On Freedom

Maggie Nelson, a poet, essayist, and cultural critic, organizes her book as four extended essays, or "songs," exploring freedom in the realms of art, sex, drugs, and climate. Written during the Trump presidency and completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book argues against treating freedom as a one-time liberation and instead proposes it as an ongoing practice inseparable from care and constraint.

In the Introduction, Nelson traces the book's origins to The Art of Cruelty (2011), where freedom emerged as an unexpected subtext, and to The Argonauts (2015), which some readers understood as a book about freedom. She acknowledges that "freedom" has become a depleted, weaponized word, relaying friends' objections that it is "a white word" or "a corrupt and emptied code word for war" (3). Two reasons keep her attached to the term. First, she is frustrated by the right wing's capture of freedom, tracing how the liberatory rallying cries of the 1960s, such as Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, and Women's Liberation, were overtaken by formations like the U.S. military campaign Operation Enduring Freedom and right-wing religious-liberty legislation. Second, she has reservations about emancipatory rhetoric that treats liberation as a singular event. Drawing on French philosopher Michel Foucault's distinction between liberation as a momentary act and freedom as an ongoing practice, she adopts Foucault's assertion that liberation paves the way for new power relationships that must be managed through practices of freedom. Nelson also engages with philosopher Hannah Arendt's dismissal of inner freedom as irrelevant to politics, countering with novelist James Baldwin's insistence that political institutions are shaped by the spiritual state of a nation. She concludes by invoking anthropologist David Graeber's formulation that revolutionary action is "the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free" (15), proposing that the border between acting "as if" and actually being free is blurry if not illusory.

The first chapter, "Art Song," examines debates about artistic freedom, care, and harm. Nelson opens with her resistance to a 2016 museum panel on "the aesthetics of care," arguing that she has never gone to art looking for care directly. She draws on French philosopher Jacques Rancière's concept of art as a "third thing" between artist and spectator whose meaning is "owned by no one" (21), arguing that art's capacity to mean differently across time complicates any fixed moral judgment. She critiques what art critic Grant Kester calls "the orthopedic aesthetic," the conviction that audiences need artistic intervention, whether through shock or healing. She discusses the 'reparative turn' in queer studies—a critical shift toward attending to art's capacity for sustenance and healing rather than exposure of harm—initiated by theorists Eve Sedgwick and José Muñoz, distinguishing reparative reading from a newer demand that polices art's meaning. Nelson examines two 2017 controversies: painter Dana Schutz's Open Casket, a depiction of Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial, and artist Sam Durant's sculpture Scaffold, which replicated historical gallows including one used to hang 38 Dakota men. Artist Hannah Black's open letter called for the destruction of Schutz's painting, arguing that white creative freedom has been founded on the constraint of others. Nelson acknowledges these concerns but argues that such work can be critiqued without being stripped of its status as art. She aligns her approach with what psychologist Silvan Tomkins called "weak theory," which emphasizes heterogeneity and tolerance for inconclusiveness, and draws on scholar Saidiya Hartman's description of the care provided by Black women as "coerced and freely given" (71) to argue that caring and coercion often exist in a knot whose extrication is never simple.

The second chapter, "The Ballad of Sexual Optimism," defends sexual freedom against critics who argue it has failed. Nelson opens with an anonymously authored 2012 essay rejecting any link between sex and liberation, situating this pessimism within a narrative that rewrites decades of feminist and queer history to conclude that sex positivity devolved into market-friendly empowerment. She rejects this totalizing dismissal, arguing that judging experience based on whether it was ever co-opted would mean a life without any felt sense of discovery. She critiques the tendency to scrutinize other people's sexual behavior while leaving one's own unexamined, and argues that the #MeToo movement's gray-area stories, while courageously breaking silences, continue the culture's silence about female complexity by requiring that female agency be scrubbed from accounts. Nelson grounds her defense in the AIDS crisis, arguing that sex positivity meant insisting on sexual expression in the face of moralists "who didn't care if you lived or died" (89). She engages with the role of power in sex, arguing against the premise that ethically correct sex requires stripping away power relations. Nelson offers a close reading of Monica Lewinsky's evolving account of her affair with Bill Clinton, praising Lewinsky's refusal to commit to one party line as itself a practice of freedom. She discusses Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa and his student Pema Chödrön, whose declaration, "My personal teacher did not keep ethical norms and my devotion to him is unshakable. So I'm left with a big koan" (122), a koan being a paradoxical problem in Zen Buddhism, underscores the complexity of navigating freedom and harmful behavior.

The third chapter, "Drug Fugue," examines drugs, addiction, and freedom through literary accounts. Nelson traces her interest to literary theorist Avital Ronell's Crack Wars (1992), which proposed that "drugs" names a deep structure in Western culture bound to the question of freedom. She analyzes the gender dynamics of drug literature, noting that its overwhelmingly male canon is treated as embodying macho liberation even when the writing describes feminized experiences of dependency and abasement. Drawing on critic Barbara Johnson, she observes that male authors who "play femininity" consolidate privilege, while women describing analogous fragmentation are treated as proof of instability. She examines female drug writing that pushes past conventional recovery arcs, including Ellen Miller's 1999 novel Like Being Killed, praised for its audacity in exploring intergenerational trauma, and Iris Owens's 1973 novel After Claude, whose freedom stems from Owens's insubordinate wit. She traces racialized dynamics, examining how white writers sought spiritual renewal in fantasized nonwhite cultures while the criminal justice system ensured nonwhite people disproportionately paid the price. Nelson discusses Spanish writer and theorist Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie (2008), which argues we are all subjects of a pharmacopornographic order, a system in which pharmaceuticals and sexuality function as mechanisms of social control. She concludes with reflections on her own sobriety, describing the decision to stop drinking as granting more intimacy with freedom than any substance ever had.

The fourth chapter, "Riding the Blinds," confronts the climate crisis. Nelson opens at Travel Town in Los Angeles, watching her toddler son pretend to drive a decommissioned steam locomotive while theorist Timothy Morton's assertion that "The end of the world has already occurred" (172) ticks through her mind, dated to James Watt's 1784 patent of the steam engine. She notes that over half of all CO₂ emissions have been released since 1988, a sixth mass extinction is underway, and the task is no longer prevention but mitigation and adaptation. She warns against both apocalyptic fantasy and nihilism, which off-load responsibility onto more vulnerable populations. Nelson examines journalist Naomi Klein's report on the Heartland Institute's climate denial conference, where attendees argue that addressing climate change is a plot to steal American freedom. She takes seriously their apprehension that the crisis challenges ideals of progress, arguing that freedom must be reimagined as negotiation with material constraints rather than defiance of limits. Drawing on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's observation that "The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use" (185), she argues that modern freedom has been inextricable from fossil fuels. She engages with queer theorist Lee Edelman's No Future, arguing that while critiques of reproductive futurism—the ideology that frames political commitments around securing a better future for children—have been valuable, it is difficult to celebrate queerness as rupturing faith in futurity when climate change accomplishes the same catastrophically. She closes with the image of "riding the blinds," a hobo practice of riding between freight train cars out of sight, borrowed from scholars Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as a figure for living without knowing the outcome.

In the Afterword, Nelson invokes Italian philosopher Rosi Braidotti's concept of the future anterior tense, "We will have been free" (214), as a form of remembering what has not yet occurred. She describes hearing the 2020 uprisings for racial justice outside her window, their energy flooding her with hope. She concludes by noting that her focus on freedom brought her into a reckoning with anxiety, "one of freedom's most formidable adversaries" (218), and closes: "I want to be in, all in: all heart, no escape" (218).