Audre Lorde: The Poet and the Philosopher

Posted: Wed, Dec 3, 2025

Lorde’s presentation at the 1979 NYU “The Second Sex—Thirty Years Later” conference (B side, 42:20–46:06; A side, 00:00–03:35), which became “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

Lorde as a poet vs. a philosopher:

  • “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” is probably most readily acknowledged as a philosophical text—as an argument for intersectional analysis.
  • “Uses of the Erotic” is sometimes assigned in a philosophy of love/sexuality class.
  • I have not seen “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” read in a philosophy class.
  • Lorde’s poems are unknown to philosophers.

I’m interested in Lorde’s political philosophy in her poetry and lesser-read essays.

“Power”: On an early Saturday morning in 1973, a plainclothes police officer jumped out of a car in Queens with a gun to stop a ten-year-old Clifford Glover and his father, shooting Glover in the back and killing him as he ran away out of fear. A jury of eleven white men and one Black woman acquitted the police officer of murder.

“The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.”

  • Anger is an appropriate response to injustice.
    • Cf. King’s insistence on discipline in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?’ ‘Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?’” Why?
  • While anger contains a danger of destruction, it is also both illuminating and liberating.
    • Illumination: Poetry “give[s] name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt”; it’s no accident that “master’s tools” are unhelpful if not counterproductive.
    • Liberation: Poetry “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
    • Cf. Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
  • Poetry directs anger to its empowerment use.
    • Contra Marx, the philosopher is situated in the world, not viewing from it from the outside; poetry does not merely “do theory” but it puts theory in action, it “put[s] myself on the line to do what had to be done.”
    • Anger requires resolution: “I was thinking that the killer had been a student at John Jay and that I might have seen him in the hall, that I might see him again. Whatwas retribution? What could have been done? There was one black woman on the jury. It could have been me. Now I am here teaching inJohn Jay College. Do I kill him? What is my effective role?”
    • Of course that’s not the answer. But this is an immensely painful process of coming to terms with anger and redirecting it to constructive use; it needs to be done rather than said—“putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world.”
    • Poetry is necessary—and urgent—for liberation because it enables us to do this. It is not rhetoric.

“Uses of the Erotic” as a “progression” from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”?

  • “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: The possibility of liberation is within ourselves.
    • “For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises.”
    • “Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.”
  • “Uses of the Erotic”: The erotic is such a power which can be harnessed for collective liberation.
    • Lorde does not mean merely the sexual or even the romantic; the erotic is about eros, passionate love—“those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.”
    • The erotic enables us to (re)connect with ourselves through our capacity for joy; it is “the life-force of women.” “In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”
    • The erotic also builds connection with others: “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms abridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”
    • The erotic requires our recognition of others as subjects of eros: “To share the power of each other’s [erotic] feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us.”
    • This cannot be taught; you have to try it out. “The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.”