In recent years, Maggie Nelson has established herself with a style that interweaves literary theory, popular culture and intimacy. By publishing books that invite reflection while taking into account the relationship of power and privilege, the Californian writer has put her finger on something that floats in the air of the times.
So much so that in two decades, she has become a true icon of thought, rock star of the hybrid essay. Because his books have a certain transformative power, and they are safe spaces where thinking and reinventing oneself is allowed, each publication is expected.
By embarking on the voluminous and demanding Of freedom. four songs on care and restraint, the writer planned to delve into the notion of freedom. The book was written over a long period — from the start of the Trump era to the beating heart of the pandemic — years during which the definition of the word took on a multitude of meanings. Camps that everything opposes have appropriated it to better impose their views. But writing about freedom is also writing about loving care and concern for others, Nelson soon realized. It “also involves writing about time,” she reveals in the introduction.
A vast program whose goal is to find “other ways of being”, a reflection that she deploys through four axes – art, sex, drugs and the climate – which she calls “songs”, since the voices of other thinkers are summoned to it. She quotes them and frequents them abundantly; this allows him — us too — to support his own point of view, to distinguish his voice in the symphony. No blind spot will be overlooked.
Painful paradoxes
This essay has the defect of its qualities: nourishing, dense, searched, but the reading is dry, at times arduous… of freedom requires concentration and time from the reader, a real investment. So we miss, at times, the organic poetry, the wandering and fluttering thoughts of blueberries (2019).
It will be question in passing of the value of the care in art and the limits of this posture, morality with regard to the representation of violence in the arts, the need for the creator to develop the ability to defend his work.
She approaches, in the second song, the complex heritage of sexual liberation, examines permissions that have become injunctions. Then explores the search for a space of freedom through drug use and addiction narratives. She never falls into the obvious, and goes so far as to consider the idea that “hit rock bottom” can open up a space of freedom since there is nothing left to lose.
The most successful song is the last, dedicated to the climate. “Entre les wagons” invites us to rethink freedom in the current context of global warming. Nelson unearths all the painful paradoxes and calls into question our reflexes… Should the preservation of the human race remain the objective, at all costs, even if it means continuing, in an accelerated manner, the work of destruction begun with the birth of the modern oil industry?
For those who want to “think out loud with others […], to allow itself to be interpenetrated and transformed while preserving its ability to qualify and maintain its position. It is not a question of agreeing, but of not giving up on others”.