Turned queerly inwards: sin, queerness and Leo Bersani’s homo-narcissism

ABSTRACT

The doctrine of sin has been the origin of significant anti-queer sentiment emerging from Christian theology and, as such, many queer Christians have wanted to insist on a distance between queerness and sin. However, some queer theologians have found value in claiming certain imaginings of sin as a queer resource. This article examines how Leo Bersani’s account of homo-narcissism as a queer relational discipline can be used to claim accounts of sin as primarily a form of individualism and separation as encapsulated in the sinful figure of homo incurvatus in se (a person turned in upon themselves). In doing so, it argues that the claiming of sin as a queer resource not only reconfigures how we understand the relationship of queerness and sin but also how we imagine sin itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Sin
• incurvature
• Leo Bersani
• antisociality
• correspondence thesis

Introduction

Within Christian discourse, sin has provided the language and conceptual framework for many of the most hostile assaults upon queer people. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that there can be a certain wariness in queer theological engagement with the doctrine of sin. Nonetheless, an increasing number of queer theologians have seen in sin an important theological resource for their own work. Some of the most generative of these queer engagements with sin have taken the form of a queer appropriation of sin in which, rather than taking the more conventional approach of insisting on a distance between queerness and sin, they have instead suggested that queer Christians ought to identify with sin. These appropriations reconfigure how sin can be understood and how queer theological responses to that sin can be articulated.

This article takes the figure of homo incurvatus in se (a person turned in upon themselves) as an encapsulation of the widely expressed idea that sin is, at least partially, about separation from others. This figure of a person marred by sinful incurvature is placed in dialogue with Leo Bersani’s proposal for homo-narcissism as a relational discipline. Emphasizing both the more familiar “antisocial” direction in Bersani’s thought and the more infrequently cited “connective” direction, I argue that the homo-narcissistic subject thoroughly embodies all the aspects of sin captured by homo incurvatus.

Rather than taking this as a reason to reject homo-narcissism as a queer goal, I contend that this instead suggests that queer Christians might productively identify with sinful incurvature. However, rather than a straightforward adoption, this identification through the lens of homo-narcissism twists the structure of homo incurvatus such that relationships between separation and connection, egotism and humility, interiority and exteriority are rendered queer.

The contested sins of queerness

In mainstream discussions of the theological dimensions of sexual practices, orientations, and identities that diverge from heteronormative monogamy, “sin-talk” is widely deployed and fiercely contested. The contours of this debate will be familiar to many. Adherents of a more conservative sexual ethic might contend that sin is located in any sexual or gender identity or orientation that does not conform to the strictures of cisgender heterosexual monogamy, or that it is only the associated behaviors that are sinful. Against this position, queer Christians and their allies frequently deny any such linkage between queerness and sin, claiming that such a position arises form faulty theological reasoning and flawed biblical interpretation. Some might argue that the “real sin” lies in the marginalization of people on the grounds of their sexuality or gender identity, while others might wish to dispense with the language of sin entirely. While there is certainly significant complexity to these discussions, especially as they interrelate to other contested positions, the general picture is one of two opposing camps. As a result of this dichotomy, it would appear that any theological defence of queerness would necessitate a rejection of any intrinsic connection between queerness and sin.

In queer theological discourse, sin has received a more muted treatment. This is likely driven in part by the discursive dynamics of queer theology itself. The most vociferous opponents of queerness are unlikely to engage substantively with queer theology and their absence modulates the need to address the questions that surround the supposed sinful character of queerness. Beyond this, however, it has been suggested that queer theologians as a whole have been somewhat hesitant to engage at length with the doctrine of sin. Because the language and conceptual architecture of sin-talk has been so frequently deployed by those seeking to marginalize and oppress queer people, there can be a certain reticence to engage with a doctrine that many see as hopelessly mired in anti-queer sentiment. More than a personal discomfort (significant an issue as this may be), this reticence is motivated by a sense that in engaging with the rhetoric surrounding sin, one is entering a discursive arena that is already tilted against the queer theologian: to speak of sin as a queer theologian is to start already on the defensive.¹ Certainly, some queer theologians have expressed a real dissatisfaction with the theological framework sin provides for discussing issues of sexuality and the myriad connections sexuality can have with other markers of identity. Sin, they argue, preconditions the terms of our conversations about sexuality such that, even if direct harm to queer people is prevented, their full flourishing is precluded. Instead, what is needed is a way of discussing queer sexuality in a theological register without drawing on sin and its harmful associations.²

Despite these reservations, queer theologians have increasingly found value in adopting, tweaking, challenging, and disrupting the doctrine of sin. This has proceeded along a wide array of different theoretical and theological directions, foreclosing the possibility of a singular “queer doctrine of sin” and instead presenting a more variegated picture of the queer dimensions of sin.

