Intense Connoisseurs: Waves of Difference and the Same in Latronico’s Perfection
by Benjamin Derksen
Homogeneity, the old ideal of nation, is useless in the global theatre of gaps and interfaces. ~Marshall McLuhan // Culture is our Business p.170
Every man, to the extent that he is human (or “spiritual”), would like, on the one hand, to be different from all others and “the only one of his kind in the world.” But on the other hand he would like to be recognised, in his unique particularity itself, as a positive value, and he would like this to be done by the greatest number, if possible by all. ~Alexandre Kojève // Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit p.236
Of course, just as the visual points of difference they sold to their clients were also sold to thousands of others by creative professionals all over the western world, an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation. ~Vincenzo Latronico // Perfection p. 26
A series of dyads lace Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. Home and chosen home, expat community and locals, sleepy hometown and hip metropolis, the real and the digital. These binaries orbit and shoot through the relationship of the novel’s two protagonists, Anna and Tom. None of these dualisms are as all-encompassing in the novel, however, as that of difference and the same. Indeed, it might be said the novel’s many pairs can be read back through this instantiating metaphysical duo. This raises the question: what is it specifically about the distinction between the metaphysical categories of difference and homogeneity that captures so much of the lives and cultural cachet of the two central protagonists?
Perfection follows its central couple, Anna and Tom, as they buck their old lives in some unnamed southern European country and move to Berlin. We are offered only brief glimpses into them as people. Indeed, they are nearly interchangeable with one another, which follows the strategy of Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, the novel that served as inspiration for Perfection. The pair find work in the then-nascent (the book begins in some undefined period around 2007, based on the cultural references) of online marketing. They find commissions all over the world as “creative professionals” where they typeset advertising campaigns, work with CSS formats for digital product catalogues, and so on. In a word, they are an early iteration of what we today refer to broadly as digital nomads. They take trips where they rent out their apartment at a much higher rate than the modest sum that they pay in rent. Their lives ping pong between parties and drugs, cafés with excellent wifi, art openings (for art they find obtuse), and various timid attempts at starting something new, all of which involve a constantly morphing group of fellow ex-pats who come and go without warning. They struggle with meaning. Early on, in contrast to the disorder of their apartment we get: “It wasn’t order they so desperately craved, but something deeper and more essential.” [1] This malaise, established early in the novel, haunts them throughout.
On to these vignettes of and reflections upon a typified young adult life is placed the metaphysical distinction of difference and the same. These concepts migrate with the characters through different areas of life. The concepts initially appear as cultural markers that enable them to sell their taste to various firms as “creative professionals.” For example: “Their exact titles varied depending on the job, but they were always in English: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist. What they created were differences.” (24) This creation of differences is not simply a product of their labour, but rather something approaching their own identities. Their work is painted as a “natural consequence” of their interest in the burgeoning internet, with which they came of age. (24) This pursuit of difference, in no way unique to Anna and Tom, but with which they have a particular knack, is the ultimate boon to their self-employment. “Everyone wanted a website, logo or graphic. Everyone sought a little beauty, a unique point within a coordinate system of differences. Anna and Tom understood this need instinctively.” (26, my emphasis) In this passage we begin to see the pursuit of difference resembling broad homogeneity, sameness, or conformity. Latronico posits an everyone, who seek (univocally) the difference that Tom and Anna have access to and can thereby produce. Although it is only implied, one could extrapolate an additional layer of the interplay between difference and the same, where once sold, difference is then converted back into the medium of homogeneous exchange: money.
