Everybody: A Book about Freedom

by Olivia Laing

"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Feminism, History, Queer, Politics, Art

357 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 29, 2021

About the author

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. She’s the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her collected essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.

Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Laing’s writing about art & culture appears in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom is a dazzling investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom.

Reviews

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Olivia Laing is becoming one of my favorite essaysts! I have to say this before I write anything about this book, since the pleasure of reading this engaging and wonderful book is the first thing to mention. To speak about bodies and freedom, she speaks of, activism, racism, imprisionment, violence, misoginy, feminisim. Wilhelm Reich, Kate Bush, Martin Luther King, Ana Mendieta, Marquis de Sade, Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Agnes Martin, Malcolm X, Elias Canetti and many more are here, and she connects them in surprising ways that open up the world and its many messages, the possibility that out bodies are a way to resist what is wrong in this world, and to truly make a difference. These are not separate essays, the whole book is connected, just like this world we live in, and just like all of us who inhabit it are.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated how Olivia Laing frames the body as a source of activism and political resistance in her book Everybody. She writes with intelligence and controlled passion about how forces such as sexism, racism, and homophobia affect our bodies on both an internal and external level. Despite these strengths, I found this book lacking in focus and therefore I felt myself distanced from it on an emotional level. Laing’s subjects span key figures in psychoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, civil rights activists including Nina Simone and Malcolm X, as well as today’s environmental protestors, though the connections between all these groups felt tenuous aside from the broader political themes that affected their lives. I felt a bit more compelled by Laing’s nuggets of self-disclosure throughout the book, and I wondered whether including more of herself would have helped me connect with the book more. Though I recognize that Laing may not have wanted to center herself in Everybody and that other readers may have considered that too self-involved.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laing is such a fabulous writer, not only are these essays interesting but they also teach, empathize and she always leave some wanting more. In these she uses Wilhelm Reich to tie these essays together or maybe I should say she uses him to guide us through what freedom for our body actually means.

From Isherwood and Weimar Berlin she explores the sexual freedom that was prominent, where all sexes, what one was or wanted to be was not judged. From freedom to McCarthyism which was almost the opposite. From illness, using Sontag and her will not to submit to the cancer eating away at her body, to Agnes Martin, who wanted to escape from people and her mental illness. Malcolm X and Nina Simone, all the different freedoms they wanted but did not have, though they fought for them.

There is so much here, people who found freedom, people who want to take away others freedoms, these essays exemplify both the body's power and it's vulnerability. A truly terrific grouping of essays.

ARC from W. W. Norton and Edelweiss.

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.

Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.

*******************************************

[Laing is non binary and pronoun fluid, so I’ve gone with ‘they’ as the most gender-neutral pronoun option in the absence of specifically stated preferences]

I have putting off writing this review for a long time on account of, you know, emotions and shit. Urgh. The truth is, I don’t think I really know how to begin to articulate the experience of reading this. It’s so … expansive and eye-opening and fascinating. And, um, kind of deeply painful too, because I don’t think there’s really a way to talk about the reality and the complexity of bodies without touching on painful things, of which death, suffering and identity scrape only the surface. Mostly, though, I’m just in awe of the mind that created a book like this. To move eruditely and compassionately, and yet also accessibly, through about century’s worth of art, politics, and medicine, and find uniting themes amongst what sometimes seems an impossible chaos of humanity, is simply an extraordinary feat and equally extraordinary to witness.

Everybody winds its exploratory, occasionally personal, narrative around the life and work of Wilheim Reich, someone I was familiar with because of, err, Kate Bush. There’s always been, I think, something intriguing and difficult about Reich: a student of Freud, he believed that emotional trauma was ultimately inextricable from bodily trauma (damage caused to the mind is expressed in the body, in freeing the body, we free the mind, etc.) and made an actual attempt to explore where fascism came from (at a time when Freud and his compatriots were insisting that their role was to remain neutral in all cases) only to die—some years later—in a United States prison, having succumbed to paranoia and potentially schizophrenia, insisting that, err, magic boxes were the cure for all ills.

Laing does not absolve Reich of his complexities (he grew quite abusive in later life, to say nothing of homophobic) but it is interesting—and unexpectedly moving—to see him spoken about as someone other than the guy who thought the power of orgasms could change the weather. He also makes a surprisingly effective through-line for a book about bodies and freedom and politics: this man who was at least at partial, if unintentional, inspiration for the sexual revolution, who wrote so passionately against both sexual and political repression, whose most infamous ‘therapy’ involved isolating in yourself in a box, and then died in a prison cell in a country that calls itself the land of the free.

To say the book is about Reich, however, is barely scrape the surface of its accomplishments. Reich’s ideas—and his limitations—offer a lens through which to investigate bodies as both of sites of vulnerability and tools for resistance. Laing examines the body in illness, the body in prison, the body *as* a prison, the body as a subject of violence, as well as the body as an expression of art, selfhood and protest. This is a journey that takes Laing from Reich and his contemporaries to Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag, to Dworkin, Carter and the Marquis de Sade, to Christopher Isherwood, Nina Simone and Malcom X, all via some figures I was personally less familiar with like Bayard Rustin and Ana Mendieta. And look I’m just not learned enough to be able to say sensible things about how Laing discusses these very disparate figures but I personally felt her perspective was always nuanced, knowledgable and compassionate, and the way she integrated their stories into the broader narrative was masterful. I mean, imagine finding something interesting to say about de Sade, of all people—and yet Laing manages.

