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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478006312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/29/2019 |
| Series: | Theory Q Series |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
LAUREN BERLANT AND LEE EDELMAN
What Survives
"Sex without Optimism" was written for a conference celebrating Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex." There we asked what survives the encounter with the scene of sex once it's separated out from the dominant framework of optimism. What survived was being open to or game for the encounter and all that might be unbearable about it. At issue was whether the queer adorable made possible our being in proximity to the unbearable or whether it was a way of aestheticizing and attempting to sublimate or deny it. This chapter returns to the question of survival — sadly, in more ways than one. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was too ill to attend the event in honor of Rubin, where she, too, had been scheduled to speak. In a cruel sequel, we first presented this talk on a panel commemorating Eve's life and work nine months after her death.
FAILURE
Lauren Berlant: Lee and I muddled for months over how to structure this — but what is it we offer? A talk, an elegy, a conversation, a literature review, a tribute, a convoluted apostrophe. While unable to figure out a genre in relation to our friend who continues to be absent, we managed to write an abstract that we believed we intended. But it was nonetheless just a placeholder, like all of our objects, like any object; an abstract is but an ambition, after all, an often hastily condensed fantasy decked out as a project, which is the primary academic genre of futurity — and in this case it additionally had to capture the emotion of a nonencounter with Eve through a reencounter with her work. Our abstract promised to consider reparativity, even in the face of the irreparable and the irreversible. But to convert the abstract into an extended piece of writing did not come easily. We recorded our phone calls after note-taking failed, reread our notes after our memories failed, talked for hours while our intentions failed.
Lee Edelman: Fail: from the Latin fallire, "to be wanting, to be defective." As if wanting as such were a defect; as if not to want were success. As if loss were a version of failure and failure a lack of aesthetic coherence, a condition of brokenness or incompletion. In such a linguistic context I must respond to this claim of our failure, our repetitive failure, by saying "No." Something important is wanting in describing as wanting those various practices, those tentative approaches to shaping the sundered moment we live as this dialogue's "now" and so in evoking as failure the want, the wanting, that relation presupposes: the rupture across which it takes its shape, the break — perhaps the lucky break — that alone enables its bond.
In the thinking we did together and tried, in the ways Lauren notes, to preserve, Eve held the place of loss as such, the place of what is "wanting" in calling our repetitive practices "failed." We returned to her writings as we did to each other, anticipating, but only nominally, a moment to come when those various returns would have turned into this text. But that anticipation was only nominal; our enjoyment was in those "failures" themselves as we tossed our rough-hewn thoughts in the air without knowing whether or where they would land, what they might or could become, or if they would come to naught. It wasn't the moving forward but the coming back that made our work possible, the joy of a repetition that didn't defer its end but performed it in a space without guarantee. What's missing in calling this "failure," then, is the joy of "no guarantee," the enjoyment of building without blueprint, of conjuring something out of nothing more reliable than the space, the divide, that provokes it.
If I call that space between us, that gap of our want, the place of the no, it's not just to make another pitch for the primacy of negativity but also to attend to the space in which such negativity always takes place, the space that, in our conversations, in our improvised dialogue unmoored by anything that promised to sustain it, allowed a provisional being-together across various sorts of divisions. Our repeated engagements thus spoke to the persistence, the survival of our common failure such that failure became the condition for the survival of relation. It bound us to the multiple iterations of "us" performed in proximity to Eve, whose loss was condensed in our meditations on rupture and repair — or, rather, in our common questions about the insistence of that pair and the seeming necessity of that pairing. What if we chose to demur from the ideological imperative to repair them? What if we attempted — deliberately, even perversely — to hold them apart? What if their very relation depended on the rupture of any such pairing — a rupture that enabled the repetition that "repair," as its prefix suggests, demands?
LB: Not feeling the failure as a happy confrontation with the rupture within reencounter, my mind turned away both from Eve and Lee toward collecting materials about loneliness, a kind of relation to a world whose only predictable is in the persistence of inaccessible love. Eve might have called the affect that I was seeking to document "shame," as she located shame in the experience of interest that a person holds toward an object after it turns its face away. But she might not have called it that — nor would I. Eve developed many ways to gesture toward the space of inexistent relationality and one-sided attachment; not all of those ways denote shame, just as the return to relation does not require revisiting failure insofar as it gestures toward the absolute. Incompletion is another thing, a set that has many members. My focus is to elaborate these zones made by the failure to resolve, repair, or achieve relation. In this chapter I want to expand for us all, beyond shame and love, the referential shorthand implied by the couplet Sedgwick/affect.
Many works auditioned for the loneliness archive. First came Tom Dumm's Loneliness as a Way of Life, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and Rae Armantrout's Versed. These are documentary works of a sort, addressing the world as seen by one life moving through collectively sensed devastation toward the ongoing state called survival. To document this funneling of a world into a life, the texts engage catastrophic episodes whose becoming-event draws on the experience of other devastations. The clutter of materials we find there points to the lost anchoring thing or things — a person, a world, and confidence in the persistence of a healthy life. The authors' pursuit of a shape for the clutter does not deny its disorganization in search of better working genres for endurance, relationality, and world remagnetizing but becomes a practice of living on, of life itself.
