What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in
progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign
states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as
freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent and
subjective? Politics Out of History is animated by the question of how
we navigate the contemporary political landscape when the traditional
compass points of modernity have all but disappeared. Wendy Brown
diagnoses a range of contemporary political tendencies--from moralistic
high-handedness to low-lying political despair in politics, from the
difficulty of formulating political alternatives to reproaches against
theory in intellectual life--as the consequence of this disorientation.
Politics Out of History also presents a provocative argument for a new
approach to thinking about history--one that forsakes the idea that
history has a purpose and treats it instead as a way of illuminating
openings in the present by, for example, identifying the haunting and
constraining effects of past injustices unresolved. Brown also argues
for a revitalized relationship between intellectual and political life,
one that cultivates the autonomy of each while promoting their
interlocutory potential. This book will be essential reading for all who
find the trajectories of contemporary liberal democracies bewildering
and are willing to engage readings of a range of thinkers--Freud, Marx,
Nietzsche, Spinoza, Benjamin, Derrida--to rethink democratic possibility
in our time.
