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Finding Nourishment vs. Identifying Poison

Finding Nourishment vs. Identifying Poison

Section titled “Finding Nourishment vs. Identifying Poison”

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  • A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.
  • “Anyone who’s spent time on the internet in the past few years will recognise how it feels to be caught up in paranoid reading,” Laing writes. The paranoid reader is all about “gathering information,” addicted to the idea that the “next click, the next link” that will bring clarity. But clarity never comes, because you can never, ever know enough to avoid danger and disaster.   Though paranoid readings can be enlightening and grimly revelatory, they also have a tendency to loop towards dead ends, tautology, recursion, to provide comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread, to prove what we already feared we knew. While helpful at explaining the state we’re in, they’re not so useful at envisaging ways out.