us to do, new
relational models.

Yes, the striking thing about your book is the way it brings Caravaggio into the present by virtue of references that you don't usually find in art historians (with the exception of people like Georges Didi-Huberrnan and Daniel Arasse.) You invoke psycho­analysis (Laplanche), but also modern literature (Flaubert, Proust, Beckett). How do you define your discourse in methodological terms?

In his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan seeks to answer the question "What is a Picture?" and establishes a very clear distinction between his own approach to art and what he calls "the shift­ing, historical game of criticism, which tries to grasp what is the function of painting at a partic­ular moment, or a particular author at a particu­lar time." And Lacan states that "For me, it is at the radical principle of the function of this fine art that I am trying to place myself."(1) It is clear that (without claiming to establish something like "the radical principle of the function" of painting), we too are affirming the possibility of a critical approach that would be both transhistorical and transgeneric. To recognize the existence of his­torical contexts in which a work of art is produced is definitely not the same thing as holding the illu­sory belief that one can speak about a work from the past from within those contexts. Some histo­rians of painting and literature would like to have us believe that the only way of getting at the "real Caravaggio" is through historical criticism, or, to refer to the debate between Roland Barthes and Raymond Picard a few decades ago, the "real Racine." In Caravaggio's Secrets our method was to undertake a very close analysis of the paintings. Will these analyses reveal to readers the "real" Caravaggio? We have no idea, and in fact the actu­al notion of the "real Caravaggio" strikes us not only as fairly useless in critical terms, but also high­ly problematical from a critical point of view. Of course, we are working in a historical context, but this can only be the history within which we live and write; it is, to take up the references you have just mentioned, the context of readers of Beckett, of Proust and of the theorists of psychoanalysis. That means that our analyses of the paintings are never simply "formalist" nor culturally neutral, so to speak. It is only by rigorously analyzing the paintings that one can hope to answer the ques­tion that I raised a moment ago: in what sense does Caravaggio, working within a system of rep­resentation of beliefs that would seem to exclude that possibility, manage to reconfigure the relational field for us?

One of the most important premises of the book is that Caravaggio's painting and, by extension, art in general, conveys a discourse in the same way as lit­erature and philosophy do. Could you explain that?

For a long time I wrote mainly critical studies of literature. This criticism often had a very marked psychoanalytical orientation. In parallel with this piece of work, I have completed several books on the visual arts written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit (starting with a study of Assyrian sculpture, and we are just finishing a small book on three films for the British Film Institute: Godard's Le Mepris, Almodovar's All About My Mother, and that extraordinary film by Terence Malick, The Thin Red Line). This work on painting and cinema with Ulysse Dutoit has recently fallen into place with my interest in certain questions raised by Foucault, and in particularly insofar as these have been tak­en up in the United States by Queer Theory. In this field, several works of art that we worked on together struck me as particularly suited to being, as you say, "conduits of discourse." The destabilization of sexual identities sought by Queer Theory should not rest content with a polemic against "heterosexism" (which it has done all too often in America). It can only be fulfilled if—and this is much harder to do—it questions the ways in which our culture formulates relations. Not only intersubjective relations but also the relations between the human and the non-human. Every culture more or less deliberately promotes what we could call certain styles of movement in space. This is something fundamental in the education of the human subject: the way in which the indi­vidual is taught to go towards or to turn away from others. How does the most complex sociality stem from these "lessons in mobility" and, more specifically, from the way in which a culture defines, values and hierarchizes difference and similarity, the other and the same. Obviously, lit­erature often questions the dominant relational system. But the visual arts may be where the out­lines of this system are most clearly visible (here they are without the idealizing power of verbal sub­limation). Perception is no doubt the best starting point fora relational re-education. The work of Caravaggio, for example, makes visible the subver­sive transformations that are possible within an established system of representation. In his work there is often a tension between the thematized meaning of a painting (the meaning that is in fact proposed by the titles: The Betrayal of Christ, The Conversion of Saint Paul, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter) and the meanings that, at first glance, are purely spatial, such as the crowded space of the betrayed Christ, the huge and indefinite beyond to which the fan-like structures of Saint John the Baptist seem to be pointing us. Working from these visual options we formulate a fundamental relational opposition in Caravaggio's work. On the one hand, there are the seductive young boys who freeze the viewer in an imaginary relation of erotic, paranoid fascination, in the Lacanian sense, and, on the other, there are all the visual clues that mobilize the gaze, that prevent it from settling on a single point. And so there is a kind of diffuse sensuality that does not single out any particular object or human subject, and which is added to and opposes the pair of the enigmatic boy and the fascinated viewer (Caravaggio's metaphor for any human couple that is absorbed in itself and dominates and monopolizes the space).