The discussion of difference and the same is not by any means limited to Anna and Tom’s commercial enterprises. Latronico paints the pursuit of cultural difference as being a broad, even conformist, desire. “Of course, just as the visual points of difference they sold to their clients were also sold to thousands of others by creative professionals all over the western world, an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation.” (26) The pursuit of a different life becomes their chief pastime as they construct their mythology in their new city. (27-30) When they go to restaurants, they post images, which “travel to the other end of the planet, bouncing along in low Earth orbit or speeding across ocean ridges, reaching the screens of their peers in Lyon, Helsinki, Valencia, who would look at them for a moment, entranced by the differences, before pressing a keyboard shortcut etched into their muscle memory, and getting back to work at a cafe with decent wifi, daily specials on a blackboard and sprawling aloe plants.” (60) This application of difference is then turned to a comparison between their vaguely referred to southern European hometown and Berlin. Referring to their friends from back home, “they were still stuck socialising with the same people from school. They still lived in the city where they were born. On the rare occasions they were required to speak English, it was broken and stilted… Of course, their friends were not to blame, but over time that confined life of habit had sapped them of any initiative or curiosity.” (33) This life of habit, of the eternal return of the same, entices them when they go home, but “that fondness would quickly give to a feeling of stasis and estrangement. Entering the departures terminal, each time they would glance at themselves in the glass doors and think back to the picture they taken when they left. The comparison never failed to move them. They were so different now.” (34)
Paradoxically, Anna and Tom’s pursuit of difference seems to betray elements of the same, which they find so distasteful where it concerns their country of origin. When in their element, in Berlin, the pursuit of difference is suddenly portrayed less as something truly different, and more as something, which is held in common, which is the same. “The form that community took was more of a lattice than a circle, with relationships based on affinity and emulation, affection, intimacy, similarity, Schadenfreude, and support.” (35) These friendships, which travel along the lattice’s axes of similarity, replicate themselves geographically, as the group moves along the same streets in the city. “In the evenings they would gravitate towards the same cluster of streets – the pedestrian bridges over the Landwehrkanal around Maybachuger, the leafy avenues in Schillerkiez, the first few blocks of Weserstraße. They would crack the same jokes about Winterdepression and the fact that they had never been to West Berlin, even though they all lived between Rixdorf and Kreuzkölln.” (36) In these areas, with people similar to themselves, they read the same publications as those in their sphere, such as The Guardian and the New York Times, in the same language (English). (61-62)
This dynamic of a lifestyle predicated upon difference, which is ironically an articulation of the same, reverses as Berlin gentrifies. “Anna and Tom had never felt they didn’t earn enough. Since moving to Berlin their incomes had grown year on year; their lifestyle, though, had remained the same. They never struggled to pay the bills, and hadn’t had to give up on small luxuries, but over time they had begun to see what they had lose value. All around them, a second hierarchy was emerging that had nothing to do with age or experience.” (79) The city now takes on the mantle of difference, while the protagonists appear as stagnant. This accompanies a shift associated with age as many of their friends become parents or become pressed for time in their new tech-sector jobs. (83-84) In their pursuit to maintain difference, Anna and Tom take a leap and try to travel, then move to a potential big work project where they take a provisional move to Lisbon, and finally on a vacation to Sicily. All of these changes ultimately fail to take root. One has the distinct feeling that the pursuit of difference is starting to tire and that their relationship itself is beginning to splinter. In the epilogue, however, the pair inherit a property from Anna’s uncle that they will market online as a destination spot for weddings, vacations, and the like. We get the final reference to the overarching dialectic here: “This parting will be different.” (111) Here, difference is constructed between the faltering relationship Anna and Tom have with their friend group, and how this new project will enable a new vigour. For them it will be a way to ply their trade in differences into the future.
This curated summary of Perfection is open to interpretation. On its face, the deployment of difference and the same are vague terms that aim to pull at something general in the cultural zeitgeist, in neo-liberal consumerism, and in digitally-enabled desire. The mutual exclusivity of the terms suggests a contradiction or a state of becoming where one travels from a state to the other. For example, the pursuers and curators of difference have in their pursuit and curation the same activity as a great number of others. Difference becomes the same. Another example from my reading is the similarity Anna and Tom share with their friends from back home in maintaining a lifestyle of habit and routine, while privately excoriating their old friends for doing so. They were, after having moved away, so different. I would like to push this interpretation further, however, in suggesting that what Latronico is in fact describing with these terms is a form of life that I would like to name intense connoisseurship. This life form has (appropriately) two parts, for which I intend to read two philosophers, who accord difference a certain privilege, together. Alexandre Kojève’s speculative philosophy of the end of history offers an interesting figure of the human, which I will read, alongside Boris Groys’ reading of Kojève’s oeuvre, as being driven by difference and taste. This is the figure of the post-historical connoisseur. To this picture of the connoisseur I will add the contemporary obsession with intensity, as argued by Tristan Garcia in his book The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession. This obsession, I will argue, is ultimately a pursuit of difference very akin to Latronico’s characters, as difference is nothing else if not intense.
Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit is a fascinating collection of texts. Compiled by his student, the novelist Raymond Queneau, the lectures offer a philosophical (or phenomenological, which for Kojève amounts to the same concept) anthropology.[2] The title, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,is something of a misnomer. It is hardly an introduction to reading of Hegel. Rather, it is its own philosophy, basing itself on a particular reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology together with loose riffs on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx. Kojève’s central claim is that History (capitalised to signify history as project and teleology) is over. This claim is controversial, but what is of interest here is less that history is over, and more so what Kojève reads as the post-historical condition. This condition is summarised by Kojève’s concept of the universal and homogeneous state. That is, a state where everything is the same in perpetuity. History, by contrast, is defined by its struggle for recognition, with its root in the fourth chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and thus in the difference between humans who act within it and the difference in time between epochs. [3] History ends in a state of universal recognition where all recognise all, thereby bringing a close to a period defined by work, revolutions, and wars of prestige. (43-44, 90, 158-160) At this juncture according to Kojève, humans undergo a formal change. Heretofore, humans have been defined by internal differences between themselves (class, nation) but post-historically, these differences are wiped away. Without difference, humans return to a more natural timeless (or cyclical) state:
“… it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this “makes Man happy.” One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens (which will live amidst abundance and complete security) will be content as a result of their artistic, erotic, and playful behaviour…” (159)
Without risk, without difference, without, in Kojève’s Hegelese, “real” or meaningful negation, humans become contented animals, who create works provisionally, for the present season, and pursue their pleasures as goals in themselves. This phenomenon is most identified with the American way of life:
“Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the American way of life was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the world prefiguring the ‘eternal present’ future of all of humanity. Thus, Man’s return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.” (161)
To this content, eternally present, mass consumer, Kojève identifies a counter type. During a trip to Japan, Kojève identified certain elements of Japanese culture that suggest some resistance to this universalising “naturalisation.” I quote this passage at length, as it is key to understanding the dynamic of the connoisseur:
“It was following a recent voyage to Japan (1959) that I had a radical change of opinion on this point. There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind, because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the “end of History” – that is, in the absence of all civil or external war… “Post-historical” Japanese civilisation undertook ways diametrically opposed to the “American way.” No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the “European” or “historical” sense of these words. But Snobbery in its pure form created disciplines negating the “natural” or “animal” given which in effectiveness far surpassed those that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from “historical” Action… To be sure, the peaks (equalled nowhere else) of specifically Japanese snobbery – the Noh Theatre, the ceremony of tea, and the art of bouquets of flowers- were and still remain the exclusive prerogative of the nobles and the rich. But in spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalised values – that is, values completely empty of all “human” content in the “historical” sense. … This seems to allow one to believe that the recently begun interaction between Japan and the Western World will finally lead not to a rebarbarisation of Japan but to a “Japanisation” of the Westerners (including the Russians).” (162)
Contrary to the homogenous culture of an eternal present, Kojève poses a culture with formalised, or distinct, values, which insists upon difference for its own sake (snobbery). Interestingly, he sees this counter type as having its own universalising potential, namely that the west will acquire this culture of distinction for its own sake. In other words, a cultural type predicated on difference and distinction will itself become “the same everywhere.” He continues:
“...since no animal can be a snob, every “Japanised” post-historical period would be specifically human. Hence there would be no “definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called” as long as there were animal of the species Homo sapiens that could serve as the “natural” support for what is human in men… To remain human, Man must remain a “Subject opposed to the Object,” even if “Action negating the given and Error” disappears. This means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detach “form” from “content,” doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure “form” to himself and to others taken as “content” of any sort.” (162)
