Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

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Duke University Press, Jan 17, 2003 - Health & Fitness - 195 pages
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.

 

Contents

SHAME THEATRICALITY AND QUEER PERFORMATIVITY HENRY JAMESS The Art of the Novel
35
AROUND THE PERFORMATIVE PERIPERFORMATIVE VICINITIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY NARRATIVE
67
SHAME IN THE CYBERNETIC FOLD READING SILVAN TOMKINS
93
PARANOID READING AND REPARATIVE READING OR YOURE SO PARANOID YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT YOU
123
PEDAGOGY OF BUDDHISM
153
WORKS CITED
183
INDEX
189
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Page 10 - But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.

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