The arc of this book has moved from exploring the necessary failure of faith to the question of our accountability for infidelities that we cannot avoid. By way of conclusion, I consider what the theological structure I have been examining has to tell us about the relation among our intellectual, professional, political, and personal investments as writers and teachers.
It will hardly come as a surprise to most readers that academia is premised on the imperative to commit. Like heterosexuality or marriage, commitment to a field is a compulsory structure disguised as a voluntary, even romantic or passionate, one—indeed, the fact that we are allowed to choose any field at all when we enter graduate school should mean that we do what we do because we love it. We are drawn to a particular period, method, theory, author, genre, language, or national tradition by an excitement, an attraction, an absorption that cannot be calculated or rationalized. But, like fidelity to most things, fidelity to a field eventually becomes its own justification. The further we progress in our educations and, if we are lucky, careers, the harder it becomes to extricate ourselves from a commitment that we make and renew as we write graduate school application statements, enroll in seminars, compose exam lists, select dissertation committees, attend conferences, apply for jobs, teach courses, write articles and books, and serve on exam, dissertation, and professional committees. We prove that our heart is really in this commitment by absorbing ourselves in the primary and secondary material that makes up a given field, and by documenting this absorption in writing that shows how deeply and seriously we have thought about our objects of study. Our inevitable failure to be committed enough awaits exposure by that ubiquitous question at conferences and in reviews: “But what about—?” Latent in queries or critiques regarding what we haven’t included (the materials we neglected to cite, the debates and histories we abridge, the scholarly debts we fail to acknowledge or even realize we owe) is the charge that we have been glib, sloppy, arrogant, or pretentious—that we have written in bad faith. Local sins of omission are symptomatic of the original scholarly sin: lack of care, in the senses of both rigor and love. (And these are not always empty allegations. In all honesty, who among us has not occasionally stood guilty as charged? And who among us has not felt so personally insulted by another’s inaccuracy or imprecision that we’ve itched to cast the first stone?)
In fact, the Pauline distinction between spirit and letter, selfless love and meretricious work, might be in the DNA of academic culture. So might its corollary: that we do truly good work only when we do it for the right reasons. This structural affinity should not be surprising, given the historical formation of the Western university. Medieval universities were institutions of papal Christendom; nearly all of the US liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities now seen as bastions of secular liberalism began as explicitly Protestant establishments.1 Matthew Arnold’s replacement theory, in which love of literature comes to fill the role of religion in modern society, is still felt in the conviction that scholarship should be a higher calling, the more averse to grubby professionalism the better.2 Stanley Fish noted decades ago that “far from being a stance taken at the margins or the periphery, anti-professionalism is the very center of the professional ethos.”3 As Bruce Robbins parses this stance, “You have to attack the profession in order to assert your own freedom vis-à-vis the profession. And in so doing, you are asserting the ideology of professionalism: freedom, merit, etc.”4 Such freedom is expressed in heartfelt attachment, whether that takes the form of thrilling to the wondrous language of The Canterbury Tales or Finnegan’s Wake; fascination with the material history of ink, paper, manuscripts, and print; enthusiasm about the brave new world of the digital humanities; or dedication to contesting the myriad violences of class, race, gender, and sexuality. The bottom line is that the true scholar cares about something beyond getting and keeping a job.
