Wendy Brown, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Wendy Brown, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity"
Host: Motyaza Hajizadeh
Guest: Professor Wendy Brown
Original Book (1995); Republished: 2025 (Princeton University Press)
Episode Date: March 12, 2026

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Overview

This episode of New Books Network delves into the enduring relevance of Wendy Brown's seminal work, "States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity." Originally published in 1995 and recently republished with a new preface, the book critically examines how identity politics on the left became rooted in “woundedness” and the implications for emancipatory political possibilities. Brown and host Motyaza Hajizadeh discuss the evolution of identity politics, the shifting terrain of freedom, the role of the state, and the challenges facing the left in an era marked by resurgent right-wing politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Enduring Relevance of "States of Injury"

• Genesis of the Book ([02:00]):
  • Brown describes the book as an “internal left critique” prompted by the late 1980s/early 1990s trend where “the left… was descending into a space and a place and a way of talking and a way of addressing the world that was choking the left itself.”
  • She critiqued both the rigid specifying of identity and the inscribing of those identities and their injuries in law.
  • Quote: “I worried very much about the inscription in the law… figuring out how we could make identity politics more emancipatory and less injury boundaried.” ([03:50])
• Lasting Impact ([05:55]):
  • The term “wounded attachments” from the book has endured in academic and political discourse.
  • The critique that began as inward-looking at the left is now applicable to the right, as white, male, heteronormative identities often position themselves as aggrieved.

2. From Emancipation to Injury

• Shift in Left Political Projects ([08:31]):
  • Brown argues that compared to the 1960s’ social movements, which “dreamed of a future in which its particular identity would no longer matter,” the later focus on identity became static and legalistically entrenched.
  • The “injured identity” transformed into a “source of capital enhancement,” visible today in DEI regimes.
  • Quote: “One’s blackness or one’s femaleness or one’s queerness becomes not just something to remedy as a potential site of discrimination, but becomes... a potential source of capital enhancement.” ([11:20])
• Left’s Strategic Shift:
  • The defeat of traditional left projects, the triumph of neoliberalism, and the loss of anti-capitalist orientation led to a retreat into identity.

3. Poststructuralism, Truth, and Politics ([14:36])

• Theory Wars Context:
  • Brown pushes back against caricatures of poststructuralism/postmodernism as anti-truth or responsible for identity politics’ shortcomings.
  • She argues that moving beyond foundationalist “Truth with a capital T” opens up transformative political possibilities.
  • Quote: “Politics is not a realm of truth with a capital T… good politics is a fundamentally human activity and it’s fundamentally discursive and it’s fundamentally deliberative.” ([16:31])
  • The right’s co-opting of anti-postmodernist rhetoric is, in her view, “a classic case of shooting the messenger.” ([17:55])

4. Freedom: From Collective Rule to Atomized Markets

• Neoliberal Recasting of Freedom ([22:14]):
  • Brown explains how neoliberalism fundamentally narrows freedom to individual property rights, marginalizing the left’s vision of collective self-rule or democracy.
  • DEI and institutional inclusion seldom reach or benefit the most marginalized.
  • Quote: “There’s a dimension we call political freedom… the capacity of human beings to collectively rule themselves. That’s the essence of democracy. And that’s very different than the individual right to do what you want with your property.” ([22:58])
• Hopeful Signs:
  • Brown see glimmers of renewed left focus on “affordability” and participation, which may rekindle “a more robust civic and political freedom.” ([25:40])

5. The State, Law, and the Regulation of Speech

• Cautions Against State Overreach ([28:48]):
  • Brown warns of the dangers in expanding hate speech and similar laws, which can quickly be weaponized by political opponents.
  • She argues for a state that “secures the goods… we need for survival… but not to turn the state into a human regulatory state.”
  • Quote: “All that will do is make the thing more desirable, more sexy, more acute. And it also… runs the risk of turning such moves… directly on us once… the wrong administration is in power.” ([30:51])

