A Dialogue on Love
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In 1991, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book A Dialogue on Love. Sedgwick recounts the therapy she undergoes for her feelings toward death, her depression, and her gender uncertainty following her mastectomy and during chemotherapy. The books weaves back and forth uncertainly between poetry and prose as well as between Sedgwick’s own words and her therapist’s notes. While the title does resonate with the idea of the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by James Merrill’s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of persiflage known as haibun. Sedgwick uses the form of an extended, double-voiced haibun to think about the many different possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting, especially those that offer alternatives to Lacanian-inflected psychoanalysis and new ways for thinking about sexuality, familial relations, pedagogy, asthma, and love. The book also reveals Sedgwick's growing interest in Buddhist thought, textiles, and texture.