I think there are probably some readers who may find the book’s structuring unconventional to the point of intimidating. And it did, honestly, take me a bit to adjust to Laing’s thematic fluidity—moving with them from person to person, idea to idea. But, in the end, I loved it and admired it, and I felt very moved by Laing’s … I can’t think of a better word for it than textual freedom. Which is fitting because, by the end of the book, they are inviting the reader to “imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear.” It was slightly frightening for me to realise—either because of me, or because I’d just spent so long thinking about all the ways the body could be trapped, violated, and made vulnerable—that I couldn’t. But please don’t think this is a grim or a depressing book. It tackles grim and depressing subjects somewhat inevitably. And yet there’s a defiance to it—a rejection of constraint and conventionality—that feels just enough like hope.

It's rare to find a book that really changes how you think or makes you want to expand the edges of how you think. I feel kind of dizzied and grateful right now to Everybody for giving me that to me, at a time in my life when I wasn’t quite ready for it, but also deeply needed it. It’s such a confronting experience at times that I’m having trouble “recommending” it in the conventional sense. But if you’re open to what Everybody is offering, you are in for something both rare and remarkable.

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that raised a billion questions in my head, while curating me an entire reading list to look for answers within.
Ps. Extremely re-readable.


Book review on youtube. ريفيو مصور عن الكتاب على #دودة_كتب

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkLsg...

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Third read — still as good.

Review from 2022:

I met Olivia Laing at a talk she delivered yesterday to celebrate the paperback release of Everybody, where she revisited her writing in light of the manifold developments across the world affecting our rights — freedoms — to inhabit our bodies as we wish. She later obliged to sign my (rather battered) copy of the book, and after a brief, warm conversation, added two little hearts around her signature. This simple interaction evoked something bodily in me, something that felt quite like the "streaming" that she starts this book talking about.

[Untitled (1976), from Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta's Silueta series of photographs, installations and films]

What is a body? According to Laing, it is a source of power, a store of vulnerability, and the vehicle through which all our experiences of the world are shaped—it is the one resource we all have in common as well as the very same that sets each of us apart. The textures of our lives are impacted deeply by the kind of bodies we inhabit, and in the eight chapters that make up this book, Laing blends memoir, art criticism, and biography in her usual fashion to explore the various ways in which our bodies, these “permeable vessels”, resist and coexist with the various forces that attempt to manage and discipline them into myriad unfreedoms.

Freedom, according to her, is the ultimate object of the body, and not simply a matter of indulging material cravings, but also “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.” Everybody thus looks at all attempts to embody freedom, as inherently political—just like physicality itself.

This is a belief the author shares with Wilhelm Reich: Viennese psychoanalyst, member of Freud’s inner circle, anti-fascist, and over-all one of 20th century’s most controversial figures in science — certainly the only one whose works were burnt by both the Nazis and the US government. In fact, Laing employs Reich’s life and beliefs — particularly his focus on recognising systemic barriers rather than just individual neuroses as causes of psychological disturbance (a major departure from Freud) — as a sort of structural link connecting the many threads that run through this book. She does not always agree with him or condone the idiosyncrasies of his later career—rather, she attempts to examine how these came about and thereby vindicate the valuable observations at the heart of his most radical early theses.

[Still from the music video for Kate Bush's 1981 song Cloudbusting, which was inspired by Wilhelm Reich's son Peter's memoir of their life together]

At the center of Laing’s own argument is the idea of the body as a fluid, ever-becoming thing, and her exploration of the limits placed on it is carried out through a sort of conversation she creates between her sources, herself, and her readers. Here, Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker and Audre Lorde explicate illness; Christopher Isherwood and Magnus Hirshfeld expose us to sexual freedoms in the Weimar Republic and through it, ideas on sexuality, “deviance,” and queerness; Andrea Dworkin and Angela Carter consider the links between misogyny and sadism (from Marquis de Sade) and Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta explores sexual violence in the contemporary age.

Moving along, we look at the idea of outlawed bodies: through Agnes Martin, whose life and work was centered on evading the “cage world” of both gender and institutionalisation; through James Vivian Bond, a trans performer who acted as Laing’s introduction to a world beyond compulsory heterosexism; through Stonewall, eugenics, and the (quite damning) links between Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and Fascism. Malcolm X, Edith Jacobson and Bayard Rustin (along with figures like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.) walk us through the turbulent history of imprisonment, retributive incarceration as an extension of slavery, and the way deviance from sexual and familial norms were — and are — used to attack and discredit the fight against systemic racist oppression. Lastly, Philip Guston helps us explore the mentality of the mob, while Nina Simone examines violence, non-violence and an uncertain future.

[Photograph of Bayard Rustin (L), an unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement, and author James Baldwin (R), c. 1963]

Laing in Everybody is committed to fluidity, and the conversation shifts back and forth, one realises that behind this ambitious project are the author’s attempts to make us think beyond the binaries that are routinely and systematically forced upon our bodies—those between health and illness, male and female, liberty and confinement, “normal” and “deviant”, life and death. Indeed, it is only when one begins to look beyond these strictures can we understand freedom, what it requires and what it means: as the title of the book tells us, freedom is for “everybody” – for “everyone”, as well as for “all bodies”, whatever kind they may be.

