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Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. By EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. 195. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
I was under the influence of Eve Sedgwick whose instruction, as any of her fstudents will report, is the most potent of all aphrodisiacs.
-Rafael Campo, The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
Eve Sedgwick is one of the most amazing scholars of our time. Her erudition, brilliance, passion, and unusual combination of interests thrill. Sedgwick's latest book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, excites, demands, perplexes. One of the difficulties of Sedgwick's book is that she demands that readers begin thinking about "nondualistic thought and pedagogy" (1). To overcome binaries, the curse of Western culture, is not an easy task. Sedgwick's writing throws the reader into a state without dualisms, much like the unconscious. While turning the pages of Sedgwick's masterful book, one wonders whether one is reading or dreaming. The writing is terse, poetic, playful, brilliant, tough, eloquent, beautiful. But because so many ideas pour out at once, it is at times difficult to understand. As Sedgwick explains, the essays that comprise her book "explore a sense of exciting and so far unexhausted possibility-as well as frustration-stirred up by four difficult texts: J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, the introductory volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and the first three volumes of Silvan Tomkin's Affect Imagery Consciousness" (2). Although the book's structure is clear, the prose unsettles by its complexity, and pretty soon the reader gets lost-in a good way-inside the difficult phenomenological world of affect. Most readers will feel that they have been thrown into a swirl of words, into a swirl of complexity.
One of the most interesting ideas Sedgwick introduces is that of the "beside" (8). Beside is a word that is between this and that. Hence, to be beside something is to escape the problem of duality. To be beside one's self is an emotional statement: I am beside myself, I am in a sense not-myself, but I am myself. This is perplexing. To be beside, to be in-a-state-of-beside, sets up the rest of the book as a beside. Sedgwick addresses...