Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"

    "Perhaps you do not know that 'jewel-case' ['Schmuckkästchen'] is a favourite expression...for the female genitals."
     "I knew you would say that."
          —Freud, Dora, p. 61

Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. (93)

We will start, therefore, from what might be called "local centers" of power-knowledge: for example, the relations that obtain between penitents and confessors... (98)

No "local center"...could function if...it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if [it] did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as its point of application or final outcome, but as its prop and anchor point. ... one must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work. Thus the father in the family is not the "representative" of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. ... But the family, precisely to the extent that was insular and heteromorphous [i.e., independent and differently structured] with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great "maneuvers" [of the state, of psychiatry, and of other institutions]. (100)
     —Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I

This book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. 
    —Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 1

The Gender of Paranoia
Recall that Freud's central study of paranoia, on Schreber, concerned a male judge--we couldn't ask, perhaps, for a better symbol of what Lacan would call "the law of the father." Indeed, Freud, in a passage that Sedgwick quotes in her essay (see 125), identified his own psychoanalytic theory and "the systems of our philosophers" more generally with the structure of paranoia: paranoia thus connotes intellectuality and masculinity.

Those tenuous and of course sexist connotations acquired some importance when Freud later was confronted with a case of paranoia in a woman that didn't easily fit into his theory that paranoia was caused by repressed homosexual desire. During the incident that triggered her fear of persecution, the woman remembered hearing the ticking of a clock--in fact, she said this sound was what triggered her fear. Freud explained the sound in two rather contradictory ways: 1) the sound was merely an "accident," not a cause of the delusion but simply an ambient sound that the woman's pre-existing delusion latched onto to explain itself; 2) the sound wasn't real at all, but nor was it accidental; it was merely an imagined equivalent for a repressed physical sensation, a throbbing in the woman's clitoris.

This is one of those recurrent moments in psychoanalysis where it's impossible to tell whether the delusion in question is Freud's or the patient's. What's striking here, however, is how Freud's reluctance to tolerate a detail extraneous to his theory, a mere "accident," leads him to incorporate that detail into his interpretation by grounding it in the woman's body. This interpretive move is oddly at once both totalizing and superfluous; Freud can and does (in parts of the study that I'm not rehearsing here) manage to account for this woman's case without altering the theory of paranoia he had developed while studying Schreber, and yet he takes an extra step to interpret this unexplained remainder; he creates a remainder (in his text) to get rid of one (in hers). We have here something like the structure of disavowal that Freud describes in his study of the fetish, where the paradigmatic fetish was the maternal phallus. But of course that phallus, unlike the clitoris, is an imagined and not a real detail.

In a rather extraordinary reading of Freud's case study, "Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism," Naomi Schor draws two implications from the simultaneous prominence and marginality of this detail (the clock/clitoris) in Freud's text: 1) "female theorizing is grounded in the body" (154), and 2) "female theory is clitoral" (158), a phrase that she later explains by glossing the clitoris as "coextensive with the detail"; feminist criticism, argues Schor, should thus be characterized by "a hermeneutics focused on the detail" (159-60). Her aim here is to make more visible "the differences between socially acceptable [i.e. typically male] and deviant [i.e. typically female] forms of system-building" (151). (This essay is the conclusion to Schor's 1985 book Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction).

I'm summarizing this here both to console myself for leaving Schor, a really wonderful theorist and critic who I hope you'll read someday, off of our syllabus, and also because I think her theory of paranoia provides a precedent for, and an interesting alternative to, Sedgwick's. It's a precedent in that it moves from a theory of paranoia to a practice of close reading; Sedgwick does something quite similar. Yet Sedgwick doesn't see this movement as gendered or rooted in the sexed body, and is perhaps unconcerned with this thanks to the very success of theorists like Schor and herself. At least in literary studies, it would be hard after the work of the past couple decades any longer to think of theory as a paradigmatically male enterprise.

Conspiracy Theory (or, Theory's conspiracy against theories)
Sedgwick's essay begins with an anecdote, a conversation that she had about AIDS during the 1980s, the formative years for her own writing, as they were for the essays we've read by Butler, Bersani and Nunokawa. We've seen in Wednesday's essays the extraordinarily intense felt disparity, for those near to AIDS patients in the '80s, between the urgency of the situation and the slow pace of the governmental and scientific response to it. While official discourse about AIDS tended to represent it as a disease that would need to be contained before it became a truly serious problem, those who were losing friends and family and lovers in the prime of their lives felt that response to be radically, even murderously disproportionate to the crisis, and to the response that would be undertaken for a disease if it were primarily affecting, say, wealthy white children rather than gay men and drug users. In these circumstances, it began to feel non-crazy to ask if public indifference to the disease was motivated by a deliberate effort, even a conspiracy, on the part of those in power.

To this suspicion, Sedgwick's friend responds basically that there might be a conspiracy, but so what? "What would we know then that we don't already know?" And what would we do with that truth that we shouldn't already be doing in response to the overwhelming evidence that much of the country doesn't care about AIDS victims?