However, one of my two criticisms of this book is, curiously enough, in this very regard: for all her stresses on “every body,” Laing fails to really include those of the disabled. The other concerns the way England and the United States sometimes collapse in her work, to the latter's visibility and the former's (dis)advantage: the second half of Everybody recounts a pulsing and powerful history of racism and the struggle for Civil Rights in the US context, bringing to light figures and incidents which have hitherto been and are even today being summarily and deliberately excluded from popular memory. However, in what seems to me a rather ironic oversight, nothing whatsoever is said of the rampant anti-blackness that was pervasive in and being fought against in the UK in this same period. A stark omission indeed, given how these sections were aimed, in part, at linking these historical struggles for justice with the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Even so, it is a truly radical project the author here takes on, and I found some wisdom in the fact that room is provided for readers to contemplate it towards the very end. I similarly admired her commitment to nuance, to blowing holes in the concept of purity now too establishing itself on the political left, and to showing in an era of increasing absolutism how (and, crucially, why) people who truly understand the damages of violence—as Reich did—can be driven to repeat it.

Certainly, one of the most admirable accomplishments in this book is its echoing of Angela Davis in ascertaining that freedom as an ongoing, constant struggle. While we are made to revisit the important corridors of (US) history, it is accompanied by consistent reminders of historical continuities and the conditions of our own time (the pandemic, the rise of the ultra-right on a global scale, and capitalist destruction, to name a few), so that it is well driven home that

“Freedom is a shared endeavour, a collaboration built by many hands over many centuries of time, a labour which every single person living can choose to hinder or advance. It is possible to remake the world. What you cannot do is assume that any change is permanent. Everything can be undone, and every victory must be refought.”

[Izabela Górska · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Powiedzmy, że marzyłaś o świecie, w którym ludzie nie będą okaleczani, nienawidzeni czy zabijani z powodu swojego ciała. Powiedzmy, że myślałaś, że ciało może stanowić źródło siły albo rozkoszy. Powiedzmy, że wyobrażałaś sobie przyszłość, w której nikt nie będzie nikogo krzywdził. Powiedzmy, że ci się nie udało. Powiedzmy, że ta przyszłość się nie ziściła”

moje pierwsze w życiu eseje i chyba najbardziej dumne 5⭐️ jakie wystawiłam do tej pory jakiejkolwiek książce

nie istnieje w mojej biblioteczce książka w której miałabym, aż tyle znaczników (zbiera mi się na płacz, gdy czytam niektóre z nich)

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

“imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear”.
This is a book about freedom, bodily freedom to be precise. It is effectively a series of essays. What sort of freedom you have depends on what sort of body you have. Laing looks at a series of thinkers who had influence on our view of the body. She covers art, history, politics, psychoanalysis, violence, sex and much more. It’s the body as a prison and a possibility. She looks at the thought and lives of a number of people. At the centre is Wilhelm Reich and his theories about how people carry their emotional pain physically. On and off Laing looks at Reich’s thought throughout the book from his theories on sexual repression to his more arcane and esoteric theories he later developed and finally onto his orgone accumulator: the less said about that the better! Although the exploration of Reich’s fusion of Freud and Marx is interesting as is the reaction of the Nazis to psychoanalysis and Reich’s views on sexual repression:
“Pleasure is frightening, and so too is freedom. It invokes a kind of openness and unboundedness that’s deeply threatening, both to the individual and to the society they inhabit.”
Laing also looks at the lives and thought of a number of others along the way: Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Andrea Dworkin, Bayard Rustin, Christopher Isherwood, Kathy Acker, Agnes Martin and Angela Carter. Laing also looks at her own journey and this is sort of a memoir as well. She grew up in a lesbian family before the repeal of Section 28 (for those not in the UK, Section 28 forbade schools from promoting or teaching about gay lifestyles amongst other things) and felt that law was a:
“powerful education in how bodies are positioned in a hierarchy of value, their freedoms privileged or curtailed according to more or less inescapable attributes, from skin colour to sexuality”.
Laing identifies as non-binary and describes her journey and the sense of dissonance between how the world perceives one and how one perceives oneself:
“What I wanted as a trans person was to escape the binary altogether, which feels so natural if it includes you and so unnatural and violently enforced if it does not.”
“We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of, and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types.”
It’s about bodies and how we live in them. Laing was an eco-protester and traveller in the 90s and was on the protests about the Newbury by-pass, living in trees and tunnels.
And how did she pick those she focussed on:

“It felt really important to me, in this culture of purity, where people either have to be brilliant or they are cancelled, to talk about people who are difficult but have really rewarding ideas”
Laing here addresses and grapples with big ideas. It’s always interesting and thought provoking.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring
– David Bowie.

