TO THE LIMITS

Cancel culture jeopardises the freedom of art to disturb. #MeToo has stopped people experimenting with the erotics of passivity. Sobriety is freer than drug taking. It’s probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned.

The question of freedom preoccupies many of our most ambitious thinkers. As the pandemic and climate crisis encourage increased state control, as freedom becomes a buzzword of the right, how can we keep faith with the liberation movements and liberal humanism that shaped us? Maggie Nelson has written a tremendously energising book wrestling