As you emphasize, there is in Caravaggio's work a kind of corporeal luminescence, close to the Lacanian agalma, which is both attractive and repulsive. What, ulti­mately is the function and significance of this glow?

We really weren't thinking about Lacan when we wrote those passages about the glow of beauty in Caravaggio's work, so it came as something of a shock to come across those passages where Lacan talks about the glow of beauty. But what strikes me about this unexpected encounter is more its character as a non-meeting. I think that the more distant attitude that I have been taking to psychoanalysis for some time now is due to the way in which it considers objects, or more fun­damentally the world itself—everything that is out­side the subject. Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has conceived of the object as essentially a bad object, a foreign body that I must struggle to appro­priate or, ultimately, an object in which the sub­ject runs the risk of finding its own waste. The function of beauty, writes Lacan in "Kant with Sade," is to be an "ultimate barrier preventing access to a fundamental horror."

Queer Theory

For Lacan, the dimenion of the object that beau­ty protects, and what at the same time it protects us from, is no doubt a want-to-be (manque a etre) that is constitutive of the subject as signifier, or, more materially, waste, that which has been cut off from the subject after letter's emergence into language (the world of signification). In his sem­inar on anxiety, Lacan calls this "the anal fruit," identifying it with the famous objet petit a. The work of art tries to capture the Thing—which is not really a thing, not really an object—in which the ultimate and unrepresentable cause of our desire is hidden. And, as you suggest, this both attracts and repels. For us, however, the glow of beauty in Caravaggio (I am thinking of all those bright sur­faces whose light seems to come out of nowhere) signals an intensification of the object as object. We can sum up the relational lesson to be drawn from Caravaggio's work as follows: if the subject is here in the world, this is not as the residue result­ing from an original loss, but rather because, in general, and introducing Baudelairian overtones here, it is impossible to take a form—to take on being—to which the world does not already have an answer, to which it does not already corre­spond. We are in the world even before we are born. This means that the world contains us: it has no need of us in order to exist. As bizarre as this may seem, I think that psychoanalysis does not really believe in the world (which is perhaps its originality, but also its limitation). For us, the glow of beauty does not indicate our fantasy presence within a fascinating but hated object. It is, rather, the sign of the object radiating out to other objects, and in this it makes the viewer take part in the multiple points of contact of its relational being. Nevertheless, I think that psychoanalysis is still indispensable. From Freud to Lacan, it has con­stantly reminded us of the way we fight this par­ticipation—in a word, the way we fight life. What psychoanalysis discovered was not the omnipres­ence of sex. Rather, it asserts the idea that pleas­ure in destruction, whether of ourselves or of the world, is a constitutive function of the human sub­ject. Not to take into account this destructive drive would be the best way of ensuring the failure of any attempt at relational reeducation.

Do you think that your work on Caravaggio fits into the framework of Queer Theory? In particular, you repudiate a transitive reading of Caravaggio, for which the painting would reflect a homo-, hetero- or bisexual identity. Aren't you—fortunately—going against the current of the simplistic identity-based interpretations that are legion these days?

