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  • Refurbishing Liberal Democracy?On Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos
  • Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo (bio)

If the lowly do notThink about what's lowThey will never rise.

—Bertolt Brecht

By way preface, I would like to register my uneasiness about publicly engaging with Wendy Brown's most recent book, Undoing the Demos.1 Temperamentally, I have always found it easier to write about scholars and thinkers I have serious disagreements with, or with whom I can readily demarcate intellectual and political enmity lines. A modicum of respect, to be sure, has always been an indispensable condition for everything I have written. Yet engaging work one respects, and occasionally even admires, is one thing; critically engaging with someone without whom one simply cannot envision doing what one does is a different thing altogether. Here the risks involved take the form of two extreme possibilities: either the proverbial love letter, or an angry letter of betrayal. Neither, however, is intellectual productive. On this occasion, as it will become clearer below, I am aware that I risk to stay a course closer to the second possibility. Even so, I have accepted the invitations to speak and write about Undoing the Demos, and done my best to avoid these two intellectual dead ends, as the best way to pay respect to a seminal thinker. Thus, the following reflections critically engage with Undoing the Demos against the background of Brown's intellectual itinerary.

1

Wendy Brown is one of the most compelling American political theorists writing today. She is the author of several important books, and it is possible to say, without too much simplification, that the signature of Brown's work consists in her ability to bring into a single field of vision the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School thinkers, Foucault and other heirs of French structuralism and feminist theory, along with the vocation of political theory as eloquently articulated in Wolin's writing and teaching, in order to critically interrogate [End Page 528] formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Within this impressive oeuvre, her 1995 book, States of Injury, continues to stand out.2 This book was recognized as a major work soon after its publication, and it served as an inspiration and model for an entire generation of students of political theory concerned with questions of power and freedom, political and politicized identity, in the immediate aftermath of the cold war.

Retrospectively, one can explain its immediate significance by contextualizing States of Injury in terms of the debates in North-Atlantic political theory at the time. Brown's book appeared at a moment when the influence of the liberal/communitarian debate was beginning to wane, and the post-revolutionary leftist imaginary was increasingly fragmented amidst the proliferation of many a so-called post-Marxist thinkers. In this context, Brown put forward a bold critique of identity-based rights claims and the forms of victimization that the politicization of identity and injury had brought into being. Drawing primarily on Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, she compellingly argued that a progressive politics focused on rights and entitlements is ultimately a self-defeating project, because it is premised on reproducing rather than transforming the terms of domination that triggered the claims in the first place.

The linchpin of Brown's critique was the insight that rights, entitlements, and legal protections function not as shields against power and domination, as the liberal-democratic doxa would have it, but as their vehicles. Against the background of the liberal turn to the capitalist State to redress political and economic inequalities, which constitutes one pillar of liberal democratic theory and practice, States of Injury examined this state form as a source of rather than solution to the problems of inequality and domination. And along these lines, she staged a formidable critique of liberal-democratic theory and practice, one largely inspired by Marx and Wolin but forging an original vision irreducible to either master thinker. Brown's work has thus been uniquely positioned to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.

2

Undoing the Demos continues to exhibit the...

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