Epistemology of the Closet

It is safe to say that the closet is the cardinal symbol that populates and guides Sedgwick’s text as a whole. For Sedgwick the metaphor of the closet functions as a double-bind and a perpetual threat upon the lives of homosexuals. Sedgwick notes that “[...] every encounter with a new” social situation “erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics” necessitate “new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure” (68). In other words, it is constitutive of homosexual life that one’s “being out of the closet” does nothing to alleviate the potential of violence, harassment, or disenfranchisement of basic rights and services that are available to their heterosexual counter parts.

The figures of Billy Budd and Claggart, as explored by Sedgwick, become symbolic of a particular mode of relation that is at once politically charged and epistemologically relevant. For Sedgwick, the principal feature of Billy’s and Claggart’s relation is best captured by the way in which Billy’s many attempts at understanding who Claggart is and what his intentions are gives rise to a type of knowledge, the form of which is identical to the object that is under epistemic investigation. In other words, Billy’s many attempts only allow him to comprehend the moral character of Claggart as secretive, opaque, and ultimately, fundamentally unintelligible.