Reviewed by: Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity Robert Sember (bio) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick . Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 195 pp. Hardcover, $69.95. Paperback, $18.95. Currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick began her academic career at Amherst College and then taught at Duke University in the late eighties and early nineties. During this time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using literary criticism to question dominant discourses of sexuality, race, gender, and even literature itself. Sedgwick first presented her particular collection of critical tools and interests in the dazzling and hugely influential volumes Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990). The latter work became one of gay and lesbian studies' and queer theory's founding texts. If one is familiar with these works, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, her latest book, will be a poignant reminder of those early days, which she discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions—chiefly the emotions provoked by the AIDS epidemic—that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principle theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action. Sedgwick's recollections of the early years of the AIDS epidemic underscore her observation that given "the strategic banalization of gay and lesbian politics . . . the moment may be past when theory was in a very productive relation to sexual activism" (13). In response to this state of affairs, she sets out in Touching Feeling to explore critical methods that may, once again, engage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. While this takes her into the familiar territory of sexual politics, she focuses on elements that appear, at first, to be unlikely tools or venues for either criticism or activism, including shame, paranoia, disavowal, and dying. The common thread to these topics is that they provide a trace of experience, a mechanism for recollection, and, consequently, an opening for analysis. An additional virtue is that they are unlikely to translate into [End Page 364] solid foundations for dogma or identity and will, therefore, keep us productively unsettled. Sedgwick draws on a wide array of texts in her investigations, but her primary interlocutor is the linguist J. L. Austin, author of How to Do Things with Words, the first sustained examination of the class of utterances known as "performatives." Austin defines performatives as language that constructs or affects reality rather than merely describing it, hence the title of his book. Among the utterances Austin examines are the "I do" (of the marriage ceremony), "I promise," and "I declare." Unlike other speech acts, performatives derive their impact from their utterance—their performance—rather than their reference to something outside themselves. Critical theorists, including Sedgwick, have devoted themselves to exposing the ideological force behind these utterances while doing things with words to affect reality and construct alternative ways of being. Thus, in Touching Feeling, Sedgwick both explores and employs the constructive potential of performatives while also revealing the histories and conditions that give them their power. In the opening paragraph, Sedgwick describes her project as the exploration of "promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy" (1). Her inspirations are twofold: first, the realization that escaping the self-reinforcing binary of repression and liberation requires thinking in some distinctively different ways about sexuality; and second, the Buddhist insight that perception "involves neither intrinsic identity nor a split between perceiver and perceived" (171). In her examination of these observations, she celebrates the capacity of performatives to shape reality while throwing into doubt their value for antiessentialist projects, which, lacking solid ground, often become trapped within the very discourses they hope to escape. Thus, while Sedgwick is clearly grounded in the techniques of critical theory, her deconstructive maneuvers are not intended to let things simply disappear into representation. In fact, it is the aporias of critical theory that interest her, the most notable of which is the radical challenge presented by death, particularly the real limits dead or dying matter...
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Oct 1, 2022
Brian V Sengdala 
Open Access