Wendy Brown

This essay argues that modern demagogy can be understood as a symptom of a kind of social pathology, combining Wendy Brown's account of neoliberal subjectivity with elements of Robert Pippin's interpretation of Hegel to do so. I begin by focussing on Brown's contention that neoliberal society has bred forms of individual subjectivity that are inherently attuned to right-wing rhetoric. Drawing on Pippin's reading of Hegel, the essay casts these modes of individual subjectivity as aspects of a flawed mode of collective subjectivity; the contemporary rise of demagogic politics is thereby presented as a symptom of a pathological failure of collective self-determinacy, caused by inadequacies within the normative structures that articulate social activity.

Resenha: BROWN, Wendy. Nas ruínas do neoliberalismo: a ascensão da política antidemocrática no ocidente. São Paulo: Editora Filosófica Politeia, 2019, pp. 33-150.

Wendy Brown (Califórnia, 1955) é professora de Ciência Política na Universidade da Califórnia, em Berkeley. O ensaio "Nas ruínas do neoliberalismo" foi publicado originalmente, e traduzido no Brasil, em 2019, como resultado das suas reflexões provocadas pela eleição do Donald Trump nos Estados Unidos. O argumento principal deste manuscrito é que a ascensão da direita se explica pelos efeitos corrosivos do neoliberalismo sobre a democracia liberal. Para defendê-lo, Brown analisa as idéias-chave do pensamento dos autores que se reuniram na Sociedade Mont Pèlerin em 1947. Nos três primeiros capítulos, os quais vamos abordar, ela explora, respectivamente, i) a crítica e o objetivo destrutivo do neoliberalismo à sociedade; ii) os ataques desse modelo à legitimidade (soberania popular) e à prática (poder político compartilhado) liberal-democrática; e a ampliação do conteúdo protegido pelo princípio da liberdade individual.

Education is one of famous public goods that people should deserve from a government. Since ‘Neoliberalism’ approached on political economy, social values of studying in higher education grew up highly and become a one of commodification. Currently, Thailand higher education is facing with the mechanism of neoliberalism that’s created a highly competitive in higher education admission system. From 1970 revolution in Thailand, higher education mobilized from elites to massification, people can access these public goods to serve the globalization.

In 1997, Asian financial crisis, Thailand was affected directly from foreign financial systems as we can see many businesses collapsed at that time. From these crisis Thailand government need to recover economic stability. Meanwhile, social value had changed and influenced to higher education. It was approached by social value that made many universities reform. Thai social value emphasizes in some faculties that could make high profit and stability in their career in the future, such as a bachelor of financial, management, marketing, medicine, engineering and international studies which studying about making profit. From these phenomena, we can see the stealth of revolution of neoliberalism that eroding higher education system and affecting to students who will become more competitive in higher education admission system; moreover, it makes inequality of education accessibility. 

From the following problem, this research will explain a relationship between a government and social under the conditions of neoliberalism, which is the stealth of revolution, and find out the mechanism of neoliberalism that’s affected the social values of jobs and higher education. Education is one of famous public goods that people should deserve from a government. Since ‘Neoliberalism’ approached on political economy, social values of studying in higher education grew up highly and become a one of commodification. Currently, Thailand higher education is facing with the mechanism of neoliberalism that’s created a highly competitive in higher education admission system. From 1970 revolution in Thailand, higher education mobilized from elites to massification, people can access these public goods to serve the globalization.

This paper weaves together two recurring themes in philosophical and political debates of recent years: the idea, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin, that describes melancholia as a dominant structure of feeling and desire among the left; and the suggestion that we are currently witnessing a revival of debates on the question of organisation. My argument identifies not one but two left-wing melancholias, the specular relation between which precludes the work of mourning and deprives us of the conditions for thinking organisation concretely. I follows that a real return to the question of organisation can only take place if we escape this melancholic mechanism; I propose that the very idea of organisation might offer us theoretical resources with which to do so. We come to love our left passions and reasons, our analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. … What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Wendy Brown The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The following work explores SoulCycle’s rhetoric of community and kinship, which overtly portrays the phenomenon as counter to the values of neoliberalism, succinctly defined by David Harvey as a conceptual apparatus under which “individual freedoms…guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade” are valued and threatened by “all forms of state intervention that substitute[s] collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose.” It shall be argued SoulCycle can accredit, at least in part, its immense success to a more covert deployment said governmentality’s principle tenets. This repackaging of neoliberalism is achieved through negotiation of the SoulCycle experience as a site and act of collective resistance, heralding participants “finding themselves together” as principal.  This furtive iteration of neoliberalism is affirmed further through the organizations disavowal of social barriers to “find[ing] you soul.”

