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The Weather in Proust


Title The Weather in Proust
Writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Date 2025-07-11 19:19:01
Type pdf epub mobi doc fb2 audiobook kindle djvu ibooks
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Desciption

The Weather in Proust gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.


Review

A Buddhist reading of Proust's obsession with reincarnation, atmospheric disturbances, and the way he handles and textualizes refreshment and surprise; bringing Proust into dialogue with Cavafy's poetry to discuss the interplay between desire, pedagogy, and the act of writing; Sedgwick's assessment of queer theory today and an urge—knowing she was soon to die—for a reassessment of Hocquenghem's work; all of these pieces then hinge around the personal as revolutionary, making art as a means of leaving pieces of oneself behind, and how suffering, transcending, and becoming aware of one's limitations and one's own mortality all inform the act of reading and the theoretical scope of any given project. The last chapter, Sedgwick's personal reflections as her end grew nearer, is harrowing just as it is enlightening. The world has lost a pioneering and truly radical intellect.

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