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kell_xavi's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Olivia Laing braids together the lives and work of many artists and authors in this work, using the concept of bodily freedom to connect psychoanalysis, cancer, the rise of Nazism, domestic abuse, queer studies, violence against women, psychosis, and prison abolition. She combines a cultural studies approach—what does the work of other writers, painters, theorists say about the body in its many varied and specific modes of being, and what do these ideas say about the collective consciousness and the political ideology of bodies and their relationships to freedom—with an investigation of the personal and situational experiences that influence her own and her sources' ways of seeing.
Many rich turns of phrase and quotations make up an impressive review of the history of bodies and freedom over the last 100 years, in dialogue with controversial, radical, and transgressive figures that create an absorbing and fascinating history.
Many rich turns of phrase and quotations make up an impressive review of the history of bodies and freedom over the last 100 years, in dialogue with controversial, radical, and transgressive figures that create an absorbing and fascinating history.
Both psychoanalysis and communism were full of potential for understanding human unhappiness and expanding human freedom, Reich thought, but each had major blind spots. The problem with psychotherapy was that it insisted on treating the individual as if their pain occurred in a vacuum, unmediated by the society they inhabited or the politics that governed their lives. As for Marxism, it failed to recognize the importance of emotional experience, not least the trouble caused by shame and sexual repression, especially to women. (c. 3)
Our past stays with us, embedded in our bodies, and we live, whether we like it or not, in the object world, sharing the resources of reality with billions of other beings. There is no steel-lined box that can protect you from the grid of forces that limits in tangible, tormenting ways, what each private body is allowed to do. There is no escape, no possible place to hide. Either you submit to the world or you change the world. (c. 3)
Freedom… [is] 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. The realization that embodiment is more dangerous or oppressive for some people than for others is what drives liberation movements… (c. 5)
…prison can inspire truly constructive development in particularly strong and intelligent people, if they’re given richer resources than were available in childhood… For everyone else, prison is an abject failure. The only thing it reinforces, [Carol Jacobsen] argues, is delinquent tendencies… a collapse into infantile behaviour. It doesn’t work as a corrective or as a rehabilitative institution. Not without a profound shift in the relationships between prisoners and gaurds, and not without out an end to the deprivation of bodily needs for food, light, exercise, hygiene, companionship, sex, and free movement. (c. 6)
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence, Suicide, War, Cancer, Domestic abuse, Forced institutionalization, Hate crime, Homophobia, and Torture
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