For Sedgwick--and for me, and, if you've ever had a moment during this course when you wondered silently aloud whether everything really has to be about sex and gender--that response is liberating.

Her friend's question suggests that we might displace our energies from an ever more persistent attempt to reveal bad hidden truths--which often seem to be the same old bad truths (patriarchy, phallocentrism, homophobia), revealed again and again-- and towards more localized, less totalizing interpretive and ethical projects--non-paranoid projects. Especially in feminist and queer theorizing, Sedgwick will suggest, historical circumstances that seem to warrant a bit of paranoia have made theory and paranoid knowing indistinguishable from each other; this singular idea of Theory has thus foreclosed the possibility of other ways of doing theory, of theories. That we can turn away from paranoiacally structured theory doesn't automatically mean that we should, she emphasizes. But she wants us to at least be aware that paranoid knowing is one kind of knowing among others.

In what follows, I'll say a bit more about the "hermeneutics of suspicion"--a term you may have run across before in other courses--and about the difference that Sedgwick describes between "strong" and "weak" theories.

I'll leave a second major idea from the essay for you to comment on and question: Sedgwick calls the specific alternative to paranoia that she describes in this essay "reparative," and I'll leave that term for you to trace through the essay and, if you wish, to discuss in her comments. Sedgwick borrows the term from the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who associates "reparative" activity with the "depressive position." Klein's "depressive position" shouldn't be confused with a diagnosis of what we now call clinical depression; the depressive position involves certain kinds of sadness, but in Klein's (and Sedgwick's) view, it's a recurring part of any healthy and ethical human life. (See esp. page 128 on this, though Sedgwick will develop the idea further in the final pages of the essay).

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Raphael, The Transfiguration (1516-1520)

As Sedgwick explains, the phrase "heremenutics of suspicion" was used by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to describe a method of interpretation (hermeneutics is interpretation) common to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

We're of course quite familiar now with how this works in Freud: because the thoughts that most trouble us are repressed and not available to consciousness, we have to look for evidence of them in otherwise innocuous expressions: dream images, slips of the tongue, half-conscious gestures such as Dora's fidgeting with her reticule (or purse). Such interpretive procedures apply to cultural as well as personal expressions: "love" has been culturally idealized as the noblest of emotions precisely to help us forget its connection to sex, and so forth. Even a denial, for Freud, is suspected of being a confession of precisely what it denies.

For Marx, economic self-interest rather than sexual desire is the privileged object to be unveiled. In every society, particular classes seek to represent their interests as universal values, and interpretation proceeds by stripping those values of their apparent universality to show how they serve the interests of a particular class (usually, in the modern era, bourgeois capitalists).

Nietzsche's wide-ranging philosophical investigations in some ways encompass those of Marx and Freud. (Freud admitted to having read some of Nietzsche's works, but his remarks have seemed to later readers to downplay the substantial influence suggested by similarities between the works of these two authors). In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), Nietzsche describes Greek tragedy as structured by the transformation of suffering into beauty. He uses Raphael's Transfiguration, above, as an emblem of this process, and indeed it's a useful image of how any hermeneutic of suspicion sees the mind and the world: any time you see an idea or image resembling the top half of the painting, an image of bliss, exaltation, clarity, you expect automatically that somewhere beneath that image lies darkness, suffering, confusion. Here's Nietzsche's rather stunning conclusion to The Birth of Tragedy, in which his use of the term "transfiguration" is meant to recall his earlier discussion of Raphael's painting:

From the foundation of all existence, the Dionysiac substratum of the world, no more can enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome once more by that Apolline power of transfiguration... Where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of beauty.       

But anyone would intuitively sense the necessity of this effect if had once, even while dreaming, imagined himself transposed back to life in ancient Greece: strolling beneath rows of tall Ionic columns, glancing up towards a horizon carved from pure and noble lines, beside him reflections of his transfigured form in gleaming marble, surrounded by people solemnly walking or in delicate motion, with harmonic sounds and a rhythmic gestural langauge--must he not, to this continuous influx of beauty, raise his hand to Apollo exclaim: 'Happy race of Greeks! How great must Dionysus be among you, if the Delian god thinks such enchantment necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!' -- But one who was of this mind could find himself answered by an aged Athenian, glancing up at him with the sublime eye of Aeschylus: 'But consider this, too, wonderful stranger: how much did this people have to suffer to become so beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both deities!' (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, §25, trans. Shaun Whiteside)

Nietzsche is, of course, perhaps the most formative influence for the thought of both Foucault and Butler (and we'll see Wendy Brown draw on his thought in a rather different way in the coming weeks). And it's perhaps in Foucault that we can find a precedent for the distinction that Sedgwick draws, following Silvan Tomkins, between "strong" and "weak" theories.

