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Reviewed by:
  • The Weather in Proust Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  • Céline Surprenant
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg. (Series Q.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xvi + 222 pp., ill.

The nine essays posthumously collected in The Weather in Proust aptly illustrate Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s statement that the ‘only predictable thing about the landscapes of critical thought is how they change—constantly and almost kaleidoscopically’ (p. 191). Such an image for describing changes of theoretical ‘gestalt’ is not, however, resonant only within the context of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the topic of two essays in this collection; indeed, the theoretical twists that marked the founder of queer theory’s writing and activism are conspicuously palpable throughout the volume. In at least three essays the author of the Epistemology of the Closet (1990) herself casts retrospective glances at her ‘twenty years of close involvement with feminist and queer thought’ (p. 190). A talk given in Tokyo in 2000, for example, reminds us of Sedgwick’s discussion of homosocial desire that underlies her 1985 book Between Men, in which she argued that the fate of women was tied up with how men’s relationships with other men are structured (p. 192). The notion of ‘homosociality’ served to undermine assumptions about the relationship between feminism and the gay liberation movement, for which Between Men and the author’s subsequent work provided influential nondualist formulations designed to weaken ‘minoritizing’ views (p. 185). Other twists are no less tangible in the book’s six remaining essays, as, for example, in the one that gives the book its title, where Sedgwick analyses Proust’s ‘religious ecology’ (p. 44) or ‘divinityscape’ (p. 45) and his simultaneous ‘power of demystification’ (p. 48), and in the essay on Cavafy’s poetry and Proust. By shifting from Freudian to Kleinian lenses, as if between two weather [End Page 262] systems, Sedgwick draws out ‘Proust’s mysticism’ and transcribes the belief in reincarnation upheld in the novel into the British school of object-relations theory (p. 35). The shift from one strand to another in rejection of the Freudian Oedipal framework is not unique to Sedgwick. Notwithstanding the fact that it rests on the assumption that ‘Klein’s psychoanalysis, in contrast to Freud’s, is based in affect’ (p. 126), two other essays bespeak the importance of that shift in Sedgwick’s thinking, following her encounter with Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory. The author’s untimely death in 2009 would seem to have interrupted the writing of a monograph on Proust as well as one on affect theory. The central part of the book, illustrated with photographs of Sedgwick’s textile art, provides a compelling material reinforcement of questions raised throughout the collection, notably around Buddhism and the deconstructive tradition. Yet The Weather in Proust not only gives us access to rich theoretical writing, but offers glimpses of the first-hand experience of illness and impending death, through the author’s occasional comments about it. We are also reminded of it by Sedgwick’s self-injunctions about her texts in progress, which the editor has wisely included in endnotes, as though in echo of Proust’s own similar notes about his partly posthumous novel.

Céline Surprenant
University of Sussex
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