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Homos, by Leo Bersani. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 208 pp. $2.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-674-40619-2.
PEGGY PHELAN Department of Performance Studies New York University
Leo Bersani's Homos is an extremely persuasive analysis of the "anticommunal" freedom made possible by "perverse" sexuality. Bersani's attention to the anticommunitarian impulses of what h names "homo-ness" will be extremely unsettling to gay, lesbian, and queer theorists who have spent the last decade arguing for the social virtues of homosexuality. Homo-ness, a relation to the social in which difference is seen as an extension of sameness and not as antagonistic to it, makes possible a radical redefinition of relationality. "
T
he anticommunitarian impulse inherent in homo-ness" (p. 53), Bersani argues, helps us see "a potentially revolutionary inaptitude-perhaps inherent in gay desire-for sociality as it is known" (p. 7G). This "inaptitude" is to be prized because it allows us a way out of the social and political impasses that result from the valorization of difference that has so besotted critical...