6. Critique, Co-optation, and the Left’s Dilemma

• Risks of Critiquing Identity Politics ([32:44]):
  • Brown discusses the tact required for internal critique, given how easily such arguments are now co-opted by political adversaries.
  • Quote: “It means figuring out where you simply stand with people, no matter how you may cringe at the formulation… and other times you… open it up… But that really requires being discerning about time and place.” ([34:12])

7. Future of the Left: Hopeful Vision

• Beyond Grievance to Inclusive Politics ([35:19]):
  • Brown calls for the left to be “more capacious… more loving,” moving beyond particular grievances to a politics that “talks about this being a planet for all of us, human and non-human species.”
  • Quote: “If we can become the big hearted, if we can become the inclusive, if we can become those who want everybody to thrive while calling out some of the particular injuries and damages, but not making that the centerpiece, I think we have a fighting chance.” ([36:40])

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “I was distressed not by what we call today just the problem of identity politics, but the very specific formation of identity politics that was taking shape then...” — Wendy Brown ([02:33])
• “What worried me was both ends of that problem, the specification of the identity… and the inscription in the law…” ([03:45])
• “One answer to your question is simply that the… the book continued to have currency. The idea of wounded attachments, the idea of Injured identity continues to have purchase.” ([05:58])
• “As soon as you did that, you handed off power to those who wanted to dismiss these things as irrelevant or unimportant anyway. My argument… is, look quite the opposite.” ([15:20])
• “We have to live with the challenge of a potentially offensive form of speech or an offensive civic sphere. We have to live with that and try to remake the social order that produces the challenging material in the first place.” ([30:35])
• “It really requires being discerning about time and place. And of course, today it requires thinking hard about where the co-optation might take place in a highly mediatized world.” ([34:24])
• “If we can become big hearted… those who want everybody to thrive… I think we have a fighting chance.” ([36:40])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:00 | Origins and intent of "States of Injury" | | 05:55 | Continued relevance; "wounded attachments" and migration of critique to the right | | 08:31 | The shift from emancipatory energies to injury-centered politics | | 11:20 | Identity as source of social capital in DEI frameworks | | 14:36 | Poststructuralism, truth, and the politics of narrative | | 22:14 | Reclaiming freedom: markets vs. collective political practice | | 28:48 | Law, bans, and state overreach—dangers and dilemmas | | 32:44 | Navigating critique amid risk of rightwing cooptation | | 35:19 | Future of the left: hope, inclusivity, and political strategy |

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rich, nuanced discussion on the history, evolution, and future of identity-based politics, the left’s challenges under neoliberalism, the enduring problem of “wounded attachments,” and the importance of reclaiming freedom as a collective, transformative project. Brown’s analysis provides sharp insights for reimagining left political strategies without succumbing to either atomization or reactionary co-optation, advocating for a more inclusive and generative approach to politics in late modernity.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[B]

It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Motyaza Hajizadeh with another podcast on political issues. And today we have a very special guest. Professor Wendy Brown is here to talk with us about a classic book that she published in 1995, but it has been republished recently in 2025 by Princeton Press University Press as a part of their classic series. The book we are going to discuss is called States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. And as I mentioned, it was published in 1995, which was more or less a critique of the left and how they use woundedness or injury as a basis for their contemporary identity politics. That was published in 1995, but it's obviously very much even more relevant today, and that's the reason, I guess, it's been republished. And Dr. Wendy Brown is a professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her other books include Nihilistic Times in the Ruins of Neoliberalism and Undoing the Demos. Wendy, welcome to New Books Network.

[A]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

Can you just, before we start, can you just very briefly tell us how the idea of this book came to you back in 1995, why you decided to write this book, and why, and it's obviously been republished again with a new preface. Why do you think it's still relevant?

