Huw Lemmey’s review of my book Joyspace (“Joyschtick,” #46/47) is a dazzling performance—clever, acerbic, and written with undeniable style. But, reader beware, its brilliance is bound up in a particular critical stance that privileges suspicion over possibility.
The influential queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay “Paranoid Reading,” analyzed this anxious mode as an Achilles’ heel of contemporary criticism that confuses bad news as consistently more rigorous than good, that vigilance and negation are themselves mistaken for critique. Paranoia, in the Freudian sense, where repression returns in the form of nervous anxiety, which, in the case of this review, buttresses its negativity and self-described confusion about Joyspace’s tone and content.
Joyspace, by contrast, is committed to what Sedgwick described as “reparative criticism”: making use of what is nourishing, artful, and even playful or provocative by experimenting with possibility amid crisis. Joyspace does not deny capital’s destructive pervasiveness—it begins with a Dickensian “best of time…
