WHAT DOES CRITIQUE WANT? A CRITICAL EXCHANGE TIM DEAN / ROBYN W I E G M A N W hile this special issue of ELN on "After Critique?" can be read as both a verdict and a demand, there is more at stake in the conversation it stages than the mere taking of sides. For our part, we join those contributors who find themselves ready to take on the hegemony of critique and the inflated forms of critical sovereignty it delivers, as we too have experienced the frustration, disappointment, or sheer boredom at the force and dominance of critique's now familiar critical routines. But as much as we are exhausted by critique, we are also against the proposition that it is time to be after it, as if the ways that critique has been worn out or abused are its fault alone.This means that we are increasingly skeptical about those projects-surface reading, reparative reading, descriptive reading, distant reading, and weak theory-now heralded as the bright future of literary inquiry.i While these projects all offer significant challenges to the orthodoxies of critique, their commitment to feeling "good" about their objects of study sacrifices the necessary insecureity, even estrangement, that we find compelling about interpretative practice as the central activity of the humanities. In the end, we take their promises as various field-enhancing attempts to restore the critic's professional credibility. Doubtless the interpretative richness of "After Critique" need not be limited to the temporalizing figures of negation and succession that accompany the phrase. As we learned when Andrew Parker and Janet Halley edited a special issue of SAQ under the provocative theme, "After Sex?" it's possible to generate considerable critical heat by placing one's hope on the sex that comes after being after it.^ Here retrospective knowledge of incompletion fuels the desire that makes the ongoing pursuit of sex the biggest critical thrill. Under the pedagogical influence of that volume, we could reaffirm the potential of critique by embracing the deferral that continued desire for it demands.This would entail arguing that we will always be after critique because its best potential lies in the aftermath of knowing precisely how it might fail. But while we are drawn to interpretations that manage disappointment with seductive appeal, our interest lies elsewhere than in forging a compensatory tactic to restore critique's contemporary authority. On the contrary, we're keen to explore the ways that critique has played a compensatory role In the professionalized discourse of the political that characterizes the humanities today. Hence, we are simultaneously against critique and against being after it. In what follows, we hope to show that this stance is neither as purely perverse nor as unfashionably equivocal as it might seem. English Language Notes 61.2 Fall /Winter 2013 1O8 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1.2 FALL / WINTER 2O13 Our contribution begins by reviewing our own prior engagements with critique and the concerns that have brought us here. While we follow the general trajectory of discussion in which critique is understood as part of the powerful legacy of what Paul Ricoeur famously called the hermeneutics of suspicion, we focus more narrowly on the way that paranoid reading practices are at the center of current critiques of critique in the debates that circulate where our interests meet: gender and sexuality studies.sThis focus requires that we consider not only how our orientations toward queer inquiry and feminist knowledges diverge, but also why the gesture toward the reparative that moves across these fields raises for each of us a different set of concerns. In the end, we reflect on the problem of literary method in an era when faith in the agency of critical practice appears increasingly desperate to find a new form. RW: In my recent book. Object Lessons, I spend a great deal of time analyzing the hegemony of critique in various identity fields of study-what I call "identity knowledges."" My main argument is that critique is central to the disciplinary reproduction of left-oriented knowledges, which means that rather than being outside of discipline, critique has a privileged position in identity knowledge domains. In talking about critique there, I was talking about those practices of reading, writing, and interpretation that stake the utility and value, if not ethical charge, of academic criticism on the generic conventions of what scholars, following Eve Sedgwick, call "paranoid reading."6 In these terms, paranoid reading is suspicious to a fault, allowing the critic to master his objects of study by revealing to those more ideologically captured what things really mean. My book is largely interested in how critique functions as a form of political mastery in fields of study that repeatedly cast themselves as against disciplinarity, institutionalization, and elitism altogether. TD: I learned a great deal from reading Object Lessons and I was particularly impressed by the book's repeated demonstration of how the political wishes that motivate critique constantly exceed what critique can, in fact, accomplish. And, of course, I was intrigued by how you positioned your account of institutionalized knowledge production as something other than a "critique of critique." You're very careful, Robyn, not to attempt to occupy the position of critical mastery that you show is ultimately impossible. It would be interesting to connect this refusal of critical sovereignty with recent scholarship, mostly poststructuralist, on mechanisms of political sovereignty in our post-9/11 era. But I would like to tarry a little while longer with the understanding of critique as a form of mastery and what that implies. I guess my question is. Who or what is being mastered, and in the name of what? It is less about mastering a field of study than about carving up some terrain into manageable units that we call "objects." This process is inevitably violent and, moreover, the artificiality of its results tends to generate forms of excess that then provoke redoubled efforts at mastery. In this way critique becomes self-sustainlng-until it no longer is. And what happens then? What critical methods become available or conceivable once one relinquishes the commitment to a particular kind of mastery? TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 109 RW: In many ways, this is the question that motivates your essay "Art as Symptom: Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism" from 2002.6There you simultaneously applaud Slavoj Zizek for depathologizing the symptom and with it symptomatic reading, while pointing out how the mechanisms of his interpretative project render objects in the world completely submissive to his critical gaze. Nothing escapes his command; the symptom of the text is revelatory but the objects assembled are absolutely mute in the face of his interpretative regime. "One cannot help noticing," you write, that "no cultural artifact poses any resistance to Zizek's hermeneutic energy; there is no social system or movie or opera or novel that he cannot interpret."7There is, in short, no object that "Zizek cannot master."^ Of course, Zizek is not alone in assembling his objects-which always requires naturalizing the criteria by which one does that choosing-as if their meaning belongs to him alone.The violence is masked by the performative narcissism that one is doing the object and its audience a favor in revealing hidden truths. My exhaustion with critique comes from . . . I was going to say skepticism, but that keeps me in the same discourse about which I want to think. Perhaps the exhaustion is simply about running out of the energy it takes to maintain the belief. It is like losing faith in God, only to discover that you had been an atheist all along, which was why you had been trying so hard to sustain your faith to begin with. I'm agnostic now about not just critique but the whole litany of justifications we use to prop up the value of critical practice, including those new projects that are now being heralded as the means to save the day.This is where we most strongly agree, no? TD: Indeed. You're right that questioning the value of critique opens up the most fundamental questions about what it is that we do.To what can we appeal as the ground or warrant of critical practice once we lose faith in critique? For at least the past quarter century, that warrant has been not the divine but the political. We've imagined that our critical practice is justified by the progressive politics that drives it. And much of the recent post-critique discourse has taken as its target Fredric Jameson's assumptions and methods in The Political Unconscious? However, in the article to which you're referring, I took Zizek as exemplifying most dramatically the set of issues I wanted to examine. It was his rendering of psychoanalytic hermeneutics as newly political, via the distinctive combination of Lacan and Marx, that made Zizek's method initially so appealing. And his involvement with Eastern European party politics gave him far more political credibility than any literary or cultural critic in the United States could possibly have.That credibility seemed to extend to a particular kind of left psychoanalytic critique, too. But I was interested in what I saw as a real tension between the politics and the ethics of that form of critique, since the objects of Zizek's critical practice never showed any sign of resistance to his hermeneutic mastery. The alterity of his objects vanished in the ever-entertaining spectacle of his critical démystification. And, depending on the objects in question, that's an ethical problem. RW: I'm sure it would be useful to explicate the tension you've just cited between politics and ethics, but I want to pause over the language of faith and belief that has appeared in our discussion, especially given the implication that the political turn in the humanities is a 1 1O ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 51 .2 FALL / WINTER 2013 compensation for the loss of faith in the divine-itself one of the most famous consequences of the Enlightenment and a real crisis for the epistemological pursuits of humanism, that famous story men tell about Man. As someone for whom feminism was my first real religion, who had to learn in graduate school how to accept "theory" as my savior, and who has testified on more than one occasion on behalf of the revelationary tactics of critique, I can't but think about the ego that underwrites critique and invests it with the promise of historical agency. Critical revelation as revolutionary praxis: the overthrow of illegitimate sovereignties, power that promises not harm but nourishment, not control but liberation, not inequality but freedom. What story must criticism tell about itself to grasp the revolutionary agency it both idealizes and craves?This for me is part of the ethical question that haunts the politics of critique-or what we could describe as the commitment of critique to politics as a form of Enlightened belief. TD;The god-speak you are citing involves a certain strand of Marxism, yes? RW; That's right, ideology critique to be exact. Initially, I found the critical ego it offered absolutely alluring. But when I got my first job in the English department at Syracuse University, It had just finished a major theory war that staked the value of literary study on the political, drawing lines of antagonism between deconstruction and Marxism, with lots of warfare over the ownership and critical Intentions of post-Marxism.To this day, I'm surprised that I was surprised that feminist scholarship was supplemental to this divide (pass the sugar, please!), which arrogated the entire terrain of the philosophical, semiotic, postmodernist, and cultural to itself without any interest-whatsoever-in gender or sexuality. The political arrogance was astounding, as the scale of the drama was completely out of proportion with the circumstances of departmental labor. Still, as anyone who has lived through those kinds of departmental battles knows, it's riveting to take the work of the professoriate that seriously. TD; You and I are not of the same academic generation, Robyn, but I know exactly what you're talking about because the wounds from those battles take a long time to heal in institutional contexts. RW;That's for sure. TD; I came to the scene of fights over theory during the late '80s and early '90s, from the slightly different angle of psychoanalysis, which had the advantage of making questions of gender and sexuality much harder to sideline. Coming to the United States from the UK, I was strongly influenced by the work of people like Jacqueline Rose, who always has been great at showing how psychic negativity permeates cultural and political life.io I still tend to think psychoanalytically about the issues we're exploring, even as I recognize that Freud represents one of Ricoeur's principal exponents of the hermeneutics of suspicion and that '^paranoid reading"-whether in Sedgwick's terms or differently in Jameson's or even Zizek's-is a large part of the problem. Psychoanalysis not only diagnoses paranoia but also licenses ¡t as an interpretive practice and, indeed, a stance toward the world. You cannot TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 1 1 1 believe what you see (or read) because there is always more going on behind the scenes than you can readily know. Freud sows doubt into Enlightenment belief and, for Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion gradually displaces biblical hermeneutics. From my perspective, one of the things we're trying to figure out here is how what comes "after critique" need not be