Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

Writing this review on a plane headed to a conference on queering sexuality, with newly shorn pink hair, I note to myself that I’m hitting a lot of stereotypes. I’m a philosopher, a professor of women studies, a feminist researcher, a parent who identifies as bisexual, and it’s with all these hats on that I’m reading and reviewing Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts. [End Page e-19]

I’m starting this way because it seems odd to review The Argonauts without any personal detail, though the inclusion of personal information isn’t something I get to do much as an academic philosopher. But The Argonauts is such a personal and philosophical book that it calls for that kind of response from those who read it. I won’t tell you my love stories or tales of my relationship with my pregnant body but I sort of want to. Maybe later I’ll write about that. The Argonauts is a one-person call for combining theory and memoir, and Maggie Nelson does it so very beautifully. I found myself marking passages, messaging friends with quotations from the book, and most of all, reading chunks aloud to people.

If you’d described this book to me I would have sworn I’d hate it. I love literature and I love philosophy but I love them separately. Together seems pretentious, I would have said. Yet, The Argonauts is anything but. It’s a philosophical memoir with lots of ideas but zero footnotes. Instead the names of authors discussed are mentioned in the margins. Readers are left to do their own work though frankly for most of the readers, I suspect they’ll be familiar. Which names? Wittgenstein, and Judith Butler, and Sarah Ahmed. Also, Jacques Lacan, Eileen Myles, and Lucille Clifton. I did wonder how accessible The Argonauts would be for readers outside academia. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe we are the intended audience, those of us who lead these lives, read these books, and create families in an intentional way.

Backing up a bit, The Argonauts is the story of the author, Maggie Nelson, and her love, Harry. It’s the story of two people falling in love and making a family. The Argonauts begins with a declaration of love and progresses through love, marriage, and parenthood in the usual order of things. But other than the order there is nothing usual about this book. This is a queer love story, about queer families, and queer parenthood. The declaration of love happens right at the start. We’re thrown right in to the lives of a couple, newly in love. Nelson writes:

During our first forays out as a couple, I blushed a lot, felt dizzy with my luck, unable to contain the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick witted, articulate, forceful, you. We spent hours and hours on the red couch, giggling. The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck.

(16)

The book’s title comes from Roland Barthes who describes the subject who utters “I love you” as being “like the Argonaut renewing his ship [End Page e-20] during his voyage without changing its name.” The phrase “I love you” must be renewed by each use. We meet our heroine, as she falls in love, after a period of singlehood and new sobriety, with Harry. Maggie and Harry are moving in together and making plans and deeply in love, but the author still isn’t sure what pronoun to use for her love. Luckily she likes saying “Harry” a lot.

The Argonauts is a love story but more than that it’s a story of queer family making. It’s also a story of physical transformations. During the course of the book both Maggie and Harry’s bodies change. Maggie gets pregnant using IVF and Harry has top surgery and starts taking testosterone. You might be...