ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 concerns the effort to imagine a contingent, ephemeral time as opposed to ordinary “clock-time” in H.D.’s memoir Tribute to Freud (1956) and in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument for an affectively rich, more surprising form of queer praxis in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (1997). While both projects prove unsustainable, they represent significant efforts to resist determinism and metanarrative, and to think with and through the impossibility that is contingency. When distinctions between ephemeral time and clock-time collapse, discourses of queer time are revealed as contextual—that is, “historically contingent” in the strongest sense of the term.
