"to apply a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities" (4)
I love how Sedgwick's writing opens the field for alternative ways of reading!
"An affect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplification; for this reason, any affect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological" (12)
"What marks the paranoid impulse in these pages is, I would say, less the stress on reflexive mimesis than the seeming faith in exposure" (16)
This reminds me of Latour's critique of critique.
"Furthermore, the force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault's early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place. Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United states and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights controversy around, for example, torture and disappearances in Argentina, or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, marks - not an unveiling of practices that had not been hidden or naturalized - but a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility" (17)
We are back to the language of visibility and seeing as a form of knowing. I'm wondering how to think outside/beyond/underneath/a preposition that doesn't rely on a spatial metaphor of this locked metaphor of seeing/knowing, and I'm still in the process of identifying Blind and critical disability scholars who are doing this work. Any suggestions would be great!
"Here, perhaps, Klein is of more help than Tomkins: to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates" (22)
I like this argument for surprise in reading. Too often I think that gets typed as "naivete."
"The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture" (25)
"That pedagogy can be a very sexy matter was no more news to Rousseau than to Plato or Dante" (27)
Love this shoutout from Sedgwick. Nerd moment: this is a really important part of how Dante understands sodomy in Inferno -- I think it's cool that the poetic structure of Dante's dialogue with his former teacher, Brunetto Latini, challenges contemporary readings of Dante's (and whatever broader category Dante's work indexes -- Catholic/Christian/Italian/European etc.) understanding of sodomy, sin, and teaching.
I would add bell hooks' writing on the eroticism within pedagogy which I don't think gets discussed and engaged with enough. This isn't a complaint that Sedgwick does not cite hooks but rather a general statement about how the erotics of pedagogy is not discussed in most circles. My assumption for why this is: desire is scary, and the erotics of pedagogy opens up the problematic of power, teaching/learning, and desire in ways that are uncomfortable for or considered dangerous by most American educators. Too many people interpret-to-dismiss-or-reveal this (i.e. a stereotypical paranoid reading) as "sleeping with students" rather than addressing desire (defined broadly and narrowly, similar yet distinct from Freud's "sex") as an emergent and complicated part of the teaching process.
"The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (31, my emphasis)
Queer folks love to read (and clock) each other all the time. I especially like reading folks for queerness -- a paranoid reading that takes pleasure in uncovering hidden desires and unclaimed identifications. I appreciate Sedgwick's appeal to consider an alternative form of reading with different affects -- reparative reading -- that adds rather than reveals. How might reparative reading add to queer reading?