I am always reminded of the Bowie quote whenever I start reading anything by Olivia Laing. She starts in one place and time and then takes you on a journey that you could never have imagined. You don’t quite know know where you are going next , but you know wherever it is, it won’t be boring. Setting a course through the struggle for bodily freedom, she begins with Freud and Wilhelm Reich (the person that ties all the parts together) and takes you through sexually liberated Berlin of the twenties with Auden and Isherwood, the Fascism of the thirties, the woman’s movement with Ana Mendieta, Angela Dworkin, and Angela Carter, the civil rights movement, and the counter culture with Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. She even manages to include a bit of Kate Bush and also some anti Margaret Thatcher chants. You can’t help but be fascinated, stimulated by the loose connections that draw all of this together. This is a book that will definitely make you want to curl up in your orgone accumulator.

[fatma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure why this book didn't work for me like The Lonely City did. From what I'd read of its synopsis, Everybody seemed like it was poised to be a new favourite--a series of essays exploring the body and its relation to politics and liberation? Yes please. It sounded so good, and it's not that it was bad, exactly, it just didn't leave any kind of impression on me. I think this is partly because I didn't care all that much about the principal figure of this book, Wilhelm Reich. Laing explores so many people's lives in Everybody--Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin--but her focus always goes back to Reich, and I just wasn't all that drawn to him as a subject of analysis.

Another thing is that these essays felt a little scattered in their focus. The Lonely City worked so well for me because each of its chapters was dedicated to a historical figure, and as such devoted the time to properly exploring that figure's life. That's not to say that Everybody needed to be written like The Lonely City, but just that the latter's format worked so much better than the former's. The essays in Everybody often flitted from one figure to another, trying to ground them all under the same set of themes. But though I appreciated Laing's attempts to draw on the commonalities between these figures, I would've liked more on fewer figures rather than a little on many figures.

Thanks so much to W.W. Norton & Company for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Цікаво і неочевидно про свободу, тіла насамперед. Багато імен та фактів були для мене абсолютно нові, як і сама призма
В цілому сподобалось, але рекомендую погортати книгу перед покупкою і зрозуміти чи вам так ок 👌

[Ari Levine]

The self-indulgence and indiscipline are strong here... Crudo was not an isolated event.

[metempsicoso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quanta invidia mi fa, Olivia Laing.
Vorrei saper leggere come fa l*i, vorrei avere un cervello capace come il suo di tirare appena un filo dal tessuto per fare sì che da quella piccola asola, collegata dalla sua voce ad altre, altrove, emergano immagini nuove.
Quante parole si possono scrivere sulla relazione tra corpo e libertà? A me, che con il mio corpo litigo sempre, che ne vivo gli acciacchi come tradimenti feroci, che vorrei potermene escludere per essere solo un ammasso di pensieri vacui in una boccia d'acqua, ne vengono poche. In punta di lingua trovo solo astio, qualche recriminazione, un po' di senso di colpa.
Laing no. In tutta l'arte che ha incontrato, di cui ha fruito in un modo che deve essere così diverso dal mio (ben più profondo, più simbiotico), ha segnato ogni richiamo, per poi ritrovarli e riorganizzarli in un saggio compiuto. Perché per me l'eco è solo un'unità di misura della desolazione e per l*i, invece, un'intera dissertazione? Come si diventa così?
Un po' per consolarmi, mi dico che ci si nasce, che è un colpo di fortuna. Che di certo è più facile se nasci nel centro del mondo, parli una lingua passepartout, cresci in un panorama in cui c'è ancora qualcosa per cui si può sperare. Sì, sono un "sore loser", un perdente dolente, dolorante e indolenzito.
C'è tutto un capitolo dedicato alla malattia e alla morte in cui a essere evocate sono autrici di cui ho letto molto - Sontag, Lorde, Boyer - e che ho apprezzato, ma di cui non avrei mai saputo scrivere così: non con quel respiro così ampio, non con quella sincerità. Mi sono sentito stupido e, nella mia stupidità, fortunato, perché mi ero finalmente deciso a leggere questo libro di Laing.
Credo che, in fondo, il mio problema sia che non sono abbastanza bravo a leggere. Una brutta notizia, considerato che fino a qualche mese fa era l'unico talento su cui potevo fare affidamento: adesso che non mi resta neanche quello, questo blocco del lettore ha più senso, così come la fine del desiderio di leggere altro. Che senso ha, se ingurgiti solo per il senso di pienezza, se poi espelli tutto con un conato? Laing mi è arrivat* con la puntualità di chi porta a conclusione.

Non sono cinque stelle per via della gelosia e perché Laing, giustamente, è vittima a sua volta del suo talento: Città sola resta inavvicinabile, più coeso, più "stringente".
Il continuo tentare di tornare a Wilhelm Reich, personaggio interessante ma per certi versi reso in modo sfuggente, non funziona sempre. Eppure, nonostante questo, resta un libro da leggere con un blocco degli appunti per annotarsi tutta una bibliografia da approfondire - io non l'ho fatto, e questo probabilmente dice tutto quello che io non ho il coraggio di ammettere.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Olivia Laing, with one qualification, and I loved this book, with the same (those of you who follow my reviews probably already know where this is going).

Laing's research into the figures she covers, including psychologists, writers and artists, and her close reading and interpretation of their works, and how she links them together, are stunning and beautiful. Her thesis is liberating and a joy to investigate with her (that people's bodies are the site of both their vulnerability and their power, in the quest for freedom and vulnerability). She writes about the subjugation experienced by racialized, queer, trans, female and feminine bodies, various kinds of incarceration and their effects, and the use of those bodies to find and enjoy freedom.