The premium placed on attachment and authenticity, paradoxically, militates against questioning field boundaries or working between fields. This is in part because “field” is defined above all in terms of historical division. Historical periods, aptly deemed “nineteenth-century confections” by Carla Freccero, initially arose to shore up the prestige of literary study, underscoring literature’s unique ability to bring bygone eras to life.5 Tracing this institutional history, Ted Underwood remarks that despite the fact that “different theoretical schools have defined the purpose of literary study in fundamentally different ways,” the “organizing grid” of historical periods has survived “repeated, sweeping transformation” of the content—the canons and approaches—of any given period.6 Eric Hayot argues that the powerful influence of New Historicism on the profession from the 1980s on further
inculcated a strong unstated theory of era as the final goal and subtending force of the intimacies of literary criticism, fixing at the ideological level a powerful theory of periods as social formations. This dominant, new-ish historicism requires a vast expansion of the material necessary to master a single period, and, correspondingly, an increase in the force of institutional and intellectual barriers between periods, since crossing them now requires a level of understanding of more than one period as a self-contained whole that cannot be easily acquired.7
This is not all bad. Period-specific studies have vastly expanded our knowledge of the complexity of the past and made us aware of how much we don’t know; they are indispensable in many respects. But the premium we place on commitment also keeps us in our places, making work that strays across different periods the exception to the professional rule rather than creating broadly applicable patterns for alternative scholarly practices and networks. Along with the examples of scholars not trained in Renaissance studies who have analyzed that period’s poetry and whom I mentioned in this book’s introduction—Eve Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, Fred Moten—we might think of the many early modernists who have written extensively across historical periods and the national traditions so often attached to them.8
Curiously, fields defined by theoretical perspectives might be more invested in periodization than those organized by historical period. This is surprising, given that borders between periods would seem to protect claims to historical, not theoretical, expertise. But, to take an example close to my own heart, those familiar with recent early modern disputes about the relation between queer and historicist methods of reading will testify that something different has happened. Debates have waxed polemic, and approaches and styles remain quite different (which can be a good thing, as I have argued elsewhere).9 Nonetheless, early modern scholars have generally concurred in questioning an institutionalization of queer theory that places, in Valerie Traub’s words, “a growing emphasis on the cultural productions of the last century and current moment” with the result that “these temporal frames become the occasion for theory, while everything prior to the twentieth century increasingly is positioned as simply history.”10 Indeed, early modern studies as a field has generally been more hospitable to queer theory than vice versa. As Madhavi Menon points out, while a number of early modernists engage with queer theory that analyzes twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and culture, “the theoretical traffic cannot move in both directions, because queerness—here conflated with homosexuality—is a post-nineteenth-century phenomenon.” What Menon says of Shakespeare is often true of the conventional perception of premodern materials more generally: “To extend queerness to him is to play fast and loose with academic credibility.”11
This credibility, I would add, is not only about expertise, or even about investment in succession narratives of queer identity. It is also about an ideal of political engagement that must be focused on the present moment, which marks interest in premodern materials as, in Menon’s words, a “turn away from queer theory.”12 Robyn Wiegman explains it succinctly when she describes the “twin senses” of professional mastery as, first, “the mastery of a field, which includes its critical vocabularies, debates, arguments, impasses, and contexts,” and, second, “the mastery of the political subjectivity that is projected onto, sought, and cultivated within the field.”13 The political subjectivity of queer theory is often imagined as profoundly different from that of early modern studies. This distinction partakes of a logic of progress and commitment whereby to turn one’s attention to premodern, presecular literature and culture is also to indulge an impulse that is at best antiquarian, at worst politically complacent, to divide one’s attention and loyalties between a past we can only study and a present we can change. Consequently, queer theory as an administrative object of academic teaching and publication tends to reinforce institutional protocols that emphasize the differences between eras and that assign value and relevance in proportion to proximity to the present. Such logic, as Carolyn Dinshaw points out, is not limited to literary studies, but shapes university structures in which “‘hard’ sciences (and ‘harder’ social sciences) continue to be generally cordoned off from other disciplines both intellectually and fiscally” on the grounds that they have immediate and urgent relevance to lives lived now.14 What Margreta de Grazia has written about periodization provides a more general description of the premium placed on innovation and demonstrable outcomes in the modern university: the distinction of dead past from living present “works less as a historical marker than a massive value judgment, determining what matters and what does not.”15 Periodization, in Kathleen Davis’s assessment, is itself a “political technique” that validates particular interests and practices.16
