On the Eve of the Future

It was as Eve’s literary executor that I believe I first encountered a talk she gave about a decade ago that was called, in its various incarnations, “Come as you Are” or “Reality and Realization.”¹ I don’t recall that Eve shared it with me at the time she wrote it, as she often did with her writing. Then again, she may have, and I may have forgotten, not wanting to take in what she was saying. It was in something of the same state of mind that I agreed to be Eve’s literary executor several years ago: not wanting to accept what I knew I was agreeing to, not wanting to believe what Eve realized would come. I’m aiming now to put together a volume of Eve’s writing that represents her work since Touching Feeling was published in 2003. In the 1999 talk to which I refer, Eve wrote that it was “learning that a cancer I had thought was in remission had in fact become incurable” that made “inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle-passes the considerable distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.” Just this shuttle, I would suggest, colors much of the work Eve was doing towards the book on Proust she was working on over the last several years. In following her realization, I believe we can find our way to the many futures Eve holds out for us still.

In the volume I’m planning, “Reality and Realization,” although possibly the earliest piece to be included, will come at the end, since I believe its realization was a shaping force on the work Eve undertook over the past decade. The perspectives she brought to the Proust project were multiple: Buddhism, for one, is crucial in “Reality and Realization,” which she imagines as part of a larger project that would fit under the rubric “Critical Theory, Buddhist Practice.” In the talk Eve breathtakingly sketches the difference between an order of propositional truth that is necessarily bound to its opposite—what is false—and a reality project tied not to “what’s true” but to “what’s realized.” “Reality tends toward the nondual,” she explains. Whereas Buddhist thought and practices offer leverage in relationship to critical theory, Eve contrasts the “exclusive perseveration of epistemological propositions in contemporary critical theory [that] reads as a stubborn hysterical defense.” That sentence seems directed as much at any reductive understanding of Epistemology of the Closet (1990) as other contemporary theoretical practices, as does the stunning final clause in “Reality and Realization”; she closes by gesturing to “the almost fatally thin ‘to know’.” The realization of death seems to lead elsewhere, not to the fatally thin but to something fatter and more sustaining, what might be called, to use one of my favorite Eve phrases, “chunky affordances.”

One place this realization takes us is the argument we know from “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”—its embrace of weak theory, its examples drawn from Proust.² Much as the work in Proust was nurtured by Buddhism, it also drew from object relations and affect theory among a panoply of nonoedipal psychologies, including most notably work by and around Melanie Klein, from whom the notion of the reparative derives—and to whom Eve attached the phrase “chunky affordances” in “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes”—and especially from Silvan Tomkins, but also embracing a number of other theorists, D. W. Winnicott and Michael Balint among them.³ Some of this work Eve considers in the aforementioned article on Klein and affect that appeared in a special 2007 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) on the future of queer theory; it will be reprinted in the collection I’m gathering. (I will be printing a version of the essay that restores some pages cut in the editorial process.) To continue simply listing the resources of thought mobilized in the Proust project: whereas Eve expressed qualms in “Reality and Realization” about the “shrunken impoverishment of any Western psychology of knowledge and realization . . . compared to the density in Buddhist thought,” it was not only affect...