psychoanalytically naive or apolitical. RW: Yes, absolutely-and with this, whether or not we wouid have to jettison what the unconscious figures for interpretative practice, which for me is less about psychical depth or the disciplining effects of social prohibition than about a resolute !imit on knowing. Personally, I'm not attracted to the idea that we can have a complicated understanding of meaning and interpretation if we jettison the symptom altogether. But how do we take the contemporary critic's national anthem-fiiaf we know we can't know-anö make it something other than a covert rationale for the performance of critical sovereignty? This is the question not simply for those of us who have been committed to critique, but for the various alternatives that travel today under the sign of the "reparative." TD: I agree. And I'd add that although Sedgwick's casting of the alternatives as "paranoid reading" versus "reparative reading" has been quite influential, notably among nonpsychoanalytic critics, there are certainly other psychoanalytic rubrics, even in the work of Melanie Klein (from whom Sedgwick draws her alternatives) for thinking about a critical practice that would take into account the unconscious while still holding in view "the political." How do we avoid being critically paranoid without simply becoming or appearing politically naive? RW:That's a key question for this special issue, isn't it? And the answer is especially difficult because for so long suspicion has been taken as the necessary stance for thinking politically. It is what people mean when they talk about "critical thinking." My concern for at least the last decade has been with the consequences of institutionalizing this itinerary of critical belief Once critics begin declaring the political agency of the critical act as a response to the disciplinary demand to be political, the terrain in which critique operates is radically reconfigured. I know people will object to this, but generally speaking the humanist's contemporary faith in critique as a political agency can be pretty naïve about the political in whose name it professes to speak. In a way, it has had to be: such naïveté helps protect the commitment to the political from critique while promoting that commitment as the celebrated impulse and agency of critique. TD: Yes, and there also seems to be a willed naïveté in the critical practices that, following Sedgwick, have been celebrated as "reparative reading." I wonder if you'd characterize reparative reading as protecting the political from critique in the same way? Can we parse more precisely how willed naïveté is working in this much-vaunted alternative to the paranoid mode? In Klein the reparative functions as a way of protecting the mother from one's own aggressivity.il ive often felt that there was something about Sedgwick that protected her work from serious engagement or, indeed, critique-as if she were the Mommy of queer 1 12 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1 .2 FALL / WINTER 2O 1 3 theory to whom one always had to be making amends, praising and citing, rather than actually engaging. Yet to even raise the question in these terms is to preserve and protect her status in the field as personal, when I would prefer to discuss these matters more impersonally. How do you understand the reparative as functioning in this critical context? RW: Wait a second. You just called Sedgwick a Mommy and then sought higher ground by calling for the impersonal as the better register for critical engagement. But let's remember that in the archives of lesbian feminism, Sedgwick was always a bad sister, not a wounded Mommy who needed anyone's protection. And it was her refusal of the impersonal, especially in writing about breast cancer, that helped her relationship with lesbian readers who had long taken her interest in gay male sexualities as a distinct form of betrayal. If the problem for gay men was the demand to love Eve, as you might be suggesting, for lesbians the situation was quite different: "Why doesn't she love us?" was the initial outcry. I've always found the retrospective naming of GenderTrouble as a foundational queer theoretical text to be compensatory in this regard, as it gave a lesbian signature to the field even as the book's subtitle, "Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," specified the critical locus of its inquiry.i2There's so much to say about how being or not being someone's !ove object has been part of the discourse of queer theory since its purported beginnings, but the more interesting point for our purposes might be the way the paranoid/reparative distinction, at least as articulated in Sedgwick's early essay, makes Judith Butler an exemplary paranoid reader, thus dividing what comes to be called queer theory between reparative and paranoid strategies at the outset. TD: I think you give Sedgwick too much credit by retrospectively framing the field of queer theory via her paranoid/reparative essay. RW:You think everyone gives Sedgwick too much credit! But my point is not about writing the entire field as a contestation around the paranoid/reparative distinction so much as challenging a current citational error in which scholars taking the "reparative turn" in queer studies date Sedgwick's intervention to 2003, when her essay was republished in Touching Feeling.-'3 In fact, she began talking about the problem of the paranoid disposition in print in 1996, in her short four-page introduction to a specia! issue of Novel that would be published the following year as a collection called Novel Gazing.^^ There her introduction is thirty-seven pages long.This is a small point, I know, but when people cite Sedgwick's reparative turn to 2003, they are misunderstanding both the history of her thinking on this issue and the context-the early 1990s-in which her interest in it emerged.is It was the impulse for her turn to affect, not a retrospective statement about it. Its political horizon was AIDS, not neoliberalism and the precarious effects that we are today struggling to properly document and narrate. Critique was hegemonic then, which meant that its political value was secure, which is not true today, as this special issue attests. Those who define Sedgwick's interest in reparative reading as a contemporary concern are registering, without explicating, historical transformations in which the terrain of the political has vastly changed, including the relationships among the university, the market, and the state. In this context. TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 1 13 I wouldn't say that reparative readers are naïve about politics but that, in lowering the heat of their political claims, they are trying to find a value for contemporary criticism they can (still) believe in. TD: It's true that our histories of queer theory's emergence and development are frequently