For the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a longtime friend of Nelson's who advised her during her graduate studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Nelson is unusual in her willingness to acknowledge and sustain multiple perspectives. A sense of certainty made freedom seem suspect; beneath that certainty Nelson finds an idea roiling with complications. In "On Freedom," Nelson writes about art with a sense of its special amplitude - the questions, answers and thoughts it makes possible. Nelson uses them as case studies for pushing past the idea of art as a space of absolute freedom on one hand or a source of harm on the other. "For me, it's been so important," Nelson told me at the dining-room table "Because it's a place where all elements - even extremities - of what it feels like to be human can be heard and find place."
Over the summer, Nelson had been working on a contribution to a proposed volume of essays honoring the literary critic and queer theorist Judith Butler. It's often hard to disentangle these threads, or tell the difference among them, but one word Nelson might apply to that distinction is "Freedom."
If Nelson takes harm to be an ineradicable, unavoidable obstacle - indeed, something that we might, no matter how hard we try, often inflict on one another as a condition of our freedom - her notion of care doesn't seek to prevent that harm so much as mitigate it.
"On Freedom" is Nelson's most clear formulation of what that nonpaternalistic care might look like.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/magazine/maggie-nelson-on-freedom.html
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