Sublime

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).

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.

nisei

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.

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.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The ple

I find it irresistibly interesting when people are cathected onto their bad style rather than simply oblivious to it (a description that may apply to us all; I sense the risk increases with age).