One way to think beyond this correlation between periodization and political subjectivity has been proposed by scholars who have endorsed modes of reading variously called “reparative,” “uncritical,” “surface,” “descriptive,” “amateur,” “postcritical,” or “hopeful.”17 The most cited instance of this perspective is Eve Sedgwick’s endorsement of reparative reading as a relation to our objects that allows for attachment, vulnerability, and surprise in place of the mastery and distance of the “paranoid” style. Personally, I’m not willing to let go of critique and suspicion entirely (indeed, many of my readings in this book have refused the distinction between surface and symptom, form and content). And I recognize that, as Tim Dean drolly comments, “the reparative often seems a little too convenient as an alibi for masking or denying professional aggressivity” or for warding off criticism of one’s own scholarly shortcomings.18 Still, in this book I have largely sought to practice precisely the openness and amateurism that these theories of reading, along with the critical analyses of modern secularism and science, endorse. Reparative or postcritical reading refuses the “buffered” sense of self that Charles Taylor sees as a product of secular modernity. Insofar as we are buffered, we are “not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers”; we also “have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering.”19 Taylor, with his talk of God and religion, has not had a major influence on discussions of reading, but Bruno Latour, another skeptic about secularism, has. Latour notoriously insists that we have never been modern—that is, we have never achieved the cordoning off of mind from world, nature from science, subject from object attributed to modern disenchantment—and maintains that we must resist claiming agency and objectivity in favor of contemplating interactions and networks of variously animate objects.20 Jane Bennett, likewise, defines “vitality” as “the capacity of things . . . not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”21 Bringing this new materialist work in conversation with the reparative turn, Rita Felski proposes that we treat texts as actors that can affect and change us, forging “cross-temporal networks” that “force us to acknowledge affinity and proximity as well as difference, to grapple with the coevalness and connectedness of past and present.”22 Rather than rely on historical context as the exclusive, or even primary, source of texts’ meaning and therefore “stressing their otherness, autonomy, nontransferability,” Felski urges us to “point out their portability, mobility, and translatability.”23 Such strategic anachronism can permit the past to attune us to, in Peter Coviello’s words, “a scene of broken-off futures, of possibilities skewed toward inarticulacy by time’s unfolding,” which can alter our current political subjectivities.24
In arguing that the presecular past may have agency and significance in the postsecular present, I have taken particular inspiration from the work of medievalists and early modernists who show that valuing attachment and identification could challenge periodization as the ultimate horizon of scholarly commitment. Focused on premodern materials, acknowledging felt connections with writers whom they might not like if they met them on the street now—Dinshaw’s connection, for instance, with the histrionic medieval Jesus freak Margery Kempe—these scholars model an approach to the past in terms of attraction and fantasy rather than identity or difference, alliance or opposition.25 This work has also shown how failures of easy comprehension and identification may tell us a lot about ourselves, our desires, our practices: the past, Traub rightly insists, may perform the role of analyst as well as analysand.26 Taking this insight seriously, I have sought to work through what the presecular perspectives of theologians and poets long past can tell us about the promiscuous tangle of desires and convictions that motivates our erotic, political, and scholarly ways of being.
Queer Faith has been an amateur act, though not quite in the sense that Dinshaw so movingly describes. When I began what I thought would be a project on feminism, queer theory, and love poetry, I did not expect also to write a book about theology, a field in which I feel myself very much an outsider and an amateur. But the structural affinities I kept seeing between religious and secular theories of desire and subjectivity, along with a certain imp of the perverse, ultimately compelled me to think systematically about the translatability of religious writing to queer theory. Having initially been so doubtful myself, it is odd to be in the position of trying to persuade readers from a range of fields—queer theorists, critical race scholars, early modern critics, and theologians—that my promiscuous readings across time and tradition might be productive or pleasurable. In short, this book, like all scholarship, has been a leap of a faith: we both hope and fear that someone will read our imperfect offerings, and we know that the meanings and the uses of our words are not ours to control. Yet, as Edmund Spenser’s valediction “Go, little book . . .” captured so well over four hundred years ago, we nonetheless nudge these parts of ourselves out into the world, inviting the promiscuous entanglements by which we strive to convert our readers—and through which we become other to ourselves.