sweaty concept

is a way of describing something that is difficult, that resists being fully comprehended in the present... it involves treating descriptive work as conceptual work and describing the difficulty in describing as part and parcel of the description of it..

By trying to describe something that is difficult, that resists being fully comprehended in the present, we generate what I call 'sweaty concepts.' I first used this expression when I was trying to describe to students the kind of intellectual labor evident in Audre Lorde's work. I want to acknowledge my debt here. . . . . By using sweaty concepts for descriptive work, I am trying to say at least two things. First, I was suggesting that too often conceptual work is understood as distinct from describing a situation: . . . By using the idea of sweaty concepts, I am also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. A concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. . . . .More specifically, a sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. By this I mean description as angle or point of view: a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it. Sweat is bodily... we might sweat more during more strenuous and muscular activity. A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is try- ing. The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty. We might need not to eliminate the effort or labor from the writing. Not eliminating the effort or labor becomes an academic aim because we have been taught to tidy our texts, not to reveal the struggle we have in getting somewhere. Sweaty concepts are also generated by the practical experience of . . . (12 -13)

sweaty concept, n.Definitions

sweaty concept