Love Without the Obligation to Love

It’s frightening to feel so little attachment to a life that’s so full of the things other people long for—rightly long for, I think: a lot of intimacy, enough money, peace and privacy, intellectual stimulation, plenty of recognition, time for my own work, no violence, both parents living, mostly good health, a long, tender relationship with my fella, oodles of terrific friends. . . . It’s not that these things don’t seem miraculous. . . . I’ve the most acute sense that things not only could be infinitely worse, but actually are for most people. Though I can’t imagine why that’s supposed to be a cheering realization!²

[T]he naturalization of social arbitrariness causes it to be forgotten that, in order for this reality called “family” to be possible, certain social conditions that are in no way universal have to be fulfilled. . . . [T]he family in its legitimate definition is a privilege instituted into a universal norm: a de facto privilege that implies a symbolic privilege—the privilege of being comme il faut, conforming to the norm, and therefore enjoying a symbolic profit of normality. Those who have the privilege of having a “normal” family are able to demand the same of everyone without having to raise the question of the conditions (a certain income, living space, etc.) of universal access to what they demand universally.³

No reader—therapy fellow traveler, critic, homologously positioned academic or artist—can help but be moved by the eloquence with which Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love conveys the gripping struggle with mortality, not first in the face of her own cancer or others’ AIDS, but rather in the context of feeling out of place in the world. There is so much in the text and, yet, so few hints about how to be a worthy reader. In a classroom, one might be tempted to say, “What is Sedgwick saying?” But I remember a conversation with Eve in the late 1980s.⁴ I was grappling with how to write elegantly, recursively, but clearly in the then-popular deconstructionist High Style. I think I said, “I’m trying to communicate . . .” and she laughed in that high-pitched voice of hers, as delicate and tentative and unpredictable as a flat pebble skipping across the surface of a faintly rippled pond: “That’s the difference!” She described her writing process and explained that however much she shaped her prose through meticulous editing, it was the reader who would bend her works to their place and their meanings. Writing is poesis, not communication. From its title to its ending, through graphic design and shifts in voice and address, A Dialogue on Love is Sedgwick’s own high-water mark in this understanding of writing, blurring the line between forms of self-assertion and forms of listening, forms of intending meaning, and forms of not being heard. “Eve” plays hide and seek with the reader, offering various angles on her body and feelings, and then veiling these with (her therapist) Shannon’s words, perpetually grafting fragments of her poems onto fragments of therapy notes, sometimes Shannon’s official record, sometimes her therapy journals, in one moment her once estranged sister’s childhood diary accounts of Eve, in other places e-mail exchanges with friend Tim—any of which might be Kathy Acker–like plagiarism or faked autobiography.⁵

Although Eve did a great deal to make me smarter, I turned out to think like a busted-up social scientist, the bastard issue of qualitative empiricism and rhetorical deconstruction, a lost wild child from the literary turn in the social sciences (now passed, I note with regret). I therefore leave it to the literary critics to say how A Dialogue on Love works as a text and instead I open this particular iteration of Sedgwick’s corpus to a sociohistorical, or historicosocial, reading. I do not ignore her aesthetic devices, but recognize them as necessities for marking a place so personal and specific as sometimes not to communicate, as the techniques of a gifted mind that sprung from a quirky but quite...