From Klein, Sedgwick extrapolated something she called “reparative reading,” which she contrasted with “paranoid reading” (“reading” functions here quite broadly, spanning different media): the former is a means of seeking pleasure, nourishment, and amelioration, whereas the latter aims to forestall pain and ward off threats.

At a time when bigots and thugs deploy “free speech” as a disingenuous, weaponized rallying cry, it makes sense that some would respond by criticizing, refusing, or vilifying the discourse of freedom, and postulating care in its place. But care demands our scrutiny as well, as do the consequences of placing the two terms in opposition.

Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create opportunities to alter course, decrease domination, start anew. But the practice of freedom—i.e., the morning after, and the morning after that—is what,

Ambivalence about responsibility for our own freedom does not mean we are stupid, self-destructive, incapable, or desirous of harm. It means we are human. And part of being human is not always wanting every moment of our lives to be a step on a long march toward emancipation and enlightenment.

Such an approach invites us to leave behind the poles of pre- vs. post-liberatory, negativity vs. positivity, optimism vs. pessimism, utopia vs. dystopia, and to reckon instead with the fact that everything is not going to be OK, that no one or nothing is coming to save us, and that this is both searingly difficult and also fine.

It’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that works overtime to flatten or disregard such differences; it’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that demands that all people have the same response to them, and always will.

I may personally hope to be a warm, life-affirming person with strong social bonds, but given the rage that customarily greets women who don’t feel put on the planet to be earth mothers, giving trees, community glue, or moral consciences, their icy or insurgent rejection of such roles can be a bracing, doxa-rearranging pleasure.

Whereas care can slip quickly into paternalism or control when it isn’t experienced as care by its receiver (think of the last time someone did something you didn’t want or like “because they cared about you”), art is characterized by the indeterminacy and plurality of the encounters it generates, be they between a work and its maker, a work and

The whole point of reparative reading is that people derive sustenance in mysterious, creative, and unforeseeable ways from work not necessarily designed to give it, and that the transmission is nontransferable and ungovernable; the whole point of reparative making is that it is reparative for the maker, which guarantees nothing in particular about