Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading Heather Love (bio) Perhaps the most common description of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work is enabling—I have used it myself many times to describe her effect on me. But I sometimes wonder whether I know what this word means. The problem could be overdetermination: there are so many things I might mean. Insofar as Sedgwick helped to launch queer literary studies, she played a significant role in allowing me to have a job that I could tolerate in academia, or even in a profession at all; along with a handful of others, she helped to make it possible for me to live a queer life that I could never have imagined. In addition to this most direct sense in which I have been enabled, there is also the fact that Sedgwick in her work explicitly sought to clear intellectual and affective space for others—to grant permission. She really knew how to reach out and touch someone. Reading her work tends to open unexpected conceptual possibilities, ways of thinking, gestures, and tones. I think this sense of opening or enlargement is what Judith Butler has in mind when she observes that an encounter with Sedgwick's work has "made her more capacious": she writes that reading and teaching Sedgwick "has moved her to think otherwise . . . and . . . it has demanded that I think in a way that I did not know that thought could do—and still remain thought."1 Sedgwick's readers describe being pushed—pleasurably—to the limits of what is knowable for them and then over the edge. Her writing allows for an encounter with forms of knowledge that depart from the keyed-up, confident pronouncements of professional critics. Drawing on a phrase of Sedgwick's, Deborah Britzman writes that Sedgwick's work allows her readers to spend time in "theory kindergarten," which she describes as "a fun fair of experiments, thrilling surprises, mis-recognitions, near-missed encounters, and phantasies that lead, in the strangest directions, to our games of 'let's pretend.' "2 In two late essays on affect and method, "Paranoid End Page 235 Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" (2003)3 and "Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes" (2007), Sedgwick associates this realm of experimentation and pleasure with reparative reading. This kind of reading contrasts with familiar academic protocols like maintaining critical distance, outsmarting (and other forms of one-upmanship), refusing to be surprised (or if you are, then not letting on), believing the hierarchy, becoming boss. Sedgwick's readers have been fantastically responsive to the gifts she has transmitted through her writing: for many readers, including myself, her criticism holds out the possibility of being in some "other" relation to the academy, which, despite everything, can still make you feel very bad. This is, according to Britzman, the new "work of theory" that Sedgwick proposes: "The work of love."4 Perhaps the whole point of the "work of love" is that it would dislocate one's habitual relation to cognition and forms of mastery, but I admit to some persistent and not necessarily productive confusion about what the work of love is. I am enabled—but to do what? That's sort of like being in kindergarten, too, or at least that's how I remember it: a sense of endless, churning potential, and a half-painful sensation of not knowing how to live it out. I get that feeling reading Sedgwick's reflections on paranoid and reparative reading: perhaps in this case it can be explained by the oddness of the direct address in the essay's subtitle: "You're so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you." It's true, I do. So what next? I don't think I am wrong to take this title as an invitation—albeit an ironic one—to the kind of paranoid, reflexive, and mimetic thinking that the essay is about. I also take it as an act of aggression. Part of the thrill of the title is the suppleness of the address: she could be speaking to anyone. But it's...
Heather Love (Fri,) studied this question.