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On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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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.
Reviews
"On Freedom skillfully illustrates that very practice, emphasizing how to recognize the choices we have and what to do with them."
"She admits, however, that On Freedom is 'littered to a fault' with quotations."
"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."
"Far less memoiristic than The Argonauts, On Freedom is more focused on cultural criticism and philosophizing, exploring its capacious topic through the frames of art, sex, substance use and climate change."
"Its pace and tone never change ..."
"Her preferred method is one of synthesis and accretion, putting quotes and observations in fragmentary conversation with one another ..."
"Once again, Nelson proves herself a masterful thinker and an unparalleled prose stylist."
"She avoids lyrical writing, adopting instead a stentorian official voice whose broad conclusions about life being a bundle of contradictions are dangerously close to parody."
"Readers of her previous work will anticipate the engagingly idiosyncratic way in which she draws on all of her lives: as poet, theorist, critic, mother, spouse ..."
"more academic, less personal (than Nelson's last book) ..."
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