Denneny's Eulogies

Yichus and Leather

By way of bringing the past several weeks of posts about Michael Denneny to an end—having I hope convinced some of you that he’s a thinker worthy of interest and attention, whose legacy still offers exciting alternatives to stale ways of thinking gay (and straight!) politics and culture—I want to look briefly at a couple of eulogies he gave, with the idea that the way he talked about dead friends and mentors might be the way he’d want to be talked about himself (I’ll be, in the coming months, at work on a few essays for other publications on Denneny—and on a book proposal about him and Arendt; wish me luck!).

First, for Harold Rosenberg (1979). Denneny emphasizes, in praise of his teacher, that thinking and talking (as matters of taste) call on and create more than theory—they reflect and make character. The point of intellectual conversation is, with delight, to direct attention to examples, such that in examining and talking about them with each other, we become ourselves exemplary. He added, after typing the speech, perhaps a last-minute thought—Harold Rosenberg had yichus. Rosenberg of course didn’t come from any intellectual lineage; perhaps Denneny meant rather that his echoing voice, inciting students and other remembers to keep thinking and talking, carries its own tradition (Rosenberg, after all, was the coiner of the ironic term about the history of modern art that its avant-garde had founded a tradition of the new).

Denneny makes much the same point in his eulogy (1994) for John Preston, a writer mostly of gay pornographic stories and novels, whom Denneny sees not only as a personal friend, but as a tradition-bearing figure who made—and this is what Denneny told us in his dissertation we should do—talk about pleasures with his fellows into a world enduring against catastrophic blows of history and nature.

victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni