Touching feeling : affect, pedagogy, performativity

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates-through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others-emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Interlude, Pedagogic 27 1. Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel 35 2. Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative 67 3. Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins (Written with Adam Frank) 93 4. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You 123 5. Pedagogy of Buddhism 153 Works Cited 183 Index 189