Touching Feeling

Reviews / Votes

"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes with intense precision, and yet her work directs us toward the domain where meaning is music, unquantifiable, enigmatic, nonlinguistic. If the performative speech act, with all its relation to norms and laws, is central to the reception of her work in queer theory, then the performativity of knowledge beyond speech-aesthetic, bodily, affective-is its real topic."-Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City "Fifteen years after publication, and nine years after the death of its author, Touching Feeling stands out. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book defined subjects, keywords, and literary-critical ambitions that dominated discussion in English departments thereafter. Whether she set the future on this path or was superbly in tune with the contemporary mood is unclear." - Mark Greif (Chronicle of Higher Education) "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's gift is to electrify intellectual communities by reminding them that 'thought' has a temperature, a texture, and an erotics. With a generosity that is at once self-abnegatingly ascetic, and gorgeously, exhibitionistically bravura, she opens door after door onto undiscovered fields of inquiry. There are too many high points in Touching Feeling for me to list them. Sedgwick's language, richly garlanded, syntactically showstopping, gives, everywhere, its characteristic, always surprising pleasure."-Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Andy Warhol "[Sedgwick's] ideas about the structures of desire between men in fiction have generated critical work for others, as her theories are put to work in rereadings of authors, texts, genres and periods. Any critic who so successfully challenges the fundamental terms of the discipline, and opens up new subjects for others to write and publish about, deserves fame and distinction. Moreover, Sedgwick's courage in speaking openly about her illness and about aspects of her self that most academic women would keep private, including being fat, is very moving." - Elaine Showalter (London Review of Books) "[Sedgwick's] miraculous prose keeps ideas and attitudes in play that would collapse into contradiction or program in a lesser writer. . . . In the era of queer theory, Sedgwick's miraculating writing keeps open a sense of sexuality as not binarized, neither only instrumental nor irreducibly conflictual, even when she is most passionately engaged in the work of advocacy. Today, writing through and after "queer" in a landscape of political impoverishment, Sedgwick's thought and writing function, as she would say, as a kind of semaphore: There is More Than This. I think we need her writing more than ever." - Christopher Nealon (American Literature) "Fearless, challenging and occasionally exhilarating, Sedgwick remains one of the most courageous critics around." (Publishers Weekly)