However, in all of this, she nearly entirely ignores disability. There are a few offhand mentions here or there to the fact that disability is also a site of oppression, and that's it. In the meantime, disabled people and disability in general have often been incarcerated, institutionalized, sterilized, euthanized, controlled, and deprived of access and equal rights to this day, on the basis of their bodies. Illness enters the book often, but not disability.

I'm not the only reader/reviewer to notice this omission (see: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/992049...).

Highly recommended, but with notable oversights.

[Sarah Schulman]

Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought. Olivia Laing's eagle eye connects previously dispersed impulses to understand and express with her lucid writing, revealing mostly Jewish, Female, and Black desires for radical social transformation through sexuality, liberation and the body. Brainy, open-hearted and bold.

[Tala🦈 (mrs.skywalker.reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

tłumaczenie pozostawia wiele do życzenia, ale eseje są fantastyczne, nie spodziewałam się takiego spektrum tematów i takiej głębi

[Literatursprechstunde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warum ist unser Körper politisch?! Dieser Frage geht Olivia Laing in ihrem Buch „Everybody“ nach. Sie führt dabei eine tiefgreifende Analyse der politischen (und sozialen) Dimension unserer Körper durch.
Sie zeigt uns die Ambivalenzen in allen ihren Nuancen, die zwischen Unterdrückung und Freiheit stecken und ordnet sie in historische Zusammenhänge, nimmt Bezug auf die Relevanz von Identität und erläutert die Rolle, die Aktivismus dabei spielt.

Besonders die Auswahl der Persönlichkeiten, über die Olivia Laing spricht, hat mich fasziniert.
So erfahren wir beispielsweise, dass die Essayistin Susan Sontag, die vornehmlich als Intellektuelle wahrgenommen wurde, auch sehr unter ihrer Krebserkrankung und den damit verbundenen Folgen für ihren Körper, litt. Oft nehmen wir Werke von Autor*innen mehr auf einer körperlosen Ebene wahr - aber die Gedanken über ein Werk wandeln sich enorm, wenn man den Körper als Aspekt hinzuzieht, es gibt ihm mehr Tiefe. Mein wichtigstes Learning aus „Everybody“: Die Berücksichtigung, aus welchem Körper ein Mensch spricht und schreibt, ist enorm wichtig! Düstere, schmerzvolle Bücher sieht man in einem anderen Licht, wenn man weiß, dass der/die Schreibende in einem Körper lebt, der dem Tod gegenübersteht.

Laing denkt auch - ausgehend von Wilhelm Reich - darüber nach, wie der politische Aktivist Malcolm X zu seinem Körper stand, über Nina Simone oder den Psychiater Sigmund Freud. Sie verwebt dabei eigene Protesterfahrungen mit diesen inspirierenden historischen Persönlichkeiten und zeigt uns deren Einflüsse auf die Gesellschaft auf. Jede einzelne dieser Figuren hat einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis der politischen Dimension unserer Körper beigetragen. So war Malcolm X in doppeltem Sinne eingesperrt, im Gefängnis und in seinem Körper. Laing macht das Gefängnis in ihrem Buch zu einer Metapher - wir können unseren Körper nur durch das Sterben und den Tod verlassen. Im eigenen Körper zu leben, fühlt sich für viele Menschen an, wie eingesperrt sein, was muss das nur für eine unerträgliche Erfahrung sein?! Warum also kollidieren gesellschaftliche Normen und individuelle Freiheit immer wieder miteinander?! Laing hat
Antworten!

Bezüglich der Identitätspolitik plädiert Laing auf Solidarität und Kommunikation, es sei wichtig über Unterschiede miteinander sprechen zu können. Sie denkt über Gemeinschaftlichkeit mit Fremden nach, sieht alles im Wandel und spricht sich gegen Stammeszugehörigkeiten aus.

Die sozialen Medien sieht sie kritisch, da Menschen dort präsent sind, aber doch verborgen bleiben.
„Meine Gefühle den sozialen Medien gegenüber haben sich sehr verändert in den vergangenen zehn Jahren. Als ich „The Lonely City“ geschrieben habe, dachte ich noch, das seien positive Orte, in denen man in Kontakt treten kann. Jetzt denke ich, ein Grund, warum sie so gefährlich sind, ist, dass sie körperlos sind, dass sie keine Körper einbeziehen. Wie Sie sagen, präsentieren sie perfekte Versionen von Körpern. Und Menschen sprechen dort miteinander, wie sie es nie täten, wenn sie zwei Körper in einem Raum wären – wegen des sozialen Umfelds und der Vorsicht, die herrscht, wenn wir mit einem anderen Menschen zusammen sind. Wir sehen ein Gesicht und wir sehen, welche Wirkung unsere Worte auf dieses Gesicht haben. Ich bin also skeptischer, als ich es war, was die sozialen Medien betrifft. Sie fördern das Verlangen nach diesen unerreichbaren Körpern, besonders bei jungen Leuten seit der Pandemie, als sie so viel Zeit vor dem Computer verbracht haben. Sie wollen eine unangreifbare, perfekte Hülle. Gleichzeitig sind diese jungen Leute voller Zorn, Angst und Verzweiflung. Das wollen sie nicht zeigen, so ziehen sie Masken an, um ihre Gefühle verbergen zu können.“

