People are Different

The Weather in Proust embodies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's seemingly simple yet revolutionary claim that "people are different."¹ It is grounded in her commitment to a critical taxonomy that refuses binarisms, that works in the space between two and infinity,² whether it be of sexualities or affects, "kinds of people,"³ or even "little gods," a practice she brilliantly argues that Marcel Proust's writing, even its discussion of the weather, and C. P. Cavafy's invocation of the periperformative, epitomize. She demonstrates repeatedly the impoverishing limits of Freudian absolutes, Foucauldian reinscriptions of the repressive hypothesis, and investments in social construction that refuse to consider where the biological and the social might cross (as in the work of Silvan Tomkins).

No surprise, then, that Buddhist thought grounds the volume as well, and in "Reality and Realization" Sedgwick returns to elaborate on some of what she describes elsewhere as the most important aspects of Buddhism as a spiritual practice but also as an alternative to what has become, in her words, "the shrunken impoverishment of any Western psychology of knowledge and realization, whether empiricist or postmodern" (212). For her, Buddhism offers a "respect for realization as both process and practice," providing an alternative to what she identifies as "the stuttering, exclusive perseveration of epistemological propositions in contemporary critical theory" that through the lens of Buddhism "reads as a stubborn hysterical defense" (212).

"Realization as both process and practice" might be one way to sum up the work in this volume. "Practice" encompasses both writing and art; ironically, although Sedgwick claims her turn to the latter was also a turn toward "non-being" (69), the voice of this volume is much more relaxed, more immediately accessible. "Process," as it includes return and revision as reseeing, perhaps even recycling and reusing and quotation (key aspects of Sedgwick's art) might also explain the moments where earlier writings reappear and, as Goldberg notes, are recontextualized. The most extreme examples of this are from the second part of the book, where several essays consist most centrally of quotations of her famous proliferating lists of the multiple meanings and expressions of sexuality.⁴ Some readers may find that such repetitions render these pieces superfluous; I agree with Goldberg that they show Sedgwick in the last decade of her life still fully committed to, and creating new contexts for, the project of queer theory. For example, in "Thinking through Queer Theory," she narrates her development as an intellectual and activist: the ways in which she continues her deep investment in feminism as she gravitates toward gender studies and then queer activism and thought. In so doing, her account makes evident how intertwined and, indeed, inseparable she found all of these movements.

Nowhere is this aspect of her work more evident than in "Anality: News from the Front," which returns to Sedgwick's concern with the theoretical and political resonances of anal eroticism, an interest for which she was often mocked, or worse. The essay forcefully responds to recent debates over the symbolic and/or psychological meanings assigned to anality and the political potential/liability of anal sex (protected and unprotected). Sedgwick demonstrates that some of these arguments, both pro and con, end up repudiating femininity in their eagerness to embrace or reject anal sex. Anality, for her, does not have to include female forms to be revolutionary, but debates about its significance cannot ignore the way femininity and gay male subjectivity and sex have been so complicatedly intertwined. To do so, she asserts, just reinstates the misogyny embedded in mainstream homophobia.

In contrast, Sedgwick turns to the work of Melanie Klein to assert that we cannot "set violence altogether out of even the bounds of the imagination" (181), and also finds in Klein visions of reciprocity and repair. Building on Touching Feeling's central themes,⁵ Sedgwick continues her project of going beyond, rather than reinscribing, Michel Foucault's repressive hypothesis and its "paranoid" replications, turning instead to Klein's formulation of the "depressive position": a "uniquely...