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  • The Weather in Proust by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  • Hannah Freed-Thall
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The Weather in Proust. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. xvi + 224 pp.

The Weather in Proust is an inspired collection of essays by the pioneering queer theorist and literary critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died in 2009. The volume, which was edited by Jonathan Goldberg after the author’s death, encompasses a wide range of overlapping topics, including Proust’s mysticism; “periperformativity” in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy; links between Buddhist practice, textile work, writing, and pedagogy; the appeal (and difficulty) of Melanie Klein; a critique of contemporary neuro-cognitive approaches to literature; and Sedgwick’s commitment to a non-assimilationist, non-separatist queer politics. As a whole, The Weather in Proust draws on and amplifies the experiments with nondualistic thought that Sedgwick developed in her 2002 book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.

Although the entire volume reflects Sedgwick’s “prolonged immersion” in Proustian language and thought, only the first chapter offers an extended critical engagement with Proust. Reading In Search of Lost Time “with something of a Buddhist eye,” this essay explores an element of the novel that is ubiquitous and yet surprisingly easy to miss: its rich and varied “divinityscape” (6, 45). In an original and convincing analysis, Sedgwick draws our attention to the irreducible complexities of the Proustian universe, inviting us to pay attention to an “atmosphere in which every act and landscape brims with a proliferation of genii, demigods, Norns, and other such ontologically exceptional beings: no shadow or spring without its nymph, no phone exchange without its goddesses” (6). According to Sedgwick, this proliferation of quotidian deities presents an alternative to the closed-system Oedipal logic that often characterizes the Proustian mental world. Drawing on Neoplatonism, Kleinian object relations, and psychoanalyst Michael Balint’s distinction between “benign” and “malignant” transference, Sedgwick demonstrates that in Proust, a paranoid, surprise-aversive fantasy of omnipotence is not inevitable. We see the Proustian drive toward omnipotence in the narrator’s will to attain his mother’s kiss at any price, and in his sadistic imprisonment of Albertine. Yet Proust makes other forms of relationality thinkable as well. Sedgwick is particularly interested in the de-supernaturalized version of reincarnation epitomized by the daily transmutations of the weather—transmutations “sufficient,” as the Proustian narrator puts it, “to change the world and ourselves anew” (qtd in Sedgwick, 7). Highlighting “the transformative potential of the faculties of attention and perception” in the Recherche, Sedgwick insists that Proustian mysticism is neither esoteric nor occult—it does not offer an escape from reality. Sedgwick’s closest relation among Proust critics is probably Leo Bersani, who has also identified alternative strains of psychoanalytic thought in the Recherche. Yet unlike Bersani, Sedgwick simply skirts Freud in her reading of Proust, finding more useful theoretical models elsewhere. Scholars of the modernist everyday will be intrigued by Sedgwick’s reading, as what most interests her about Proustian mysticism is its “quotidian, unspecial, [End Page 964] reality-grounded structure and feel” (4). Sedgwick is especially drawn to the “antidepressant” effect of Proust’s writing, and this same quality illuminates her essay, which is buoyant and compelling from start to finish.

“The Weather in Proust” is the highlight of the volume, but all of the essays are complex and provocative. In “Proust, Cavafy, and the Queer Little Gods,” for example, Sedgwick expands her brilliant 2002 discussion of the interplay between affect and performative language. She argues that by foregrounding the historical and subjective grounds of performative force—what she terms the “periperformative” element of language—the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy models an understated, minimalist queer mode of resistance to normative constraints.

What I find most refreshing in Sedgwick’s critical thought is her commitment to subtle, non-dualistic concepts of difference. Scholars dismayed by the recent rise in neuro-cognitive approaches to literature will be heartened by Sedgwick’s critique of one-size-fits-all cognitive models in “The Difference Affect Makes” and “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind.” Here, Sedgwick makes explicit what she finds so useful about Klein’s object relations and Silvan Tomkins’s theory of affect...

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