in hysterics

found this just now. also see THIS piece, just written by a friend of Sedgwick’s.

Judith Butler on Eve Sedgwick

- What is, in your opinion, the importance of [Sedgwick's book] Epistemology of the Closet?

J.B. : The Epistemology of the Closet was the breakthrough text of queer theory and has instituted lasting effects on literary reading and queer practices within and outside the academy.  Sedgwick allowed us to think about the tensions that exist between “identities” and “acts” and also encouraged us to consider the powerful effects of silence even as we affirm public acts of coming out.  She gave us a way of understanding desire as it crosses identifications and bodies, and allowed us to see a way of reading some of the most important modernist literary texts that brings to the fore the intense preoccupation with queerness that runs through its languages.  She also offered a way to think about the vibrant connections between academic and activist work.

- What have been the interactions (or dialogue) between your thought and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s works?

J.B. : I think perhaps at first we took each other by surprise, since her Epistemology of the Closet was in press when Gender Trouble was published. So we had different perspectives, mainly because I was formed in philosophy, and she was an extremely fine reader of literary texts.  I think we both agreed that simple notions of identity could not form the basis for a robust politics, especially when AIDS became the focus of queer politics in the US.  We were both interested in performativity, but she explored domains of affect that were not at the center of my own thinking.  Perhaps my early version of performativity was construed as “agency” in a way that missed some of the important dimensions of “misfire” in Austin.  If we had differences, it was probably over language and disciplinary formation. But I had every confidence that on political matters, we would put our bodies on the same line.

- How has “Queer theory” redefined Theory and Politics?

J.B. : I think the very thought that sexuality is theoretical, that it has always been at work in theory, that it requires its own theory, is still contested.  Of course, there are always normative views of sexuality that are presupposed in many theories, but what does it mean to have a theory of the anti-normative or the counter-normative?  And what does it mean to have a theory in which, at the heart of the normative, one finds a certain failure, weakness, faillibility.  To have a theory of sexuality is no longer to treat sexuality as the taken for granted; it is also no longer to take it as too unimportant for the matter of theory. That latter position undertakes a disavowal that itself has to be theorized.  Theory is a way of exploring the possible, and sexuality is certainly a domain whose possibilities have remained unthought, unthinkable, in a great deal of so-called theory.

From Mediapart