Maggie Nelson Reviews Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Weather in Proust

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, poet, professor and scholar Maggie Nelson offers an extended consideration of the much-loved critic and scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "one of the primary founders of the field known as queer theory, who died of breast cancer in 2009." Sedgwick's last writings have been published by Duke University Press as The Weather in Proust -- a "slimmish, 215-page collection" edited by Jonathan Goldberg.

It is decidedly not a hodgepodge of odds and ends that Sedgwick left behind, but rather nine solid, finished-feeling essays on topics that preoccupied Sedgwick throughout her prolific career. These topics — which include webs of relation in Proust, affect theory, non-Oedipal models of psychology (especially those offered by Melanie Klein, Sandor Ferenczi, Michael Balint, Silvan Tomkins, and Buddhism), non-dualistic thinking and antiseparatisms of all kinds, and itinerant, idiosyncratic, profound meditations on depression, illness, textiles, queerness, and mortality...

For you Proust devotees, Nelson elaborates:

In his brief introduction, Goldberg tells us that the first five chapters of The Weather in Proust comprise the writing Sedgwick had done toward a book on Proust that occupied her in the last few years of her life. It is good of him to let us know, for the range of these chapters is wide enough that one might never have guessed that they were all intended to be part of the same project. One can only imagine that Sedgwick’s book on Proust, had it come to full fruition, would have profoundly challenged and expanded the notion of a monograph — not to mention raised the bar quite a bit higher for the “how Proust can change your life/my year spent reading Proust” genre.

As for Sedgwick's close readings, Nelson generously cuts us a break:

Really, I mean to offer up my own exhaustion, my own willingness to skim, skip, pick and choose, as an encouragement to others to read Sedgwick with a similar sense of agency and disobedience. For it would be a shame if any thoughtful reader missed out on Sedgwick’s fantastically rich politically, psychologically, philosophically, spiritually, and even scientifically probing essays, on account of feeling turned off here and there by her intense analysis of books or authors one may not have read.

Fascinating questions come up in Sedgwick's work, such as “Can masculinity expand to contain women and femininity as well?” and further delvings into the nuances of knowledge and realization. Nelson writes admiringly:

Getting curious about the gap between knowing and realizing — and being willing to hang out there for an indeterminate amount of time — was one of the principal activities of Sedgwick’s later years. As she explains in Touching Feeling, she wanted to move past

the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do — the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?

It will likely not come as news to any of us that we can be quick to apprehend something intellectually, but that realizing it — whatever that might mean — is often a much more involved, perhaps limitless affair. In a 1999 interview, Sedgwick put it this way: “It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” Sedgwick explains that she eventually learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.” Indeed, as she puts it in “Reality and Realization”: “Perhaps the most change can happen when that contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”

Sedgwick never denied the difficulty of such a process — especially for intellectuals, who often pride themselves on their own quicksilver capacity to absorb knowledge (which may have nothing to do with their capacity for realization). That’s why she says “It’s hard.” It is hard, often quite. But Sedgwick’s native capacity for tenacity and jubilance in the face of difficulty, as well as her sustained engagement with Buddhism, allowed her to cast this difficulty as a privilege.

For the full essay, please read on here.