New Books in Critical Theory 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, offers a brisk tour of her new book States of Injury. She traces how woundedness shapes modern political identities. She links neoliberal subjectivity to commodified identity and debates truth, censorship, and the limits of legal remedies. She calls for a renewed, inclusive left oriented toward care, class, and collective freedom.
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Injury Became Identity’s Defining Politics
- Identity politics in the late 80s–90s became fixed around injury and legal remedies rather than emancipatory transformation.
- Wendy Brown observed identities were being specified and then inscribed into law, which froze historically contingent identities into permanence.
Wounded Attachments Now Animate The Right
- The critique of wounded identities now applies across the political spectrum: the right also uses wounded white, male identities to mobilize.
- Brown notes her original left-focused critique has contemporary relevance because similar wounded attachments animate right-wing politics.
Neoliberalism and Left Defeat Fueled Wounded Identities
- Neoliberal shifts converged with left defeats to push activists toward identitarian politics focused on the self as human capital.
- Brown links market-driven selfhood and the end of the Cold War to a retreat from anti-capitalist coordinates.
