Sedgwick’s (2003) writing on paranoia and reparative reading utilizes paranoia as a lens for developing critical theory. Like most of the readings from this week, Sedgwick uses Klein’s theories to develop critical theory beyond the psychoanalytic field. “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?” (124). Sedgwick uses Klein’s work on positions, and parallels the “depressive position,” with the “paranoid position.” Below are helpful quotes that demonstrate these parallels and Sedwick’s ultimate conclusions:
“The very mention of these names, some of them attaching to almost legendarily ‘paranoid’ personalities, confirms, too, Klein’s insistence that it is not people but mutable positions—or, I would want to say, practices— that can be divided between the paranoid and the reparative; it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices” (150).
“And if the paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology, they operate also on a larger: that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse” (150).
“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 selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-151).
What does reparative reading entail? Why did Sedgwick use the depressive position to expand to another category, the “paranoid position” ? Why does homosexuality and queerness play such a recurring and vital role in psychoanalytic theories?