One prominent direction that is not unique to queer theology has been to think about sin in terms of social structures and their attendant discourses. Rather than thinking about sin in terms of the permissibility or otherwise of particular acts, relations or orientations, this direction contends that sin is most appropriately considered in terms of the deforming effects it has on the social and institutional structures in which we live. The effect of sin is to distort human relationships away from mutual respect and equal dignity and towards inequality, injustice and relations of exploitation and oppression. Under this framing of sin, queer Christians and their allies should, therefore, realign their attention from individuals and focus instead on the oppressive structures that facilitate and undergird heterosexism. Concomitantly, salvation from sin is not so much a matter of being saved from the consequences of personal failings as it is about being rescued from social forces that prohibit queer people from flourishing.³

A structural framing of sin does not, however, obviate any personal implication in sin and its consequences. For Mary Elise Lowe, sin is best understood in terms of a discursive context in which human subjectivity gains coherence in an environment that is wholly saturated by sin and its consequences. That is, who we are as individuals is determined by our social contexts and situation and these contexts, being themselves conditioned by sin, impart sin to us as individuals. This complicates the relationship between queerness and sin. Even if sin is located principally within homophobic and heteronormative social structures, this does not mean that queer people cannot be implicated in these sinful structures. Rather, one’s subjectivity can be sinful in so far as it occupies a position within sinful and oppressive social structures at the very same time that it resists these structures.⁴

An alternative direction for conceiving of the relationship between queerness and sin is to contend that sin can inhere to queerness, but only when it “goes wrong”. That is, there is nothing necessarily sinful about queerness, but that does not mean that queer practices are always free from sin. This can, in some instances, be a result of the negative responses queer people can take in response to widespread heteronormativity and homophobia. For example, refusing to authentically reveal one’s identity to others and instead remaining “in the closet” could be understood as a refusal of the social transparency inaugurated by Christ’s self-revelation as God,⁵ although this claim must be tempered with the important safety dimensions of remaining in the closet in some situations. Similarly, drawing on insights from the kink community, a queer perspective on sin might identify sin in queer sexual practice that fails to live up to certain ethical norms: the denial of human dignity encapsulated in the abrogation of informed consent; the refusal to accept bodily limits in sadomasochist practice; the self-denial of dignity through essentialist identification as a kink practitioner.⁶

Queerly appropriating sin

The above examples each have their own particular commitments and perspectives, but they share a basic refusal of any direct identification between queerness and sin. They might not agree on what sin is, nor on the implications of sin for queer people and communities, but they are in broad agreement that queerness is not itself sinful. In this, they align with the contours of the mainstream discussion described above.

This agreement is not, however, universal in queer theological accounts of sin. Indeed, some queer theologians have taken an entirely contrasting approach and have moved against the intuitive desire amongst queer Christians and their allies to distance queerness from sin. Arguing for a much closer connection between sin and queerness, these arguments can be understood as queer appropriations of sin on two levels. They are queer appropriations in that they argue that identifying, in some way, with sin can be a productive or effective strategy for queer people. But they are also queer appropriations in that, by refusing the impulse to disavow sin, they disrupt the rhetorical logics of sin and challenge the insider/outsider structure that it is embedded within.

One of the most sustained of these appropriations is provided by Geoffrey Rees’s subversive conjoining of an Augustinian account of original sin and queer theory. Rees contends that we should think of original sin, first and foremost, as an “ongoing epistemic catastrophe” in which people lose access to coherent self-knowledge.⁷ As a consequence of the Fall, people are incomplete and unintelligible to themselves. Moreover, we recognize this incompleteness within ourselves and abhor it. This leads to an inevitably fruitless search for an alternative basis on which a coherent self could be grounded. The “romantic fiction” that sex provides is that in an intimate relationship the disintegrated sinful self can be reconstituted as a whole through union with another equally incomplete self.⁸ Marriage gains its theological and social significance as the proper regulation of these relations that offer the promise of allowing a “full humanization” that resolves the disintegrating consequences of sin.⁹ This promise, however, is inevitably unfulfilled as a coherent self is only fully attainable through the immediacy of a relationship with God.

For Rees, queer sexuality is sinful because sexuality, as with all human relations and practices, is irrevocably mired in sin. Identifying with sin is, therefore, something of a leveling force for queer Christians and their allies: their sexuality is sinful, but no more so than the sexuality of others. Indeed, Rees goes slightly further in his queer appropriation of sin. He argues that, to the extent that queerness illuminates the instability of the heterosexual order by positing alternative patternings of human relationships, it is particularly effective in exposing the unintelligibility of fallen human identity. On an ethical and political level, this means that although queer sexuality may only be as sinful as all other forms of human relationship, it might enjoy a privileged position as a result of being especially capable of making the romantic fiction of sexuality more evident.¹⁰

As a further extension of the queer appropriation of sin, Linn Marie Tonstad has gone as far as contending that queer Christians might productively identify as sinful in a manner beyond the universal sinfulness of fallen humanity. Like Rees, she contends that queer sexuality is inescapably implicated in the sin that conditions all human relationships. This is a point often missed by queer Christians who want to escape sin through various rhetorical and discursive strategies in which their innocence is safeguarded through recognition and denunciation of a sinful other (e.g. “homophobia is the real sin”). This denial, in Tonstad’s view, will simply reinforce the exclusionary logic that ultimately undergirds the oppression faced by both queer people and other marginalized groups: “Our problem as homosexuals is not primarily that we, in particular, have been placed on the side of the sinful, threatening other. It is the distinction between the good and the bad to begin with.”¹¹ Rather than denying their sinfulness and, hence, reinforcing the distinction between good and bad, Tonstad argued that queer theology ought to affirm the sinfulness of queerness and position itself on the side of those marked as deficient. This would engender a form of “sinful solidarity” that stands against a social order in which social goods are distributed according to the perceived righteousness of the recipient. Appropriating sin is not just an abstract, theological move, but also an ethical and political challenge to the consequences of sin as felt in exclusionary social structures.

