the enemy body is always portrayed as being fashioned from grosser material, obscenely sexual or avaricious, greedy, primitive, uncontrolled, infectious, spilling over, barely human, a kind of disgusting fleshy jelly. it makes me wonder if what drives prejudice is at root the horror of the body itself. after all, as sade observed, the body can be a terrifying place : open and insatiable, helpless and dependent. hatred is a way of displacing the annihilating fear onto other helpless bodies, asserting a magnificent autonomy, a freedom from the sullying, hopelessly interdependent life of flesh.

everybody                                                                                                              a book about freedom

olivia laing

+++ i wanted to write about the book, but i'm kind of too steeped in the content, steeped in the silence around the object — it's the content that spills out everywhere and into everybody.

it will not be dismantled, not until each one of us looks at what our silence is facilitating, peering, as guston did, into the blind spot in which atrocity keeps on and on occurring.

(ibid)