Queer as an act of writing

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate what Sedgwick says from the way she writes.

If one could define theory in opposition to literature as something that can be paraphrased,

34 Halperin, David 1995, and Huffer, Lynne 2010 are among several authors who have commented on Foucaultian traces in Sedgwick’s work.

something that can be said in other ways and summarized, then Sedgwick’s writing would be situated somewhere in between the realm of theory and literature. She is a truly contemporary, passionate writer, who, like Derrida, is in search of her own style of expression. And as in Derrida’s work, it is not possible to disconnect what is said from the way it is said. In his book on Sedgwick, Jason Edwards warns that readers of Sedgwick should be ready for “sentences that are openly queer and explicit in other ways and about a variety of things” (Edwards 2009, 6, italics original).

Sedgwick introduces “I” to critical texts and she strongly identifies with what she says.

She is the narrator of her story about queer sexuality, and her literary criticism is it itself literary. It is also important to notice that Sedgwick very rarely speaks of sexuality in abstract terms or in purely political terms, and instead she addresses sexuality through her reading of literature. We can view Sedgwick’s texts in the context of what Culler (2000) calls “the literary in theory” in contemporary thought (he explicitly mentions Sedgwick in his text). Culler’s conclusion concerning literature and theories is that everything is literary. He states: “... the effect of theory has been to inform disciplines of both the fictionality and the performative efficacy of their constructions” (Culler 2000, 290).

To understand Sedgwick better I will also reflect on the rhetorical aspects of her writing. Sedgwick does not consider “queer” to be a term like others that would have a limited field of connotation. It functions instead as a figure of otherness; it is an invitation to think differently. Finally, I suggest that Sedgwick uses “queer” as a peculiar literary figure, a trope that can have a disruptive effect on discourse. Although methodologically Sedgwick is inspired by post-structuralism, she does not follow it as a school of thought.

Sedgwick’s writing continually fluctuates between objective academic discourse and a radically individualistic style. Sedgwick does not search for stylistic or for methodological coherence in her writing; instead, she offers us a mixture of fragments of literary criticism with her own memories written in the first person. Furthermore, she includes parts of her poetry and personal reflections in academic essays. As a result, Sedgwick creates a kind of effusive and intimate discourse that can be used to discuss problems of shame, exclusion, desire and bodies.

Judith Butler calls this way of writing “a form of political lyricism” (Butler 2002, 109).

I wish now to focus on the meaning of the term “political” for a moment. Sedgwick’s writing is not a neutral form of literary criticism. Although she does not address political issues directly, her texts remain deeply political because they comment on social reality and aim at challenging this reality. Sedgwick does not merely interpret homophobia and shame, rather through her texts she intervenes at the very core of shame and homophobia. With the concept

“queer” as a tool she explores the political potential that lies within experiences of shame.

It is difficult to find the basis for any discussion concerning rights in Sedgwick’s work, nor does she reflect directly on the state and its institutions. For example, in Epistemology of the Closet and in Tendencies, she primarily focuses on ways of reading desire in Western culture. This reading is deconstructive because it reveals the closures, discontinuities and contradictions that underlie the construction of dominant heterosexual desire. Sedgwick draws her “queer tutelage” from this network of contradictory relations. “Queer tutelage” can be understood as an examination of a possible space for alterity in Western culture. It focuses on difference and dissonance rather than on continuity and sameness. In other words, Sedgwick’s work is not a literary game, as some texts from the Yale School would seem to be, but, as Butler puts it: “a certain ethics of thinking, one that postpones the question of logical incoherence in the name of historical possibilities that emerge when no single schema turns out to exhaust the epistemological field” (Butler 2002, 117). It seems that what is crucial here for Butler is the impossibility of posing a question regarding real or original desire on the basis of Sedgwick’s work. What is real is the sequence itself that produces a particular desire.

Sedgwick’s work suggests that no desires can be privileged nor can they be more authentic than others. Instead, they all reflect each other and there is neither a source for them, nor any ahistorical ground for them.

According to Sedgwick, the unity of heterosexuality is fictitious and is achieved by discourses that aim at hiding their own inner contradictions. In the context of her work,

“political” would imply a way of approaching Western culture that does not give precedence to certain signs but instead takes all signs as a site of productive struggle. I also find her approach political because it is an intervention in the Western binary way of thinking. Sedgwick’s method is deconstruction but deconstruction is also an effect of her analyses. Deconstruction leaves the reader without an answer regarding what a desire is or what sexuality is. Another point is that politically deconstruction does not postulate emancipation or liberation. However, it produces moments of undecidability and it challenges any unitary notion of a sexual subject.

To me the message of Sedgwick’s work is that there might be an infinite number of ways of thinking about sexuality and none of them would be able to exhaust the meaning of desire.

It is also important to mention here what Berlant refers to as Sedgwick’s “poetics of misrecognition”. The starting point for Sedgwick’s writing is the closet. This is the point of misrecognition for the subject, because the subject identifies with the degrading perspective of the other. Yet this misrecognition might also be reparative. It does not destroy the possibilities for identification but opens them up into the unknown. Moreover, the poetics of misrecognition

is a negation of literary and political necessity, and can be a form of analysing fantasies.

Berlant argues that “Misrecognition (meconnaissance) describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that something can fulfill our desire” (Berlant 2002, 71).

If we could discuss Sedgwick’s work in terms of ontology, it would be rather simple, desiring bodies exist and there is no need to question that. Sedgwick does not feel that she needs to reflect on this. Instead, to Sedgwick the important questions would be: How does desire function and what are its consequences, what surplus does it produce on the psychic, cultural and political level, how limited and how open is desire for reimagination? And as for the concept of “queer”, Sedgwick seems to ask: Can we reimagine agency?