[A]

Well, those are two different questions. So let me start with the first, why I decided to write this book. In most cases of the books I've written, I think there's more than a dozen now. I don't actually set out to write the book that I end up writing, and that was certainly the case with States of Injury. I wrote a couple of essays circling the problem that the book ends up centering on. And that problem was the way that I it seemed to me that the left in the late 80s, early 90s was descending into a space and a place and a way of talking and a way of addressing the world that was choking the left itself. So this is an internal left critique, I consider myself of the left and on the left. And I was distressed not by what we call today just the problem of identity politics, but the very specific formation of identity politics that was taking shape then. And it was a formation that attempted, on the one hand, to specify what a particular identity consisted in, you know, what a woman was or what it was. We didn't say queer back then, what. What lesbian and gay identity was, or even what a black or brown identity was. And then in turn, to attempt to inscribe in the law the remedy for the injury. And what worried me was both ends of that problem, the specification of the identity, which went against everything at that time that I was reading in political theory, social theory, literary theory, other kinds of theory, that was precisely loosening identity from particular specifics and coming to understand its constituted character, its variable character, its differentiation across time and space, and the living of the identity. And on the other hand, I worried very much about the inscription in the law, and we can talk a bit more about that later. But that was the problem I was kind of thinking through at the time. And as I say, it was a sympathetic left critique. It wasn't a dismissal of identity politics. I was trying to figure out how we might get identity politics onto a different footing. Second problem I was concerned with was the problem of freedom. I. I came to see in many identitarian political struggles at that time, a preoccupation with injury and suffering that seemed to foreclose the project of emancipation that I associated with left concerns. And instead, what I saw then was very much a brandishing of identity as a site of injury and as a source of truth that came out of injury and as almost a constant iteration or reiteration of injury. And so I also wanted to get at that problem, figure out how we could make identity politics more emancipatory and less injury boundaries, more concerned with a broad future for everyone, and less concerned with the particulars of the injury or the injured dimension of identity that was emerging then. Okay, so that's kind of where the book came from. It's very much an 80s 90s problem on the left, of course, we'll talk about how it has migrated to the right, which is one reason I think the book is relevant now. So to get to your second question, why was the book republished? The term in the middle of the text, wounded attachments, has become a term that gets used a lot in social and political theory now. And so one answer to your question is simply that the. The book continued to have currency. The idea of wounded attachments, the idea of Injured identity continues to have purchase. But I also think the rise of the right, both the attack on identity politics by the right and the wounded identity at the heart of right wing politics. It's very much a white identity, a male identity, a heteronormative identity. And. And so the very critique that I launched against the left is now, I think of interest to many people as a critique that goes culture wide from right to left.

[B]

You actually unpacked a lot of points. I wrote down four more questions as I was listening to you, but we'll get to talk about a few of them. And I think you made a very good point. It was a couple of years ago, I was doing another interview about a book. I don't remember the title of the book, but it was about radical 60s or 70s. And the point the author made or the question I asked at the end, and the point the author made was that, and he was very much on the left like us, that we have kind of abandoned that idea of emancipation and we have replaced it with the ideas of equality, which is not a bad thing. But we have left, we have forgotten. We've forgotten, let's say the bigger picture. And I do see resonance of that here as well. And that ties into my next question that you describe post Cold War US Left as politically disoriented. And I think it doesn't even apply to the Cold War left. Maybe we can make the same critique about them today as well, that identity politics has somehow substituted that anti capitalist and emancipatory projects. Given all the defeats that the left has had, do you think it was a strategic misreading of how freedom, equality and power could be articulated together? Why do you think that was the case and why do you think it's still the case?

[A]

