for half a century, leo bersani's texts have inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged work in the fields of literary criticism, literary theory, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. concluding with an interview with bersani, this is the first book-length introduction to bersani's oeuvre.

leo bersani: living theory chronologically follows the development of bersani's thought from his engagement in the 1960s and 1970s with french and american modernist fiction and his early articulations of poststructuralist theory (derrida, deleuze, foucault, blanchot), before moving to his work on psychoanalysis and to his groundbreaking formulations of what would become queer theory in the 1990s. the final chapter proposes a dialogue between bersanian ethics/aesthetics and the recent emergence of disability theory.