Both Rees and Tonstad are diverging from the more conventional approach adopted by queer Christians and their allies that seeks to distance queerness from sin. These are provocative arguments and not ones without risk. It has long been recognized that queer theological argumentation needs to be highly sensitive to the discursive context in which it operates and that there needs to be serious strategic consideration of how these arguments function within a broader context of Christian homophobia.¹² Reviewing Rees’s book, Susannah Cornwall has cautioned against an overeager reclamation of sin as a queer resource in a context where many queer people continue to face marginalization on the grounds of the supposed sinfulness of their sexuality. Although this is obviously not concordant with Rees’s position that all sexuality is marked by sin, Cornwall wonders whether there is too much proximity between these arguments for comfort. Perhaps, she asks, there is still value for queer Christians in protesting the innocence of queerness as a response to a long history in which queerness has been identified as especially sinful.¹³

This is an important cautionary note and should make any attempt to queerly appropriate sin attentive to the risks that accompany it. Any provocative joy in claiming sin as a queer concept ought to be tempered by a recognition of the deeply anti-queer legacy of the doctrine. Nevertheless, what Rees and Tonstad show is that reconfiguring the relationship of queerness and sin can critically undermine the deleterious effects of the doctrine as it functions in the world. My contention is that there is significant value in furthering this reconfiguration by expanding the remit of these queer appropriations of sin. In particular, Leo Bersani’s account of the separations and connections of homo-narcissism as a queer relational discipline provides a generative perspective on the figuring of sin as separation, as encapsulated in the figure of homo incurvatus in se. This perspective develops queer appropriative strategies in a new direction, indicating that queer identification with sin can be part of a reconfigured theological perspective on sin without being the end point of that reconfiguration.

Sin as separation: homo incurvatus in Se

A particularly widespread and enduring approach for understanding the nature of sin and its consequences is to articulate it in terms of separation from others. This approach appears across the broad reach of the Christian tradition and while it would be reductive to claim that this separation is always understood in the same way, there is a broadly consistent central argument.¹⁴ Human existence is framed as fundamentally relational such that the proper form of human life is one of harmonious sociality. However, these relations are variously deformed, obscured and severed by sin. As a result, to live in a context of the inescapability of sin is to be thrust into a world fundamentally marked by isolation from others and individualism. Understanding sin as primarily a form of separation is by no means exhaustive of hamartiology, but it is a widely-explored dimension of the doctrine of sin. Given the extent to which relationality and sociality have also been important loci of queer thought, this is a productive direction for a queer appropriation of sin to take.

A particularly evocative description of sin as a deformation and dissolution of human relations is the figure of homo incurvatus. Rather than “reaching out” in relation with others, the incurved person is instead directed inwards. For Matt Jenson, the figure of homo incurvatus is much more than just a vivid image of sin’s effects on human relations. Incurvature can also function as an umbrella concept that gathers together seemingly disparate and unconnected sins, their causes and their consequences.¹⁵ Incurvature, in his reading, captures something essential about what sin is and what sin does. Tracking the development of the figure throughout its long history, Jenson contends that incurvature describes a wider range of sins than might seem immediately obvious. Naturally, the most obvious manifestation of sinful incurvature is an undue abundance of self-regard. He contends that while an inwards turn can at times be a beneficial moment of self-reflection, what marks incurvature as distinct is the absence of any “upwards” movement towards reflection on God. Divorced from this “upwards” (and, hence, “outwards”) momentum, “the danger is that we will get stuck at the lower levels of inwardness, lost like Narcissus in our own reflected gaze.”¹⁶ Incurvature, in this form, appears as pride, egotism and the suborning of all social relations towards the gratification of the self.

However, homo incurvatus is too capacious a figure to be simply equated with pride. Indeed, Jenson highlights how sinful incurvature can manifest in a wide array of human behaviors such that it appears almost inescapable. Even turning outside the self towards God – something that would seem to counteract the inwards turn of homo incurvatus – can be warped by incurvature to the extent that this outwards/upwards is oriented towards the satisfaction of religious desire.¹⁷ Incurvature appears to condition even our attempts to escape it. Importantly, Jenson also describes how incurvature can manifest in behaviors that entirely contrast with egotism and pride. Self-denigration and an unfounded belief in one’s own insufficiency can also lead to a withdrawal from relations with others.¹⁸ To the extent that it can be both motivated by and lead to a focus on one’s own failings, self-effacement can be as much an inward curve as prideful self-regard. Even the abandonment of the self, the total antithesis of pride, can also be a manifestation of the homo incurvatus. Self-loss precludes the possibility of a genuine relation between selves and hence functions as a form of incurvature.

