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A review by savaging
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
5.0
My favorite Nelson book yet. I was a little jolted at first by the idiosyncrasies of academics -- everything's couched in what this person said about what that person wrote about what that artist created.... -- but once I caught my stride I remembered also how delicious all this close reading can be.
I can fall prey to the kinds of thinking Eve Sedgwick classifies as 'paranoid' -- totalizing and immovable interpretations which homogenize and flatten the world into a classifying system. I mean the world is chaotic -- it's comforting to diagram it out into a clear meaning, whether that's a religion or a political stance or any other big theory.
But it's also an ever-tightening net. I left social media (except for this barely-functional website) because I was feeling that urge to weigh and adjudicate each artifact of our time, to label it with a Correct Opinion, to bite my nails over the fear I didn't get it 'right'. What an exhausting way to live.
And so it's a real joy to consider drugs and sex and art and biospheres and all the things that trouble the neat lines of our diagrams. Even if Nelson has no clear answers, reading this book actually makes me feel more free.
I can fall prey to the kinds of thinking Eve Sedgwick classifies as 'paranoid' -- totalizing and immovable interpretations which homogenize and flatten the world into a classifying system. I mean the world is chaotic -- it's comforting to diagram it out into a clear meaning, whether that's a religion or a political stance or any other big theory.
But it's also an ever-tightening net. I left social media (except for this barely-functional website) because I was feeling that urge to weigh and adjudicate each artifact of our time, to label it with a Correct Opinion, to bite my nails over the fear I didn't get it 'right'. What an exhausting way to live.
And so it's a real joy to consider drugs and sex and art and biospheres and all the things that trouble the neat lines of our diagrams. Even if Nelson has no clear answers, reading this book actually makes me feel more free.