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).

Whenever someone starts talking about “absolute freedom,” you know you’re in the presence of a straw man. No one on earth has absolute freedom to do much of anything; as anyone who has ever tried to install a piece of art with mold on it in a museum or spill blood in a piece of live performance art quickly discovers, such endeavors require planning

For many artists, art plays a unique and crucial role in working out “what … we might want when we’re not under surveillance,” as Adam Phillips has said of psychoanalysis.

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

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.

But they can also condition us into thinking of freedom as a future achievement rather than as an unending present practice, something already going on.

It may sting when you get (or give) an I Can’t, but it likely indicates that care is engaged elsewhere.

The eruption of these issues into the realm of art via the uncritical valorization of care no doubt contributed to my “yuck,” insofar as it risks suggesting that art—a realm to which women have been allowed entrance basically one second ago in human history—should become yet another place where women must grapple with an already-feminized, maternal

Refusing to take up the burden of how one’s art may make innumerable, heterogeneous, essentially uncontrollable others feel does not to me signify ethical failure.