Everybody - Wyrmsign.org

Liz reviewed Everybody by Olivia Laing

Keeping alive the dream of a bodily freedom that is equally shared

5 stars

Reconsidering the work and biography of dissident psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (Foucault's favorite foe in his History of Sexuality), Olivia Laing wanders in this non-fiction book through an archive of individual and collective struggles for bodily autonomy and freedom that marked the 20th century both before and after World War Two. This sumptuously written text has itself the qualities of fluidity it unearths in the resistance, willfulness and emancipator agency of the multiplicity of marginalized body constitutions and ways of embodiment it describes and learns from. Alongside accounts of Andrea Dworkin, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Agnes Martin and many others, the reader is invited to reflect on sexual liberation and vulnerability, depathologization and illness, collective action and mental health, with a lot of room left to pursue their own reverie. It sometimes feels just like a conversation with a friend you haven't seen for a while and with whom …

Reconsidering the work and biography of dissident psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (Foucault's favorite foe in his History of Sexuality), Olivia Laing wanders in this non-fiction book through an archive of individual and collective struggles for bodily autonomy and freedom that marked the 20th century both before and after World War Two. This sumptuously written text has itself the qualities of fluidity it unearths in the resistance, willfulness and emancipator agency of the multiplicity of marginalized body constitutions and ways of embodiment it describes and learns from. Alongside accounts of Andrea Dworkin, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Agnes Martin and many others, the reader is invited to reflect on sexual liberation and vulnerability, depathologization and illness, collective action and mental health, with a lot of room left to pursue their own reverie. It sometimes feels just like a conversation with a friend you haven't seen for a while and with whom you can unleash your imagination and thought thanks to topics that pop up unexpectedly in a dialogue cemented by trust. Amazing.

phildini, while reading reviewed Everybody by Olivia Laing

Where do we go from here?

3 stars

Everybody started with such a strong premise. A new thesis on bodily autonomy and how it relates to society was going to be woven in front of our eyes, centering around a contemporary of Freud’s who preached sexual revolution as a foundation to societal revolution. The first few chapters are electrifying; gripping in a way that few nonfiction books are.

But then… perhaps Laing was trying, in her own book, to reinforce the arc of Reich’s own life. Where the second half of Reich’s life saw him slowly relegated to irrelevancy on the fringes of the scientific frontier, Everybody seems to meander through it’s own second half, never quite reaching the thesis hinted at in the early chapters.

I was left with some interesting historical discoveries, but no framework to put them in.

Liz

rated it

Dec 8