A review by whitehousedotcom
A Dialogue on Love by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

4.0

I was introduced to the legacy of EKS years after she passed. This is a temporal arrangement I think about frequently enough that it's become a piece of furniture in my cognitive space that, when it's time for theory to bear an affective load of sadness and mourning, I sit in. I don't feel bad about deifying her in this way--it seems plenty of others have beat me to it: she's the patron saint of all things warm and taken. She's an eminently personal scholar. I don't feel alone in boasting an intimate parasocial relationship with the idea of her. Not quite a celebrity, but someone that seems easy to care for and be cared by. Easy to imagine as our mother and child in another life (p.216), right?

I have an admittedly fraught relationship with confessional writing (self indulgent? yes. consumptive? yes. are these bad things? ???) but, oh, I'm not sure. A Dialogue on Love dodges these nested concerns, why? Does its dialogic format gleam honesty of its mutual construction of me, of it not merely being consumptive but reconstructive? Or is it because it takes therapy, a confessional practice, and turns it into an archival practice, an analytic project, collaborative and multivocal? I don't know. Maybe it's only the living's confessions that distress me. To know you are dying qualitatively changes the nature of confession: frankly, you won't have to live with yourself once inside out--but all of us who continually imagine her stolen warmth get to.

Thanks for the good company, Eve and Shannon.