For those who haven’t heard, I have the sad news to share that Eve Sedgwick died yesterday. Although she taught at CUNY, I never got the chance to take a class with her. Nonetheless, I can only think of a few other writers who have impacted me as much as her. I read Between Men for the first time in my second year of college, and it changed everything about what I was studying, and more importantly, how I was studying. As I said to Dean earlier, I feel like that book and Epistemology of the Closet taught me how to think. I know so many people must be struggling with her passing, and I just want to add my small bit of grief and empathy to the collective mourning.
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I spent the past few days shunning my dissertation at the Awesome Farm work weekend. Awesome Farmers KayCee and Owen gathered a group of thirty or so friends and farm allies to work on a bunch of projects — sheep maintenance, field clearance, egg gathering, chicken coop construction, and of course, the much-loved lunch crew. I worked on coop construction, and let me just say, my entire body hurts. I’m wobbling around like a freshly-shorn lamb. You know how people will say something like, “I’m so sore, I hurt in muscles I never knew I had?” Well, I don’t even have the muscles I never knew I had, so I’m just in a generalized state of pain. But well worth it. It was an amazing time, and I greatly enjoyed the intensive hanging out with good friends and the chance to work with new people. I really like being part of a group effort, and I think what I lack in muscle mass I make up for with enthusiasm and cheering-along-ness. Having never been that into the usual objects of team spirit (like sports, or nation-states), I have a lot of stored up rah-rah to spare. If you live in the city, or the Hudson Valley, you can pre-order chicken and lamb from the farm’s website, and as Carla from Top Chef reminds us, nothing taste better than food made with love.
Foucault would be 82 today. It is hard not to regret all the pages he never got to write, but I also think his early departure lucked the rest of us into a special task — to keep revising his work in relation to the world of today, without him doing all the thinking for us. I can’t really come up with another recent writer whose work has been as influential and as reviled. I’m still amazed when sociologists dismiss his work (and those who use him) as “trendy” – forty years plus seems a bit long for a trend, no? But as Charles Tilly pointed out, the chances are good that work with the greatest impact on a field will likely receive the strongest opposition (h/t to WITW for reminding us of this).
In Foucault’s own words:
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ”politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
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