“How does one go about defetishizing negation while remaining critical? Begin with Freud’s dictum that there is no negative in the unconscious. Sedgwick seeks to read every word the subject writes (she believes in the author) to establish the avowed and disavowed patterns of his or her desire, and then understands those repetitions in terms of a story about sexuality that does not exist yet as a convention or an identity. That aim is what makes her writing so optimistic. In it the persistence of sexually anomalous attachment figures as the social potential of queerness, in which what counts is not one’s ‘object choice’ as such but rather one’s sustaining attachments, which are only sometimes also one’s social relations. In this way repetition, heavily marked as a process of reading and rereading, has a reparative effect on the subject of an unwieldy sexuality. The queer tendency of this method is to put one’s attachments back into play and into pleasure, into knowledge, into worlds. It is to admit that they matter. In Sedgwick’s work desire’s self-elaboration enables an aesthetic that is organized neither by the sublime nor the beautiful, the dramatic nor the banal, but by something vibratingly quiet.”

6 months ago · 36 notes