That answer is a long and complex one. Let me try to compress it again. My own critique is not that identity politics is the problem, but that the particular construction of it in that period became problematic because of its. Because it was so bound up with injury on the one hand and an emerging left legalism on the other. Whereas the women's movement, as you just mentioned in the 60s, the civil rights movement in the 60s, black liberation in the 60s, had that more emancipatory force in its energies, in its discourse, and to put the matter very simply, dreamed of a future in which its particular identity would no longer matter. And that's what vanished as we moved deeper into the 80s and the 90s. The identity itself acquired a certain permanence and a certain persistence and as I said, even to the point of attempting to be inscribed in the law as, as, as someone like Catherine MacKinnon did, attempting to make gender in the law a problem of dominance and submission or dominance and subordination, where masculinism is identified with dominance and, and women are identified with subordination. And so it was a kind of an inscription that rendered a particular historical condition and a particular social constitution as a more permanent feature of us, even though I don't think that was full intention. So where did this come from? I think it has many sources. Some of them I unfold. In the book itself I talk about the convergence of a certain development of post mortist capitalism, what we would later call new neoliberalism, that began to produce the self as the center of the universe and its own human capital as what had to be constantly intensified, accumulated, enhanced, prevented from depleting. And in that identity becomes part of that. It becomes part of what one is cashing out all the time. And of course we see that eventually in the so called DEI world, where one's blackness or one's femaleness or one's queerness becomes not just something to remedy as a potential site of discrimination, but becomes, I'm going to risk saying this, a potential source of capital enhancement. And so that has to be one feature of it. But there are a number of other histories that I'm suggesting come together at this moment, including what you just identified, which is the Left being on its back foot in this period. It suffers a series of defeats, some of which it doesn't even understand yet, at the site of neoliberalism, the smashing of unions, the destruction of regulations and regulated capital, but also the. The loss of bearings that comes with the end of the Cold War. Not because the left was so identified with Russia or China or Cuba, but in, certainly not in the US but, but because the question of how to stand for a left alternative to liberal capitalism has really been thrown into question by the so called triumph of liberalism and the triumph of capitalism as the Cold War comes to an end. So I want to suggest that's another reason that you see a kind of backing up into identitarian political movements, because there's a loss of coordinates about how to address capitalism and how to address states and how to address an international order that is quite literally celebrating the triumph of the American hegemon and capitalism and liberalism more generally as the Cold War is over.

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Equal Housing Lender when we're talking about identity politics, one of the issues is usually not. You know, in culture wars, the boogeyman is usually the postmodernist or the post structuralist, and there's a lot of back and they sometimes identify them as being the source of this identity politics. And they're critiqued even from those on the left. But you know, well, better than I do that there's also this caricaturized picture of postmodernists these days in among the right wing State yourself. They're anti science, they're anti truth. The question I'm asking is, and there's a lot of focus on how they, let's say, destabilize that idea of truth, and they are accused of being relativist. But you argue that, let's say, we can also look at other possibilities, the transformative politics that post structuralism can bring about and that is usually ignored. Can you talk about this part of the book, please?

[A]

Sure, yeah. This book was written in the midst of what we called the theory wars, then academic debates primarily, but not exclusively, about the relationship between a more traditional left, Marxist or Habermasian or Kantian left, if you may, theorizing and post structuralist theory, Derrida Foucault, to some degree, Lacan, a number of others. And the debate often suggested that as soon as you took away foundations and truth with a capital T from a historical narrative or from a description of a condition like racism or sexism, that the political battle was lost. That as soon as you took away those foundations and said no, these things are constructed, they're discursive. Of course there's a materiality to them, but they're also produced and reiterated, and the interpretations of them really matter. As soon as you did that, you handed off power to to those who wanted to dismiss these things as irrelevant or unimportant anyway. And my argument in a couple of the essays is, look quite the opposite. Once the foundations of a particular political position or political identity are gone, then we have the possibility of actually building a politics, of actually building accounts that are either compelling or not compelling, that are either rhetorically forceful or lacking in rhetorical force. And politics is not a realm of truth with a capital T. Of course, facts matter. And facticity is a complicated thing. It also has a dispersive dimension. It's not ever raw in the human world. But even after we say facts matter, we still are narrating them, we're still putting them together discursively, we're still describing what it is, for example, to be a subject of racism or a subject of sexism. And in doing that, we're developing a political world, we're developing political accounts, and we're inviting others into those political worlds to have arguments about them. And there's some kind of anxiety that I was trying to name that fears for the human capacity to make worlds through words in these theory wars, there's a tremendous anxiety that if we give up something like empiricism, raw empiricism that is outside the human, then all is lost. And what I was suggesting is good politics is a fundamentally human activity and it's fundamentally discursive and it's fundamentally deliberative. And once we acknowledge all of that, then this world of post structuralist thought can be nothing but helpful. It helps us understand how certain narratives get built, why certain narratives are powerful, why others are not so powerful. What we need to do to shift the narrative, as we say today, to bring something more clearly into the light. And you know, the right is extremely good at this. And the idea that it's postmodernism's fault is actually quite funny to me because it was a major historical shift, materially produced. That it was theorized and theorized very powerfully by a especially a set of French theorists and then attacked as having ruined the world and especially ruined the left, is a classic case of shooting the messenger. It's really quite funny.

