Always interested in what Nelson has to say, even if it begins as a critique on how she is privileged enough to chase an inquiry about freedom for a book length project, although shouldn't we all share the privilege. And yet no one can do it as lyrically and incisively as her.

Maggie Nelson is one of my favorite writers and I was excited to see the news of a new essay collection from her. Her writing is beautiful and clear and the topics she explores within are timely and important.

Really enjoyed the first part but admittedly felt my interest waver as the essays progressed - perhaps more an indictment on me as a reader, but I often struggled to stay connected to Nelson’s central thesis in each part

I wasn't able to finish reading this before my review period for the ARC was over (my bad) but even based on the roughly 20 pages I read, I can recommend this week. As she did in "The Argonauts", Maggie Nelson lays out a clarifying and illuminating framework for thinking about the question of "freedom" in a historical moment where it's perhaps as fraught as it's ever been.

THINKING OUT LOUD, WITH OTHERS
Published at Ruminate Magazine online

In the 1960s, the rhetoric of “freedom” permeated American leftist culture: “Free your mind,” “Free the land,” “Free South Africa,” the Freedom Riders, and the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi.

Since at least George W. Bush’s time as President, right-wingers have arrogated it to themselves: freedom fries, Operation Enduring Freedom, the Religious Freedom Act, the Freedom Caucus, and “Freedom’s never free.”

Today on the right, freedom as an ideal seems in retreat under the influence of Donald Trump. During his campaign in 2016, Trump supporters coined neologistic terms of despotic endearment such as the imaginative “Trump the Allfather,” the rather dull, “Trump the Patriarch,” “Trump the King,” “Trump the Godfather,” and the fascistic and terrifying “God-Emperor Trump.”

“Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word?” writes Maggie Nelson in her new book, On Freedom. Despite its weaponization and the threat to its existence from anti-democratic forces, Nelson says it is not her way to diagnose “a crisis of freedom” and propose solutions. The intellectual method of this poet, essayist, critic, and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, is to focus her attention where the thicket of our inherited ideas is its thorniest, where mutually antagonistic concepts, practices, and values are knotted. This is where her subtle and nuanced thinking is at its best. In On Freedom, she “bears down on the felt complexities of the freedom drive in four distinct realms—sex, art, drugs, and climate—wherein the coexistence of freedom, care, and constraint” seems most acutely tangled and wherein you find “marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender,” and which commingle “sometimes ecstatically, sometimes catastrophically.”



Nelson is our day’s ur-thinker for nuance, our own private Susan Sontag. She calls her method “thinking out loud with others,” for she quotes liberally from other writers. It makes her text a rich palimpsest, dense with significance. A phrase is introduced—for example, “freedom and fun,” from the founder of the Proud Boys description of the group’s mission—and then the phrase is re-used in multiple contexts serving to connect those contexts—like an ideational version of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.”

Other examples include: “insubordinate conviviality,” from Manolo Callahan, “will to power,” from Friedrich Nietzsche, “a big koan” from Pema Chödrön, and “practices of freedom” from Michel Foucault. With this ever-growing technical vocabulary, by the end of the book, she can brick together paragraphs of extraordinary profundity and reach.



Consider the art world. A handful of presumptions about what is and is not ethical have congealed there in recent years: “Depicting violence in art, or certain kinds of violence in art, harms others; there exists some kind of ethical imperative for the artist to acknowledge [this] harm, even if she does not agree with the premises… ‘not caring’ about, not responding to, or not agreeing with one’s critic’s, including not making or doing or saying what those critics would prefer you make or do or say, is ethically negligent; treasuring the freedom to make the art you feel most driven to make correlates to the generalized claim ‘to do as one pleases’,” with the latter’s off-putting connotations.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibited a quasi-abstract oil painting of Emmett Till in his coffin, titled Open Casket by Dana Schutz, who is white. A furor resulted, the intense wrathfulness of which will shock those who do not share in the indignation. Among the many people outraged was Hannah Black, who wrote in an open letter to the Whitney Museum that the painting should be removed and destroyed. “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.”

Also in 2017, artist Sam Durant, who is white, exhibited—at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, located on the former homeland of the Dakota people—a large outdoor sculpture that replicated parts of seven historical gallows, including one in which thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in 1862.

