Reading with care

“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory.  The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions.  How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment  of the past that it no longer is?  And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”

-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke.  Pgs 117-8.)