[B]

All right, yeah. And they've written a lot of books, unfortunately. I mean, none unfortunately. I mean, the right wing UN academics who are educated and smart, they've written books, but have completely forgotten or ignored, let's say, that historical background that you mentioned. They start simply from that post structures and postmodernist phase. And the funny thing is that I've sort of scheduled an interview, which I'm not that keen to do, which is about a book called the Truth with capital T. And it's written by a scientist who's more or less a liberal centrist, sometimes more conservative, as well, and he has a whole chapter on this idea of the foundations of truth have been on their mind. And there are cherry picking quotes from feminist historians of science, like Sandra Harding, if I'm not mistaken. And I read that this is complete. Yeah, this is completely wrong. But I know the person, he's a very high profile.

[A]

It's a very convenient whipping post. And what I suggested, I think in either the original preface or the new preface to the book, is that, you know, the idea that we've made truth difficult and we've made the problem of facts a problem like which, how are facts made? How are they constructed, how are they interpreted? Through what historical lenses do we read them? The fact that that seems inconvenient for politics is a kind of lazy response. It's a lazy retort. It's like, I don't like the effect. So I'm going to dismiss the theory. But you need to engage the theory. You know, if, if there is a discursive dimension, a narrative dimension to all that humans do and all the worlds that we live in and the worlds that we make, then we need to wrestle with that. And if you, if you find it inconvenient or overwhelming, okay, say you find it inconvenient or overwhelming, but don't say the theory is wrong, which is exactly what those people you just described.

[B]

You're right.

[A]

Okay, onward.

[B]

Yeah. Another question is about the idea of freedom. And you rightly mentioned that the right wings have identified or defined freedom as market freedom. And the left has also retreated into this sort of institutional inclusion, which is not going to change much for those people, the working class people, let's say, the ordinary people that the left has to engage with. Yeah. And the people who benefit from those DEI initiatives are the ones who are already sort of privileged. I'm myself from Iran, but I came from a middle class background, which enabled me to be able to travel to New Zealand, do my studies there, now live in Australia. So it was already privileged even from, in my own base anyhow. But the question I have, how can the left reclaim that idea of freedom, build those collective practices to redefine the idea of freedom for a more democratic society, for a more democratic rule, rather than simply be tied to that idea of woundedness that you're critiquing.

[A]

Yeah. Great. So a couple of things on this point. One, my argument was that in the late 80s and the 90s, what you saw the left doing was moving more and more simply to equality and distribution and away from the problematic of freedom altogether, which just gave the right more and more room to attract a constituency on the basis of offering freedom, even as it was already beginning to turn authoritarian and eventually fascist. But it, it also meant that the, the, the, the center of political freedom, which is very different from individual freedom. I mean, what liberalism has kind of occluded from, from sight and is the way in which individual freedom does not exhaust the problem of freedom. That is, there's a dimension we call political freedom, which is the capacity of human beings to collectively rule themselves. That's the essence of democracy. And that's very different than the individual right to do what you want with your property, or decide who you want to date, or decide what kind of groceries you want to buy. All of those are important personal freedoms, but they're very different from the rule of the people. And at the very moment that the left was ceding the ground of freedom, we had not only the right claiming more and more to be the party of freedom, but also neoliberalism attacking that idea of political freedom. One of the tricks up the sleeve of a neoliberal form of reason is to say there's only one kind of freedom and it's the right to do what you want with your property, with your assets, with your entrepreneurial capacities. It's an highly individuated, including corporately individuated notion of freedom. And that assault on political freedom that was already latent, I'm suggesting in liberalism was really completed by neoliberalism. So by the time the left comes back to the project of freedom, which I think it has in the past decade, it's dealing with some pretty scorched earth. It's dealing with people who really don't believe anymore in the rule of the people who have bought the line from neoliberal intellectuals and policies that markets ought to be more or less left to their own devices and that even traditional morality ought to be not intervened in legislatively. That was another plank of a neoliberal form of reason. So you get this discursive kind of closing out of the world of political freedom, treating social justice and legislation that the people attempt to undertake for themselves to make a better world. It's cast increasingly as totalitarianism or tyranny by the right. And that's significant because it just makes the left's project of trying to revamp and redeem freedom much more difficult. But it's beginning to happen now. I think. I, I think even the so called affordability campaigns that you're seeing around the world, you know where it start, you Know, Mamdani in New York is infamous for it. But there are others who are saying, you know, nothing is more important than affordability and that's being linked to the freedom to be able to participate in the life of the city. To be doing more than simply surviving, but being part of a community. And that's the beginning of a more robust civic and political freedom.

