CAnsel culture jeopardizes the freedom to encroach on the freedom of the arts. #MeToo has made people stop experimenting with the sexiness of passivity. Abstinence is freed from intoxication. In a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, perhaps it is fitting that the conclusions be at once so daring and so unexpectedly old-fashioned.
The question of liberty has perplexed many of our aspiring thinkers. As pandemics and the climate crisis encourage increased state control, freedom becomes the core of the right, how can we maintain trust with the liberation movements and liberal humanism that shaped us? recently Olivia Ling The culture of the last century was excavated in search of freedom. Now Maggie Nelson has written a tremendously invigorating book wrestling with freedom in four areas: art, sex, drugs and climate.
For centuries, people have struggled with whether freedom is better than freedom, and whether inner freedom is merely a luxury (or a senseless reward for the oppressed). Nelson is not interested in joining historical thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who risked their lives to escape the liberty of one person, resulting in the imprisonment of another, but himself. deeply connected to these questions. She takes the view from Michel Foucault that liberation is a momentary achievement, whereas freedom is a continuous exercise. For them the exercise of freedom is basically an exercise of the mind that is characterized by uncertainty, necessary “if we want to get rid of the paranoia, despair and police habits that have come under threat and even the most We are controlled even with good intentions”. We do”.
Nelson’s book is written as part of conversations with friends and mentors. He has the gift of bringing serious intellectual debate to a page full of personalities who are figuring out what to do with their lives. She is less interested in defining liberty for subsequent generations than in immediately intervening. This conversation as invigorating as she opens up to her readers as fellow interlocutors—she describes it as “thinking aloud with others”—is wonderfully moving. The Register of Books at the New York School is a contrast between the academic style of his book and his charged, slang poetic style. Argonauts. It forms a companion volume to his 2011 book the art of cruelty, Where freedom emerged as a subtext. Collectively his writing across genres is emerging as an integrated project, in its commitment to the Lacanian will, intellectually rigorous, faithful to the avant-garde tradition, while freely diverse in its styles and forms.
The four sections are loosely cumulative. The art chapter focuses on the relationship between freedom and caring, which is very easily contrasted with Nelson’s concerns: “Beyond the petty stereotypes of today’s bullying and bluffing … the criminal and the victim, the artistic of vital importance. There are dimensions and archives. All Producer and Viewer”. She doesn’t want artists to have to accept the damage done by their work; She does not want to remove such art from the gallery which disturbs the audience. Yet she wants to highlight the benefits of critical theory, decentralization of the subject, authority.
And so to sex, where, similarly, Nelson is concerned about increased policing of the freedoms of others, suggesting that we express our desires rather than “what we do or what we do ourselves”. may be involved in. do, and how our desires and behavior are class (or not) with the political stance we aspire to elsewhere. Foucault, which means that we cannot dissipate power at will and instead we should dream of more capable and free forms of power (I’d love to hear more about that). Although we are professionals, it is correct to call people out for misconduct, she worries that we are in danger of boiling over in “outrage, despair and malice” and that the structures of the game are regressively patriarchal and heterosexual. Let’s instead (in David Graber’s words) need to act as if one is already independent, and to respect the ways in which it can be painful, difficult, and unequal for people who have good sex. . He is refreshed with the lead singer of Pinegrove, who has announced that he is no longer going to sleep with his fans because there is a “Inappropriate dynamic in the game”. Who is it that tells these women they don’t want what they want? Instead of joining forces with bureaucrats accused of police sex, Nelson wants us to accept “the furious, turbulent fact of womanhood.”
If the sections on art and sex make for a deputy of sorts, so do the sections on drugs and climate. The argument here is that constraint provides a richer experience of the exercise of freedom than does limitlessness. Writing about his experience of heavy drinking, he argues that drugs give you a sense of freedom, while actually reducing the space left for freedom, and that drugs are for our “nonhuman” people. . hole” (this becomes important in considering the agency of nature). There are some compelling readings of the addict’s memoirs, where she shows the meaning of achieving freedom without regard for her own limitations. She is clear in her commitment to inner freedom. What is considered in Buddhist terms as “renunciation, laziness, abandonment” has reached such a low level that you touch the bareness of your bare life.
We don’t have this freedom when it comes to climate. We cannot chase our addiction to fossil fuels, bring it back by burning our environment. Here Nelson grapples with how our freedom exists, describing pagan freedom as a defiance of limits, and describing (she’s drawing on Naomi Klein) “the need to interact with various physical constraints.” ” Defines us as the practice that shapes our lives. and possibility”. Hope, as with addiction, is that freedom can be found through bondage, through collective thriving, through actually getting out from below. Including giving up and embracing discipline. She hopes that when we surrender ourselves to nature, turning ourselves into ecological time, a free renunciation and liberation from the self can come into play. .
The climate section was the least satisfactory to me, perhaps because we have less freedom to differ in our opinions here. Dissent is perhaps appropriate as a way of experiencing our current impasse – arguably requiring us to embrace intellectual boundaries as well as physical limitations with the backlash of conservatism. But somehow the lack of interest in the broader intellectual traditions that characterized the book undermined the writings here. A kind of magpie delight for Nelson – she quotes the authors without reference to her own. It seems strange that Foucault is given center stage without some understanding of his complex, shifted intellectual background. Or without the spirit of Nietzsche and Pierre Hadot behind him. It seems odd even for the attitudes that liberal humanism (uncertainty, subjectivity, ambivalence) tolerate so widely, but for the book to claim so strongly that liberal humanistic themes are needed, desires, and trajectory now. are not available to us.
Undoubtedly, this is the central dilemma of our era. And arguably, what makes this book so exciting is the balancing act that enables Nelson to set everything apart while maintaining a belief in the values (desire, artistic freedom, hardship) that shaped him. . Reading this, I had a visceral experience to see how this can be done in good faith, how we can think like Nelson thinks about sex and art, while also believing in the need for a new order. Huh. Huh. Nelson’s quote from one of the few historically distant writers is Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he returns wholeheartedly, reminding us that he has a uniquely American song, and that too sits at the feet of the general. At one point he has a line in his head: “This time, like all other times, is great, if we know what to do with it.” We have so much courage to imagine that moment as a good moment, so much freedom to write it down. We hope this book will serve as a call to thought, prompting other authors to have a collective conversation about the genealogy of liberty and the future of the liberal humanist theme, returning to liberty with all its upheaval and hardship. will allow. Will give, which will help us. Find out what to do with these times that may eventually turn out for good.