Everybody: A Book About Freedom

“To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.”

“To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.”

“From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet— he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this — a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required for it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.’ - Simone Weil”

“Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute.”

“But there’s stress and stress, the attenuating wear and tear of overwork versus the exhausting psychic fray of living the wrong life.”

“Say you wanted a better world. Say you fought for it, and say that it unravelled, that people were irrevocably damaged, that there were deaths. Say that the dream was freedom. Say that you dreamt of a world in which people were not hobbled or hated or killed because of the kind of body they inhabited. Say that you thought the body could be a source of power or delight. Say that you imagined a future that did not involve harm. Say that you failed. Say that you failed to bring that future into being.”

“Foucault can mock sexual reformers as much as he likes for their belief that the absence of sexual restrictions will automatically mark the beginning of an era of freedom. However, unfortunately, the opposite statement is also true. Sexual freedom is dangerous and rebellious. It is not by chance that authoritarian regimes then and now lash out at homosexuality and abortion, trying to enclose each gender in a strictly defined framework and force them to perform reproductive duties, and it is not by chance that such prohibitions precede more inhumane acts — purges and genocide.”

“The problem with psychotherapy was that the patient was treated as if their pain were happening in a vacuum, without the participation of the society in which they exist or the politics that defines their life.”

“Freedom doesn't mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time.”

“To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed.”

“The Lavender Scare, the purge began the same year as the Red Scare, and in the same way: as a rumour about State Department infiltration that sparked a national moral panic. Between seven thousand and ten thousand federal workers lost their jobs in the 1950s alone because of suspicions of homosexuality. Many struggled to find work again, and there were many suicides. One of the most formidable components of the purge was Executive Order 10450, signed by Eisenhower on 27 April 1953, three months into his presidency. It barred homosexuals (‘sex perverts’) from federal employment, along with drug addicts, alcoholics, anarchists and anyone else bent on undermining the project of America.”

“Eugenics regards the human race as a kind of library, some volumes of which need to be removed from circulation. The men ran back and forth, in shiny boots. There were ashes and fragments of burning paper in the air. More and more books were thrown on the fire, books by Freud and Reich and Havelock Ellis: dangerous books, degenerate books, books that dared spell out a lexicon of bodily delights.”

“Sexual hygiene arguments allowed the liberationists to argue for legalising contraception by reframing it as part of a patriotic campaign to increase the quality of the nation’s offspring, rather than polluting the communal gene pool. Even the seemingly innocent rebranding of contraception as ‘birth control’ and later ‘family planning’, terms now so ubiquitous as to be unquestioned, were actually a way of making non-reproductive sex – sex for sheer pleasure – acceptable by smuggling it beneath a conservative, eugenicist banner.”

“What does freedom mean? Who is it for? What role does the state play in its preservation or curtailment? Can it be achieved by asserting the rights of the body, or, as the painter Agnes Martin believed, by denying the body altogether?”

“Contrary to what the white supremacists might think, claiming the right to deny other people their liberty is not a freedom movement, and nor is refusing to wear a mask designed to protect other people's health.”

“Damaged people made damaged worlds.”

“...the true horror of violence, that the you of you is still inside.”

“Like literature, sex is a space of imaginative play, in which dangerous forces can be encountered and sampled. And like illness, sex is a descent into what Edward St Aubyn once described as ‘the darkness of the pre-verbal realm’, where uncertain ecstasies and terrors lurk. BDSM, the volitional version of the Sadeian revel, is one of the ways of getting there, a route back to the immense feelings of infancy, to the body before language intervened.”

“To be born at all is to be situated in a network for relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We're all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they're capable of and what they're allowed or forbidden to do. we're not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom simply isnt a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It's also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyd by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which youve been assigned.”

“Total liberty to act can and does have hellish consequences for the bodies unlucky enough to be acted upon.”

“But there's stress and there is 'stress', the attenuating wear and tear of overwork versus the exhausting psychic fray of living the wrong life.”

“A woman's body exists as a receptacle for male anger, we all know that.”