“Unlike Eve Sedgwick”

The moments in Eve Sedgwick’s writing I have returned to most often are the ones where she is engaged in a palpable, even flamboyant, effort to make her readers not just smarter, but happier, too, to provide them with resources for revising the affect theories that guide their everyday lives, in a way that has an ameliorative, antidepressive, sustaining, or energizing effect on those lives. I think, for example, in “Queer and Now,” of the list of all the elements that are “condensed in the notion of sexual identity” and are supposed to organize there into “a seamless and univocal whole,” but that, upon reading this list, fall apart into a surprisingly wide range of possibilities, as one realizes anew how ridiculously and spectacularly reductive the heterosexual-homosexual binary is.² I know I am not the only one who felt recognized by Sedgwick’s shout-out to those for whom “the constituent elements” of my gender and sexuality can’t be made “to signify monolithically” or who felt newly alert to my estrangement from this reductive and reifying notion of “sexual identity.”³ Moreover, emboldened by the perspective offered by Sedgwick’s critical voice and the nimbus provided by the word queer, I was able (to borrow from Djuna Barnes) “to dazzle my own estrangement.”⁴ And, with my estrangement temporarily amazed and distracted, it became itself available for contemplation and consideration, enabling me to see how it was something I shared with others, and how it might be the locus of a politics.

I have battened on many other such reparative passages in Sedgwick’s work, especially in her later writing where the reparative impulse moves to the forefront both as motive and topic. Yet, in my most recent rereading of one of these later essays, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” I found its affective tone to be more conflicted than I had remembered.⁵ There is a lot going on in this essay, both in terms of the argument and in terms of the affects that are swirling around. That is, it’s not all friendly and reparative in there; indeed, there are moments when Sedgwick seems angry at paranoid reading and its practitioners, a group (complicating things further) in which she insistently includes herself and in which we, too, may recognize ourselves, or at least parts of those selves. Reflecting on the voluble mix of affects in this essay, however, reminded me that the energy generated by negative affects in Sedgwick’s work has always contributed to the thrill I have experienced in reading it. In “Queer and Now,” for instance, one notices that it is precisely the depressing effects of the Christmas monolith that occasions her reflection on what “queer” is and how it might be enabling. And the essay as a whole is framed by the alarming and depressing statistics about the suicides of gay and lesbian teenagers at the beginning and, at the end, the dispiriting effects of the vociferous journalistic attacks on “political correctness” and on Sedgwick herself. That is, Sedgwick appears to marshal her most reparative prose precisely in response to a hostile environment, where she is aware that she and her friends and allies are unvalued, unnourished, indeed under attack.

The first time I read “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” I found myself vibrating most empathetically to the chords of Sedgwick’s sensitivity “to the psychic expense extorted by the paranoid defenses” (as she describes it in a later, related essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes”).⁶ Her description of the logic of paranoia, with its special attunement to the moods of academic departments, helped me to understand why I have found the behavior of paranoid colleagues so disorienting and depressing. In Sedgwick’s description of the contagiousness of paranoia, the way that it tended to “grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution”⁷ and inexorably pulled one into its “symmetrical epistemologies” and in her communication of the urgency, for the depressive personality, of resisting this pull, I saw news I could use...