Leaving aside Kojève’s baggage with respect to how these cultures manifest as a result of some national character, what he presents here is striking. The resistance to the imperialism of the same is linked to the ability to detach the form and content of one’s life. In other words, to make one’s life beautiful and distinct. Boris Groys, in his analysis of the same passages, suggests that what is really at stake is a new dimension of art in the life of humans. “The Kojèvian project … presupposes the commitment of its population to certain civilisational values that would not allow the Latin cultural space to become a desert of pure consumption… After the end of history, sacrifice is made no longer to war and revolution but rather to paradisal work that produces not commodities but life-forms. Obviously, we are speaking here about art.” [4]
Here I would like to suggest that this artistic life-form, predicated on difference, that is spreading outwards, is that of the connoisseur. Derived from the French verb to know, the connoisseur is precisely the one that seeks and that knows about life, about art, that seeks to render her life as an art object. Culture is not digested whole, like a python devouring its prey, but can be broken down and understood: that form and content can be detached. The connoisseur poses herself in contrast to mass consumer culture, and indeed may be decried as a snob by those “not in the know,” although that does not place her beyond the realm of consumption. Rather she selects. She chooses. She discriminates. She knows culture because she practices it. Difference is once again the privileged term here, as it is precisely the difference of her choices that make them worthwhile and distinguish the connoisseur. Contentedness is precisely the thing to be avoided, as the “good enough” option would be to descend into mere consumerism.
Anna and Tom are, in many ways, akin to the figure of the connoisseur. As in Kojève, difference is the preferred term. Conformity and contentment are to be avoided. Latronico pays careful attention to the music they listen to, the specific objects that they choose to place in their apartment, and the manner in which they photograph their own apartment. All of these references reek of intentionality. Latronico’s deployment of difference is often times in reference to a choice, though unnamed, cultural object. This pursuit of different objects and a curated lifestyle is also reflected in the way in which Anna and Tom convey their lives to others. When they leave their apartment to be rented by tourists they exhibit themselves and their lifestyle. “...on arrival they [the guests] would receive a note both friendly and exuding savoir vivre, listing farmers markets and neighbourhood dining spots.” This savoir vivre is amplified when the visitors are prospective new residents to the city. They give them tips and warnings about how to get a foothold. Moreover, however, “dealing with these guests never failed to remind them that they had made the right choice...” (22) These interactions are, at their base, exercises in recognition. The point is to have an audience that will confirm Anna and Tom’s taste, distinction, and difference. They market this savoir vivre and its concomitant visual identity. This ability to rebroadcast their difference to a broad public, who share their concern for difference, echoes Kojève’s vague predication of the “snobification” of mass culture.
To the figure of the connoisseur, I would now like to add the twist of Tristan Garcia’s work on intensity. In his work, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession, Garcia describes intensity as the defining aspiration of modern life. This is clear if one spends any time reading advertisements as all promise more, better, more authentic, and so forth. The same holds true for various modern promises: never have we had it so good (the good intensifies), technology is always getting better (technology intensifies), and so on. Garcia, however, points out that the critics of liberalism play the same game: “their radical opposition also promises intensity, this time an unquantifiable intensity that’s not up for sale, a supplement for the soul that the society of material goods might no longer be able to provide.” [5] Intensity thus is a normative call that crosses boundaries.
What explains this impetus towards intensity? In a move reminiscent of Kojève’s distinction between the contented, homogenous, re-naturalised masses and the snobby connoisseur, Garcia locates the impetus of intensity as a problem of individual differentiation. “...what is this strange internal intensity of life that they promise us? The feeling that my life could not just be that of anybody whatsoever. The conviction, albeit fleeting, that I am indeed the subject of my life. After all, if I weren’t assured by some je-ne-said-quoi that pertains to no one else but me...” (7) Intensity functions, therefore, as a kind of internal guarantee of my subjecthood. I am the only one that can feel the creative and frictional hum as I write this sentence. If Kojève presents the dynamics of a social recognition that in some way guarantees individuality externally, Garcia’s picture of identity applies internally, as the difference of experience from all the others is what guarantees identity.