It is important to note that describing sin in terms of incurvature does not entirely preclude human agency. Homo incurvatus is not just a description of how sin deforms the human being, but also a description of a particular kind of sinful project. That is, in Jenson’s terms, homo incurvatus is one who “tries to live without relations, who lives as though she had no relations.”¹⁹ That is, incurvature is not just a condition that is forced upon people as a result of living in a fallen world, but it is also a behavior that some people aspire to. This is, of course, not to deny the existence of structural forces that encourage incurvature and separation from others. It is clear that certain technologies, economic arrangements and social conventions can either facilitate or resist human sociability. What Jenson’s positioning of incurvature as a willed practice as well as a condition of human existence does is open up a space for human agency in so far as we conform to or resist these structural forces of separation.

There are, doubtless, dimensions of sin that cannot be readily corralled by the image of a person curved in on themself. Homo incurvatus may be a useful and unexpectedly wide ranging umbrella concept, but it is not all-encompassing. Nonetheless, it provides a potent description of sin in relational terms that escapes both a focus on evaluating individual actions or practices without wholly retreating to a focus on purely structural forces. Importantly for the queer appropriation of sin, by locating separation from others as the central dimension of sin, notable points of concordance appear between the figure of homo incurvatus and the practice of homo-narcissism as described by Leo Bersani that suggest the latter harbors potential for queerly appropriating the sin described by human incurvature.

Homo-narcissism: inward turns and outward connections

Bersani’s account of homo-narcissism is complex and evades simple description. This complexity is partially a result of the fact that he developed the idea across a body of work stretching multiple decades and in dialogue with as diverse examples as Assyrian relief sculpture, the literature of Marcel Proust and the evolution of stars.²⁰ Moreover, the homo-narcissistic subject brings together two seemingly divergent theses in Bersani’s work, one of which enjoys much greater prominence than the other.

The more widely recognized of these theses is Bersani’s contribution to the “antisocial thesis in queer theory” of which he is frequently recognized,²¹ alongside Lee Edelman,²² as a pioneering proponent. Certainly, Bersani’s most popular work – the polemical and provocative essay Is the Rectum a Grave? – foregrounds an uncompromisingly antisocial reading of (especially gay) sexuality. Bersani was writing in the context of both the unfolding AIDS crisis and the emergence of what he saw as problematically redemptive accounts of gay sexuality that framed non-heterosexual practices as more communitarian, mutually respecting and egalitarian than their heterosexual alternatives. In response, Bersani argued strongly for the socially abrasive character of gay sexuality. In his view, gay sexual practice is so rife with examples of hierarchy, competition and exclusion that any attempt to position gay sexuality as the foundation of a more welcoming and nurturing set of social relations falls flat.²³

Moreover, in Bersani’s reading sexuality stands not only against “positive” relations like love and affection, but against relationality tout court. Crucial to this argument is Bersani’s contention (not unique to him) that sexuality undertakes a “shattering” of the self. It is this shattering that undermines human relations: “sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart.”²⁴ Sex is antisocial because it undoes the very self that is required for the establishment of relations between people.²⁵ The antisocial character of sexuality is, therefore, not contingent on the particular social arrangements that regulate sexual activity. It is not the case that sexuality could, in fact, be otherwise than antisocial if other economic, social or political forms prevailed. There is no way of “doing sexuality” that is not antisocial as antisociality is an essential characteristic of sexuality.

The antisociality of sexuality is certainly an important idea for Bersani, and he is sometimes portrayed as solely an antisocial thinker.²⁶ This portrayal is doubtless helped by the fact that some queer theorists who have opposed the antisocial thesis have seen Bersani’s strident rejection of the goods of community as a useful contrast against which they can articulate their own position.²⁷ The antisocial severing of relations is, however, only half the story Bersani wants to tell. Alongside the shattering of subjects, the dissolution of community and the withdrawal from relations, Bersani was also deeply interested in connections of various kinds, and this became especially evident and explicit in his later work.²⁸ Throughout his work, with varying intensities, Bersani articulated a form of “universal solidarity” that extends beyond even the anthropocentric distinction that marks human from nonhuman.²⁹ This focus on connections has been helpfully termed the “correspondence thesis” and it works alongside the antisocial thesis, interwoven with it.³⁰

The correspondence thesis does not repudiate the antisocial thesis but rather builds on it. It is a description of a “something else” that the antisocial dissolution of relations clears the way for.³¹ At its core, the correspondence thesis is the contention that the shattering of the self that sexuality enacts is not a total erasure. Instead, the self is “lost, only to be relocated everywhere”.³² This relocation of the self occurs through the recognition of the connections and correspondences between the self and the world in which fragments of the self are recognized as imperfectly reproduced in the world. Having lost the self, we then (queerly, improbably and almost miraculously) find it again, partially mirrored beyond itself.

