I remember Ellen dancing at some Village Voice holiday party a dozen years ago. Her limbs swung loosely from side to side as she jiggled and swayed along with Stanley. Eyes closed, her expression was beatific. I was struck by how graceful and sexy she looked, so unabashedly immersed in music, movement, and emotion. Of all the essential insights Ellen’s work offered over the last four decades, her insistence on pleasure — in work, politics, day-to-day life — has been, to my mind, the most necessary. Neither hedonistic abandon (which is at its core nihilistic) nor an ironic Sex and the City – style insouciance (because Ellen never agreed that there was anything naughty in it), the pleasure she propounded in her brilliant critical essays was part and parcel of freedom. No liberationist politics (and no critique of repressive reaction), she maintained, could make sense without taking account of the ways culture both answers and produces desire.
