You've Heard This One Before

Maggie Nelson believes we react too quickly and think ungenerously. In her new book, she’s guilty of doing both.

- By Andrea Long Chu

FOR MOST SCHOLARS—I speak from recovery—academic writing is a professional genre, not a literary one, more akin to a legal memo than a novel. The famous abstruseness of what we call “theory” is usually not an effect of intellectual sophistication; more often, it’s just someone doing their job. I don’t mean that cruelly. I mean it as a rightful acknowledgment that scholars are workers, and, like other workers, they have an inalienable right to mediocrity.

On Freedom, the new essay collection from the poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson, sits squarely in this genre. Its lyrical subtitle—Four Songs of Care and Constraint—is an overpromise; the chapters are “songs” exclusively in the sense that they have musical names: “Art Song,” “The Ballad of Sexual Optimism,” “Drug Fugue,” and “Riding the Blinds.” In fact, they are bits of straightforward academic criticism. They do not sing; they talk. What they say is this: If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Nelson believes to be menacing the left—from the Me Too movement to climate nihilism—we must learn to sit with ambiguity, risk, and indeterminacy. In doing so, Nelson says we’ll be engaging in what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “practices of freedom”—careful, patient experiments with what freedom might look like in everyday life with often conflicting results.