“These works led many to feel as though white artists (and institutions) could use a little (or a lot) more insight and accountability, and less unthinking, uncaring freedom, especially as the latter coincides all too well with the logic of white supremacy, with all its ignorance, impunity, and carelessness,” Nelson writes.

Nelson approaches these two cases in the most nuanced way, amounting to an intervention on an orthogonal—or perhaps higher—plane than those weighing in on one side or another, in one frame or another, from one ideological perspective or another, from one kind of moral-emotional eruption or another.

It seems to Nelson (and she convinced me) that the works of art by Schutz and Durant summoned—without artistically preventing re-enforcement of—the legacy of an all-too-well known homicidal construction of freedom. The art works re-presented the acts of violence perpetrated against Black and Indigenous people and failed to prevent causing “enforcement of a vicious construction of freedom.”

Nelson says we can judge the works as harmful and are free to judge that they should be suppressed or destroyed, but we can also judge them as harmful without concluding they should be suppressed or destroyed.

One engages more seriously with the above issues, Nelson argues, when one does not turn toward questions of the freedom of artists and curators. Her work teaching at an art school serves as an example of which direction to turn to when you turn away from attempting to curtail an artist’s freedom. The permissive policy for exhibitions of art at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) has “ended up featuring in other universities’ sexual harassment training.” But “because we weren’t there to shut each other down, we had to learn how to communicate our pleasures and displeasures differently,” she writes. “The amount of time I’ve spent politely workshopping hyperviolent work steeped in unexamined misogyny can seem like wasted hours of a life…. But I value its lesson that, without suppression, shaming, or ejection as go-to options, we learn to fellowship differently.”

Such a sharp and refreshing book from Maggie Nelson. She's one of my favorite writers, in part because her writing challenges me to really think. I really enjoyed this and expect to revisit it in the future to glean more (that likely previously went over my head, lol).

Thanks to NetGalley and Greywolf Press for the copy of this in exchange for my review.

How to grapple with this one? It's always a pleasure to read Maggie Nelson and her prose is as engaging as ever. I just wish her thoughts here felt... more interesting? More, well... more thought-out? There's a decided "watch out for cancel culture" undercurrent to the early going that rubbed me the wrong way and left me less-than-receptive to some of the more compelling stuff about climate change and drugs. But maybe my hopes were just too high.

What a thought-provoking work! It's timely to think about and explore the idea of what freedom means and the limitations of freedom (and ways it is abused). This is a topic I've considered for awhile, but after reading this book, it's hard to stop thinking about and mulling over the many angles to consider freedom. An important read!

Note: I voluntarily requested, read, and reviewed this book. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sending me a temporary digital advance reading copy/advance review (ARC) galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. As always, my opinions are my own and do not represent my co-host or the podcast. I request, read, and review many books prior to publication to explore possible future guests for the podcast. I wish we could interview the author of every one of these books because I'm so impressed by the creativity, thoughtfulness, and wisdom shared through the temporary books I get through NetGalley. I find the idea of simplifying any book into 1-5 stars to be quite silly and reductionist, so I don't participate in that game and instead, just give five stars to each book.

This book was, admittedly, a difficult read--extremely dense and erudite. However, Nelson shows here why she's continuously lauded as one of the great critics and writers of our modern day in her treatise on freedom.

A fantastic read by one of our premiere cultural critics and essayists. Nelson goes deep in unpacking the concept of freedom, a fraught topic right now, and comes away with no simple answers and many questions. Where do we draw lines around sex and drugs, for instance, and what do we owe each other when it comes to stewardship of the planet? This is a dense book with a lot to mull over and by no means an easy read, but very worthwhile.

I found Nelson’s critique insightful, despite the fact that some of her points could be deemed common knowledge. Her introduction was deliberate and steady. In "Art Song," she comments on freedom as a right in art and how that right can be abused in some situations. Her knowledge accompanied with her unique voice bodes very well with me as a young adult, especially concerning the topic of freedom. Reading Nelson is like engaging in a conversation with someone who is well-versed on the topic but is open to questions and critiques. She inspires her reader to question that which is commonly accepted and find a new understanding of freedom. At 304 pages, Nelson shows that even the most explored subject still has something new to say.

Another tour de force by Maggie Nelson, author of Argonauts, endlessly teachable; and great fodder for discussion.