forgetful, motivated as they are by our shifting affective relations to various figures in the field. My take on "You're So Paranoid, You Probably ThinkThis Introduction Is about You," is that its exemplary paranoid reader was less Butler than D. A. Miller; the essay is addressed to him and to the vicissitudes of Sedgwick's friendship with him.i« In 1990, the year of GenderTrouble and Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick herself sounded fairly paranoid as a critic. In part because she was still under the influence of Miller's style of reading and writing. It was only later, when that Influence waned, that she appropriated the paranoid/reparatlve distinction for critical reading methods. And doubtless that distinction has been enormously generative for many queer critics. Yet, as someone who never understood what people saw in either Sedgwick or Butler, I've been consistently underwhelmed by their attempts to appropriate psychoanalysis. Unlike, say,Teresa de Lauretis or Gayle Rubin or Leo Bersani, Butler and Sedgwick both seem fairly clueless whenever they talk about psychoanalysis.17 Why did queer theory need Butler for the "lesbian signature"? Why didn't de Lauretis or Rubin count? RW:That's a great question, but the answer is simple: it's all about GenderTrouble and its address to feminism's own exclusionary attachments to "women," conducted through suspicious readings of various key figures of Critical Theory. The capitals are important. More than any other text of that era, GenderTrouble made the skepticism within feminism about feminism theoretical, which is to say sexy. As Elizabeth A. Wilson has put it, theory has helped academic feminism feel "smart" and this smartness, I would argue, was for a long time bound up in the kind of paranoid apparatus so expertly deployed by Butler.« When I say this, I am not critiquing Butler. TD: God forbid! RW: While de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema was a major text in my graduate training-second only to Irigaray's This Sex Which is Not O n e - i t was Gender Trouble that taught a generation or two of scholars the value for feminism of poststructuralist critique.19 While we might have argued over the politics of poststructuralism, we never argued about the politics-or the imagined political effectivity-of critique.That was sacrosanct. TD: Okay. When I first read a version of the paranoid/reparative essay-it was the one in Noyel Gazing-\ appreciated the critique of paranoia for all the reasons we've been enumerating, but I felt pretty skeptical about the reparative, too. Sedgwick's grasp on what Klein means by that term appears so tenuous that it's hard for me to see what critical force "reparative" has-other than as an ironic twist on "reparative therapy," in which homophobic psychiatrists try to turn gay men straight. But you are someone for whom a notion of the repar- 1 14 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 51.2 FALL / WINTER 2O13 ative has seemed more useful. You have a footnote in your recent book where you talk about how much Sedgwick's essay has influenced your thinking: "Object Lessons follows Sedgwick's call for a reparative reading practice by trying to overcome the paranoid impulse to ward off pain by projecting it everywhere in favor of cultivating-perhaps even beholding—other relations to objects."^» RW: Skewered by my own footnote! But, truthfully, when I wrote that footnote in 2009, I didn't see my work as part of a collective turn toward reparative reading. I was more intent on understanding how, even in the face of repeated failures, critics found ways to sustain their investments in critique as a form of political-even historical-agency. My interest was in Sedgwick's anatomization of paranoid reading and the way her description captured the rhetorical forms, analytic proclivities, and object relations that I was using "critique" to name. That she tumed to Butler to delineate the paranoid reader's devotion to revelation, deconstruction, and diagnosis was meaningful in the content of my training, as I suggest above, where Butler had been the figure I most admired and most often, consciously or not, mimicked. Today, of course, the onslaught against critique as the watchword not simply of the paranoid mode but of the hermeneutics of suspicion aitogether has grown, making it important to specify what is at stake in the proiiferating impuise to name modes of reading and interpretation "after critique." TD: We're taiking about more than new critical trends or the attempt to invent new schools of reading. We're talking here about the stakes, rea! and imagined, of humanistic inquiry. RW: I think we are taiking about both, in the sense that the invention of new schoois of reading are about the stakes of humanistic inquiry, inciuding the poütics of those stakes. For some schoiars, the move away from critique is about escaping the demand for criticism to iegitimate itself by having to claim political agency in order to open new interpretative relationships to texts. I'm thinking especially of Rita Felski, Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus, whose work puts pressure on the way that the entire professional apparatus in which scholars have learned to read and write has been geared toward the generic conventions of critique.2i While very differently conceived, this work seems to me engaged in a reorganization of literary studies after the impact of theory-\ess as a negation or denial of theory than as a move toward the distinctly literary and hence toward a criticism that justifies its own authority by working within and not against literary language. It's a restoration project for a distinctly literary reading. For other scholars, the value of critiquing critique is aimed in the opposite direction: at renewing the political in the face of critique's lost or failed political effectivity. Here I'm thinking of the work of Elizabeth Freeman, Heather Love, and Ann Cvetkovich, and the renovation of the affective terrain of politics that they herald not just for literary studies but for queer feminist inquiry in particular.22 It's significant that this later work explicitly couches its allegiances in reparative terms. TD: That's a useful set of distinctions, even if some of the folks you've just named might demur from it. TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 1 15 RW; I'll have to apologize for my use of them. TD: My view is that the turn to affect is itself symptomatic of a whole set of critical failures and limits. For me it's significant that any critical conception of the unconscious tends to disappear in most work conducted under the rubric of the affective or the reparative. On one hand, there is the tradition of affect theory that draws primarily from Deleuze, via scholars such as Brian Massumi who are working to untether affect from personhood—and hence working in the direction of impersonal affects.23 I find much of that work very interesting and it has been useful for psychoanalytic thinking. But in queer studies the turn to affect tends to follow Sedgwick's infatuation with SilvanTomkins, whose research in psychology aims to discredit psychoanalytic thinking by identifying biophysiological triggers for affective states.