Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (review)

I was under the influence of Eve Sedgwick whose instruction, as any of her students will report, is the most potent of all aphrodisiacs.

—Rafael Campo, The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry

Eve Sedgwick is one of the most amazing scholars of our time. Her erudition, brilliance, passion, and unusual combination of interests thrill. Sedgwick's latest book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, excites, demands, perplexes. One of the difficulties of Sedgwick's book is that she demands that readers begin thinking about "nondualistic thought and pedagogy" (1). To overcome binaries, the curse of Western culture, is not an easy task. Sedgwick's writing throws the reader into a state without dualisms, much like the unconscious. While turning the pages of Sedgwick's masterful book, one wonders whether one is reading or dreaming. The writing is terse, poetic, playful, brilliant, tough, eloquent, beautiful. But because so many ideas pour out at once, it is at times difficult to understand. As Sedgwick explains, the essays that comprise her book "explore a sense of exciting and so far unexhausted possibility—as well as frustration—stirred up by four difficult texts: J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, the introductory volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and the first three volumes of Silvan Tomkin's Affect Imagery Consciousness" (2). Although the book's structure is clear, the prose unsettles by its complexity, and pretty soon the reader gets lost—in a good way—inside the difficult phenomenological world of affect. Most readers will feel that they have been thrown into a swirl of words, into a swirl of complexity.

One of the most interesting ideas Sedgwick introduces is that of the "beside" (8). Beside is a word that is between this and that. Hence, to be beside something is to escape the problem of duality. To be beside one's self is an emotional statement: I am beside myself, I am in a sense not-myself, but I am myself. This is perplexing. To be beside, to be in-a-state-of-beside, sets up the rest of the book as a beside. Sedgwick addresses "aspects of experience and reality that do not present themselves in propositional or even in verbal form alongside others that do" (6). The world of affect is not the world of propositions, it is the world of the beside.

In Touching Feeling (without a comma between them) Sedgwick attempts to articulate what is, in a sense, beyond articulation. But one thing she knows is that touching feeling, although hard to articulate, has "texture" and "an intimacy [which] seems to subsist between textures and emotions" (17). Her writing is certainly texture-ful, innovative, and delightful. It is also maddening: a reader must struggle to understand what Sedgwick is trying to do and will always seem to lag behind her genius. Sedgwick addresses all sorts of affective experiences, ranging from her own illness to paranoid schizoid and reparative pedagogies, from shame and queer theory to literary analyses. She provokes the reader, who will experience not one but a multitude of whirling emotional states. She seems to be eager to get away from dealing only with one affective framework, to burst beyond the edges of this and that, and to throw the reader into chaos.

Toward the end of her book Sedgwick states that, counter to what she is doing, a "disturbingly large amount of theory seems explicitly to undertake the proliferation of only one affect, or maybe two, of whatever kind—whether ecstasy, sublimity, self-shattering, jouissance, suspicion . . . horror . . ." (146). Theorists, in other words, usually end up splitting psychologically, needing to take sides: Either I like you or I don't. Either I read Klein or I read Freud. Either I like queer theory or I don't. Sedgwick attempts to show that it is time for theorists to get beyond splitting, beyond dualistic thinking, to the...