Object-Love in the Later Writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This chapter focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s little-known breast cancer advice column, “Off My Chest,” which she wrote from 1998 to 2003 for MAMM, a women’s cancer magazine, and A Dialogue on Love, a memoir of her therapy that records her struggle with her cancer diagnosis and metastasis. The chapter argues that Sedgwick’s journalistic and experimental writing circulates a public discourse of love that mediates her relationship to her own mortality. Sedgwick sets herself up as an object for collective identification. By disseminating pieces of herself in published works she strives to serve as an instrument for “good pedagogy” to counter the “bad pedagogy” of the cancer establishment. Influenced by Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation, which she regards as another word for love, she offers a Buddhist inflected teaching that recognizes life as an ongoing collaborative project sustained through the anonymous and impersonal love of readers she has never met, but who survive her death.