Maggie Nelson: “Freedom” – Culture

Strange things happen in the so-called discourse. The American author Maggie Nelson has published a volume of essays: “Freedom. Four variations on affection and coercion”. In four essays, Nelson deals with debates about art, sex, drugs and the climate crisis. At first glance, the chapters on art and sex in particular seem like another salvo against the supposedly out-of-control cancel culture. It’s about allegations of sexual assault, about art censorship, about hurt feelings that are supposed to be made good through punishment. In return, Nelson advocates more tolerance for complex and perhaps disturbing ideas and artworks. We have seen many such interjections in recent years.

But this is where the confusion begins: Maggie Nelson is not really suitable as a voice in the chorus of those who warn against the terror of opinion by “Woko Haram” and sing the praises of the supposedly tolerant Enlightenment. Because Nelson is one of the most important voices in feminist and queer literature and theory of the past decade. In her 2015 novel The Argonauts, she detailed her use of psychoanalysis and queer theory to mentally and emotionally penetrate her relationship and her partner’s testosterone therapy. Together with the Spanish queer theorist Paul Preciado, she founded the genre of “auto theory”, the literary summit of the feminist dictum that the personal is political.

There is still a lot of theory in “Freiheit”, but little is left of the “auto”. It’s as if Nelson was afraid. She arms herself with quotations and endnotes as if building a shield to protect her from the attacks of her critics. On some pages she mentions up to ten thinkers to whom she refers. Thus, for the first time, Nelson’s work is captured by Calvinism, without which identity-political debates can hardly be understood: the almost theologically seeming textual exegesis to justify the superior moral point of view. The enchanting thing about Nelson’s previous books was that it wasn’t about who read Fred Motten or Lauren Berlant correctly, but how this dry theory can help to understand and emotionally cope with real life full of blood, sweat and vaginal secretions.

The leitmotif is Nelson’s plea to endure complexity and ambiguity

The examples and cases treated by Nelson in “Freedom” are so numerous that listing them would go beyond the scope. The most important issues include allegations of sexual assault against the literary scholar Avital Ronnel and the comedian Aziz Anzari. In “Art Song” she delved deeply into the debates about a painting by a white painter that showed the corpse of a black boy laid out in 2017 and drew the ire of activists who called for it to be destroyed.

The leitmotif is Nelson’s plea to endure complexity and ambiguity instead of surrendering to paranoia and the logic of punishment and exclusion. Diversity is threatened by a “homogenizing logic of paranoia that spares no effort to level differences.” She uses Michel Foucault’s distinction between liberation (as a momentary act) and practices of freedom (as something enduring) as a leitmotif. Freedom must be constantly renewed in negotiation processes. The “Ballad of Sexual Optimism,” for example, is about sexual self-determination and desire. Sexual liberation will always be flawed by putting people in situations where their needs conflict with someone else’s.

But Nelson entangles himself in contradictions. In the last part, “Stowaways,” Nelson addresses Franco Berardi’s thesis that politics and therapy would coincide in a 21st century shattered by ecological catastrophe and social inequality. On the one hand, Nelson resists “the transformation of other areas of life into areas of care and therapy”, but she has demonstrated exactly this process (at least in literature). She draws on critical theory to thoroughly penetrate fractures and relationships in her life, not only theoretically and therapeutically, but also politically.

It’s amazing what contempt “freedom” encounters in Anglo-Saxon countries

Perhaps it was because of this indecisiveness, because of the contradictory signals the book sends out, that it was torn apart by Anglo-Saxon criticism. But the rejection, even contempt, for Nelson’s book is astounding. This is where the discourse begins to get really strange: “Freedom” is abstruse, mediocre, amorphous, full of platitudes, has aged badly since publication and above all: “deadly boring,” they said. One critic wrote that Nelson had no ideas, just opinions — of all people, Andrea Long Chu, who can be counted among Nelson’s intellectual heirs. It is often said that Chu founded “the second wave of trans studies”. “Freedom” was dismissed by Chu as a boring lament from “another representative of Generation X,” who complained about an alleged “greed for public humiliation.”

What did Nelson do to anger future generations of women thinkers? In “Freedom” one reads horror at the moralizing of the debate, horror at what one has set in motion oneself. Chu himself is criticized in the book. Her distinction between “the desire to punish” and punishment itself, which Chu raised in an essay on MeToo, is not as ethical as the younger thinker believes, Nelson writes. At these points there is a somewhat strange dialogue between the positions. Nelson criticizes an internet essay in her book, which criticism is then dismantled in another internet essay, it’s a discursive echo chamber that only becomes tiresome, especially when observed from afar across the Atlantic.

Cornelius Reiber lightly translated Maggie Nelson’s dense and complex style of writing into German. But one wonders whether the American Kulturkampf is really so easy to transfer to Germany. Many of the examples mentioned will be unknown to a local audience, and our feuilletons are full enough of the alleged culture struggles on campuses even without the help of American authors. Who should read this book in this country? Eternally angry columnists, editors who also think they are in the Kulturkampf? Nelson himself is too queer for that, too woke, too “left green filthy”, as they say in the language of Goethe and Schiller. In the midst of our own confusion, do we still need the Oedipal accounts from the USA?