This is not an intuitive claim, but it is one Bersani explores through a wide range of different examples covering different forms these correspondences between self and world can take. The most readily graspable of these are the formal, artistic correspondences that Bersani identifies in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, of which three stand out as paradigmatic. Analysing the relief sculpture of an ancient Assyrian palace, Bersani and Dutoit note that the central narrative portrayed is centered around battle and hunting scenes of immense violence in which there is clear exultation in the violence of hunting and warfare. However, while central to the narrative, this violence is consistently de-emphasized from the viewer’s perspective through structural forms that direct attention elsewhere: parallel lines and geometric forms suggest a continuity between the various human, nonhuman and inanimate objects that constitute the scene.³³ In their analysis of Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist with a Ram (1602), they call attention to the fact that rather than the viewer’s attention being drawn to the youth’s genitals (as Caravaggio does in other work), one’s gaze is instead drawn outwards along “fanlike structures”. These structures work “extending the youth away from himself, connecting him, as the other fanlike structures do, to a realm of being he can’t contain.”³⁴ Watching the final moments of Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line, they highlight the aesthetic parallels between the vertical orientation of the rifles held by the soldiers on their ship leaving the area and the final shot of the film – shoots of a coconut tree spearing upwards.³⁵ In each of these pieces of art, there is some form of connection being drawn between the human subjects and the world in which they exist.

These artistic commentaries are particularly important for Bersani because of his contention that art functions as a form of “ontological laboratory”.³⁶ Within these laboratories, new ways of being in the world are developed and examined, with the possibility that these ways of being might move from their artistic representation into practical enactment in the real world. Art is, therefore, functioning as a proposition of ways in which its subjects relate to their world and is therefore showing a way in which our world could and, perhaps, should be.³⁷ In other words, art is making an ethical recommendation about how we might live. In each of the examples introduced above, the subjects of the art are connected in an ineffable form with their exterior world: the Assyrian hunters and the lions they fight; Caravaggio’s youth and his immediate surroundings; Malick’s soldiers and the tropical biome in which their war unfolds. If the representation of the subjects of this art is meant to convey an ethical suggestion, it is clearly one of recognizing the connections between oneself and the external world; of identifying ourselves as reproduced, imperfectly and partially, outside ourselves.

At a latter point in his career, Bersani described his work in queer theory as motivated by a desire to examine the psychic and social correspondences that he believed parallel the formal correspondences he identified in art.³⁸ He wanted to identify and analyse the subtle pleasures that arose from discovering oneself as replicated, however imperfectly, “out there” in the world. Moreover, to the extent that we can identify a normative prescription within his work, it is to identify and develop a relational discipline in which we ascetically withdraw from existing relations so as to be open to these correspondences and connections. In doing so, we lose ourselves and become subsumed in the “allness” of universal presence.

The narrative of relinquishing the self in pursuit of universal solidarity might appear surprisingly pleasant for a thinker like Bersani, so often identified with the most resolutely negative strand of queer thought. Certainly, it should be stressed that in some of his presentations of the antisocial withdrawal from relations, the description of self-loss is far more brutal and discomforting. In his reading of Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites,³⁹ Bersani identifies a modality of self-divestiture which he describes as a thoroughgoing movement towards evil. Indeed, the evil of the isolation cultivated by Genet is so profound in the purity of its betrayal of all existing relationality that it even betrays the binary of good/evil itself, leading the queer subject to the “empty value of solitude.”⁴⁰ Perhaps most troublingly, while Bersani contends that the nature of the reinvented sociality that emerges from this antisocial abyss remains undecided, he notes with concern the metaphoric suitability of Nazism for such a project. Described thusly, the homo-narcissistic project seems deeply bound up with a negative affective register.

There is, therefore, something of a disjuncture between Bersani’s descriptions of homo-narcissism. This disjuncture lies not so much with the content of homo-narcissism itself, but with the associated affects it brings with it. The framing of homo-narcissism Bersani draws from Caravaggio, Malick and the unknown Assyrian sculptors is one of an edifying and almost uplifting transformation. With Genet, he figures the homo-narcissistic subject as attached to evil, betrayal and death. This is a difference that Bersani himself notes, describing his later movement towards a greater emphasis on connectivity as an “apparent betrayal”⁴¹ of sexual shattering and a refocusing towards a more socially viable modality of self-loss. Elsewhere, he hints at some of the dangers that can accompany too ready an identification between the homo-narcissistic subject and a deathly self-negation.⁴² This development in Bersani’s thought is not quite as neat as a moderation of an earlier account of homo-narcissism – as noted above, the more edifying modality of homo-narcissism can be identified in some of his earliest works. Nonetheless, there is a shift in emphasis in Bersani’s account of homo-narcissism. My contention is that it is the more edifying figuration of homo-narcissism that is the more theologically interesting precisely because it alloys the well-trodden negative affects of the more radical direction of queer theory with a surprisingly positive affective contextualization of that negativity.

This, then, is the double movement of homo-narcissism. There is first an antisocial movement that takes the form of an inwards turn and an ascetic withdrawal from the various ways in which one already exists in the world and relates to others.⁴³ As a result of this withdrawal, the self recedes to the point of its loss. But then, following this antisocial movement,⁴⁴ the self is amazingly rediscovered in the world. It is important to note that this narcissistic recognition of the self in the world is qualified by its impersonal character. That is, the replication of the self within the world is only ever partial and imperfect and participation in “the community of all being”, requires a lessening or blurring of the self. It is not our “psychological individuality” – the various attributes that mark us out as unique individuals – that can be identified in the world but rather a “depersonalized identity” that is not quite so bound up with our individual character.⁴⁵ It is this which makes homo-narcissism impersonal, because it is not our personal individual character that is undergoing this process of loss and refinding.⁴⁶

Theological engagement with Bersani is scarce, but generative where it does occur. Some theologians have sought to emphasize the ascetic withdrawal and self-loss of the homo-narcissist. Although the tone is quite different and the emphasis on sexual practice marks a substantial divergence, it has been noted that there is remarkable similarity between Bersani’s account of a self that becomes so receptive to the world that it becomes lost in it and the self-renunciation and transcendence that runs through Eastern Orthodox accounts of theosis.⁴⁷ Sex, in this reading, is a site of self-transcendence that might be best understood as a form of prayer.