[B]

Hopefully that would be a remedy to this kind of atomized environment that as you mentioned, everybody is just struggling to survive, pay the mortgage. Crucial of course, yes. Going back to those of Taiman, Wendy left who had that power to bring communities together. Parents, working class people, those really beautiful, let's say community building practices that was very much common back in 1960s and 70s. Another question I have is there are lots of conflicts these days all over the world, even within democratic societies. Disinformation, migration, access to health, education. And there are all these challenges and there are some of these societies that we live in or countries, they have enacted laws, let's say maybe to battle or combat disinformation. Sometimes there are anti democratic laws when it comes to migration even. A classic example I can think of is what happened in Australia, where I live a few months ago. We had this horrible terrorist attack in Sydney, which I'm sure you've heard of. But then more recently the government of Australia introduced something called hate speech law which has become very controversial because it's criminal law. Criminal law needs to be as clear as possible so that ordinary people like me can read and understand. This is very vague and open to interpretation. It definitely makes it more difficult for neo Nazis to preach hatred. But at the same time there's a clause in it which says that if the criticism of a foreign state, if it causes injury to, to people could also come under this, which is what the United Kingdom did as well, basically criticism Israel. And that's what a lot of people are arguing now. So the question I have is, and it's making it difficult for people simply to criticize even I don't think criticism of Iran, where I come from would ever constitute as Islamophobia. They need to be criticized for the horrible things they're doing. But anyhow, the question I have is that how can we, let's say, recover practices of freedom and don't default to bans and sanctions and emergency powers, which is what's happening what happened in Australia, I guess even in America sometimes to be able to reconstruct that democratic society and combat all these campaigns of disinformation, anti migration, hatred speech, things like that

[A]

it's a really crucial question, I think, in states of injury. I was, I was at the beginning of that instantiation of hate speech law, of efforts, especially on the part of the left, but not exclusively to, as I said at the beginning of our time, build more and more of its agenda into legal codes that essentially constituted bans or other ways of securing what was imagined to be a left agenda. So bans on pornography and bans on hate speech and so forth. And you know, the trouble with these is exactly what you have just identified. First of all, they lard the state with more and more power to decide what counts as hate speech or a violation. But also they can be weaponized very, very powerfully by the other side. And of course, that's what we're experiencing in the US These days as the Trump administration moves to declare anyone not just criticizing Israel, but even criticizing the Trump administration as a terrorist and moves to censor speech and moves to shut down campus protests, that moves to down other kinds of protests. So I agree with you about the problem, and I think that it's difficult but essential for the left to treat the state as an administrative state that secures the goods and the provisioning that we need for survival of both human and non human species, but not to turn the state into a human regulatory state, a state that deems what we may and may not say or do or declare. We have to live with the challenge of a potentially offensive form of speech or an offensive civic sphere. We have to live with that and try to remake the social order that produces the challenging material in the first place. We won't get there by turning it into matters of state bans and state censorship. All that will do is make the thing more desirable, more sexy, more acute. And it also, as I say, runs the risk of turning such moves, such laws, such codes, such bans directly on us. Once, as it were, the wrong judges or the wrong administration is in power.

