In On Freedom, Maggie Nelson shows how enlivening new ways of thinking can actually be. The starting place and guiding principle for Nelson’s latest book is, perhaps unexpectedly to the many readers of her previous work of auto-theory The Argonauts, not from the world of queer theory or poetics but rather from the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber who wrote, “revolutionary action is not a form of self sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future word of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Graeber’s imperative towards acting as if already free reverberates across the numerous subjects Nelson invokes (sex, art, drugs and climate change) in what is at once a hugely wide ranging and also remarkably consistent book asking what constantly acting towards a possible freedom, amid constraint and with care, might do to our way of looking at the world and making possible future action. 

Nelson’s book is deliberately looking at practices of freedom that could seem more subtle than those invoked by directly political writers such as Graeber or Robin D. G. Kelley, with her chronicle moving toward the “development of more understated practices by which one develops a greater tolerance for indeterminacy, as well as for the joys and pains of our inescapable relation.” To call Nelson’s book self help would be perhaps an overstatement and yet, at its best, this is a book which demonstrates the minor key power of reparative reading, thinking and political practices where, as with the theorist Eve Sedgwick’s quotation of Proust, “the reparative reader ‘helps himself again and again’” and possibility is opened rather than foreclosed. These stakes are high and the book unfolds like a series of Russian dolls, each essay containing the others in miniature: a way of thinking of art can inform thinking on sex which can inform ways of thinking on climate change. In all the essays, there are consistent fights: against logics of imprisonment and toward heterogeneity as well as a push toward recognizing “the difficulty of difficult things.” Through the depth with which Nelson approaches these four topics, the reader can “see a World in a Grain of Sand,” to quote William Blake. 

Nelson’s style of writing and thought here will, I suspect, find as many detractors as proponents and this is to the work’s benefit. This is, refreshingly, a true work of criticism, willing to be disagreeable, argumentative and move toward unexpected conclusions. I think that many readers who came to Nelson through The Argonauts and Bluets will be startled by what they find here. What is often lost about auto-theory, I think, is its difficulty: one must have something to say theoretically to move into life writing. Nelson writes personally in On Freedom in the sense of coming to her own conclusions, but her life is far from central. Nelson the theorist rather than auto-theorist speaks here. Nelson writes, toward the start of the chapter on art, riffing on Sedgwick, 

what follows here…proceeds unabashedly under the sign of “weak theory.” Weak theory does not set forth a new linguistic or conceptual register (such as that of the rhetoric of harm), attempt to shepherd a wide variety of phenomena under its rubric (aka concept creep), and demand that others assent to its terms. Instead, it emphasizes heterogeneity, and invites a certain epistemological uncertainty. It is undisturbed by inconclusiveness and mess. 

How does Nelson do this? She starts by asking why her response to being invited to a panel on “‘an aesthetics of care’ as something that would extend beyond an animating principle for certain artists, yuck?” The idea of art as exclusively performing care provokes an uncomfortable reaction in Nelson. Rather than satirizing this as jargon, Nelson thinks closely about how care might actually relate to aesthetics, not taking care as a surface given or suggesting tossing it aside entirely. Through dwelling on the difficulty of an aesthetics of care, Nelson moves to a number of questions: how does thinking about care exclusively as a rubric for art fall short? Isn’t all art related to care as “the patient labor—the aesthetic care—that artistic endeavor demands” of everyone from Marquis de Sade to Kara Walker (as some of the figures Nelson names)? 

The particular challenge of the art chapter comes from Nelson’s close engagement with “the more recent focus on the subordinated, vulnerable subject, who feels that (other people’s) art poses a nearly (or verily) criminal threat of harm, and wants to see its makers or enablers called to redress. This…model treats the demand for care and repair—and subsequent calls for castigation if and when the demand is not met—as forms of reparative labor itself.” This model and its possible risks can draw in a wide variety of examples seemingly daily (several occurred as I read Nelson’s book) and it provides vivid stakes here. How can artistic freedom be pursued and how can we extend care in a way that does not move into the logic of imprisonment? Nelson writes, for instance, “thankfully, acting as if the world neatly divides (or that our task is to divide it) into problematic, ethically turbulent, essentially dangerous people who should stay ‘over there,’ and nonproblematic, ethically good, essentially safe people who should be allowed to stay ‘over here,’ is not our only option. After all, what I’ve just described is a prison.” It is this kind of thinking which, for the receptive reader, makes possible new ways of thinking outside our current impasses and to think about the care in art making rather than exclusively what art does for us. It is deliberately “weak theory,” as described, not necessarily encouraging a quickly different response but rather to notice certain tendencies and to perhaps engage more thoughtfully. 

The rest of the chapters and the constellations Nelson draws are frequently startling in much the same way. In her chapter on sex, for example, Nelson draws as formative her coming of age during the AIDS crisis, noting that for that somewhat forgotten history “rather than sunshine and rainbows (or cheap beer, threesomes, and hot dogs), the word “positive” evoked positive HIV status (as in POZ magazine); to be sex positive in this climate meant talking condoms instead of quarantine.” Again, Nelson’s challenge is looking to freedom and possibility while recognizing constraint and difficulty. The chapter on drugs is perhaps the oddest, focusing on close analysis of several texts including Ellen Miller’s intensely troubling Like Being Killed, Paul Preciado’s autotheoretical Testo-Junkieand Iris Owens’s After Claude, but also recognizing the pernicious role of whiteness in drug literature. Nelson writes here, “it’s about reckoning with the historical construction of transgression, the challenges of uneasy alliances in the quest for liberation and defiance, and the question of what white folks can or should do (or shouldn’t) when they recognize that the systems they’ve constructed or inherited damage, degrade, and kill them also.” The climate change chapter moves through a shared depression at our collective state to a possibility of action amidst constraint, one which would have been inaccessible without the thinking it builds on and which again moves in surprising ways. The scope again moves wider and wider, messier and messier, considering the ways in which pernicious systems of thought are constructed and perhaps moving to new ones, to freedom and to presence in our lived reality as we act as if already free.