While such a reading is attractive in the unexpected similarities it identifies between two discourses that are ostensibly wildly different, I am concerned that it places too much emphasis on self-loss and does not sufficiently account for the refinding of the self that is so central to homo-narcissism. Bersani’s account of the double movement of homo-narcissism does not seem to so much describe a transcendence of the self but rather its reconfiguration and dissemination. For the self to be recognized as replicated in the world, more of it needs to survive the process of being “recycled as allness” than ascetic transcendence would suggest.⁴⁸

This persistence of the self has been identified by Kent Brintnall in his critical commentary on Bersani’s repudiation of barebacking as too risky a practice.⁴⁹ Bersani contends that bare-backing literalizes self-loss and in rejecting this practice he also disavows some of the praise for self-shattering that he presents in Rectum as “naïve and dangerous.”⁵⁰ The reason for this disavowal becomes clear when we contextualize antisociality and self-loss in relation to the correspondence thesis: a literally destroyed self cannot identify the correspondences and connections it has with the world. Brintnall is highly critical of this repudiation, seeing it as a disappointing step back from the radicality of Bersani’s earlier work and a developing alignment on his part with the celebration and valorization of the autonomous individual that defines contemporary politics and culture.⁵¹ Furthermore, he contends that the persistence of the self in homo-narcissism is deeply problematic because it is the self that supports “the racist, sexist, classist, and nationalist anxieties about dangerous others that comprise our contemporary cultural order.”⁵² For Brintnall, the homo-narcissistic identification of the self in the world also necessitates an identification of some parts of the world as too dangerous for the maintenance of the self, and this is what is occurring in Bersani’s rejection of barebacking. Inevitably, this division of the world into safe/unsafe will lead to the exclusion of those who become identified with this danger to the self’s continuity.

Brintnall’s critique certainly highlights a possible risk that accompanies homo-narcissism as a relational ethic – that the self that is being rediscovered becomes part of the exclusionary structures of self-preservation and warding off of threatening difference. However, I am not as convinced as he is of the alignment between the impersonal recognition of homo-narcissism and the contemporary valorization of the self in its individuality. Precisely because homo-narcissism is impersonal, because the self that is mirrored in the world is depersonalized, the markers of class, race and sexuality that motivate the exclusion of difference are effaced in the movement of corresponding forms towards one another. The correspondences that establish connections between the self and the world are indifferent to the “accidents of personality” that motivate exclusionary politics.⁵³

This depersonalized self is much less amenable to the self-protective projects that concern Brintnall. Moreover, keeping in mind Cornwall’s warning about the discursive contexts of queer theological arguments, I can see a value in the maintenance of the self afforded by homo-narcissism. Although we doubtless live in a society in which the autonomous subject is widely valorized, this plenipotent self might not be as universally present as Brintnall’s account would have it.⁵⁴ For many people, autonomous subjecthood is a (limited) good that they have been long denied and continue to fight for. A homo-narcissistic way of being in the world might offer an avenue through which this can be achieved without the full gamut of self-protective demarcations that have historically accompanied such autonomy.

Before assessing the possibility of deploying homo-narcissism to queerly appropriate the sin of homo incurvatus, it is worth specifying the extent to which homo-narcissism can be generalized beyond the confines of the gay male sexuality that has such a central role in Bersani’s work. Both Homos and Rectum clearly emphasize gay sexuality as especially conducive to the shattering of the self and one could perhaps think from these that homo-narcissism is uniquely bound to homosexual practice. However, Bersani would later contend that this would be taking the sameness in same-sex desire too literally.⁵⁵ This does not mean that gay sexuality is entirely divested of a particular relation to homo-narcissism, but we should rethink homosexuality as: “no longer (merely) a particular sexual orientation, it can be seen as the sexuality most appropriate to a perceived solidarity of being in the universe < … > Homosexuality expresses a homoness that vastly exceeds it but that it nonetheless has the privilege, and the responsibility, of making visible.”⁵⁶

This reconfiguration indicates that gay sexuality might have a particularly close relationship to homo-narcissism, but this is not an exclusive relationship and nor is it a given. Other sexual arrangements and relational forms, both straight and queer, might be conducive to a homo-narcissistic form of being. Moreover, a homo-narcissistic relational discipline does not effortlessly flow from a particular sexual arrangement, but must instead be worked towards as an ethical goal.

Queerly appropriating: homo-narcissism and homo incurvatus

Is the homo-narcissistic subject guilty of the sin of homo incurvatus? On a certain level, the answer can only be unequivocally affirmative. The ascetic withdrawal from relations that marks the first movement of homo-narcissism closely parallels Jenson’s description of homo incurvatus as someone who tries to live without relations. Moreover, as a relational discipline, homo-narcissism appears to be an attempt to embrace both the self-aggrandizing and self-effacing poles of the incurved self identified above.