Dumm's theoretical book gathers up solitude's affective history by way of ordinary language philosophy, trauma narrative, and the story of living with the dying of his wife. His aim is to teach not how to flourish in loneliness but how not to. Citing Emerson, Dumm writes, "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." This nothing is not an absence, though. As the books of poetry also ask, genuinely and with significant degrees of hesitation: Is it worth, after all, fleeing the shadows of the nothing that comes after a great loss? To what life, after all, is one recommitting, once the thing that stood in for a life worth attaching to no longer obtains? Why bother beginning again to be ordinary? "Why bother" is one phrase that marks a great loss. Bother, from bodhairim, "I deafen": After the world has withdrawn from my confidence in it, why should I turn my hearing back on fully to engage with its noise? These works seek not to return to the prior state, though. Nor are they looking for a transformative, confirming event or substitute anchor. Gestural, curious, verbose, and disconnected, they make an aesthetic to focus on this: that what survives loss are so many decisions to patch up, or not.
Doubts about how nextness will persist, then, persist as life goes on. Having looked around to discover a trust in the ongoingness of things shoplifted and noting that aloneness has come to buffer their loneliness, the poets bespeak a live blankness in the ear and eye, an apprehensiveness in all the senses. Rankine: "Define loneliness? Yes. / It's what we can't do for each other." Armantrout: "Objects are silly. / Lonesome / as the word "Ow!" / is." Prehending, grasping at the hurt air around the bruise of loneliness that comes from running into the nonsolidity of the objects that organize your world, you discover that you were merely you all along, dangling in the air. "You know how fantasy works," Eve writes. "It's like a closed room with all the air sucked out of it — hence, no gravity, and just a few, diverse objects tumbling around together. And the objects could be anything; they're all in different registers. ... words and phrases, some of them acts, organs, angles ... and what makes them add up to 'fantasy' is that there isn't a stable context for them, or a stable place to identify, or anything."
Fantasy tethers you to a possible world but makes you passive too, she suggests, "waiting — waiting with dread" to discover what you already know: that the shoe of realism will drop. In one version of Eve's project, the subject of this unbearable knowledge shuttles between the paranoid rupture and the depressive position's compulsion to repair the attachment tear that she feels too intimately. In another version, though, in the space of dread and hesitation, there is no agency-generating project, not even a welcome mat. Dread's hesitation might be consumed in a flash, endure a long stretch, or become a state of withheld relaxation that spans an entire life's existence. Dread gives a fundamentally queer shape to life, multiplying a cacophony of futures and attachments. This is a relational style made stark, and collective, by illness. "Dread, intense dread, both focused and diffuse ... [was] the dominant tonality of" the first phase of AIDS consciousness, she writes, "for queer people, at least for those who survived."
Dread maps out what's weak in reparative desire; in Eve's work, its power is in the tableau of ambivalence it produces, in contrast to shame's familiar contrapuntal dynamic of cloaking, exposing, and desperate attaching, or paranoia's rhythm of projection, attack, and vulnerability. Dread raises uncomfortable questions about repair, the unclarity of what repair would fix, how it would feel as process and telos, and whether it would be possible, desirable, or worth risking. As we will see, the work of dread in Eve's oeuvre points in many directions, and indeed that is its clarifying power. Dread slices between noticing the mood made by the abrasion of loneliness and the discovery that nothing at the moment compels the drives or action toward cultivating anything, or even pretending to: this aggressive passivity is where fantasy offers consolation for living on while failing to provide a reliable cushion. A Dialogue on Love demonstrates prolifically the irreparable problem/scene made by dread, staging the interregnum that paces, dilutes, and sometimes abandons the fantasy of repair. At one point, Eve borrows Mark Seltzer's phrase the "melodrama of uncertain agency" to describe this fantasmatic space of flailing or animated suspension.
The impasse not yet or perhaps never caught up in the drama of repair is neither life existentially nor life post-traumatically but existence, revealed in the stunned encounter: with the contingencies of structuring fantasy; in what one loves in one's own incoherence; and in the bruise of significant contact, with people and with words. Eve dreads, for example, what she calls "the zinger." A zinger is a phrase that makes you rear back on impact, rattling your pleasure with the force of its sure verbal aggression; you have no choice but to take the zinger's hit, and then you're dazed and alone with it, even if the aim wasn't to take you down. Even then your buckled footing is collateral damage but damage nonetheless, a lonely "ow." The resulting loneliness cannot be compartmentalized and is not over there, waiting for you to turn your attention to its repair; it has run into the store for cigarettes and never returned, leaving you in the idling car.
