On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

You can work to make a safe environment, but if the teachings at hand are meant to rattle, people are going to feel rattled.

For this reason, Michel Foucault’s distinction between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing) has been key for me, as when he writes, “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.”

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.

Yet one of art’s most compelling features is how it showcases the disjuncts between the time of composition, the time of dissemination, and the time of consideration—disjuncts that can summon us to humility and wonder. Such temporal amplitude understandably falls out of favor in politically polarized times, in which the pressure to make clear “whic

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

without suppression, shaming, or ejection as go-to options, we learn to fellowship differently.

Yet even when our complaints are justified, it’s worth staying alert to the ways in which complaint can become a default posture, a negative feedback loop, wherein we cultivate the habit of shoring up our own virtue or worth by distancing ourselves from the sorry, sordid desires and defects we diagnose in others. We need to be able to lodge our com

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.

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).