UC Berkeley

In Thoughts and Things, Bersani juxtaposes Jean Genet’s novel, Our Lady of the Flowers with some of Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking about how naming works. Bersani finds in Genet’s novel a moment of unnamability that is, for him, a challenge to the legitimating naming power of the state and that justifies favoring a psychoanalytic framework over Bourdieu’s, whatever the power of Bourdieu’s thinking about naming and about structures of domination. This article challenges Bersani’s reading of Genet’s novel, which is more sociological that Bersani allows for. It also challenges Bersani’s understanding of Bourdieu’s thinking about naming and the state.