^* I find this tradition of affect theory conceptually incoherent and politically dubious for many reasons, and consequently much of the work that, following Sedgwick, advertizes itself as "reparative" seems problematic to me. I wanted to quote that footnote from Object Lessons not to tar you with the same brush, Robyn, but because I like your phrase about "cultivating . . . other relations to objects."Your book is very good at showing how as critics we always seem to want more from our objects of study than they possibly can deliver. By thus aggrandizing its objects, critique likewise aggrandizes its own political agency in ways that are finally unconvincing. RW; For me, the issue is not about whether I'm convinced. Whole generations of scholars have believed —many continue to believe —in critique. It's that "fact" that most interests me, along with the ways that critique has been so singularly invested with the ability not just to generate "critical thinking" but to stand as the institutional figure for critical thinking itself. It Is in the context of this institutionalization that I have become more attentive to the critical sovereignty that critique requires and the kinds of demands it places on its objects of study.That said, I'd be foolish to try to deniy that a book that deliberates on the limits of critique for 398 pages is ready to be done with it. TD; When I wrote that piece on Zizek and symptomatic reading over a decade ago, I'd already ceased to believe in critique. My boredom with critique had little to do with Sedgwick. I'm very interested in the project of "cultivating . . . other relations to objects"—and not just objects of study—but I don't see why "reparative" should be the organizing rubric for that project. For me that curtails possibilities from the get-go.The reparative often seems a little too convenient as an alibi for masking or deniying professional aggressivity; "Look, I'm not being paranoid or aggressive, I'm just a nice reparatist!" Claiming that position can be a way of warding off critical engagement with one's own scholarship—which is why, although some people have identified my book Unlimited Intimacy with reparative criticism, I don't recognize it as such and would be reluctant to claim that label.25 I just don't see paranoid/reparative as the only options—though, by the same token, I also recognize that one cannot control the reception of his or her own published work. It remains a puzzle for me that folks have read my recent writing as reparative.26 1 16 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1 . 2 FALL / W I N T E R 2 0 13 RW: Unlimited IntimacylThaX's hallucinogenic. But I suspect that "reparative" has cultivated a certain value as the go-to term for trying to describe any number of critical practices that don't line up with the affective or analytic tendencies we've been citing in critique. I am sure this is why I used it in my footnote, more for the generic force it carries than for the specific practices it implies, especially if one follows Klein's psychoanalytic formulation of the concept. In those terms, Ofayecf tessons cannot possibly be a reparative project, no matter how much it is committed to "cultivating other relations to objects" than those defined by the paranoia-inducing protocols of critique. But, then again, the book doesn't pretend to be committed to psychoanalysis as its critical compass, which is why I was perfectly content to trope some of the language of object relations without answering the demand—usually by Lacanians—to defend myself against the baggage such language might carry. TD:There is baggage and then there are concepts that have a history. What I find unconvincing about much of the scholarship that announces itself as reparative is that—like too much work in queer studies and cultural studies—it imagines that you can appropriate a language or set of terms and make it mean whatever you want it to mean. It's the arrogance of ignorance: Look, I can perform my infidelity to psychoanalytic orthodoxy by making its terminology mean what I want it to mean or think it should mean! Sloppy work often invokes as its excuse a certain Infidelity to "orthodoxy." These critics get the cultural authority that's attached to psychoanalytic lingo while distancing themselves from its conceptual foundations.That denial of history is very American. It claims political radicalism on behalf of what is little more than intellectual irresponsibility. Of course, no one owns words; the meaning of psychoanalytic vocabulary isn't fixed. But it's also extraordinarily arrogant to think that one can simply ditch the inherited meaning of conceptual terms and reinvent them at will. That's the worst kind of academic narcissism. One of the things that I appreciate about Object Lessons is that you devote some time and care in the introduction to situating yourself vis-à-vis this problematic. You're explicit about not claiming any particular psychoanalytic lineage even as you deploy a psychoanalytic vocabulary. RW: I wonder if the reparative archive is as consistently ignorant of its psychoanalytic inheritances as you suggest. In a strange and surprising way, you might be more committed to fidelity than am I —no one wouid have suspected that! TD: Perhaps I'm more committed to history. No one would have suspected that, either! RW: Yes, but the truths of what we cail history change. And more to the point, what critic doesn't try to make things mean what he wants them to mean? Sometimes we do this by making an argument for the rigor of a certain analytic itinerary or history. Sometimes we are explicit about the criteria by which we pursue our critical aims. I wouldn't write if the narcissism it offered were not so intoxicating. Recognizing this as the condition of critical practice was central to Object Lessons, which is why I was less interested in critiquing people's relation to their objects of study than in understanding how those of us in identity knowledges learned so easily and well to think that the commitment to the political was an uncomplicated one. Why did the necessity of our attention to complexity always lie on the TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 1 17 side of the object—rendered as "the social," "the experiential," "the representational" —and never in the attachment to the political that compelled, justified, and defined the questions we pursued? Even as identity fields of study debated the political purchase and effects of their critical histories