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51
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
47/100Critics
10/100Scholars
96/100Author:
Maggie Nelson
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Date:
September 7, 2021
The author of The Argonauts interrogates the meanings of freedom. 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?
What The Reviewers Say
... a sustained, uncompromisingly even-handed meditation.
Maggie Nelson, in taking on this most American of topics in On Freedom, is always alert to the conceptual primacy of constraint, even as she allows herself no little freedom of her own.
Nelson moves through knots of ideology on freedom via 'songs' of art, sex, drugs, and climate, drawing conclusions—some wild, some that readers might find regressive—that obliterate the binary of freedom vs. constrain.
It is a very serious and beautiful book about why ‘freedom’ has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite.
