Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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An affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to experiences of cognitive frustration

I thought this was an incredible phrase from Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity describing the photo of the artist Judith Scott embracing her own work, which adorns the cover of the book:

I do feel close to Scott in that we evidently share a sensibility in which fibers and textures have particular value, relationally and somehow also ontologically. But in acknowledging the sense of tenderness toward a treasured gift that wants exploring, I suppose I also identify with the very expressive sadness and fatigue in this photograph. Probably one reason Scott’s picture was catalytic for this hard-to-articulate book: it conveys an affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to experiences of cognitive frustration. In writing this book I’ve continually felt pressed against the limits of my stupidity, even as I’ve felt the promising closeness of transmissible gifts.

If writing doesn’t leave us “pressed against the limits of [our] stupidity” in what sense are we really writing, as opposed to rehearsing our existing thoughts in words?

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