Notes on Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"
“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” was originally written in 1995 (I think?), then revised and republished in 2003 as part of Sedgwick’s final essay collection. Sedgwick writes that paranoid reading (the “intellectual offspring” of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, those suspicious readers par excellence) has become the dominant mode of critical inquiry practiced in literary and cultural studies today—so dominant, in fact, that most people think of paranoid reading practices and “theory” as synonymous. To practice theory is to practice the hermeneutics of suspicion: as she puts it, “Paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription”) (125). This is a really rich essay, and my summary will only touch on a few aspects of it. Skipping around a bit, I want to start with her list of the characteristics of paranoid reading:
1. Paranoia is anticipatory.
2. Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic.
3. Paranoia is a strong theory.
4. Paranoia is a theory of negative affects.
5. Paranoia places its faith in exposure.
Given the longstanding historical associations between homosexuality, homophobia, and paranoia (as both a medical condition and an interpretive mode), Sedgwick sees queer studies as a particularly good site for exploring how paranoid reading operates and why it has become so firmly entrenched in our contemporary understandings of what theory does/should do. That paranoia should become queer theory’s preferred methodology, and not just its object, speaks to some deeply rooted issues within contemporary queer theory/identity politics. Queer studies, perhaps to an even greater extent that feminist or critical race theory, has always been deeply preoccupied with the relationship between visibility and recognition (legal, social, political) on the one hand, and between visibility and violence (hate crimes, bullying, etc.) on the other. Queer theory’s mantra has become a combination of “Expose before you’re exposed” (#1 and #5) and “Never forget that the system really is out to get you” (#3 and #4). Sedgwick insists that this was by no means inevitable, and that it is possible (though difficult) to break the stranglehold paranoia has on contemporary theory. The problem is that paranoid thinking is contagious, and very teachable—whether we are intentionally taught it (in the grad school classroom) or happen to come into contact with in other ways (other people’s paranoia make us paranoid, in part because it makes us afraid that they’re going to get there first, see things we missed, and use the knowledge to expose or humiliate us).
Sedgwick’s definitions of paranoid vs. reparative reading have three primary sources: Melanie Klein, Silvan Tomkins, and Foucault (whose mid-career work is mostly paranoid, and late work, mostly reparative). Sedgwick advocates thinking about critical practice in terms of Kleinian “positions.” Though I haven’t read Klein, I think positions are sort of similar to Foucault’s notion of tactics or strategies of resistance. They emphasize practices of engagement over fixed identity positions, and are non-prescriptive, flexible, and responsive to the needs of the moment (rather than aiming at ideological purity, consistency, etc.). The paranoid position, Sedgwick writes, is “understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety […] a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one” (128). She contrasts this with the depressive position, in a passage I think is beautiful enough to quote at length:
By contrast, the depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting: this is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available to be both identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love. (128)
Sedgwick associates the depressive position with a reparative reading practice. I love this definition, for a whole host of reasons. I like the idea that the work of repairing is actually work (which makes me think of that famous Audre Lorde quote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”). I also like that a reparative practice doesn’t try to recreate a “preexisting whole” (whether remembered or imagined), but aims instead to produce “something like a whole” that is responsive to the needs of the moment and of the individual, and that makes use of the resources that are available to the individual. To me, that last part is important for thinking about how and where antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic work gets done, and what tools are available to us in the process. Insisting on ideological purity is one of the surest ways to get nothing done. A post I saw on Tumblr recently makes the point well:
“Because Karl Marx was problematic, we’ll have to abandon his work. Because everyone is problematic, we’ll have to abandon everything. Just reblog memes, describe your privileges, sign petitions you don’t understand for countries you’ll never live in and make sure you continue jacking off to liberal identity politics. Revolutionary work.”
The point is, we work with what we have, salvaging what we can. Or, as Sedgwick puts it in her discussion of camp: “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).
A few more thoughts and questions to come.
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