Virginia Jackson on the late Lauren Berlant, over at Critical Inquiry:
I. The Function of Criticism
In 2015, before she got sick and after they turned down an offer from my university, I wrote an essay about Lauren’s work and what it meant to me.
That essay was a poor rehearsal for an elegy, since all I was mourning then was the chance to have them as a colleague, the missed opportunity to have her close. I never imagined a world without her; instead, I selfishly and grandiosely thought that we could create a world together, and then I missed that fantasy world when it did not happen (they would have had a lot to say about that). I see now (as I think she saw then) that world would have been impossible, but that’s the kind of thing Lauren made you believe: that the sum of [nothing is impossible] + [everything is impossible] = {some things must actually be possible}. And they made you think that work—academic work!– could be a form of personally motivated communal expression, maybe even a way of making wishes come true. I needed that reassurance at the time (I still do), and maybe it is also reassuring to confess that Lauren answered that need, though honestly, I am embarrassed to write about my deep affection for and attachment to Lauren in Critical Inquiry, since such public testimony translates so immediately into cultural capital, given who Lauren was and will continue to become. They would have pointed that out, too. In fact, they would have said that may be all criticism ever is. Like that precarious sequence and like the pronouns in those sentences, my feelings then as now were and are a muddle of the personal and the professional: as everybody can’t seem to stop saying these days, in recent years, Lauren used “she” for personal stuff and “they” for professional stuff, but the problem with this separation is that she was terrible at telling the personal from the public, the personal from the professional, the personal from the academic, the personal from, well, anything. Whatever they did, there she was. Now that they are gone, and she is, too, I see that what I wrote six years ago didn’t even come close to measuring our loss.
Lauren was a public figure, so of course they had a mediated life that was very different than her life with her cats and Ian. That’s not what I’m saying. I was not one of her best friends, though I loved her dearly, but probably like a lot of people, what I loved most was their work.
More here.