The Weather in Proust

Series Q

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan Goldberg (Editor), Michael Moon (Editor)

The Weather in Proust gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Theory, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Buddhism

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academician specializing in literary criticism and feminist analysis; she is known as one of the architects of queer theory. Her works reflect an interest in queer performativity, experimental critical writing, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered purportedly hidden homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens, Henry James and Marcel Proust. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, coining the terms "antihomophobic" and "homosocial."

Reviews

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Buddhist reading of Proust's obsession with reincarnation, atmospheric disturbances, and the way he handles and textualizes refreshment and surprise; bringing Proust into dialogue with Cavafy's poetry to discuss the interplay between desire, pedagogy, and the act of writing; Sedgwick's assessment of queer theory today and an urge—knowing she was soon to die—for a reassessment of Hocquenghem's work; all of these pieces then hinge around the personal as revolutionary, making art as a means of leaving pieces of oneself behind, and how suffering, transcending, and becoming aware of one's limitations and one's own mortality all inform the act of reading and the theoretical scope of any given project. The last chapter, Sedgwick's personal reflections as her end grew nearer, is harrowing just as it is enlightening. The world has lost a pioneering and truly radical intellect.

[hmmm]

definitely odds-and-ends, but still a nice warm psychospiritual shower

[Duke Press]

“This posthumous collection of Sedgwick’s essays presents readers with a glittering kaleidoscope of ‘capacious concerns.’ Sedgwick, a pioneer in queer studies, shines as she contemplates Proust, textile art, and mortality in language that is challenging and exhilarating. . . . Engaging with Sedgwick will fill readers will wonder.”--Publishers Weekly

“For a writer whose prose (and thought) could often be astoundingly dense, circuitous, and lovingly (if sometimes frustratingly) devoted to articulating the farthest reaches of complexity, the overall effect of The Weather in Proust is one of great clarification and distillation. Indeed, for those unfamiliar with Sedgwick’s work, I would recommend starting with The Weather in Proust and moving backward from there, as the volume offers an enjoyably compressed, coherent, and retrospective portrait of Sedgwick’s principal preoccupations.”--Maggie Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Like all of [Sedgwick’s] writing, The Weather in Proust both contributes to theory and challenges what we actually mean when we theorize, or read and write theory. . . . The Weather in Proust ravishes in the flexibility of its theoretical energies, in essays on topics as surfacially different as Proustian weather, the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, Japanese textile practice, anality, and autism. . . . The delight of discovering Sedgwick’s own findings arises in part because the voice in these essays feels so lucidly sincere. Her writing feels true, a word which aptly comes from an Old English word meaning “loyal;” her writing feels loyal, both to itself and its readers.”--Michael D. Snediker, Theory & Event

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sedgwick ciphers Vol. IV of À la Recherche via Plotinism, using "weather" to think the relation between system and clinamen, the causal stream of the individual soul and the plenitude to which it returns. This brings her to Kleinian object relations, which she mobilizes to cipher the affective relations within the text. Via Proust, she comes to a reading of Cavafy along the same register of influences, on the deities that populate the works of either, and their ties to Greek national identity in the case of the latter. (The spatterings of treatments of Austinian performative speech act theory in relation to both, however, verge somewhere between mundane and useful.) We move (this is an edited collection of posthumous unpublished works) to her own textile work, suminagashi, shibori, etc.—her treatment of both Buddhist theory and practice, and Japanese artistic forms, borders on Orientalist, though there is a certain inevitability to the "turn to the East" in one's late life—one can think of figures as diverse as Kristeva and Irigaray on the one hand, Foucault and Lynch and Anderson and the Beatles on the other, who have drawn resource from alternative spiritual practices. Throughout, there are references to some of her early work, namely Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet, which help to clarify her positions as regards what has come to be termed "queer theory," especially on "homosociality": while she sought to link homosociality to desire, in order to lessen the distance between it and homosexuality, she still maintains the difference between desire in general and the sexual in particular, which is clarificatory in that, nowadays, what frustrates me (especially in film analysis) is a too-ready conflation of the two, which erases the homophobia that is so structurally present in heterosexual homosociality. She offers a critique of the Theory of Mind approach to understanding autism, as well as the works of Guss and Botticelli, in a piece that also touches on the work of Hocquenghem. She maintains that neither is there a natural alliance nor a necessary disjunction between the political ambitions of gay men and those of women in general, examining some dissonances as well as some convergences. Throughout, she demonstrates the best of what has come to be called "affect theory" has to offer, alongside Cvetkovich, both of which I have found much more fruitful than the works of, for example (sorry not sorry), Berlant or Ahmed.

[Sasha]

Eve fucking Sedgwick. My g-d!!!! So good

[Meg]

See Maggie Nelson's review here: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.ph...