Writing Toward a Book on Proust

In the wake of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s death, PMLA and GLQ featured collections of articles attesting to the impact of her work on a generation of queer scholars, but also reflecting on what it was like to know her as a person. I never had the opportunity to meet her myself, but my attachment to her, as a reader, nonetheless feels “personal,” and I know I am not alone in this. This cathexis owes everything to her style—at once conversational (even gossipy), intimately first person, and rewardingly difficult. I am also particularly drawn to that oddly serene tone of “late” authors faced with their own mortality, abandoning their old methods and fed up with critical debates they once set in motion, longing instead to work on a project they love—a fantasy book—regardless of whether it is fashionable. In her previous book, Touching Feeling, Sedgwick frames this as a shift from “paranoid” to “reparative” reading, and illuminates the difference with a passage from Proust’s Time Regained. As faithful editor Jonathan Goldberg explains, the posthumously published The Weather in Proust “gathers, in its first five chapters, the writing toward a book on Proust that occupied Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last years of her life” (2011, xiii). In the chapter from which the collection gets its name, Sedgwick explains: “Like, I think, many readers of Proust, I especially want to understand his continuing access to a psychology of surprise and refreshment, as well as his nourishing relation to work” (4).

The values of surprise and refreshment are also accessible in the refreshing tone of late Sedgwick, and in this she resembles late Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. It is for this reason that I find it so odd to see how her relation to them in her later work is so oblique and often based on unfortunate misrecognitions and dismissals. Sedgwick’s dismissive gestures are clearly a way for her to stake her own claim as someone trying to produce a specifically American alternative to certain strains of psychoanalytic thought (especially in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader), while at the same time critiquing American ego psychology.

Her criticisms of Barthes, Foucault, and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis had lasting consequences for the field of queer theory, whereby her fight became a whole discipline’s fight. Perhaps influenced by her interlocutor D. A. Miller, in Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick summarily dismisses Barthes as prematurely utopian about the possibility of blurring the paradigm of sexual meaning (Sedgwick 1990, 10). While Epistemology testifies to Foucault’s influence on her thinking, in Touching Feeling and The Weather in Proust Sedgwick explains her frustration with volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality using almost exactly the same phrase (the manuscripts gathered in Weather are understandably full of such self-plagiarism): compare “Rather than working outside of it, however, volume 1, like much of Foucault’s earlier work, might better be described as propagating the repressive hypothesis ever more broadly by means of its displacement, multiplication, and hypostatization” (Sedgwick 2003, 11) to “The moves demonstrated in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, at any rate, like much of Foucault’s work before that book, might instead be described as propagating the repressive hypothesis ever more broadly by means of its displacement, multiplication, and/or hypostatization” (Sedgwick 2011, 134). Anyone who teaches volume 1 with any regularity will surely be sympathetic to Sedgwick’s sense of “blockage,” but I am nonetheless disappointed by her lack of attention to Foucault’s later volumes and interviews, and her repetition of the liberal critical orthodoxy that Foucault trapped himself in a corner that he couldn’t get out of, a point passionately refuted by Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault (and with equal passion by David Halperin).

Sedgwick in fact admits that Foucault functions for her like a joke that sticks in your mind because you don’t quite get it (Sedgwick 2003, 9). In her brilliant (and reparative) reading of Sedgwick’s “Foucauldian blind spot,” Lynne Huffer argues that...