Episode 003 Show Notes

Although Sedgwick's piece does an excellent job of defining paranoia, it does much less in terms of helping the reader to really understand what reparation actually does. She makes three explicit statements that begin to build a picture of reparation. 

1. Reparative impulses are not nonexistent in the current world of critique. However, they are usually either unacknowledged or dismissed. They can be dismissed for two reasons.
• They are "merely aesthetic" (i.e. just about pleasure).
• They are "merely ameliorative" (i.e. just about reform or improvement).
• Sedgwick asks the very excellent question, "What makes pleasure and amelioration so 'mere'?" She attributes this dismissal to what she calls "paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure" (144)
2. Reparation requires a kind of yielding. She says, "to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise" (146).
3. Reparation's deepest impulse is, unsurprisingly, to repair: "The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self" (149).

Taking these characteristics and adding to them the ones that I reverse-engineered from Sedgwick's qualities of paranoia (discussed in Episode 002), I came up with this list of qualities of reparation:

1. Reparation is motivated by the desire for both pleasure (positive affect) and improvement
2. Reparation requires yielding to surprises, even unpleasant ones
3. Reparation desires to piece together what is broken
4. Reparation responds rather than anticipating or mimicking
5. Reparation is a weak theory that surrenders the need for control in favor of greater freedom

I love all of these ideas, but I found myself not knowing what to do with them. Heather Love's article, Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, was incredibly important in helping me move from just loving Sedgwick's ideas to finding ways to apply them. Love's piece offered three major insights.

1. Love calls for a more careful reading of Sedgwick, acknowledging that the piece also calls readers to "acknowledge the negativity and the aggression at the heart of psychic life and to recognize that thinking is impossible without this kind of aggression. As in Klein, the schizoid position and the depressive position can't really be separated from each other: subjects vacillate between these two positions without ever coming to rest" (238). Love's insistence on reading Sedgwick herself in both paranoid and reparative ways is vital because it models the use of both of these positions.
2. Love describes paranoia and reparation as growing from the same impulse: [J]ust as allowing for good surprises means risking bad surprises, practicing reparative reading means leaving the door open to paranoid reading. There is risk in love, including the risk of antagonism, aggression, irritation, contempt, anger--love means trying to destroy the object as well as trying to repair it. Not only are these two positions--the schizoid and the depressive--inseparable, not only is oscillation between them inevitable, but they are also bound together by the glue of shared affect. Paranoia is a mode of anxiety about what might happen to you; reparation is also grounded in anxiety. The depressive position for Klein involves anxiety not only about what you may have done to others, but also about the unintended consequences of your actions in the present" (239).
3. Love's piece got me thinking further about love. Pun acknowledged. She says, "To read Sedgwick's always reparatively is to miss the energizing force of paranoia in her work; it also reduces the kinds of relations we might now cultivate with her. Recognizing that it is not only reparation but damage at work in Sedgwick's late essays will let us begin the hard work of deidealization. And that's love too" (240). 

For more, see Eve Sedgwick's  "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; Or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." It is the fourth chapter of her book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (published in 2003 by Duke University Press).

Also see Heather Love's article Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. It was published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (52.2) in 2010. 

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