Maggie Nelson  

"In October of 1998, just a few weeks into my graduate school career, I was invited to attend a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss."--The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson

"For this reason, Michel Foucault’s distinction between liberation (conceived of as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (conceived of as ongoing) has been key for me." --On Freedom - Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021) by Maggie Nelson

"But his use of the term, and his unwillingness to give it up, were no semantic accidents. Like Nietzsche before him, Artaud insisted on cruelty because cruelty is associated not only with implacability, but also with evil. And both men considered the riotous reclamation of evil something of a necessary pit stop on the way to dancing with cosmic forces which have no truck with normative, especially religious, conceptions of morality. In other words, embracing cruelty is a step — a sort of hazing, or threshold — on the path to moving beyond cruelty, a space valorized by Artaud (as well as by the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Camille Paglia, and countless others) as a more elemental, more animal, more "natural" realm than that of the civilized world, with the latter's internalized psychic limits, fretting over ethics, hypocritical moralizing, tedious social contracts and policy debates. "We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither," Nietzsche wrote, rallying the invisible troops."--The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011) by Maggie Nelson