The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Lorde's argument is easy to misquote and hard to actually hold. The erotic, for her, is not the pornographic — she draws the line explicitly. The pornographic is sensation without feeling; the erotic is the deepest measure of what we are capable of feeling, and therefore a source of knowledge about what is worth our lives. Once you have felt the fullness of that, she argues, you will not settle for the numbed, the merely adequate, the work that asks you to abandon yourself. The erotic becomes a standard.

What to attend to: the refusal to keep the erotic in the bedroom. Lorde moves it into work, friendship, politics, the act of writing itself — anywhere the question is whether you are fully present or going through the motions. Attend also to the prose's compression; this is a poet writing theory, and the sentences are built to be returned to. *Your silence will not protect you* is from the same body of work, and it is the same argument from a different angle: the cost of the unspoken.

In Vela's reading this is the keystone of the erotic-as-power lineage. The Nin collections work the question out in literary form, Maggie Nelson works it out in autotheory, brown works it out in organizing — and all of them inherit, directly, what Lorde set down here. A reader new to the lineage should start with the essay and let it reorganize how the rest of the canon reads.