Against Paranoid Reading
by Jennie Rose Halperin
“What does knowledge do—” asked feminist scholar Eve Sedgwick in her 1997 essay, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You; “the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?”
Sedgwick’s essay is about the origin or spread of HIV, and it asks what the ultimate usefulness of such knowledge might or might not be. This question is relevant to the current flavor of American paranoia surrounding everything from the origin of Covid to the behavior of murdered protesters in Minneapolis. In the essay, Sedgwick asks what “knowing” even is, or what it changes—and how can that knowledge be couched in reparative justice, rather than in vindictive paranoia?
Sedgwick’s conceptual framework of “paranoid reading” always stems from a negative place, with a pre-installed objective of uncovering ill intent; it places its faith in exposure, and lays “extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se.”
Though densely written in 1990s academese, Sedgwick’s essay remains remarkably prescient. Even as real reasons for distrust—in government, in media, in science and in medicine—have multiplied, Sedgwick’s “enlightened false consciousness” of the paranoid has filtered through nearly every aspect of American life.
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