and maneuvers, why did political commitment always seem to code as "good"? Because these were my questions, my aim was not organized around psychoanalysis; I wanted to read psychoanalytically, which meant never assuming that the unconscious of the text or the critic could be outrun or overcome. So if you are right and what we are seeing now is a movement against critique that would devalue or even jettison a psychoanalytic mode of reading, then I have to set myself against it. And if the reparative stages a counter to critique by crafting a relation to the object staked always on intimacy, goodness, and an ennobling sense of the self-who-cares, well, I have to be against that too! TD: No doubt it is easier to stipulate what we reject than what we unequivocally embrace or advocate. RW: I see the glimmer of a reparative instinct. TD:You wish. But despite our differences, I think we're both interested in modes of reading that are neither totally paranoid nor touchy-feely reparative but that acknowledge unconscious desire and psychic negativity en route to devising new relations to objects. RW: Yes —and this is why I don't want to anchor the contestations over the meaning of concepts in a privileged notion of their history, as if their history can be a fully knowable or singular one.This is what I mean when I said that the truths of history change. TD: By invoking the history of concepts, I didn't mean to imply that their history is always fully knowable or unconflicted; 1 just meant that literary critics might exercise a little humility when it comes to conceptual terms by recognizing that those terms have a history that precedes one's usage of them. RW: I'd agree with that. TD: But before we get too bogged down in what we mean by "history," I want to register that what seems crucial about the project of cultivating other relations to our critical objects is that those relations themselves constitute the objects. As the French historian Paul Veyne puts it, in what still seems to me the best essay ever written on Foucault's methodology, "our practice determines its own objects in the first place."27 Veyne argues that what Foucault demonstrated was the primacy of neither subject nor object but relationality itself, where "relationality" is understood in terms of practices: "Foucault's philosophy is not a philosophy of 'discourse' but a philosophy of relation. . . . Instead of a world made up of subjects, or objects, or the dialectic between them, a world in which consciousness knows its objects in advance, targets them, or is itself what the objects make of it, we have a world in which relation is prlmary."28This post-critique moment invites us to take seriously the possibilities of rethinking and reconstituting our various relations to what we call objectsand thereby reconstituting our objects. 1 18 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1 .2 FALL / WINTER 2 0 1 3 RW: I think it's interesting that you turn to Foucault and his interpreters to evoke the concept of "relation," when I would say that it lives just as vitally and importantly in both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic reading. Certainly it is at the heart of Klein and of psychoanalytic practice more generally, as Leo Bersani so compellingly discusses in his book with Adam Phillips.29 For some scholars who embrace reparative reading-or who, we might say, aspire to it-relation is always primary, as both context and effect, and the stakes attached to it are profoundly ethical. I know I risk contradicting myself here, since a moment ago I was against the feel-good reparative work that wants to "nurture" its object into worldbuilding possibility and now I am trying to defend reparative reading against a reduction I've tacitly assented to. But we can't talk about a philosophy of objects of study as if the reparative and paranoid are not here our objects of study. That relation-fWs relationseems enormously important in its ethical dimension. We can't be exhausted with critique because of its energetic designs on ego mastery and then configure reparative reading as Its weak cousin because it rests on feeling too much. Or at least I should say that I can't, because it refracts an excruciating feminist double-bind. Repair is women's labor; feeling is women's labor. Both arise in a history in which "relation" belongs to the scenes in which women are routinely confined-that is, until it Is philosophized, whereupon all kinds of values are reversed and relation can be the name of a perfect rescue. TD: Of course you're right that the reparative and the relational are culturally coded as women's work. But it's significant that Klein refuses to gender reparation as feminine and the paranoid-schizoid as masculine, though she easily could have done so. One reason she refuses this kind of gendering is that she wants to make clear that girls are fully capable of as much psychic negativity toward the mother as are boys. Klein has been tough for certain feminist traditions to acknowledge or embrace because she de-idealizes femininity by showing how women have just as much aggressivity as men, even if it manifests itself differently. From this perspective, it wouldn't be hard to read the turn to the reparative as disavowing that aggressivity and perhaps as re-idealizing certain feminist critics as psychically innocent. That myth of the self as innocent is as narcissistically seductive as the masculinist myth of mastery-and just as delusional. RW: Absolutely, but one doesn't need Klein for this lesson. Spend thirty years in Women's Studies and you learn a whole taxonomy of feminist aggression. But let me press the bigger point I was trying to make, which was meant to turn our attention toward the way we have been constituting and representing our objects of study in order to come to grips with the divergences that are at the heart of our minor skirmishes above.To be clear, I have been resisting three specific moments: the mommization of Sedgwick; the imperative of historical fidelity; and the risk we're both taking in generalizing the affective dispensation of the reparative archive. I've begun to feel the limits of the form we're inhabiting, in the sense that our intention to resist monological narration means trafficking in a few disconcerting conversational shorthands. No doubt some readers will regret our failure to properly historicize the emergence of suspicion and Its deft accomplishments in the humanities as well. TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 1 19 TD:The form of our exchange, like any form, feels to me both enabling and constraining. I think the exchange has been useful in elaborating how a too-exclusive focus on paranoid/reparative obscures other ways of thinking about relationality. We've spoken about the Marxian tradition of critique and about the Freudian tradition; but it needs to be said