City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 10-2014 Depressives and the Scenes of Queer Writing Allen Durgin Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/482 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] DEPRESSIVES & THE SCENES OF QUEER WRITING by ALLEN DURGIN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 ii © 2014 ALLEN DURGIN All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Robert Reid-Pharr, Chair of Committee Date Mario DiGangi, Executive Officer Wayne Koestenbaum Steven F. Kruger THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT DEPRESSIVES AND THE QUEER SCENES OF WRITING by ALLEN DURGIN Adviser: Professor Robert Reid-Pharr My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading. Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick’s brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to a lack of critical language. My dissertation is an attempt to develop this language. Retiring the term reparative, I return to the figure of the depressive within the works of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and experimental psychologist Silvan Tomkins, as well as Sedgwick herself, and trace the recursive contours of a depressive mode. I demonstrate how such a recursive mode is responsive to its own contingency and changing environment and how it offers alternatives to the normalizing teleologies and assumptions of paranoid critical practices. Experimental in form and method, my dissertation enacts the same depressive mode it purports to describe, ultimately locating the depressive within particular forms, or scenes, of queer writing. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “You could make a mother out of anybody.” —Postcards From the Edge Many a mother nursed this project to health. Its first mother was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick whose expansive presence and enveloping love, I hope, can be felt on every page. Then came its fairy godmothers—Robert Reid-Pharr, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Steven Kruger—who took this orphaned project under their sheltering wings after Sedgwick’s passing. They are living, breathing, walking antidepressants, just going around making people feel better. Of course, I cannot forget those longtime companions whose love, respect, and revitalizing energy have buoyed my spirit and kept me afloat these many years: Bob Speck and Jeffrey Gimble; Juleen D. Collins, Robin Follett, and Joanna Parson; Jeanine Casler and April Stafford; Kevin Donlin and James Leo Ryan. Also, those strangers on whose kindness and kinship I came so happily to depend: Kelsey Louie, Marty McElhiney, Charles Quiles, Peter Dehazya, and that queer little family of Arielle Pink, Eposhe Paul Ithete, and little Leo Ithete. Unlike many queer men, I had the good fortune of being born into a family whose love altered not when it alteration found: my mom and dad, Joan and Allen Durgin; my siblings Jean, Jennifer, Jason, and Jeremy, their spouses and children; as well as my extended family, particularly Pam Stevenson and Dr. Shannon Stevenson. They kept faith when I no longer could. vi And when this project became lost, it was found and adopted by that motley crew at Columbia University’s Writing Center. Sue Mendelsohn, Linh An, Kat Savino, Adam Pellegrini, Phoebe Collins—all dramatized not only the presence of attentive readers, but also the power of goodness and light. Finally, my Sedgwickian family—Hal Sedgwick, Tina Meyerhoff, Annie Cranston, Kate Stanley, Mandy Berry, Michael Moon, Jonathan Goldberg, Jane Gallop. They kept Eve alive in my heart by graciously sharing with me their memories, words, and love of her. Eve was fond of pointing out how important it is for the characters in Proust to show that they are loved. How lucky I am that such demonstration has proven so easy. I suppose it is common among those whose parents have passed away to wonder if they are proud of them. As I finish this dissertation, I find myself thinking of the last lines of “White Glasses,” a conference paper in which Sedgwick eulogizes her dying friend Michael Lynch who cannot attend. “Hi Michael!” she says, and I say along with her, I know I probably got almost everything wrong but I hope you didn’t just hate this. vii For Eve viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Depressive Pedagogy……………………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter 1 Depressives are Dense……………………………………………………………………... 41 Chapter 2 Depressives Make Scenes…………………………………………………………………… 80 Chapter 3 Depressives Take Things Personally…………………………………………………......... 121 Chapter 4 Depressives Brood…………………………………………………………………………… 166 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………… 207 1 INTRODUCTION Depressive Pedagogy The depressive creates other depressives by repeating the relationship which created his own character. —Silvan Tomkins To me, though, apparently a vision of non-karmic possibility, however subject to abuse, at least opens a window to give air and light onto scenes of depressive pedagogy. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Sometime in the middle of my graduate studies, I was talking with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I don’t remember the content of our conversation—I had long since learned that the ostensible reason for being there (i.e., to discuss a literary or theoretical text, to assist in some small research task, or, more often than not, to share whatever big or small things were going on in each of our lives) mattered little compared with the simple fact of being in the room with her—but I do recall that at the time I was taking class with queer theorist José Muñoz. After patiently listening to me go on and on about something equal parts mundane and monumental, Sedgwick startled with a haiku of sorts. “You know,” she enthused, “I was José’s teacher back at Duke. So not only Am I your mother I am Your grandmother too.” 2 I have been brooding a lot over Sedgwick’s words since her passing in 2009. No doubt, the reasons are complicated and varied—for instance, I find myself transfixed by its efficacious wrapping of maternal assurance with Little Red Riding Hood threat—but among the many things I want that story to do is to show myself as being loved by her; to install myself, however fleetingly and precariously, at the center of some queer family; and, most importantly, to revel in the thrill of mimicking her. What my story is really about is a kind of depressive pedagogy. My dissertation examines the relationship between depressiveness and pedagogy within the field of queer theory. Its main point of departure is Sedgwick’s provocatively titled essay “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading: You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” First appearing in the late nineties as an introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, and then later reprised in her 2003 book Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy, Sedgwick’s essay signaled what many saw as a move away from the field she helped found—queer theory—and into the burgeoning field of affect theory. In the essay, Sedgwick describes how “the hermeneutics of suspicion” has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences: “not surprisingly, the methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia” (Touching Feeling 125). Sedgwick is careful to distinguish between paranoid interpretative practices, on the one hand, and the diagnostic categories of schizophrenia and dementia (with their suggestion of delusionality and psychosis), on the other. She does so to make clear that the problem with practicing paranoid strategies is not that they may be wrong about what is going on in the world. In fact, they may know all too well the real, systematic violence that lies hidden within all sorts of institutions. Rather, paranoia “represents a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia 3 knows some things well and others poorly” (130). One thing paranoia knows poorly is how to deal with its own contingency. As Sedgwick demonstrates, the paranoid proclivities of current critical discourse have had the unintended consequence of replicating the same repressive structures these critical practices were meant to critique. Disturbed by the danger of present theory in general and queer theory in particular becoming increasingly numb to itself, Sedgwick turns to the theories of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and lesser known experimental psychologist Silvan Tomkins to articulate the assumptions, limitations