Intensity is inherently unstable. Having an intense experience means that the same experience will produce less of a sensation. To regain (or chase) the same sensation, some difference is required. Garcia suggests that the promise of intensity via a difference is meted via a triplet of ruses. These are: variation, acceleration, and primavarism. Variation is the first ruse and is characterised by a search for intensity in that, which has not been experienced before. (84) When trying something new or something else for the first time, the sensation is always extremely intense. Whether this is learning a new sport, trying a new drug, or travelling to a new location, the simple novelty of the experience produces intensity. Ultimately variation is unsustainable prospect both because humans require some measure of routine and repetition, but also the constant flipping between options itself becomes repetitive. “...the intense person tires quickly. She always wants to be somebody else… Everything that promises an ideal or definitive form of thought is quickly corrupted, and leaves her with the pressing desire to move on to something else.” (85) The intense person moves on to the second ruse, acceleration. Here, the question is not difference in kind but a difference in dosage. More experiences, more progress, more of the same thing. (86-87) This is of course the logic of addiction, and even if the pursuit of intensity does not manifest a formal dependency, it is clear why one cannot accelerate forever. Eventually the reality principle comes knocking. The trilogy of ruses is rounded out by primaverism. Intensity here is rendered in nostalgia, as a series of remembered firsts. (89) The pursuit of variety, for example, comes to be defined not by its own intensity but as its place among a series of firsts. Here difference rears its head as a question of time: a different time, when a first could be experienced with a certain level of intensity. One cannot, of course, live in the past. Life must be lived forwards. Ultimately, intensity cannot help but burn itself out.
Anna and Tom exhibit various aspects of these ruses. In particular, their search for difference reproduce the intense person’s search for variety. They try a variety of new things but they never stay long, they get bored, they cannot stick around. Nowhere is this more striking than in their attempt to volunteer to support the sudden influx of refugees from the Syrian civil war. When their efforts prove to have middling results, they quickly let the project drop in favour of other pursuits. They visit a swinger sex club, where the experience proves too intense. Rather than exploring what could be for them there, they retreat to comfort and try to find intensity that suits them elsewhere. When their life becomes stale, they pursue novel difference with travel, then with a live-in project in Lisbon, and later with a trip to Sicily, which they secretly hope will reinvigorate their lives. The trips in fact prove to be instances of primaverism even after the intensity of variation subsides.
“Getting ready to leave always seemed to take up the entire day before they were due to travel; work left over from the week meant they had little time to enjoy the weekends; off-season weather proved unreliable, as did the restaurant reviews, and the wifi. More often than not they returned to Berlin tired and behind on deadlines… But each time, after a while, they would remember those trips more generously, as if the act of remembering could alter the experience itself.” (90)
The novel essentially ends with a new “difference project,” thus enabling the circle of ruses to continue. The tragedy of Anna and Tom is their pursuit of difference is not tempered by a true change or pivot towards self-reflection. Although they are written as types more so than characters with deep psychological profiles, it is clear that they are cycling through the ruses elucidated by Garcia. They thus fall neatly within the frame of the intense-obsessed modern subject.
I have argued that Anna and Tom, and their pursuit of difference in life, can be conceptualised as intense connoisseurs. They seek the recognition of and distinction from others through their taste in things and experiences, their choice of lifestyle, and their ability to market these aspects through their jobs. Difference here is the privileged term accorded to them as connoisseurs, and the same is the mass culture or conformity, which they seek to avoid at all costs. They also exhibit the ruses of intensity, particularly variation, as they constantly flip between projects, experiences, and meanings without ever being able to settle into any one of them. Difference from this angle is fleeting sensation and is quickly subsumed by the same in an unstable play between the central dyad of the novel. Together they allow us to follow the dynamics of difference and the same in Latronico’s novel, but in addition they give us a formalised life form by which to understand Latronico’s proposed semiotic sociology: the intense connoisseur.
[1] Pages refer to Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection, trans. Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025. p.20.
[2] Pages refer to Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H Nichols, Jr, Cornell University Press, 1980. p. 39.
[3] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977. p.111-113.
[4] Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 2025. p.128.
[5] Pages refer to Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession, trans. Abigail Ray Alexander, Christopher Ray Alexander and Jon Cogburn, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. p. 7.