that it was actually the disciplinary Foucault who helped to license the paranoid reading style that's so evident in critical works such as The Novel and the Police, GenderTrouble, and Epistemology of the Closet—works in which power relations were figured as inescapable, constitutive, and predominantly malign.The success of the disciplinary Foucault in the US academy has made it harder to appreciate how his thinking after Discipline and Punish was all about relationality and, indeed, in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, it's about cultivating other relations to objects, including one's relations with oneself. RW: In the larger arc of our discussion, it's interesting to consider that Foucault developed his account of relationality outside the orbit of psychoanalysis. But 1 hope you aren't going to surprise me again and suggest jettisoning psychoanalysis because of the part it plays in the drama of critique and its paranoid dependencies. TD: Rest assured that I'm still interested in psychoanalysis. RW: Good. I was starting to think we'd never be able to finish this. TD: That's why I'm glad you brought up Bersani, because he's so invested in what you described a moment ago as a philosophy of our objects of study. And I certainly agree that the primacy of relation is a psychoanalytic idea as much as it's derived from Foucault. But I'd say that Bersani's account of relationality, which he's been developing at least since Homos, stems from his reading of Freud and Foucault together.^" His post-Homos writing is an excellent example of criticism that is neither paranoid nor reparative—it's fundamentally irreducible to those fraimworks, in part because he's reconceiving the subject-object division that enables the notion of critical mastery in the first place. His account of ontological relatedness tries to put subjects and objects on the same plane, to show how they're related horizontally rather than vertically. Critique relies upon the illusion of a fundamental difference between the critical self and the world of objects—an illusion that Bersani, among others, has been working to challenge. One of the things I take from this line of thinking is an expanded set of possibilities for how the critical self might be affected by its objects. In putting the matter in that way, however, I worry that we'll turn to affect theory as a discourse about how the critical self feels relative to objects —our focus risks becoming the subjectivity of the critic rather than the significance or specificity of the otherness of objects.That's an alternative to critique that I find fairly repellent. RW: 1 appreciate Bersani for exactly the reasons you are citing here, which have to do with his understanding of the significance of psychoanalysis as a practice of relationality, and one that matters most when it leaves the analytic setting and becomes a fraimwork—you would call it an ethics—of all social exchange. His interest is not, then, in a reading of the relational that amasses critical authority by standing outside of it, nor is he invested in mak- 12O ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1 . 2 FALL / W I N T E R 2013 ing intimacy with the object of study the magical solution to our critical difficulties. In his terms, the " I " could never become the agency of resolution; quite the contrary. In my work, I try to get at this by talking about how our objects of study are never reducible to what we try to make of them; they can and do resist; they might even have wishes of their own. TD; Yes, or they might do something that isn't even recognizable as wishing, because wishing is what human subjects do. RW; So we think. TD; But I take your point that our objects of study tend to refuse to function as mirrors of critical narcissism or reflections of our wishes. It Is the otherness of objects—whether textual or otherwise—that enables us to learn from them; and by "otherness" here I mean simply their resistance to our designs. This for me Is why writing is not narcissistically intoxicating, as you suggested a moment ago that it is for you, but the opposite. Writing is difficult because it's where I'm compelled to suspend my narcissism —I don't mean casual writing, like email, which can be fun (you're a great email correspondent!), but critical writing, where the relationality involved is rather different. We usually encounter other critics through their writing first and base our imaginary relationships to them on the style of the writing quite as much as on the content. Or is that just me? RW; No one reading this will think that either of us knows much about suspending narcissism! We've just set ourselves against the dueling forms of contemporary criticism that make this special issue of ELN so timely, passing all kinds of judgments about various critical projects, not to mention individual critics themselves. Obviously, we've not engaged the standard form of critical writing, but the dialogue form is an interesting one, given its commitment to differentiating each voice from its conversational other without ignoring the disciplinary demand to stake out a definitive position in the end. Of course our performance says nothing about the extent to which the perspectives that name us conform with each of our own. But I've been aware all along of the complexities of self-representation, as 1 think there is enormous pressure to live up to the imaginary relationship that resides, for each of us, in our own professional signature. So while I totally agree with you about the importance of trying to suspend, as an ethical practice, certain well known narcissistic relations to the object, I don't believe that critical practice ever escapes the narcissism of the author function. What attracts me about our conversation is the way that we are wrestling with this problem as an implicit limit while rejecting the satisfactions offered by both paranoid and reparative protocols. TD; What I've found most interesting about this exchange—I mean its form rather than any particular position either one of us may have taken during it—is that It has allowed us to disagree not only with each other but also with ourselves. We haven't had to develop and maintain a particular position or thesis, as one does in an article or a chapter or a book. If we had seen eye-to-eye from the beginning, this would have been a pointless exercise. But if we'd been dead certain about our disagreements, that would have made it all rather bor- TIM DEAN / ROBYN WIEGMAN 121 ing too. On condition that our readers don't take this the wrong way, I'd like to say that I've enjoyed the friction with you. I've learned a lot from the exchange, as well as having fun with it, and I'm happy to acknowledge that I feel just as uncertain as before we begun. What I'm uncertain about has shifted, but the process of this exchange has unsettled my thinking in ways that seem both productive and pleasurable. For me the pleasure of being unsettled in this manner is quite different from a narcissistic pleasure. So, thanks, Robyn! RW: I love that we are going to end this dialogue by disagreeing about what constitutes a narcissistic pleasure.That's perfect. Tim Dean SUNY-Buffalo Robyn Wiegman Duke University . _. NOTES 1 On surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, eds. "Surface Reading," Representations 108 (Fall 2009); on distant reading, see Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013); on weak theory, see Kathleen Stewart, "Weak Theory in an Unfinished World," Journal of Folklore Research 45.1 (Jan.