Eve, quite a wit herself, writes about fearing zingers that would "decathect me [from an attachment] ... suddenly, hard, and completely," slicing with a bullying rationality through what fantasy had been holding out against loss. At times life itself becomes zinged, as in the cruel joke that history plays on the joyous subject in the form of accident or catastrophe — a cancer diagnosis, say — or in the betrayal of a friend, a harsh judgment against someone she loves, or a reencounter with homophobia. Then there is the zinger of discovering that she has been trying, all of her life, to seduce intermittent love into becoming a permanent and unconditional flow. Her devastating and constant rediscovery of the eternal task of holding up the world by herself might be why the word "loneliness" appears only once or twice in her writing, and not interestingly: it is too lonely. Her word for this situation of disrepair is abandonment. Abandonment presumes a prior attachment, but there's also something settled about it: not a death sentence but a fact about the riveting state of loss.
Yet at the same time as the outrage of discovery sends Eve into a compulsive formalism, she finds that her abandonment brings optimism with it:
Yet my fear of the coming operation, if it was fear, didn't register as fear, but as a disconsolate sense that I already had been abandoned. And that
I was abandoned in the sense that there was no controlling that grief,
that outrage. A crazy regression, an infantile compulsion. But maybe an alternative to looking forward with dread?
Affect management is always belated. Abandonment is when, in the scene of looking backward, one discovers that the end of sociality has come already and that there is nothing left to fear or constrain — as long as one is not caught up in the depressive position's nostalgia work of re-seduction, the repair that is never completed. The abandoned one can be a pillar of salt that is freed to be infinitely salty. The recognition is not a solution, though. The relation of abandonment to dread, of productive pasts to horrible futures, of recognition of the intractable, is a complex one in the Sedgwickian oeuvre: not convertible to a gesture, a politics, or emotional comfort but habitable only on the condition that it is not repaired.
LE: "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," Eve's introduction to Novel Gazing, was later republished as the penultimate chapter of Touching Feeling:Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. As she unambiguously defines it there, reparativity is "frankly ameliorative." Fearing the failure, the unsustainability of its relation to the world — fearing, indeed, that the world "is inadequate or inimical to its nurture"— the subject of the reparative impulse attempts a "project of survival." For reparativity, associated with the depressive position in Eve's reading of Melanie Klein (how accurate such a reading of Klein may be is another question entirely), is "an anxiety-mitigating achievement" that responds to and attempts to overcome the paranoiac's "terrible alertness to the dangers posed by ... hateful and envious part-objects"; the reparative, by contrast, strives "to assemble and confer plenitude on an object" in the hope that the object "will then have the resources to offer to an inchoate self"— resources providing the "sustenance" that subsequently enables the self to survive. Assembling, conferring plenitude, giving the inchoate a sustaining form: the work of reparativity grounds itself in a notion of aesthetic coherence that opposes the incompletion, division, and defectiveness of failure. The paranoid position, Eve argues, stands condemned as "self-defeating" — defeated, that is, in attempting to defend against an anticipated external threat precisely insofar as the paranoid position is itself the source of that threat. Associating reality with the relentless danger of impingement from without and initiating, in consequence, a primal separation of the self from the world that would harm it, the paranoid position makes rupture a value in response to the anxiety occasioned by the vengeful part-objects it locates outside.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface. Reading Sedgwick, Then and Now / Lauren Berlant 1 Introduction. "An Open Mesh of Possibilities": The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times / Ramzi Fawaz 6 Note. From H. A. Sedgwick / H. A. Sedgwick 34 1. What Survives / Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman 37 2. Proust at the End / Judith Butler 63 3. For Beauty Is a Series of Hypotheses? Sedgwick as Fiber Artist / Jason Edwards 72 4. In / Denis Flannery 92 5. Early and Earlier Sedgwick / Jane Gallop 113 6. Eve's Future Figures / Jonathan Goldberg 121 7. Sedgwick's Perverse Close Reading and the Question of an Erotic Ethics / Meredith Kruse 132 8. On the Eve of the Future / Michael Moon 141 9. Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick / José Esteban Muñoz 152 10. Sedgwick Inexhaustible / Chris Nealon 166 11. The Age of Frankenstein / Andrew Parker 178 12. Queer Patience: Sedgwick's Identity Narratives / Karin Sellberg 189 13. Weaver's Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects (Sedgwick, Emerson, James) / Michael D. Snediker 203 14. Eighteen Things I Love about You / Melissa Solomon 236 15. Eve's Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself / Robyn Wiegman 242 Afterword / Kathryn Bond Stockton 274 Acknowledgments 279 Bibliography 281 Contributors 295 Index 299What People are Saying About This
“Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing remains indispensable, never more so than now when the light of her intelligence illuminates a darkening horizon. We need her intelligence, her queer sensibility, and her way with words. Reading Sedgwick will be welcome both for those encountering her for the first time and as a reprise for those wishing to be reminded of her work's particular charm, enlivening curiosity, and power.”