Maggie Nelson turns the most overused political word in the room over in her hands.

On Freedom is not a manifesto for liberation as pure escape, nor a neat argument for freedom as individual choice. Instead, Nelson thinks through freedom as something knotted into relation: care, obligation, art, sex, drugs, climate, collectivity, harm, pleasure, dependency, and the often very uncomfortable fact that being free never means being untouched by other people.

The book is organised as four “songs” — art, sex, drugs, climate — and moves in Nelson’s usual mode: essayistic, formally loose but intellectually exacting, more interested in tension than victory. It is especially good on the limits of purity politics, the fantasy of being morally uncontaminated, and the uneasy overlap between liberation and constraint. For readers of Nelson’s The Argonauts, Lauren Berlant, Sontag, contemporary feminist theory, affect theory, art criticism and thinking aloud.

Penguin Random House trade paperback, first published by Jonathan Cape in 2021; this edition printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press. Good second-hand condition with light handling, minor cover marks, and a small corner/edge bump visible.