A relational ethic that places the recognition of the self and its correspondences at the heart of our relationship to the world certainly runs close to the egotistical manifestation of sinful incurvature. Indeed, in some sense the entire world becomes reconfigured around the self and the extent to which various elements of that world mirror that self. At the same time, the loss of psychological individuality that is a necessary precondition for the recognition of correspondences – the lessness that is required for entry into allness – resembles the self-effacement that works as the opposite manifestation of sinful incurvature. Whereas homo incurvatus is presented as manifesting either as pride/egotism or excessive humility and dissipation of the self, the homo-narcissistic subject embodies both these dimension of sin at once.

As such, to the extent that homo-narcissism enjoys a particularly close (although not exclusive) relationship with some forms of queer sexuality, the identification of homo-narcissism as manifesting sinful incurvature can be taken as a queer appropriation of sin. That is, if (some) queerness is particularly amenable to the development of a homo-narcissistic discipline, and the homo-narcissistic subject is sinfully curved in upon themself, then we can say that homo-narcissism describes a sinful aspect of queerness. Moreover, if we are to follow Bersani in imagining homo-narcissism less as a description of extant relational forms and more of a goal to be worked towards, we might provocatively state that Bersani provides a framework for declaring that queerness should be sinful. For queer Christians to thus identify with sin would, therefore, be more than just an act of solidarity, as Tonstad argues for above. Instead, such an identification with sin would be to claim the position of the sinner as offering a new way of relating to the world and its inhabitants, that provides affordances for alternative patternings of life.

However, the deployment of homo-narcissism in the queer appropriation of homo incurvatus is also thoroughly queer in that it twists each and every aspect of incurvature. As it is appropriated as a resource for queer Christians and their allies, the sin of homo incurvatus is itself queered. This is particularly evident in how reading sinful incurvature through the lens of homo-narcissism reconfigures the isolation, elevation of the self and inward orientation of homo incurvatus. In the ascetic withdrawal of the antisocial movement, one isolates oneself away from others and severs all relationships. Nonetheless, almost paradoxically, this severing of relationships directs one towards a web of correspondences and connections that can be much more extensive and intimate than the relations that are supplanted. The isolation of incurvature is reframed in terms of a greater connectivity.

A homo-narcissistic rendering of homo incurvatus also places attention to the self as the locus of human relationships, both with other humans and with the non-human world more broadly such that any engagement with the world is routed through a form of self-fixation. However, this self that so conditions our relationships with others is depersonalized with many of its distinctive characteristics effaced. This is a self that despite the attention paid to it – indeed, because of the form that attention takes – is reduced to the point of loss. Moreover, the self that is recovered as replicated in the world is dissipated, thinly distributed and never perfectly replicated. The elevation of the self of homo incurvatus, both in its egotistical and self-deprecating modalities, is refigured as part of a strategy of losing the self.

Perhaps most significantly, even the interiority of homo incurvatus is queered by homo-narcissism. Certainly, the isolating withdrawal and self-fixation of sinful incurvature indicates a significant inwards orientation – as opposed to outwards towards others or upwards towards God. Indeed, the very concept of curving in on oneself seems to demand that this is the dominant orientation of homo incurvatus. And yet, homo-narcissism refigures this inwards turn as part of a dilation of the self beyond itself. This is not quite a finding of radical exteriority within the self,⁵⁷ but rather a recognition that “we are already the alien” and that our interiority can be found beyond the self.⁵⁸ Given the cosmic themes in some of Bersani’s later work,⁵⁹ we might analogize the inward direction of the homo-narcissistic homo incurvatus as comparable to a dying star that collapses in on itself and, in doing so, explodes outwards.

Unexpectedly, the reconfiguration of homo incurvatus by homo-narcissism produces an account of the relationship between queerness and sin that appears remarkably apologetic in tone. One could read the above as an argument that that while queerness might be identified with sinful incurvature, this is only the first stage of a relational reconfiguration in which queerness becomes identified with an entirely contrary movement towards enhanced relationality. It would be tempting to articulate this in an apologetic register: queerness might first appear to be sinful, but in actuality it is productive of a proper relationality and thus queer Christians and their allies can comfortably align themselves with existing social and theological goods. Rendered thusly, homo-narcissism’s appropriation of sin would be quite distant from Tonstad’s call for queer Christians to identify with sin itself and would rather be more consonant with the more conventional approach adopted by queer Christians and their allies that seeks to distance queerness from sin.

However, I do not think this is quite what a homo-narcissistic rendering of homo incurvatus does. The above, apologetic reading holds that the connective movement of homo-narcissism reverses or effaces the antisocial withdrawal of the queer subject such that the identification between sin and queerness is only an apparent identification that is subsequently undone through the enhanced relationality of the homo-narcissistic subject. Instead, I think it is more productive to read Bersani’s antisocial thesis and correspondence thesis as supplementary to one another. That is, the homo-narcissistic subject is both withdrawn from the world and also profoundly connected to it and these two contrasting movements do not cancel out. As such, a homo-narcissistic rendering of sinful incurvature is a contention that queerness very much is identifiable with that sin and also with a relationality that is completely opposite to it. This is close to a redemptive reading of homo-narcissism and it is certainly true that in Bersani’s work “something resembling redemption lies close to nonredemption”.⁶⁰ This resemblance, however, is imperfect and in this context the imperfection lies in the fact that the enhanced relationality of homo-narcissism builds on but does not undo the sinful isolation of homo incurvatus.

