For Eve… (II)

Posted: April 19, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Personal, Philosophical | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I hadn’t read the essay “White Glasses” in Tendencies before she (EKS) died. In fact, I didn’t read it until today, five minutes before writing this post. “White Glasses” is a public talk and obituary to her friend, Michael Lynch, whom she had expected to die of AIDS before she delivered the talk at a conference at CUNY in May, 1991. He didn’t die until June. The talk is a not-quite-obituary that doubles (or multiplies) as a reflection on love, illness, death and identity. The paper has several different temporal dimensions that relate to life and death. When writing a paper for presentation the first thing you think of is how to make that intelligible for the audience. So, I guess, because she thought Michael was going to be dead by the time she was to present the paper, the first layer is in the temporality of retrospection: contemplative writing about the past. Her own diagnosis with Breast Cancer, which happens during the course of writing this paper, shifts her position on question of life and death again, and her own life-threatening sickness creates another temporal space within the essay. All this is compounded by the fact she had to redraft the paper just before the talk to include an address to the living-Michael, who didn’t die “in time” for the presentation. It is as though each redraft of her paper adds another quite visible temporal dimension of life and death in the story of “White Glasses”. This is, of course, made even more complex by my position as reader and the fact it is the first paper by Sedgwick that I have read since her death last week. And at my time of reading “White Glasses” both Michael Lynch and Eve Sedgwick are dead. 

I struggled, in my previous obituary post “For Eve…”, with how to memoralise or pay my respect to the person whose writing had such impact on my life, work and politics. The anxieties came from trying to avoid composing of a list of clichés in order to simply insert the name “Eve” amongst them and to complete the task of memorialisation: Eve was a hero in my eyes, Eve changed my life, Eve will not be forgotten. So, I went about memorialising by means of writing about who Eve was for me, rather than engaging in the act reificatory memorialisation itself. Reading “White Glasses” has helped me with understanding my process for mourning and memorialising Eve. “White Glasses” is a paper in classic Sedgwick style: a deftly complex blend of the personal, political and theoretical. Apart from the questions she generates about identity and illness across sexualities and across illnesses, she reminds me that the writing of a memorial or obituary is, indeed, easily classifiable as a performative speech act. And not even in the complex Butlerian sense where everything is performative, but in the traditional more particular Austinian sense – I, the speaking subject, memorialise – And the I (the speaking subject) does through the act of speaking (or writing) what the I says she is doing. The performative speech act is a double: it is both the words and the action. Therefore, I do, by whatever means I deem appropriate, hereby memorialise Eve!

I have a good example of how Eve helped me to understand performativity itself by appearing as a celophane-and-crepe-paper-clad Pope in a dream. But that’s a story for another time…

In the beginning I didn’t think my blog would even begin. Now my blog is 100% obituary to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Alleluia. 

 

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For Eve…

Posted: April 16, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Personal | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I don’t quite know how to ‘pay my respect’ to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who died on the 12th April, 2009 after a long illness. I never met her in person, we had a single email exchange and were friends on facebook. However, I have read most of her books and through my reading she transformed the way I think about the world. So, I actually feel like this death is the death of a friend.

How do you mourn this kind of loss which is both clearly abstract and actual at the same time.

Once upon a time Eve (and Adam [Frank]) asked the question, “What does it mean to fall in love with a writer?” I am not totally sure what it means, but I do think it suggests that as a reader we get involved in a relationship with the writing itself. Sometimes this relationship between reader and writer is nourishing in the way love can be. This is a strange phenomena because once on the page the words-as-objects don’t change. But, of course, as a reader (and re-reader) our experience with the words, our knowledge of the meaning of the words and our response to the words changes. Sometimes very little, sometimes quite a lot. Sedgwick was one of those writers that my relationship with her words changed quite a lot. While the content of her books hasn’t always been explicitly relevant to my research, Eve’s questions about the desire, literature, politics and people and her methodological approach to these things were a constant source of both intellectual and personal nourishment. 

In literary studies we frequently read dead scholars, philosophers, poets and authors, and the fantasy of meeting the “writer herself” only exists hypothetically at an ideal dinner party where guests can be invited from anywhere in history. So, falling in love with a writer that is alive has another dimension. The abstract idea of the person who produced such incredible writing in the world right now, walking, eating, sleeping, breathing, teaching, writing, reading. Reading the work of a critical thinker that is alive is different: the idea of the living writer suggests that these questions are current, they are being produced near to the time of my reading them, they don’t belong to a richer, more dynamic, intellectual arcadia of a time that has now passed. The work of a writer who is alive suggests that this current moment is just as interesting, complex, dynamic and intellectually rich. The context for that work is more or less the world out there, or the world of the recent past, and the stuff that is in it, stuff I might be able to see or touch. Eve gave me a way of thinking about my world as rich, dynamic, problematic, productive and creative. 

So, in falling in love with with a writer that is alive you run the risk of having to mourn their loss. And, that I will do for some time to come… Thanks Eve for your big brain and your generosity in providing the stuff of a relationship that I will never directly reciprocate. In my eyes you deserve to be cast in a precious metal and deified accordingly.

xx Jen

 

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