To theorize out of anything but a paranoid, critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant. [Unfortunately] A monopolistic strategy of anticipating negative affect can have according to [Jane] Tomkins, the effect of entirely blocking the potential operative goal of seeking positive affect….[;] The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any recourse to reparative motives…. Reparative motives, once they become explicit are, are inadmissible in paranoid theory… because they are frankly ameliorative (“merely reformist”)….
p.126, 136, 144
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