It's difficult to say. For a start, it has never been very easy to establish a definition of Queer Theory. At the beginning, one of the main theorists of this ten­dency (which I certainly wouldn't call a "school") stated that all those who are against the "regime of normativity" are "queer." That, of course, is more a battle cry than a useful description. On one side, it was a generous definition, because it opened the doors to the "queer" domain to lots of heterosexuals who are not happy with the oppressive regime of normativity. On the other hand, it was tough for large numbers gays and les­bians who are managing very well thank you with that normativity, and who dream of marrying their same-sex partner and who, as a result of this, find themselves excluded from the "queer" com­munity. In Homos, I protested against this "queer" tendency to erase any sexual specificity from homosexuality. While sharing the well-justified "queer" mistrust of these "essentialist" cate­gories (that's a very trendy slur) that lock human­ity into a rigid opposition between two sexual identities, the homo- and the hetero-sexual, each with their own nature, their own "soul," I thought it was puritanical and almost homophobic to politicize the "queer" in this rather hasty and over-optimistic way, and to be indifferent to the crucial and not always liberating role played by specific sexual preferences and practices in the constitu­tion of subjectivity and in the way the subject con­ceives sociality. Queer Theory, as celebrated at the time of the seminal texts (Fear of a Queer Planet, published by Michael Warner, Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick, Gender Trou­ble by Judith Butler), struck me as incapable of doing that kind of work. As I see it, it was too reliant on a kind of voluntarist performativity that would be able to overcome social restrictions and, for most of them, simply ignore unconscious ones. The situation is changing. To change the dominant relational system, you would first have to formu­late the gay subjectivity or specificity that would be one of the alternatives to the system, but not the only one. Then you need to be better aware of all the social and psychic resistance to the trans­formations that we are looking for. Only a redi­rected relational mobility can reduce the precariousness of concrete political reformations. Here is some of the work I am thinking of. It cer­tainly doesn't form a harmonious whole—far from it! There are the efforts by David Halperin (in recent essays) and D. A. Miller (in Place For Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical) to define a col­lective or cultural gay subjectivity through musi­cals, opera and the cult surrounding certain movie stars; Didier Eribon's very original work (especially in Reflexions sur la Question Gay) on the role of insults and shame in the constitution of gay subjectivity; the very dark, very Freudian book by Judith Butler on power (The Psychic Life of Pow­er), a book that is leagues away from the some­what facile optimism of Gender Trouble; and the big book of essays entitled Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis and edited by Tim Dean and Chris Lane, which shows that psychoanalysis does not have to be Enemy No. 1 of the gay or "queer" movement. As for our work on Caravaggio, let's say that, to simplify things a bit, while dismiss­ing the biographical and critical obsession with Caravaggio's homosexuality and the homo-eroticism of his work, I do take into account his "gayness," even if I am not sure about it. The rejection of the couple, diffuse sensuality, per­ceptual promiscuity in space—those may be some of the features of a gay subjectivity, a gay sociality and a gay eroticism. Homosexuality is most specifically itself, perhaps, when it is dis­solved as a sexual identity. But all that would need to be explored in another piece of work.

What messages do you detect in Caravaggio's art?

First of all, one would need to point out that the gaze that paralyses the other, the intimacy that immobilizes relations, never really disappear from his work. It is there right to the end, like a harrowing reminder of an anti-aesthetic, and therefore relational energy, a human energy that aims only at its own extinction (see David hold­ing Goliath's head). But we put the accent main­ly on this diffuse, non-erotic sensuality that Caravaggio implicitly offers as an alternative to what Lacan somewhere calls "the hell of desire." To come back to the terms of contemporary debate, instead of a passion that fixes being, that is to say, instead of the passional and couple, which remains our dominant model of intimacy, Caravaggio suggests a kind of seduction of the whole space, which idealizes, imprisons and violates nobody.

Translation, C. Penwarden

Leo Bersani. (Ph. DR)