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Mikko Tuhkanen's provocative and comprehensive study of the work of Leo Bersani deserves the status of a decisive and paradigm-shifting event in the field of critical theory. Bersani's work, which has evolved over a period of over fifty years, emerges as something like a Trojan Horse within the hegemonic camp of critical theory for which only difference and alterity are positive and mobile. Tukhanen draws out and in so doing sharpens Bersani's consistent call for a radical re-assessment of precisely those concepts and values connoted as negative, redundant, static, or even politically and ethically dangerous in the broad orthodoxy of critical theory: sameness, essence, narcissism, the speculative. Tuhkanen shows adeptly, through a series of engagements with Bersani's preferred critical objects -- Baudelaire, Freud, Proust, Beckett, Jean Laplanche, to name only those most prominent -- how Bersani, the "essentialist villain," has wielded the critical armory of essence against, but also within, the domain of what is construed as a pervasive ontology of loss, lack, and trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]