Für wen ist „Everbody“ von Olivia Laing die passende Lektüre?!
Ich würde sagen, für alle Leser*innen, die sich für die Zusammenhänge von Gesellschaft, Körperpolitik und Geschichte interessieren. Schonungslos ehrlich animiert sie dabei, über unsere eigene Lebensrealität nachzudenken und diese zu hinterfragen. Sie berichtet vom langen Kampf um körperliche Freiheit und dessen Meilensteine, wie sexuelle Befreiung, dem Foranschreiten des Feminismus, LGBTQ-Bewegungen, dem Civil Rights Movement und so vielem mehr.
Mir hat „Everybody - warum unser Körper politisch ist“ in vielerlei Hinsicht die Augen geöffnet. Absolute Leseempfehlung!

[Reece Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly cannot say enough good things about this book.

Everybody takes a Foucaultian look at arenas of major sociopolitical action over the last century, always circling back to the central role that bodies play in these discussions. Laing focuses on many figures -- Wilhelm Reich, Susan Sontag, Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone to name a few -- and the use of their bodies in shaping modern dialogue on topics such as race and sexuality.

I've gone back and forth on my use of the word "body" in political discourse. When I heard/saw it on social media ("violence on black bodies" or "silencing of queer bodies"), my first instinct was always to roll my eyes. There was something about the use of such a concrete image like the body in a discussion about massive institutional and systemic problems that seemed too theoretical and academic for TikTok. However, I think Laing's book changed my perspective on the use of the word "body"; it's probably the best image to use given that it's the vehicle through which we interact with the world, both by giving and receiving.

One of Laing's analyses that really interested me was the role of the body in medicine. Laing takes up chronicles of illness from writers like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde to examine what it means to experience medicine as a body. Undoubtedly, we can see that symptoms of sickness are like a language of the body that is otherwise quiet. It's interesting that we really only seem to notice this language when it's saying that something is wrong; we take positive news for granted. On this note, Laing also notes how a popular idea in some circles was that there was a concrete link between the psyche and physical illness. Psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich believed that past trauma was stored in the body and that this could in turn cause illness. While this is an interesting idea, albeit with some kooky corollaries, another thing that fascinated me was Laing's discussion of how patient's feel when they become sick. They are confronted with the confines of their own body, often reduced to raw flesh in a hospital gown. Indeed, the gown itself is one step of a depersonalizing process that begins the second one steps into a hospital whereby doctors strip patients of their selves in order to better isolate the sickness. Illness also accentuates how the body can be a "permeable vessel" that is subject to forces outside its control. This move can be made to discuss tangible things like viruses or intangible things like generational poverty. I think further efforts in what I'm going to call "body analysis" or "theory of body" would be incredibly insightful for really disparate fields like medicine and politics.

However, Laing relates this neat analysis of ~bodies~ to the political realm by making the simple observations that not all bodies are treated equal. If bodies are the "permeable vessels" that Laing claims (one side of a two-sided theory by Reich), then they are not all exposed to the same external forces. Black bodies experience different forces than white bodies. Queer bodies experience different forces than het bodies. And it's this difference that Laing charts in her book in a way that is both witty and informative.

One aspect of this text that particularly impressed me was the wide variety of sources used to explore the definition of bodies and their relationships to one another. I found myself reading an analysis of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom while only a few pages later examining performance art. I think this book exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary study in that it provides us a multi-angle view of a single question. Laing seamlessly moves from art theory to music analysis to literary critique, all while managing to avoid pretentiousness. At times, it felt like I was talking to a very educated, philosophically minded friend. Witty and biting, Laing's voice is incredibly unique and experiencing it is reason enough to read this text. Additionally, while this book is rooted in theory, Laing still manages to espouse praxis as being the ultimate goal. You know that Laing is not sitting in an ivory tower, chewing mental bubblegum for the hell of it. Laing is about action as their own history in activism proves.

Overall, I cannot recommend this book enough. I will say that some chapters may be challenging without some familiarity with psychoanalysis or the discussed texts (i.e. Sade) but there were plenty of works I was not familiar with and managed to appreciate the analysis nonetheless.

[Jolanta (knygupė)]

3,5*
Knyga apie mūsų kūnų (ne)laisves. Apie tai, kaip kūnas, per odos spalvą, lytį, seksualinę orientaciją, ligas ir t. t., apibrėžia mūsų vietą visuomenėje.
Tekste minimi garsūs moslininkai, meninkai, visuomenės veikėjai, bet ašis ant kurios suvertas visas Olivios Laing kūrinys yra austrų psichoanalitikas Wilhelm Reich. Pridedu autorės straipsnį apie jį "The Guardian"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Kažkokie dviprasmiški jausmai man po šios knygos. Buvo įdomu, patiko, su daugeliu autorės išanaliziotų dalykų sutinku, bet...va pabaigoje Laing retoriškai klausia - jei kūnas nebeturėtų baimių, tik įsivaizduokim, ką mes galėtume nuveikti, kokį pasaulį sukurti. Hmmm, na nežinau, kažkaip turiu abejoniu aš dėl taip paprastai 'pataisomo' pasaulio. Ir, beje, vien kapitalizmo irgi gal nereikėtų kaltint.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring and outsider artists for the highly atmospheric The Lonely City. Her new book is similarly wide-ranging in its points of reference and again brings together biography, theory and memoir. The topic here is slightly more nebulous, however. It’s about being a body in the modern world and how outside forces like illness, rape and imprisonment restrict physical freedom. The gurus this time include an analyst in 1920s Vienna, the feminist writers and civil rights activists of the 1960s–70s, and today’s environmental protestors. I found Everybody scattered and sometimes struggled to find an overall thread, but it contains many interesting nuggets of information and fascinating life stories that are worth engaging with.

