"I accepted the honor of putting Canetti between fresh covers because I, like pretty much everyone else during the past two years of pandemic-caused lockdown and crowd avoidance, became interested in “freedom” — rather, I became interested in why I’m often ashamed to speak that word, and why I’m often ashamed to admit that I’m ashamed to speak it, and so on. Perhaps my reaction has to do with the clunk of the verbiage itself — I can’t help but regard that “-dom” slapped onto the end as vaguely sadomasochistically sexual — or perhaps it’s the hint of sanctimony or sham piety with which it tends to be employed... ⁠ It might be that my discomfort with the word “freedom” is only my discomfort with the exclusionary politics of those who abuse it (in much the same way, I’m disturbed by the exemptionary politics of those who abuse “liberty”). But then it might also have to do with the fact that I was born in 1980 and so grew up in an America that was still cheering the collapse of the Soviet Union when it was attacked by religious fundamentalists and reacted by declaring war on the world — an endless technologized jihad of surveillance and control that by now has lasted half my lifetime. Whatever the cause of my word-aversion, the fact remains: as I became an adult, I found it harder and harder to write the word “free” without irony and to read the word “free” without thinking that it referred to something that cost nothing. As a writer — not just as a writer in a free society, but as a writer period — it sometimes feels as if I possess, or would be able to possess, every freedom except one, which is the freedom to be unpolitical, the freedom not to have my every sentence be judged by the terms of my identity, as construed by each of my readers.⁠ Canetti, exile, cosmopole, polyglot, was among the first modern voices who refused this."⁠ Joshua Cohen on editing the new Elias Canetti reader (out tomorrow from @picador) at the link in bio.⁠ ⁠ Image: L.S. Lowry, Going to Work, 1943. Oil on Canvas. 18”X 24”. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.