This language, though inspiring, can "condition us into thinking of freedom as a future achievement rather than as an unending present practice, something already going on," Nelson writes. "I noticed then that he was selling buttons divided into three categories: saving the unborn, owning the libs, and gun rights."īut if that kind of freedom - predicated on limiting other people's freedoms - is antithetical to Nelson, she also does not subscribe to the "rote, unventilated" sense of freedom as it's often used on the left: the idea that people are working progressively towards some joyous, emancipatory point in time when liberation will have been finally achieved. "He looked me up and down, then said slowly, with a hint of menace, a hint of insecurity, 'You know, regular old freedom,'" she writes. She asked the young man what kind of freedom he wanted to talk about. In the past few months, vaccines have demonstrated this with special clarity, in their double guise as tickets to liberation and tools of authoritarianism, depending very much on who you ask.Īt the beginning of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Nelson describes walking across the campus where she works as a professor and seeing a young man with a sign that said, "Stop Here if You Want To Talk about Freedom." It's a word that lends itself to any agenda, any wish, any fear.
"Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word?" asks the writer Maggie Nelson at the beginning of her elastic, imaginative study of the idea of freedom. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson
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