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A review by sam_bizar_wilcox
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
4.0
I like Maggie Nelson the theorist more than Maggie Nelson the poet. In this collection(?) she tackles issues of consent, climate, free speech, etc. in ways that I found both provocative and tantalizing. Her voice was a rather edifying one as I was finding myself nodding along to positions I might not have initially taken. More importantly, though, she treats those who have moral positions that slightly deviate from her own with intellectual respect and compassion: something to be celebrated in any corpus, but one where the topics can be so hairy as freedom is a true godsend.
I used Nelson in conversation a lot as I was reading this book, and I think there's a lot of fun to be had unpacking and wrestling with these ideas. This book is the sort of non-fiction that can simultaneously entertain through Nelson's clever verbiage, as it can also provide countless hours to puzzle over some of the ideas here. More important: she is accessible. Her scholarly repertoire is immense, but she scaffolds citations so that anyone from a Eve Sedgwick aficionado (I am not, but aspire to be) to your average Twitter leftist can parse through these interesting and difficult concepts.
Do I buy Nelson's ultimate positions on freedom? I'm not sure; but that isn't the point, I reckon. Rather, the notion of freedom ought to be dislodged from the contemporary conservative appropriation of the term and tempered, in some way, about how freedom might actually be applied equitably in a world faced with imminent peril and by communities to whom the charge for freedom has been a rallying cry against oppression (not a blunt tool, as it so often is by the right, to oppress).
I used Nelson in conversation a lot as I was reading this book, and I think there's a lot of fun to be had unpacking and wrestling with these ideas. This book is the sort of non-fiction that can simultaneously entertain through Nelson's clever verbiage, as it can also provide countless hours to puzzle over some of the ideas here. More important: she is accessible. Her scholarly repertoire is immense, but she scaffolds citations so that anyone from a Eve Sedgwick aficionado (I am not, but aspire to be) to your average Twitter leftist can parse through these interesting and difficult concepts.
Do I buy Nelson's ultimate positions on freedom? I'm not sure; but that isn't the point, I reckon. Rather, the notion of freedom ought to be dislodged from the contemporary conservative appropriation of the term and tempered, in some way, about how freedom might actually be applied equitably in a world faced with imminent peril and by communities to whom the charge for freedom has been a rallying cry against oppression (not a blunt tool, as it so often is by the right, to oppress).