The weather in Proust

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan Goldberg (ed.) Duke UP (Series Q), Durham, NC, 2011, 240pp., $23.95, ISBN-13: 978-0822351580 (paperback)

Posthumously published in 2011, The Weather in Proust gathers together the late work – mostly unpublished talks and essays – of the eminent literary critic and leading figure in the development of queer theory Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The first of its three sections belongs to the work that Sedgwick was writing on Proust, mysticism and psychology at the time of her untimely death from cancer in 2009, and its five chapters provide a rich sense of what that book was to have been. The second section is comprised of three chapters in which she reflects on the present state of queer culture and thought. In the book’s third section, a single chapter titled “Reality and Realization,” Sedgwick expands on many of the themes – existential, mystical, and affective – that preoccupied her throughout this last period of her life. Famous for her heuristic practice of speaking in the first person singular as she broke through to new possibilities for intellectual life, and famous, as well, for her readings of literary texts, here, in her last work, Sedgwick presents an “I” who speaks with the same brilliance but now, provoked by the news of certain mortality, out of the need to practice emptiness and nonbeing creatively.

Beginning with a reading of the narrator’s remarkable relationship to atmosphere in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the chapters in the first section range from insightful reflections on the surprising appearance of “queer little gods” in Proust’s novel and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy to a rich meditation on Sedgwick’s own practices as a writer and artist. The section concludes with a powerful critique of cognitive science’s “theory of mind,” which Sedgwick develops through an exceptionally attentive and sympathetic interpretation of the affective experience of autism. What is striking in the selections in the second section of