love (philos).
These correlative principles— that every singularity is a path to universality, but no particularity can own or identify itself with the universal as such—entail that diversity is necessary to knowledge production. Not as a matter of public relations or normative moralism, but because universalizing any particular position or life experience inevitably leads to omissions that must be continuously suppressed if that claim to universality is to be maintained. The resulting misrecognitions and misapplications impoverish any attempt to solve problems, mobilizing the resources of the ego to impede, rather than shepherd, the transformative work of learning.
This insight is tangible in Sedgwick’s treatment of “paranoid reading,” not as the essence or definitional principle of theory or criticism “as such,” but as a particular critical “position”—using the Kleinian sense of this latter term: “the characteristic posture that the ego takes up with respect to its objects.”45 In questioning paranoid reading’s project of exposure, Sedgwick seeks to expand the range of positions available to theorists beyond that of paranoia, rather than to disqualify any position. She is not questioning the utility of that project for some ends, but only the wisdom of universalizing any particular approach: “The force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context, like the one assumed in Foucault’s early works, in which violence would be deprecated and hence hidden in the first place.”46 As Sedgwick observes, this context differs from the era of Reaganism, what she calls the Reagan–Bush–Clinton–Bush America in which, “while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure,” the dominant culture is conditioned by “an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle.” From the Evil Empire’s nukes to Saddam’s WMD’s, from the shirtless suspects on Cops to Willie Horton, from “welfare queens” to casualties of AIDS, little effort is put into articulating pious concern for the victims blamed by a US government increasingly driven by neoliberal and neoconservative imperatives.
Of course, the neoliberal agenda of that period is well served by a phallic image of the state, as necessarily defined by domination or manipulative paternalism. And the inverse of the premise of phallic potency is the image of democratic governance as ineffectual, incompetent or impotent, which as much as the image of naked predation only reinforces a neoliberal “starve the beast” strategy. As a budgetary strategy, this starvation means first cutting taxes, so that spending restrictions can later be introduced as necessary to avoid deficit and debt—a strategy illustrated by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan musing, just after the 2017 tax cuts, about the need to cut Medicare and other social programs to address the budget deficit they had just enlarged.47 If we apply the same pattern to an electoral strategy, “starve the beast” would mean sowing mistrust of government, voter disengagement and disillusionment with the efficacy of electoral mechanisms of power. By undermining the legitimacy of democratic governance, one muffles the outcry that might otherwise follow restrictions on voting and other civil rights. In both its budgetary and its electoral forms, the monstrous state must be depicted as only capable of benefiting the bestial other, so that attacks on the state are attacks on the other. It would appear that this is the strategy pursued by the same partisan forces that support the tax cuts, and it is well supported by the strategy of division and voter suppression that US intelligence services and the Mueller Report have attributed to Putin’s efforts in the 2016 election.48
Putin’s reorientation of Russia’s burgeoning democracy into an oligarchic mafia state illustrates the benefits of undermining democratic legitimacy for those with corrupt agendas. As Russian information operations have illustrated, those who seek to undermine democratic governance encourage a definition of politics as pure antagonism, rather than as collective action in pursuit of a common good. Logically, the politics of antagonism is the politics of supremacy, because it rejects the necessary democratic principle of consent, which requires the state to serve all its citizens, not solely those who supported a given politician or party. This indifference to consent is common to patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism. It is also evident in both the old left paternalism of government as caretaker and the New Right notions of government as predator, because both definitions ignore or dismiss a key consequence of governance by consent: that such a principle makes the state, in principle, an instrument of the people’s self-governance, self-determination and self-care. Of course, this is not the government we have always had, and we have never had such a government entirely. But we have had such governance to some extent, in some times and places. That distance between democratic principles and historical democratic governance is what informs Masha Gessen’s description of democracy as “an aspirational ideal,” toward which a society progresses or does not.
By bringing together D. A. Miller’s anachronistic notion of the state with a discussion of conspiracy and systemic oppressions, Sedgwick’s essay dramatizes the consequences for interpretation of indifference to historical change and subject position. She describes Miller’s writing as a brilliant performance in emulation of Foucault’s characteristic concerns, but by relocating those themes in the United States of the eighties Miller produces an anachronistic exposure of the violence of paternalistic care in an era of neoliberal neglect, placing the state in the role of universal agent, rather than situated instrument. Disciplinary specialization, which presumes the development of a discourse that is either relatively or absolutely autonomous, here overlaps with the entailments of self-universalizing privilege to condition anachronisms and misrecognitions of the problems posed by one’s historical and political situation. And when literary studies neither produces profit nor contributes to solving social problems, what will be its constituency? And who will object to its demise?
Sedgwick illustrates the difference between the violence of state intervention and state neglect by describing Reagan’s attitude toward the AIDS epidemic. This difference is relevant even when they achieve the same ends: If Reagan had executed fifty thousand people whom his constituents’ Christian morality condemned as sinful, the action would have been condemned in the same terms as the state crimes that Orwell describes. But in allowing approximately that number to die of AIDS while he refused to even acknowledge the existence of the epidemic.49 Reagan could find cover in distraction, public inattention, or his own ideology of liberty as absence of state intervention.50 Reagan did not actively murder fifty thousand citizens, most of whom were gay men, and were therefore condemned by the particular strain of religious dogma he courted and encouraged. The evidence suggests that he merely allowed those fifty thousand humans to die, while taking no action at all.
Sedgwick’s account of the time shows that this distinction was not always clear, and that many who opposed Reagan were predisposed to understand his actions in the mold of state attack, rather than state neglect. In the eighties, Sedgwick recalls asking a friend about the idea that HIV was “deliberately engineered or spread” by the US government. Cindy Patton, a sociologist and a historian of AIDS, replied “I just have trouble getting interested in that.” In a nuanced and considered reply, Patton questions the utility of such suspicions to projects for change, ultimately rejecting the notion that conspiracy theories are helpful in pragmatically progressive efforts to solve the problem of the epidemic—efforts that Reagan’s administration should have been undertaking. Sedgwick acquits herself well in taking time to reflect on this response, which seems to pose a challenge to her worldview, rather than dismissing or attacking Patton’s response as insufficiently radical or oppositional. She reports that, having “brooded a lot over this response” in the years since, she has come to find it “enabling” and empowering.
When Sedgwick broached the possibility of a government conspiracy to spread HIV, “sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic,” Patton replied with a clear sense of the equivalent violence of state neglect and state attack. Conspiratorial speculation was uninteresting, Patton explained, because even if proven, it would add nothing to what she already knew:
that