El neoliberalismo constituye un fenómeno posible de ser analizado desde múltiples perspectivas de análisis debido a la multiplicidad de operatorias del poder a través de las cuales se despliega y materializa sus efectos. Para la ciencia política, y más específicamente para la teoría política, la cuestión acerca de los efectos del despliegue histórico del neoliberalismo en la vida democrática, la actividad política, la tarea gubernamental y el Estado reviste una mayor relevancia. Por esto, en este trabajo nos proponemos recuperar las contribuciones de autores como la politóloga Wendy Brown y el filósofo Maurizio Lazzarato al enfoque iniciado por Michel Foucault. El objetivo principal apunta a analizar los planteos y críticas de estos autores a las ideas expresadas por Foucault en El nacimiento de la biopolítica, para luego someter sus trabajos a una revisión sobre sus puntos en común y divergencias. ¿Desde qué perspectivas podemos estudiar el neoliberalismo y su despliegue? ¿Cómo fue conceptualizado por Michel Foucault? ¿Qué críticas remarcan otros autores en su enfoque? ¿Qué puntos en común y diferencias podemos reconocer entre las críticas de Wendy Brown y Maurizio Lazzarato al enfoque de la gubernamentalidad propuesto por Foucault?

Este ensaio corresponde ao arrazoado (revisto e ampliado) da conferência pronunciada pelo presente autor no IX Seminário de Análise do Discurso (SEAD), que tematizou a análise do discurso e suas condições de produção, realizado em novembro de 2019, na Universidade Federal do Pernambuco. O objetivo da preleção em tela foi compartilhar algumas hipóteses no tocante à problematização de algumas ferramentas conceituais no espectro teórico marxiano/marxista, diante do desafio de dar repostas a alguns problemas políticos do nosso tempo, atinentes à questão da relação entre ideologia e luta de classes no capitalismo contemporâneo. Neste caso, abordamos a questão da luta de classes no contexto da racionalidade neoliberal no século XXI, sob a dominação do capital fictício (fiktives Kapital) enquanto forma social resultante do processo de substantivação e autonomização do valor (Wert). A hipótese primária assumida aqui é que a forma do valor (Wertform) enquanto razão econômica e social imanente ao conteúdo das relações sociais produzidas a partir do trabalho subjugado ao capital, produz determinações para as formas ideológicas desse conteúdo ser vivenciado subjetivamente pelos indivíduos na trama política da sociabilidade capitalista. Essas determinações fornecem uma nova morfologia ao caráter ideológico da luta de classes, a partir da nova morfologia do trabalho sob a dominação do capital fictício.

Em 2017, Melinda Cooper publicou o ensaio " Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and New Social Conservatism " ("Valores familiares: Entre o neoliberalismo e o novo conservadorismo social"), no qual ela propõe o estabelecimento da família na centralidade do projeto neoliberal para compreender a aliança entre a economia de livre mercado e o conservadorismo social.

Eine sozialphilosophische Kritik des Rechts befragt nicht dessen Abweichen von moralischen oder naturrechtlichen Gesetzen, sondern problematisiert seine Auswirkungen auf das menschliche Zusammenleben. Daniel Loick zeigt in seinem grundlegenden und weit ausgreifenden Buch, dass und wie die Dominanz des Rechts in bürgerlichen Gesellschaften ethisch deformierte, verzerrte oder defizitäre Formen der Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität erzeugt. Dieser Juridismus lässt sich aber nicht durch eine Überwindung oder Abschaffung des Rechts, sondern nur durch dessen radikale Transformation kurieren – hin zu einem wahrhaft menschlichen, das heißt sozialen Recht.

This chapter offers a critique of Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" essay, taking left Nietzscheanism to task for naturalizing hierarchy and failing to explicitly side with the oppressed. In contrast, I suggest that queer theory's appropriation of Nietzsche's critique of morality presents a more liberatory contribution to and basis for a left politics rooted in solidarity with the oppressed and the waywardness of desire.

Being fit' means to have a flexible, absorptive and adjustable body, ready to live through sensations not yet tried and impossible to specify in advance. (Zygmunt Bauman, 2012) Data is cheaper than atta [wheat flour] (Lalu Yadav [a member of Parliament in India, 2016])

Final draft of the following publication:
Schleusener, Simon (2020): 'You're Fired!' Retrotopian Desire and Right-Wing Class Politics. In: Gabriele Dietze/Julia Roth (Eds.): Right-Wing Populism and Gender. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag (pp. 185-206).
DOI: 10.14361/9783839449806-011
Online ISBN: 978-3-8394-4980-6
© 2020 transcript Verlag.

