EVE SEDGWICK’S “OTHER MATERIALS”

Abstract

“Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Other Materials’” refers to a graduate seminar that Sedgwick offered at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials.” As its title suggests, her seminar advanced Sedgwick’s enduring “FASCINATION” with “MAKING UNSPEAKING OBJECTS” of all sorts, which elsewhere included the body’s organic and inorganic waste. Taking a cue from her teaching, I suggest that, while critics have extensively detailed Sedgwick’s contributions to literary interpretation, sexuality, gender, affect, and performativity, we should also appreciate her writings as theorizing queer material relations. This observation is pertinent given her rethinking of psychodynamic object relations theory alongside her creative writings on “THE WASTE PRODUCTS,” or the matter we ceaselessly produce. My argument thus anchors its claims in a close non-Kleinian reading of her poem “Bathroom Song,” which also offers an unforeseen take on paranoid and reparative idioms of psycho-material being. How waste matter facilitates this unanticipated insight is one of my essay’s – and Sedgwick’s – subsidiary concerns.

Keywords:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; queerness
• object relations
• materiality
• material culture
• waste

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Online records document that Sedgwick offered this class in the spring semester of 2004 and the semester of 2008.

2 This is not to neglect her earlier interests in material objects. See her extended discussion of kitsch in Epistemology (155–56) and her moving account of her close friend Michael Lynch’s eyewear in Tendencies (252–66).

3 Besides Edwards, other thinkers on this front include Wiegman on “the socially ignored topic of female anal eroticism” (“Eve” 169); Berlant, “Eve”; Bond Stockton, 15–17; Bora on “the wonders of digestive, anal, and fecal pleasures” (95); Bersani on “cultural droppings” (Homos 181); Dean’s psychoanalytic observation confirming that “the phallus is less a figure for the penis than, more fundamentally, a figure for the turd” (266); and Reid-Pharr on “our dirty prehistory” (409).

4 Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first “gift”: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment, and, by withholding them, his disobedience. From being a “gift” they later come to acquire the meaning of “baby.” (52)

5 In a 1920 footnote on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s theorizations, Freud writes:

the prohibition against getting pleasure from anal activity and its products – has a decisive effect on his whole development. This must be the first occasion on which the infant has a glimpse of an environment hostile to his instinctual impulses, on which he learns to separate his own identity from this alien one and on which he carries out the first “repression” of his possibilities for pleasure. From that time on, what is “anal” remains the symbol of everything that is excluded and repudiated from life. (Three Essays 53)

6 Within this ur-scene, writes Jean-Michel Petot,

anal aggression is aimed not so much at the feces as objects to be expelled as at objects – in the first instance the mother’s body – which are attacked in these fantasies by means of the feces, identified with dangerous substances. (153)

7 Or, as Katherine Hawkins puts it, this is “a practice that teaches us to detach love from individual objects and, through creative work, to restore its generality to the universal spirit (l’esprit universel)” (279).

8 I’m deeply influenced here, as I have been elsewhere, by Bill Brown’s thinking on what he terms “object relations in an expanded field.”

9 Given this formulation, Sedgwick clearly anticipates queer scholarship on craft work. See Cvetkovich 168, 188; and Vaccaro.

10 In her contribution to the edited collection Regarding Sedgwick, Miller lovingly details “the craft of weaving and the practice of Buddhism” (221) as they informed Sedgwick’s tenure at the CUNY Graduate Center. See also Cohen; and Edwards 132–34.

11 For more on the blurring between the paranoid-schizoid and the reparative, see Huffer, who elegantly writes in a Foucauldian reading of Sedgwick that “the antagonistic dualisms of the mise en abyme – Foucault versus Sedgwick, paranoid versus reparative – begin to collapse in on themselves, as lovers who have been fighting often do” (39); and Hanson.

12 Wiegman gets to the heart of this matter in a recent essay: “As I read it, the problem [Sedgwick] tracks in the literary humanities throughout the 1990s is the sheer impossibility of thinking otherwise” (“Times” 23). See also Love on how “reading her work tends to open up unexpected conceptual possibilities” (235).

13 Berlant elaborates this thought in Cruel Optimism: “I love the idea of reparative reading insofar as it is a practice of meticulous curiosity. But I also resist idealizing, even implicitly, any program of better thought or reading” (124).

14 Though these two theorists are often seen in respectful opposition, there exist uncanny parallels between Bersani’s theorization of “impersonal intimacy” and Sedgwick’s notion of “the impersonal” (Bersani, Is the Rectum 60).

15 See also Edwards’s observation that “she does not have a natural facility or particularly high level of acquired skills as a textile artist, the question of her formal mastery was happily out of the question” (133).