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On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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Critics' Rating Index
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Readers' Rating Index
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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 is the sole source of intellectual tension and hesitant to commit to any stance without an excess of caveats and concessions."
"Like The Argonauts, Nelson's account of her life with the artist Harry Dodge, it is clotted with jargon and arcane references to Foucault et al."
"a compelling analysis of a divisive human concept ..."
"Others, though, will find it to be a capitulation or an easy way out ..."
"Patient and 'devoted to radical compassion,' Nelson turns each thought until it is finely honed and avoids binaries and bromides."
"By the end of her theorizing, Nelson has breathed fresh air into the title notion, and in her openhanded treatment has given her readers a chance to consider freedom more freely."
"Four cerebral essays comprise a text that the reader must stay with in order to allow any personal consensus on freedom to coalesce ..."
"There is a lot of vulnerability in Nelson's writing, and I don't mean in the way she shares intimate and painful details of her life, though that is there as well."
"The subtlety of Nelson's analysis and energy of her prose refresh the mind and spirit."
"In defense of what should be obvious — we are beholden to each other and the planet that sustains us — Nelson encourages readers to examine 'how we negotiate, suffer, and dance with that enmeshment,' therein finding meaning, purpose and joy in an age of justifiable anxiety."
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