Interview - Wendy Brown Written by E-International Relations
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Interview - Wendy Brown https://www.e-ir.info/2017/04/25/interview/ E-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, APR 25 2017
Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. She is author ofManhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton, 2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010), The Power of Tolerance, with Rainer Forst (Columbia, 2013), and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015). Where do you see the most exciting debates happening in the field of political theory? My own interests are in trying to figure out what kind of novel political powers and formations are taking shape in the contemporary political world. For me some of the most pressing developments involve globalization, financialisation and technocracy, as well as the emergence of populisms and authoritarianisms in Western democracies. These are problems that many of us are concerned about at the moment; a deep engagement with them requires moving across other disciplines, including political theory, but also geography, sociology, political economy and the work of other scholars working in critical theory grounded in the humanities. How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
I came of age politically during the end of the Vietnam War, and in the midst of tremendous upheaval generated by political and social movements concerned with emancipation, from the women’s movement to the anti-Apartheid movement. My initial formation was very much within a Marxist tradition, but in my study of political theory Marx never was the only referent. Early on, I focused on feminist theory and other kinds of social theory that revolved around questions of identity; and even then I was drawing from Nietzsche, Freud, the Frankfurt School as well as Plato, Aristotle, and a variety of other thinkers. I’ve never been a one-paradigm theorist. One of the most important intellectual influences was my graduate school supervisor, Sheldon Wolin. The importance of him to my own thinking was twofold. First, his original take on the problem of democracy is one that has stayed with me. Democracy here is not synonymous with liberalism, nor is it ever understood as an already realized state. It is rather an understanding of democracy as radical possibility, as carrying a potential that can only be ephemerally realized through actual political practices. This conception was formative for my own thinking about dedemocratization, about the potentials and challenges to different forms of democracy. Second, he was an extraordinarily subtle and profound reader of historical political theory; his readings of historical texts were always at once alert to context and dedicated to illuminating something about the present. I don’t pretend to have his gift for reading political theory, but I have been inspired by that move – turning to the history of political thought, to great thinkers who one does not necessarily align with politically – to illuminate forms and predicaments of power in the present. In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, you trace the neoliberal logic and show how it
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