On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

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 it

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,

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.

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

It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for them

For once we truly acknowledge that there are other people in the world—which is harder to do than it sounds—we must reckon with the fact that we cannot control them, even as we depend upon them (Phillips).

it increasingly seems to me that the goal of our patient labor is not our own liberation per se, but a deepened capacity to give it away, with an ever-diminishing attachment to outcome.

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.

Faced with the binary choice of aligning with or against so-called exclusionary works of art or culture, disidentification proposes a third way, one that allows people to transform “these works for their own cultural purposes.”