Queer Theory 101: Paranoid and Reparative Reading

Time to turn on our thinking brains

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It’s one thing to think critically, it’s another to think critically about thinking critically. If that sounds a little redundant, let me bring in an expert on the topic. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 2002 book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity is a book about how to think, and about how to feel about what we think. Sedgwick envisions “a mind receptive to thoughts, able to nurture and connect them, and susceptible to happiness in their entertainment.” Thinking is fun!

The most famous essay in the book is “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in which Sedgwick explores the predominance of the paranoid perspective within critical thought. Reparative reading emerges as the alternative to paranoid reading, though Sedgwick rejects the dualism that would separate and oppose the two positions entirely. Nor is it the case that one practice is wholly negative and the other wholly positive, at least not in any definitive sense.

Sedgwick wants to complicate the supposedly primordial connection between queerness and paranoia that has long animated both psychoanalysis and queer theory. Freud traced paranoia back to the repression of same-sex desire, and it later became one of the practices of antihomophobic theory in the 1980s. Sedgwick also examines the norms of literary critique. She brings in Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” noting that this framework has become “by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself.” Sedgwick suggests that this critical turn “may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations” of a piece of knowledge.

Before we get into what it is exactly that Sedgwick means by “paranoid” and “reparative” readings, we have to look at the theorists she draws from – a practice necessary to understand any piece of dense, academic text. Sedgwick brings in Silvan Tomkins, a psychologist and one of the founders of affect theory. Tomkins defined affect as “amplified body energy,” involuntary bodily responses that produce emotion when combined with other personal and social factors. He distinguished between positive, negative, and neutral affects, and maintained that humans are motivated to maximize positive affects and minimize negative ones. 

Sedgwick also cites Melanie Klein, a child psychoanalyst and the primary architect of object relations theory. Klein distinguished between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The paranoid-schizoid position involves the infant separating objects into “good” and “bad” categories as a means to protect themselves and ward off anxiety. The depressive position is the subsequent developmental stage wherein the child begins to integrate these objects and understand that they can have both good and bad qualities. Sedgwick transports Klein’s theory from the realm of child psychology to the realm of epistemology (the study of knowledge), observing the utility of such positions in a new framework.

Sedgwick defines the paranoid position as a practice with distinct qualities. For Sedgwick, “paranoia is anticipatory,” which means it has an “aversion to surprise” and embodies a “unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance.” Paranoia works to prevent surprises, looking to know the future before it happens. It is also “reflexive and mimetic,” which means it can only be understood through imitation. Moreover, paranoia takes the position of “Anything you can do (to me) I can do first.” 

“Paranoia is a strong theory,” which Sedgwick takes from Tomkins. Per Tomkins, a strong theory “is capable of accounting for a wide spectrum of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source.” Thus, a strong theory is inherently reductive and broad. Paranoia is also a “theory of negative affects,” another notion proposed by Tomkins. Negative affect is opposed to positive affect, defined as “the anticipation of pain in one case, the provision of pleasure in the other.” Lastly, “paranoia places its faith in exposure,” believing that exposing the truth of knowledge will solve the problem. 

To put it more simply, a paranoid reading attempts to definitively understand and categorize a text, leaving little room for ambiguity. Following Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, the paranoid reading wants to define a text as good or bad, or, to use more modern language, problematic or progressive. Such impulses represent a defensive position, one that attempts to forestall threats. 

Despite her stated commitment to nondualism, Sedgwick defines the reparative position as the antithesis of the paranoid one. While paranoia is a strong theory, reparation is a weak theory, which could include something like an “imaginative close reading.” While the paranoid position forecloses ambiguity, reparative reading welcomes it. The reparative reader is willing to accept surprise, and above all, maintains hope. Sedgwick writes: “Hope, often fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatitvely positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.” Reparative readings seek pleasure and work to replenish the self. 

Here we can rope Klein back into the discussion as we return to object theory. Per Klein, the reparative position stems from the depressive position which, as you may recall, integrates objects and begins to understand them as both good and bad. In her book On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson describes reparation as “something felt and enacted by a child when she fears she has damaged a love object (usually, a mother) and subsequently feels the need to restore and protect it.” For Sedgwick, the reparative impulse “wants to assemble and confer plentitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.” It pursues nourishment for a not-yet-whole self.

Sedgwick reexamines the notion that there is an inherent connection between paranoia and queerness, suggesting that reparative practices are just as if not more queer-oriented. The paranoid temporality depends on generational repetition, the idea that what has happened to one’s family in the past will continue to happen in the future – thwarting any expansive sort of futurity. Sedgwick argues that this framework doesn’t mesh with the productive impulses of queerness. She writes: “But isn’t a feature of queer possibility […] that our generational relations don’t always proceed in this lockstep?” Indeed, Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer time teaches us about the exciting possibilities of non-normative timelines. 

Sedgwick also questions the assumption that camp is a paranoid practice, presumably defined by its problematizing critique of dominant culture (a critique sometimes viewed as an indictment of such culture). Instead, Sedgwick claims that camp is better defined as “the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices.” These camp traditions are additive rather than subtractive. Sedgwick contends that the message of the reparative position is this: “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” 

Still struggling to wade through the ideological density? Don’t fret. Let’s return to what Sedgwick says in the introduction about thinking about how to think, and the pleasure we can find in mulling things over. The theory of paranoid and reparative readings can be applied to any number of texts, from visual art, to pop culture, to literary history. Sedgwick proposes that we consider how our reactions to such texts might fall under one – or both – of these frameworks. Are we reading something from a defensive position, reducing its meaning to a broad essence, or are we searching for joy and surprise?

This is not an either/or, good/bad paradigm. A paranoid reading does not always mean tearing something down, and reparative readings are not always produced with the best of intentions. In a sense, all of Sedgwick’s readings of the texts she cites exemplify this reparative practice, as she engages with these ideas with an acute sense of hope. Sedgwick is hopeful that we can engage with the objects around us in ways that sustain and nourish us, despite whatever context they were produced in. Using your brain should feel good, after all.