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Tracy McNulty's new book, Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life, addresses the growing sense that freedom, in contemporary thought, is too often defined negatively—that is, as the opposite of social norms and laws. By emphasizing too simplistically what freedom opposes, she claims, we miss the crucial way that freedom is in fact not opposed to such restraints but is rather enabled by them. in this light, restraints can function as indispensable resources for creativity and social change. They are essential to freedom—and desire—the very ground of their possibility, what freedom/desire works on and with and through. Though we tend to see this point rather easily in conversations about poetry and music and in the context of teaching and learning, we often miss it, says McNulty, in our thinking about social and legal issues.
When we look at legal constraints alongside formal constraints (those of poetry or music), we can see, suggests McNulty, the crucial difference between the letter of the law and its prescriptive function as representation of some law-making authority or identificatory ego-ideal. For McNulty, the letter of the law, most simply, is its liberating dimension. Consider for example the way Raymond Queneau describes a strict adherence to the precise letter of the various limits that, in his writing, he forces himself to observe: such a devotion protects him from “inspiration,” an utterly random business of jotting down whatever phrases happen to “come knocking at the window,” which in fact is best understood only as the writer's obedience, even slavery, to rules that remain unknown. Instead of involuntary submission to blind whimsy, his work proceeds as a rigorous activity of will, of desire, of grappling. It opens the space for