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

Why is it that, at a time when countless state officials are apologizing for historic wrongs and insisting that Canada has entered a period of reconciliation, many settlers continue to act towards indigenous peoples with unabated aggression and resentment? This thesis attempts to explain the continual reproduction of settler colonialism through an investigation of the processes involved in the formation of settlers as political subjects. Developing a Butlerean account of the subject, the author suggests that settlers are produced through colonial regimes as political subjects with deep and often unacknowledged investments in the reproduction of systems of oppression that provide for their material and psychic position of privilege. While the instability inherent in such systems ultimately threatens settlers themselves – as seen in the collapsing North American middle class – the fragility and precarity experienced by settlers who are targeted by neoliberal reforms often leads them to reinvest in, and aggressively defend, those very systems of power as a matter of subjective continuity.
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.

This article examines the contemporary embrace of feminism by the mainstream media and among high-powered women. I begin by showing that not only is a neoliberal variant of feminism on the rise but that this feminism is producing a new form of neoliberal governmentality for middle-class women, one based on careful sequencing and smart self-investments in the present to ensure enhanced returns in the future.  Providing two representative examples–the glorification of college hook-up culture and the new technology of egg-freezing being offered as part of corporations’ benefits package—I demonstrate how upwardly mobile middle-class women are currently being encouraged to invest in their professions first and to postpone maternity until some later point. By encouraging these women to build their own portfolio and to self-invest in the years once thought of as the most “fertile” I further suggest that neoliberal feminism is increasingly interpellating middle-class aspirational women as "human capital."  Yet, given that reproduction continues to present a stumbling block in this conversion process, reproduction and care-work are increasingly being outsourced to other women deemed “disposable” because not properly “responsiblized.” Hence, the emergent neoliberal feminism not only forsakes the majority of women by splitting female subjecthood into the few worthy capital enhancing female subjects and the disavowed rest, but it also facilitates the creation of  new and intensified forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation.

PSC 349, Varieties of Capitalism Professor Mark Dallas Farangis Abdurazokzoda Final Paper I, Farangis Abdurazokzoda, affirm that I have carried out all my academic endeavors with full academic honesty. Abstract: In his 1925 paper Physical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes, Sigmund Freud asked a simple question "What does a woman want?" With the crises of capitalism and the impotence of communism as a system, the socioeconomic, political and ideological question today is what do we all want? Would we like to live in the realm of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? And is there another "[economic] model on the rack in this historical season"? This essay aims to highlight the necessity to analyze and diagnose the present, formulating alternatives by reflecting on political rationality taking shape in the U.S. over the past thirty years. To do so, I will discuss the varieties of capitalism: classical liberal capitalism, neoliberalism, capitalism with

At a time when neoliberalism has become an accepted term in public debate to refer to the current state of modern societies and their political economies, Kean Birch critically analyses the conflicting theories that shape our understanding of ‘neoliberalism’.

With an ever-expanding variety of perspectives on the concept of neoliberalism, it is increasingly difficult to identify any commonalities. This book explores how different people understand neoliberalism, and the contradictions in thinking of neoliberalism as a market-based ethic, project, or order. Detailing the intellectual history of ‘neoliberal’ thought, the variety of critical approaches and the many analytical ambiguities, Kean Birch presents a new way to conceptualize contemporary political economy and offers potential avenues for future research through a judicious exploration of ‘neoliberal’ practices, processes, and institutions.

This work will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers to critically assess the concept of neoliberalism across many disciplines. The book will also serve as a general introduction to a wider audience interested in the term ‘neoliberalism’, its potential pitfalls, and its contested future.

This interview revolves around critical thinking and its contradictions and aporias. Professor Brown starts by discussing critical thinking as an infinite but specific intellectual effort that cannot and shouldn’t be melded into a single project. The same goes for the left, because of the complexities and diversities involved in issues like sovereignty, Human Rights, the Third World and feminism.

A partire dalla pubblicazione della traduzione italiana di La politica fuori dalla storia, di Wendy Brown, il saggio discute due questioni centrali per la teoria politica femminista contemporanea: la rivendicazione di diritti e la politica della differenza sessuale. Rispetto al primo tema, la peculiare posizione di Brown – la sua ben nota critica e la sua concezione dei diritti come significanti vuoti che hanno storicamente e ancora possono catalizzare potenti istanze politiche – è letta attraverso la sua articolazione del rapporto tra teoria e politica; quanto al secondo tema, si suggerisce che il discorso di Brown permetta di sottolineare i rischi impliciti nella politica della differenze sessuale quando essa non si misuri con la capacità del potere contemporaneo di alimentarsi di differenze, e in particolare quando “il soggetto” – per quanto “differente” – continua a essere pensato come presupposto inevitabile del discorso politico.

