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On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
by
52/99
Critics
60/99
Readers
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Scholars
7/99
Rating
98/99
Volume
49/99
Rating
71/99
Volume
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About This Book
Named a Most Anticipated/Best Book of the Month NPR * USA Today * Time * Washington Post * Vulture * Women's Wear Daily * Bustle * LitHub * The Millions * Vogue * Nylon * Shondaland * Chicago Review of Books * The Guardian * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Publishers Weekly So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with―indeed, our inseparability from―others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture―from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis―is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
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Reviews
"Maggie Nelson, in taking on this most American of topics in On Freedom, is always alert to the conceptual primacy of constraint, even as she allows herself no little freedom of her own ..."
"[An] expansive and sharp-eyed study ..."
"And arguably, what makes this book so exciting is precisely the balancing act that enables Nelson to tear everything up at the same time as she retains faith in the values (desire, artistic freedom, difficulty) that shaped her."
"sparing but powerful testimony about her own path to sobriety ..."
"These lessons are well received, but not until the third song, 'Drug Fugue,' did I recognize the joyous version of Maggie Nelson with her deliciously reckless-seeming record of thought ..."
"While her intellect is the driving force of On Freedom, Nelson decenters herself to build a canon of radical thought with reference to artists and thinkers too numerous to name here."
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