Mind the Gap
In her hommage to Michael Lynch ("White Glasses") Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick invokes gaps twice
the opacity loss installs within ourselves and our vision, the unreconciled and irreconcilably incendiary emerges streaming through that subtractive gap, that ragged scar of meaning, regard, address.Across the length of the whole book (Tendencies), it is worth coming back to the introduction ("Queer and Now") and the section under the heading "Thought as Privilege" for it provides content to the activities that arise out of the gap/crack.
And across the ontological crack between the living and the dead.
[our emphasis]
What the American intellectual right has added to this hackneyed populist semiotic of ressentiment is an iridescent oilslick of elitist self-regard. Trying to revoke every available cognitive and institutional affordance for reflection, speculation, experimentation, contradiction, embroidery, daring, textual aggression, textual delight, double entendre, close reading, free association, wit — the family of creative activities that might, for purposes of brevity, more dimply be called thought — they yet stake their claim as the only inheritors, defenders, and dispensers of a luscious heritage of thought that most of them would allow to be read only in the dead light of its pieties and exclusiveness.What I find admirable is that in the midst of polemic there is a solid defense of the diversity of intellectual activity. The attack is a celebration. The astounding enumeration is short list to issue out of the mindful gap over passages bookish and otherwise.
And so for day 1680
20.07.2011
