New Books Network Wendy Brown, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Mar 12, 2026
Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor and political theorist known for work on neoliberalism and democracy. She traces how woundedness became a basis for political identity. Conversations cover the shift from emancipatory movements to identity legalism, neoliberal selfhood and identity as capital, limits of censorship and hate-speech laws, and possibilities for rebuilding inclusive, democratic politics.
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Identity Politics Became Injury Bound
- The left in the late 1980s–90s became bound to identity as injury, which narrowed political imagination.
- Wendy Brown shows this formation specified identities legally and reiterated woundedness instead of aiming for emancipation.
Neoliberalism Pushed The Left Into Identity Retreat
- Neoliberalism and end of the Cold War nudged the left away from emancipation toward identity as a defensive posture.
- Brown ties market-focused neoliberal subjectivity and geopolitical triumphalism to the left's loss of coordinates against capitalism.
Post-Structuralism Enables Political Rebuilding
- Post-structuralist theory doesn't destroy political action; it reveals how political identities and facts are discursively produced.
- Brown argues that recognizing constructedness lets activists build more persuasive political narratives, not abandon politics.