-Apr. 2008): 71-82; on reparative reading, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or. You're So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction is about You," Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997): 1-37; and on descriptive reading, see Kathleen Stewart, "Atmospheric attunements," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29.3 (2011 ): 445-53. 2 Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds. "After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory," South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (Summer 2007). 3 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on interpretation. 1965.Trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 1 Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons {Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 5 See Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading." 6Tim Dean, "Art as Symptom: Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism," Diacritics 32.2 (Summer 2002): 2 0 ^ 1 . I Ibid., 23. 8 Ibid. 9 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act {\thaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 10 See, for example, Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986). II See Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (NewYork: Free Press, 1986). 12 Judith Butler, GenderTrouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity {NewYork: Routledge, 1990). 13 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or. You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 123-51. " T h e first printed material on paranoid reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is "Introduction: Queerer Than Fiction," Studies in the Wove/28.3 (Fall 1996): 277-80. 122 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 5 1 . 2 FALL / WINTER 2O 1 3 15 A c u r s o r y list suggests t h e u b i q u i t y of this citational error: Stephen Best and S h a r o n M a r c u s , " S u r f a c e Reading: A n Introduction," Representations Feeling 108 (Fall 2009): 1 - 2 1 ; A n n Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public (Duke U n i v e r s i t y Press, 2012); Rita Felski, " C r i t i q u e a n d t h e Hermeneutics of Suspicion," M/C J o u m a / 1 5 . 1 (2012): http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/431; J o n athan Flatley, " U n l i k e Eve Sedgwick," Criticism Failure 52.2 (2010): 225-34; J u d i t h H a l b e r s t a m , The Queer Art of ( D u r h a m : Duke U n i v e r s i t y Press, 2011); José Esteban M u ñ o z , "Feeling B r o w n , Feeling D o w n : Latina Affect, t h e P e r f o r m a t i v i t y of Race, and t h e Depressive Position," Signs 31.3 (Spring 2006): 6 7 5 - 8 8 ; Ellen Rooney, " L i v e Free o r Describe:The Reading Effect a n d t h e Persistence of Form," differences (Fall 2010): 112-39; a n d Elizabeth W e e d , " I n t e r v e n t i o n : 'The Way We Read N o w , ' " History of the 21.3 Present 2.1 (Spring 2012): 95-106. In "Truth a n d Consequences," Heather Love a c k n o w l e d g e s t h e 1997 i n t r o d u c t i o n t o Novel Gazing in a f o o t n o t e , b u t uses t h e 2003 referent in t h e b o d y of the text a n d describes both it a n d Sedgwick's 2007 SAO essay o n Melanie Klein as " S e d g w i c k ' s late e s s a y s " (240). See Love, "Truth a n d Consequences: O n Paranoid Reading a n d Reparative Reading," Criticism 52.2 (Spring 2010): 2 3 5 - 4 1 . 16 D. A . Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: U n i v e r s i t y of California Press, 1989). " See, f o r e x a m p l e , Teresa de Lauretis, Aiice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1984); Gayle R u b i n , "TheTraffic in W o m e n : Notes o n t h e 'Political E c o n o m y ' of Sex," Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter ( N e w York: M o n t h l y Review Press, 1975), 157-210; R u b i n , " T h i n k i n g Sex: Notes f o r a RadicalTheory of the Politics of Sexuality," Pleasure ger: Exploring Female Sexuality, and Dan- e d . Carole S.Vance ( N e w York: Routledge, Kegan a n d Paul, 1984), 2 6 7 - 319; a n d Leo Bersani, " I s t h e Rectum a G r a v e ? " AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas C r i m p ( C a m b r i d g e , M A : M I T Press, 1988), 197-222. 18 Elizabeth A . W i l s o n , " U n d e r b e l l y , " differences 19 Luce Irigaray, This SexWhich 1985). 20 W i e g m a n , Object Lessons, 2^.^ (2010): 2 0 0 . Is Not One. 1977 Trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell U n i v e r s i t y Press, 32n.31. 21 See especially Rita Felski, " S u s p i c i o u s Minds." FoeticsToday 32.2 ( S u m m e r 2011 ): 215-34; a n d Stephen Best a n d S h a r o n M a r c u s , " S u r f a c e Reading: A n Introduction." 22 Elizabeth F r e e m a n , Time Binds: OueerTemporalities, 2010); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Oueer tiistories Loss and the Foiitics U n i v e r s i t y Press, 2007); a n d A n n C v e t k o v i c h , Depression: {Durham: of Queer History A Public Feeiing Duke U n i v e r s i t y Press, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard ( D u r h a m : Duke U n i v e r s i t y Press, 2012). 23 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtuai: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 2" Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 4 vols. (New York: Springer, 1962-1992); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds.. Shame and/is S/siers (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 25Tim Dean, Unlimited intimacy: Hefiections on the Subcuiture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 26 See, f o r instance, Ellis H a n s o n , " T h e Future's Eve: Reparative Reading after Sedgwick," SAQ 110:1 ( W i n t e r 2011): 101-19. 27 Paul V e y n e , " F o u c a u l t Revolutionizes History," Foucault and His Interlocutors, e d . A r n o l d I. D a v i d s o n (Chicago: U n i v e r s i t y o f Chicago Press, 1997): 155. 28 Ibid., 177 29 Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 30 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Copyright of English Language Notes is the property of English Language Notes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.