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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
"She pays careful attention to those with whom she disagrees, judiciously accepting some of their points while firmly rejecting others ..."
"At its best, the effect is of being privy to an engaging conversation, but at times the citations feel poorly integrated."
"On Freedom proves that Nelson continues to do us a great service as a critic, which is to herself digest, and sometimes wrestle with, copious amounts of literature and theory, some of which is infuriating to read (Paul Preciado, Jacques Derrida, et al.), and to integrate this material into a relatively short book, in an accessible, felicitous voice all Nelson's own."
"Patient and 'devoted to radical compassion,' Nelson turns each thought until it is finely honed and avoids binaries and bromides."
"But if you approach it in a Nelson-esque spirit, with an open, curious mind, you may stumble at times over the dense language and academic theory, but you'll also find lots to keep you engaged—provocative ideas, thinkers you've never heard of and a vast encyclopedia of cultural references, from the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron to the Allman Brothers' 'Ramblin' Man.'"
"It's probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned ..."
"She quotes other writers extensively and rarely makes a declarative statement herself ..."
"The resulting equivocation stalls her rhetoric."
"sparing but powerful testimony about her own path to sobriety ..."
"Only the first two essays come close to working, if by this we mean that they make some kind of vaguely perception-shifting argument ..."
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