[B]

And one final question that I have, one final question that I have, and it's kind of a packed question. First of all, I consider myself to be on the left. I have criticism of identity politics, but I'm usually hesitant to voice that criticism because it could easily be co opted by the right. So the question I have is that in conflicts over race, gender, sexuality, minority rights, how can we honor their histories, histories of injury, without being, let's say, wedded to that idea of grievance, forward narratives, those injuries that you mentioned. And do you think, do you think that given all these fight against these dei Initiatives, the right wing's full assault on identity politics. How do you think the left should react? And how do you see the future of the left in this scenario? Let's say, should we be hopeful or more pessimistic? That's the question maybe that I have.

[A]

Okay. The co optation question is really important and it changes the times. When I was writing this, the right had nowhere near the power that it has today around the world. And it was therefore possible to have an open discussion, an academic discussion, a theoretical discussion, a political discussion that attempted to take apart some of what we were doing and put it back together differently without fear that it would be seized upon by right wing pundits, right wing social media, right wing tabloids, and used against us. Those times have changed. So I take very seriously your account, which is one that says, how do we honor the histories, the challenges, the perils that various peoples, we could just say call them subaltern or those who are not identified with powerful classes and genders and races. How do we honor those struggles and at the same time not simply give up on being critical intellectuals or critically engaged at a political level? And I think that means choosing time and place. It means figuring out where you simply stand with people, no matter how you may cringe at the formation or the formulation, but you stand with them. You know who you stand with and you do it. And other times you're in rooms and seminars and podcasts and other things where you can simply say, look, let's take this apart, let's open it up, let's rethink this. Let's use our critical intelligence and not just cringe and think it through. But that really requires being discerning about time and place. And of course, today it requires thinking hard about where the co optation might take place in a highly mediatized world. Your second question, which I'm already losing track of, but I want to give a minute to how should the left. What was it?

[B]

Yeah, how should the left engage? Well, you already addressed that. But the question I have now, given all this assault on identity politics, and I do like the point you mentioned about time and place being discerning. How do you see, let's say, the future of the left? Do you think the rays of hope?

[A]

Yes, yes. With the attacks on DEI and all the rest of it. Look, it's really important to remember the left may have inadvertently produced some of the DEI world, but that was never its task. It was really trying to work at a, at a very grassroots level with the problem of gender and race and sexuality. And I wish there had been more class in it that there was, but there was some class as well and, and I think the possibility of continuing to do that while learning to speak in a somewhat different language about it, while learning to speak in a more inclusive language, a less aggrieved language, a language that really talks about this being a planet for all of us, human and non human species, to deserve protection and equality and care from one another. This has to be the approach of the left. It has to be less burrowed down into particular identities or particular complaints and more expansive, more capacious. I'm even going to say more loving than we've been over the recent decades because that's how we will finally triumph over the right. The right is the one that's now burrowed down anti immigrant, full of hate, racist, Islamophobic, often anti Semitic, homophobic, the rest of it. And over the long run that exhausts people. You can conscript some, but it really exhausts people. And if we can become the big hearted, if we can become the inclusive, if we can become those who want everybody to thrive while calling out some of the particular injuries and damages, but not making that the centerpiece, I think we have a fighting chance.

[B]

Professor Wendy Brown, I do like to thank you for the time to speak with us on your books. I really, really enjoyed reading the book and also talking to you. It was an honor for me and the book, despite the fact that you wrote it in 1995, as I think most of our listeners have picked up now, it's very much relevant to what's happening today. And there is also path forward and this I, I myself usually find that my friend, I left this friend are usually divided when it comes to identity politics. Some of them pick up that writing language of wokeism and they don't even consider that to be the left. They go to that class based, let's say class reductive. But, but I do think that the book you've written back in 1995, Amazing has, has a lot for, for, for, for everyone right to engage with. Thank you so much for your time. Really enjoy talking to you. Hope to be able to talk to you about your future works as well.

[A]

Thank you.