See my full review at Shiny New Books.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tämä oli upea. En edes muista missä törmäsin Laingiin, mutta onneksi törmäsin.

Everybodyssa Olivia Laing hahmottelee maailmaa, jossa kehomme olisivat vapaita. Sen tieltä täytyy ensin poistaa este jos toinenkin, ja upeassa, eheässä esseekokoelmassaan Laing pureutuu vuorotellen näihin esteisiin aina vankiloista kehon sairauksiin, rasismista aktivismiliikkeisiin. Erona perinteiseen yhteiskunnalliseen esseekirjallisuuteen Laing ottaa koko teoksen kantavaksi voimaksi itävaltalaisen psykoanalyytikon Wilhelm Reichin, hänen elämänsä vivahteikkaat, raa'at ja traagisetkin vaiheet, ja kokoaa koko laajan ja syvästi filosofisen aiheensa Reichin elämäntarinan – sekä Reichin kehittämän orgonikammion, jolla ko. psykologi ajatteli voivan poistaa traumat ja sairaudet kehosta - varaan.

Laingin kieli on pakotonta ja kerronta sujuu soljuvana, näkisin tämän kyllä toimivan ehdottomasti myös suomennettuna. Toivottavasti joku laatukustantamo nappaa Laingin käännösoikeuksista kiinni. Sillä välin jatkan itse hänen muuhun tuotantoonsa tutustumista englanniksi.

[Tommy Lefroy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Olivia Laing’s Everybody to be astute, conversational and wildly interesting. Laing’s discussion on “bodily freedom”, though fairly western / euro centric, still manages to uncover some overlooked figures in the fight against civil and sexual repression, and physical health freedoms. Published in early 2021, this is a timely read, though there is only brief mention of current events.
'Everybody' is dense and can jump subjects quickly. I had to read it in spurts because I've spent much of the last year living out of an overstuffed suitcase that this book was too big to fit in :') But this was one of those reads that felt like a fateful find because an uncanny number of topics it addressed had recently come up in conversations around me—everything from welfare eugenics in first wave feminism to Marquis de Sade to Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe (which an ex once described in great detail how it was shot as we drove through the valley, near LA, where it was filmed).

One recurring subject, Wilhelm Reich, is presented by Laing with such compassion, the closeness she clearly feels to Reich’s fascinating story makes the reader feel the same. After dedicating his life to the pursuit of freedom, Austrian-born Reich died in the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Laing’s take on bodily freedom can come across easily as a lack thereof. Although there is rhetoric such as, ‘the fight’s not over yet’ etc, Laing’s choice to make Reich a focal point reinforces themes of disillusionment, present in so many movements towards freedom, which left me with an aftertaste of hopelessness, reader beware.

One fun fact I gleaned was that Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting is straight up about the FBI raiding Reich’s orgone generator factory (we love a marginal history reference!)
I also particularly liked Laing’s discussion on the works (and mysterious death) of feminist artist Ana Mendieta, civil and gay rights activist Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone. I found the section on Simone to be particularly poignant as a performer, including the below excerpt which was one of my favorites -

" ‘Everybody is half dead,’ she told an interviewer in 1969, setting out once again what sounds very much like a Reichian philosophy. ‘Everybody avoids everybody. All over the place, in most situations, most all of the time. I know. I’m one of those everybodies, and to me it is terrible. And so all I’m trying to do all the time is just open people up so they can feel themselves and let themselves be open to somebody else. That is all. That’s it.’ "

^this stirs so much in me and reminds me I can’t. wait. to play shows this summer 🖤

-Wynter

More on Riech, by Laing -
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

More on Todd Haynes's Safe -
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...

More on Ana Mendieta -
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...

Kate Bush's Cloudbusting -
https://open.spotify.com/track/5atQ2h...

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm convinced that Olivia Laing is a good writer and that I just haven't read anything that truly showcases her authorship yet. My issues with "Everybody: A Book about Freedom" are the same ones I found reading another one of her works "Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency". My problem lies mainly with the flow and structure of this book. Whilst some passages and chapters are prisms for depth and insight (I personally found her exploration of Sontag, Acker, Dworkin, Carter and Sade to be the most fascinating) others are dry factual reiterations resembling a biography. There's a roughness around the edges in the writing itself, a lack of seamlessness which is perhaps attributable to the impressively broad scope of topics Laing tackles. My major gripe with Laing's writing so far is the in-depth analysis that her writing is always be on the verge of undertaking is eroded by the frequency of biographical recounts. It's like I'm holding my breath out of anticipation, waiting for something that never comes. While these biographies do serve to prove her point, a large portion of the book is simply stating biographical facts of a writer/philosopher/activist/artist. Her analysis attempts to grasp a conclusion that it never quite reaches, making what could have been vibrant and multidisciplinary analysis always fall one step short. This also accounts for the book's semi-awkward flow, which never seems to find the right balance between personal and theoretical. Instead the reader is left with a stilted blend of biography, memoir and theory all clumsily thrown together.

