fromOpenings: Some notes on the political in 'Drafts'
As my mentor, RBD instilled in me my suspicion of rhetoric. Now I tell my students simply this: Every poem fails, and that is why they all are generous gifts. For their failures open opportunities for our thinking. She may say she’s working on a beyond in between, but that’s only because she’s invested in seeing her poetics and politics as similarly invested in using that between to get outside. That is to say, her project is still one of liberation.[46] I’m just as much Foucault’s pupil as hers, though. Freedom need not be, in fact never can be, liberation. Foucault addresses this when speaking not about the second-wave feminism with which RBD was allied but instead about its sister movement, the movement that made my thought — indeed, my very life — possible: the American Gay Liberation movement.[47] It’s no exaggeration to say “my life.” If it were not for the GLF, the GAA (the Gay Activists Alliance), or later Queer Nation and ACT UP and GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), or any number of post-Stonewall movements and organizations, I surely would be dead by now, another statistic of a self-loathing gay suicide, a hunted down faggot loathed by the world, or another victim of the Plague. Yet, I also recognize politics’ limits. I do not believe in liberation or the thought of any outside, even if it is only an enclosed outside between two defined spaces. (Philosophy, like poetry and politics, does come down to an article of faith. The will to believe — William James here — depends on what we can believe, on what’s observed, studied, experienced.)
No comments:
Post a Comment