Q&A about Wendy Brown

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Clarissa

January 19, 2025

Wendy Brown does criticize neoliberalism. However, her idea of a solution to all neoliberal ills is… open borders. Every leftie who tries to say something against neoliberalism ends up getting scared and almost immediately reverts to a screeching defense of mass migration.

An anti-neoliberal liberal is a contradiction in terms. You either think that freedom from all constraints, including biological, is possible and good or you don’t. If freedom sounds more appealing than duty and permanence, criticizing some minor manifestations of this deification of freedom is mostly a waste of time.

Lefties twist themselves into weird shapes, claiming that cutting off a mentally disabled woman’s breasts is wonderful and freedom-making but cutting off her disability benefits is bad and unacceptable. They want to condemn the neoliberal economy but hysterically celebrate the neoliberal mentality that only came into existence to make that economy possible. I spent years trying to contort myself into a similar shape until I realized that the problem isn’t with some obscure aspect of neoliberalism. The whole thing stinks. It stinks in its entirety.

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3 responses to “Q&A about Wendy Brown”

Bryan

January 19, 2025

Prof. Clarissa, thanks for answering my question. I was expecting to like Brown’s discourse but didn’t. I had thought that I had read you favorably contrasting her thought to that of her wife Judith Butler, but maybe it was some other prof’s blog that I follow, I can’t remember. Anyway, I’ve only read her very early work so far, and she’s said nothing about open borders there, so that must be in subsequent books. I thought that her critique of victim consciousness in “States of Injury” was promising, particularly her critique of Catharine MacKinnon’s all-incompassing j’accuse against heterosexuality, but it seemed to me that Brown lost her own insight later in the book when she started using “male” as a rough synonym for “Satan.” That problem is even worse in “Manhood and Politics,” where I find her reading of Aristotle’s “Politics” tendentious in the extreme.

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1. Demotrash
  
  January 19, 2025
  
  That was her, but it was a few years back. We’ve all come a long way here politically.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  January 20, 2025
  
  I did manage to find a few good quotes in Brown that can ve useful if you excise them carefully and pretend she didn’t follow up with ultra leftist stuff. But I have lost all patience with these games. Brown is one of those people who have insight yet are terrified of fully accepting it. And it gets tiresome fast.
  
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