All that being said, Laing's writing isn't bad. Freedom was an interesting and accessible work, with many portions that captured me. I just couldn't get over the awkward structure and the frequency of biographical elements. I can understand the books high praise, as there were moments where Laing's writing shone through with all the lustre of a diamond. When it works, it creates a discourse that is both engaging and poignant. The autobiographical elements were perhaps the most intriguing, when she manages to smoothly integrate her own experience with theory. However, these moments are frequently bogged down by a constant return to Reich (whose integration degrades to pure namedropping in later chapters) and having too broad of a focus without precise analysis to back it up. My conclusion is that Laing is talented at writing narrative, especially her own, but not so much with purely theoretical concepts.

I have a good feeling about reading In The Lonely City though...I think it might be the Laing that I learn to love.

[Come Musica · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Questo è un libro sui corpi in pericolo e sui corpi come motore di cambiamento. L’ho iniziato durante la crisi dei rifugiati nel 2015 e l’ho finito proprio mentre venivano annunciati i primi casi di Covid-19.
La nuova pandemia ha rivelato la portata spaventosa della nostra vulnerabilità fisica, ma le rivolte globali di Black Lives Matter dell’anno scorso suggeriscono che la lunga lotta per la libertà non è ancora finita."

È con questo saggio che ho definitivamente apprezzato Olivia Laing come scrittrice: passando da Susan Sontag a Nina Simone, la scrittrice affronta vari temi che ruotano attorno al corpo.

Tutti abitano un corpo. Tutti i corpi non sono entità a sé stanti.
"Everybody" è sia "tutti" sia "tutti i corpi". Ed è così che Olivia Laing investiga "tutti gli aspetti dell’esperienza di vivere in un corpo", soffermandosi sulla correlazione tra malattia fisica e ragioni psicologiche, sugli atti sessuali e le forme di violenza, sulla prigionia e le forme di protesta.

La stessa Laing si definisce non binaria, cioè il genere femminile e quello maschile le stanno stretti:
"Dieci anni fa le questioni trans non erano neanche lontanamente visibili o discusse quanto lo sono oggi, e la discussione esistente era incentrata sulla transizione da maschio a femmina o da femmina a maschio. Era un passo avanti, ma ignorava il problema di cosa fare se nessun genere ti si addiceva. Da persona trans volevo soltanto eludere il binarismo, così naturale quando ti include e così innaturale e violento quando non lo fa."

Siamo più della somma delle singole parti; siamo molto di più del nostro corpo e della nostra mente; siamo il frutto di ciò che abbiamo vissuto, sognato, assorbito... e non dobbiamo mai dimenticare che "i nostri corpi sono potentissimi e lo sono grazie, non malgrado, la loro evidente vulnerabilità."

[soph · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastically erudite and ambitious book, very well-executed and deeply thought provoking. At once political and artistic, Laing weaves several different movements for the liberation of all bodies into a cohesive and powerful narrative, using the experiences of visionaries and artists, activists and psychoanalysts, to create a collection of essays that everyone should read.

[Ірина Білоусова · Rating 5 out of 5]

Моя перша книга Олівії Ленґ, але точно не остання. Це якраз одна із тих книг, що надовго залишають післясмак, наштовхують на роздуми про своє тіло та його досвід.

В есеях дуже багато згадок і розповідей про видатних людей різних напрямків діяльності - психоаналітиків, митців, борців та борчинь за права, феміністок, письменниць... Кого тут тільки немає. І про всіх них після прочитання хочеться дізнатися більше, тому є цілий список фільмів та книг. Чи дійдуть до них руки, то уже інша історія.

Дивовижним чином Олівія Ленґуміє пов'язувати події, речі та ідеї, які різні люди з різних країн, епох чи рас виголошували чи навіть показували своїми діями. Це справді вражає.

На черзі у мене її єдиний художній текст "Крудо", а далі буду сподіватись на наступні переклади українською.

[Jaclyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sheer scope of this project! The depth of Laing’s intellect! The ambition! History, politics, philosophy with the lightest touch of memoir! I don’t want to reduce Laing’s achievement here to a summary so all I will say is that if you read narrative non-fiction, and even if you don’t, hers is one of the brightest minds in this space. Oh and she’s one of the most beautiful writers. That combination has me completely floored. This is Laing’s finest work to date and it simply has to be read.

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Olivia Laing’s writing and this is another invigorating non-fiction work. She creates mini-biographies of artists and thinkers from history (Reich, Sontag) but they become interesting stories through her lucidity & feminist eyes. She uses the idea of the body to explore human experience, thought and struggles with freedom & illness, with intimate portraits of her characters along the way. Will be more rewarding if you know the people featured.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahh… It’s books like this that make narrative non-fiction incredibly addictive.

[✩°｡⋆ryan⋆｡°✩ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very informative but I feel like her thesis was a little overambitious and it made the whole book fall a bit flat for me.