LEO BERSANI AND ULYSSE DUTOIT.

THE DYNAMICS, the provocations, the sacrifices entailed in any collaborative viewing and interpreting of works of art are easy enough to imagine. But for Leo Bersani, former chair of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ulysse Dutoit, who has taught film at the same institution for some twenty-five years, the collaborative effort has proved a creative stimulant nurtured to a point where it is by now the veritable ethic of the brilliant, often controversial books they have jointly written, beginning with The Forms of Violence in 1985.

I have been a close friend to both since the time of their first meeting in Paris in 1968, and with Bersani for even longer than that; I know each of them to be formidably articulate, intelligent, and strong willed. For such individuals, collaboration in the interpretation of painting, film, sculpture, and writing could prove to be at the very least an inconvenience, with each party to such an undertaking exerting a digressive, at times diluting influence on the inevitably intense focus of the other. It could become a challenge to what is considered the necessary self-assertiveness governing any determination of what is most importantly "there" in a work of art, while of course subordinating, even erasing, other features of it. William James once complained that this kind of governance is built into the very structure of our ordinary sentences.

But what might be construed as a sacrifice of critical force has, in Bersani and Dutoit's case, become an enormous, and, I think, exemplary enhancement of it. In fact, the often passionately expressed intention of their work is to challenge that will to power, which has its corollary in what is so frequently the critic's envy of achievements grudgingly recognized as greater than his own. Looking together at the same picture or the same film, then writing together about it, as Bersani and Dutoit manage to do, can produce a tension between collaborators that relieves the antagonism inherent in the critic's competitive relation to works of art; it saves their work from that fixed exclusivity of purpose that actually blocks the possibilities of a fuller interpretive receptivity and inquisitiveness.

Before they began to collaborate in 1985, Bersani was by himself widely acclaimed as the author of several books that have since earned a reverberative place in the history of criticism, notably A Future for Astyanax in 1976 and, only two years later, Baudelaire and Freud. And even after the collaboration began, leading in the past eighteen months to the publications of their Caravaggio's Secrets and Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, Bersani wrote by himself such disruptively original, widely translated works as The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986), and Homos (1995), with its brilliantly revisionist chapters on Proust, Genet, and especially Gide. It is notable, all the while, that his collaborations with Dutoit have substantially enriched his critical perceptions of film, painting, and sculpture, as well as literature. When it comes to his way of looking at any of these things, there can by now be no sure way of determining just where his collaborations with Dutoit begin and where they might, if ever, end. And yet it is important to note that in the work Bersani has been doing by himself, he sustains the remarkable individuality of his way of seeing and responding that has been conspicuous from the very beginning, with his first book, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (1965). Collaboration has only enhanced that individuality. Bersani and Dutoit's active collaborations have meant not a loss of individual being for either of them but a freer, more confident, nonaggressive supplementation of it.