In this, we can see that a homo-narcissistic reconfiguration of homo incurvatus develops the queer appropriations of sin in a different direction from Rees and Tonstad. Bersani’s account of queer relationality provides queer Christians with the resources to develop an identification between sin and queerness that does not see this identification as the end point of the relationship between sin and queerness. Rather, homo-narcissism provides us with a theological account of queerness that might be described as “more-than-sinful”.

Conclusion

It is unlikely that the near future will see the end of sin’s use as a rhetorical tool for the marginalization and oppression of queer people and it is, therefore, likely that queer Christians and their allies will continue to have need of theological resources for countering this. This article has demonstrated one way that one particular queer theoretical perspective can engage one particular approach to understanding sin so as to produce an accounting of sin that evades both its anti-queer deployments and some of the more well-worn refusals of this deployment. As queer theology continues to develop in its engagement with the doctrine, doubtless other “less obvious” queer ideas and frameworks will be brought to bear on this question, producing an ever richer and more complex queer accounting of sin.

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Jack Slater

Jack Slater is a PhD student in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Exeter. His research lies at the intersection of posthuman/more-than-human theory and queer theology, with a focus on theological anthropology. He is particularly interested in how relationships with nonhumans can be generative of new forms of sociality.

Notes

1 Cheng, Sin to Amazing Grace, 4–9.

2 Robinson-Brown, Famine of Grace, 21.

3 Stuart, A Queer Thing, 86–95.

4 Lowe, “Sin, Queer Lutheran Perspective,” 80–1.

5 Cheng, Rethinking sin and grace, 111–3.

6 Mechelke, “Kinky Doctrine of Sin”.

7 Rees, Romance of Innocent Sexuality, 233.

8 Ibid., 33.

9 Ibid., 164.

10 Ibid., 245–6.

11 Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?” 129.

12 Sweasey, From Queer to Eternity, 79.

13 Cornwall, “Review, Romance of Innocent”.

14 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 108; de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ, Common Destiny, 6–8; Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 40–3. Three purely illustrative examples from different directions of the Christian tradition.

15 Jenson, Gravity of Sin, 5.

16 Ibid., 45.

17 Ibid., 95–7.

18 Ibid., 177, 185–6.

19 Ibid., 191.

20 Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 10–13. The earliest developments of a putative account of homo-narcissism predate the most explicit later formulations by almost four decades.

21 Caserio et al., “Antisocial Thesis, Queer Theory”.

22 Edelman, No Future.

23 Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, 215.

24 Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 4.

25 Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, 217.

26 Wiegman, “Sex and Negativity,” 224.

27 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11,14.

28 Bersani, Thoughts and Things, ix.

29 Bersani, Caravaggio's Secrets, 79.

30 Tuhkanen, Bersani, Speculative Introduction, 10.

31 Bersani, Rigorously Speculating, 282.

32 Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 11.

33 Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Violence, 18–21.

34 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 82.

35 Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 174.

36 Caravaggio’s Secrets, 59.

37 Forms of Being, 175–7.

38 Bersani, “Broken Connections,” 415.

39 Genet, Funeral Rites

40 Bersani, Homos, 168

41 Bersani, “Broken Connections,” 415

42 Bersani, “Shame on You,” 107–8

43 Tuhkanen, The Essentialist Villain, 53.

44 The priority of the antisocial movement should be understood more as a logical priority than a temporal one. It is not necessarily that ascetic withdrawal must happen before the identification of correspondences.

45 Bersani, Marcel Proust, xiii–xiv.

46 Tuhkanen, “A Passion for Sameness,” 140–1.

47 Daniels, “Ekstasis as (Beyond?) Jouissance”.

48 Forms of Being, 177.

49 Kurnick, “Carnal Ironies,” 113. As had been noted by David Kurnick, Bersani’s assessment of barebacking seems largely oblivious of the pharmacological developments that have radically changed the manageability of HIV for many people (notwithstanding the uneven global accessibility of such treatment). It is, however, possible that HIV treatment has not eliminated the connection between unprotected gay sex and death, but rather modulated it into different forms.

50 Bersani, Shame on You, 107.

51 Brintnall, “Erotic Ruination,” 56, 66.

52 Ibid., 52.

53 Bersani and Philips, Intimacies, 82.

54 Tonstad, God and Difference, 283. Note that Tonstad directs her critique against Bersani and Brintnall together, whereas I believe Brintnall’s critique reveals a point of important difference between the two.

55 Bersani, “Rigorously Speculating”, 280.

56 Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, 89.

57 Milbank, “Sacred Triads,” 465. As Milbank finds within Augustine’s account of the self.

58 Loughlin, Alien Sex, 280.

59 Bersani, Thoughts and Things, 78–9.

60 Kurnick, “Embarrassment,” 398