Strong and Weak Theories
Sedgwick doesn't, of course, use "strong" and "weak" to mean good and bad, though insofar as we take our idea of what a good theory is from a science like physics, a strong theory may seem good, better under all circumstances than a weak theory: a theory is "strong," in Sedgwick's terms, insofar as it is broadly (even universally) applicable, and insofar as it can reduce order complex phenomena according to clear and simple principles. Einstein's formula for the equivalence of matter and energy, E=mc^2, is paradigmatic of "strong" theory in this sense: it holds true for all matter and all energy, and explains their relationship in terms of just two variables and a constant. Lacan's theory of language--all language, all signification--as an expression of patriarchal law is likewise a strong theory.

Strong theories are both powerful and reductive--in fact, powerful insofar as they're reductive. And Tomkins notes that affective theories are strong insofar as they're not predictive; for the paranoid, that is, paranoia is a strong theory not because it really protects the paranoid person from bad surprises, but because it allows him to perceive the world as saturated with such surprises. If I'm sure the government is out to get to me and, in spite of my strenuously scrupulous preparation of my tax return, I'm selected by the IRS for an audit, this won't make me question my paranoia; it will make me more paranoid, make me ask myself how I could have been more careful in the preparation of my tax return. (See 134-5 on this).

This self-reinforcing tendency of paranoia makes it "strongly tautological," Sedgwick explains, and of course we've all felt this in dealing with strong theories this semester. Another phallus, really? Dora feels this when she tells Freud that she know he'd see the jewel-case as a sexual symbol. Indeed, the quotation from Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet is, as she knows, a perfect example of strong theory: the homo/hetero distinction structures all knowledge in the modern West, she argues, and any theory that fails to take account of this will be marred by this blindspot.

Weak theories, conversely, are weak not in that they're faulty, but in that their applicability is local rather than universal. A weak theory can seem "little better than a description of the phenomena it purports to explain" (Tomkins, quoted 134). But here we trade off explanatory power for descriptive sensitivity; if a weak theory can't explain everything, it might nonetheless be successful at explaining one thing, one person or group of persons--think of Halberstam's investigations of butchness--or one text.

Joseph Cornell, Parrot Box

For Sedgwick, as a literary scholar, close reading is the paradigmatic form taken by weak theory. "But who reads The Novel and the Police," she beautifully asks, "to find out whether its main argument is true?" (135). Miller's paranoiacally Foucauldian study of surveillance and discipline in the nineteenth-century novel, in other words, is valuable Sedgwick not primarily because it shows how pervasive disciplinary practices are (or because it fails to show this), but rather because that supposition, that strong theory, leads Miller to exquisitely responsive, revelatory, loving and challenging interpretations of particular novels. One could say the same thing of Sedgwick's reading of "The Beast in the Jungle," I think.

Strong and weak theory, then, are not mutually exclusive; rather, they always coexist and inform one another.


This is true already in Foucault (and I'd argue in Freud as well). In the passages I've quoted above, Foucault begins a discussion of power by claiming that it's "everywhere"--a paradigmatically strong theoretical claim. But as he goes on to distinguish between strategies and tactics, and to describe the interdependence of broad forms of power (e.g., scientifically licensed homophobia) on "local centers" of power (e.g., the relationship of confessor and penitent, or the bourgeois family unit), we see him doing something very like what Sedgwick admires in Miller: Foucault's hermeneutics of suspicion leads, at its best, to a quite imaginative perception of the particular social forms inhabited by power. When he insists (against a certain kind of psychoanalytical interpretation) that the father is not the "representative" of the sovereign, or vice versa, we can see this as a moment when strong theory becomes stronger (in a different sense) through weakness: against the possibility of a monotonous repetition of the same, a perpetual parade of phallic fathers, Foucault's paranoiac alertness to the ubiquity of power is transfigured here into a heightened perception of its evolving historical forms.

A box made by Joseph Cornell
(Cornell is one of the artists associated by Sedgwick
with "reparative practices" on p. 150)

There's a practical value in all of this to keep in mind with regard to your own writing in the coming weeks: for good reasons, students and teachers alike give much attention to the thesis--what Sedgwick calls Miller's "main argument," above--as a sign of a paper's value, and surely this is important; yet it's no more important than, and indeed dependent upon, the interpretive and analytical work done by each paragraph, and the art and effort that go into the crafting of each sentence. And so in her first book, which had reduced dozens of gothic novels to a few characteristic tropes and conventions, Sedgwick wrote sentences like the following:

"The gorgeous narrative work done by the Foucauldian paranoid, transforming the simultaneous chaoses of institutions into a consexutive, drop-dead-elegant diagram of spiralling escapes and recaptures, is also the paranoid subect's proffer of himself and his cognitive talent, now ready for anything it can present in the way of blandishment or violence, to an order-of-things morcelé that had until then lacked only narratability, a body, cognition" (Coherence of Gothic Conventions, quoted 132).