Why Wendy Brown Remains as Relevant as Ever

“Brown makes the bold choice of echoing conservative critics in scrutinizing left-wing variants of identity politics from a Nietzschean perspective; however, she takes a far more nuanced and less polemical approach.”

Introduction

Wendy Brown, who currently teaches at University of California, Berkeley, is the greatest critical theorist alive today, and her writing spans a panorama of topics with ease and profundity. While her recent work has marked a turn towards analyzing neoliberalism and its corrosive effect on democracy across the globe, perhaps her most provocative analyses come from her re-interpretations of Nietzsche and his arguments about the politics of resentment. Brown makes the bold choice of echoing conservative critics in scrutinizing left-wing variants of identity politics from a Nietzschean perspective; however, she takes a far more nuanced and less polemical approach. She also makes the striking claim that right-wing critics are far too tempted by the easy partisan belief that identity politics is exclusively the purview of the political left—and that resentment need only be directed from the weak towards the powerful.

Reinterpreting Nietzsche In an Age of Identity Politics

“Liberalism contains from its inception a generalized incitement to what Nietzsche terms ressentiment, the moralizing revenge of the powerless, ‘the triumph of the weak as weak.’ This incitement to ressentiment inheres in two related constitutive paradoxes of liberalism. There is a paradox between individual liberty and social egalitarianism, which produces failure turned to recrimination by the subordinated and guilt turned to resentment by the ‘successful.’ There is one between the individualism that legitimates liberalism and the cultural homogeneity required by its commitment to political universality. This latter paradox stimulates the articulation of politically significant differences, on the one hand, and the suppression of them, on the other, and offers a form of articulation that presses against the limits of universalist discourse even while that which is being articulated seeks to be harbored within-included-in the terms of universalism.”- Wendy Brown, States of Injury

As far back as her classic 1993 essay “Wounded Attachments,” Brown notes that resentment—or in the Nietzschean parlance “ressentiment”—was a ubiquitous feeling in modern societies. Contra pro-capitalist commentators, who insisted that this resentment was only ever directed by the poor against the rich, Brown notes that it was far more widespread. Indeed, how could it not be?  Modern capitalist societies were hyper-competitive places where to be a winner was everything and to be a failure was to have lost the game of life. What made it worse was the ideological veneer given to dignify this competition, which held that everyone had had the same opportunities to get ahead. This implied that if one failed it was due to a lack of personal virtue; if one did not make it, it was because he or she did not work hard enough, lacked the necessary talent, etc.