En cada época ha de hacerse el intento de ganarle de nuevo la tradición al conformismo que está a punto de avasallarla. . . . Sólo tiene el don de encender en el pasado la chispa de la esperanza aquel historiador que esté traspasado por [la idea de que] tampoco los muertos estarán a salvo del enemigo cuando éste venza.

Acabamos por amar nossas paixões e razoes de esquerda, nossas análises e convicções, mais do que amamos o mundo existente que presumivelmente pretendemos transformar com estes termos, ou o futuro que estaria alinhado com eles... Aquilo que emerge é uma Esquerda que opera na ausência tanto de uma crítica radical do status quo quanto de uma alternativa inspiradora à ordem existente. Mas talvez ainda mais problemático, esta é uma Esquerda que se tornou mais apegada a sua impossibilidade que a sua potencial fecundidade, uma Esquerda que se sente mais à vontade contemplando não a esperança, mas sua própria marginalidade e fracasso, uma Esquerda presa numa estrutura de apego melancólico a uma certa vertente de seu passado morto, cujo ânimo é espectral, cuja estrutura de desejo é voltada ao passado e punitiva.

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. These criticisms are pursued with varying intensities, as some defenders of human rights are willing to accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, while staunch opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in language of human rights because of the deep pathologies of rights-thinking as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this paper, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of “humanity” as a political identity, and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.

This article adopts an analysis that explicitly politicises poverty and relates it to the concrete history of racialised capitalism and structural inequality that defined colonialism and apartheid and continues to persist and intensify in "post"-apartheid South Africa. Rather than formulating racialised poverty in legalist, economist or managerial terms, it should rather be understood as a form of oppression that comprises exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Such a formulation would make social structure, historical injustice and power central and would also allow for poverty to be grasped beyond a purely distributive logic by bringing to light the non-distributive, non-economic dimensions of poverty. Comprehending poverty in this way, as not only a question of economic distribution and empowerment, but also one of ethical, moral and even ontological recognition necessitates an enquiry into the emancipatory force of rights. Given their centrality in political and social discourse and in legal scholarship on poverty, it is worth considering whether and to what extent rights can be utilised in the struggle against (racialised) poverty.

En esta conversación que hemos mantenido con Wendy Brown, la autora analiza la relación actual entre neoliberalismo, nuevas formas del autoritarismo social y la radicalización de las derechas. Se explaya sobre el momento actual del capitalismo tras la derrota electoral de Donald Trump, así como sobre las dificultades que implica el análisis de las nuevas formas de opresión y explotación neoliberal. Por ultimo, examina las paradojas políticas que supone una lucha colectiva que no sólo resista las embestidas neoliberales sino que también proponga modelos alternativos de organización social dispuestos a dar una disputa real por el poder.

Through the lenses of contemporary terrorism, the paper charts the rise of global resentment against the background of the multiplication and denial of failure. The paper examines resentment and ressentiment as emotional responses to different kinds of failure: failure of justice and failure of recognition, respectively. It then investigates their place in the affective and moral economy of the global age, teasing out their key distinctions and assessing the strengths of the claim concerning an ever expanding diffusion of ressentiment in late modern times. Through inroads into classical and contemporary political theory, the paper seeks to rescue resentment from the relative hegemony of ressentiment. The paper closes with a reading of the Paris terror attacks of 7 January and 13 November that seeks to disentangle the different forms of resentment mobilised in the acts. By raising the issue of the moral value of resentment, the paper ultimately seeks to address the question of how to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-hegemonic and self-affirming political practices.

Understanding political melancholy as central to the crisis of modernity and democracy implies a growing realization that melancholy teaches us something essential about different forms of political crisis and their affective modes. This essay contends that the relationship between political melancholy in Weimar Germany and its repurposing by German Jews for Zionist thought reveals how political melancholy was and remains at the heart of Zionism. The essay offers both a historical and theoretical consideration of political melancholy. Its purpose is to question how a political affect of melancholy helps us grasp Zionism, offering a new way to think through its failures. More specifically, the growing attention, both critical and affirmative, paid to “left-wing melancholy” is used to examine a general sense of loss and crisis in the West and the more concrete expression of this sense in the history of Zionism.

Tradução do terceiro capítulo de Undoing the Demos, livro no qual Wendy Brown procura compreender como a emergência do homo oeconomincus subjugou outras figurações e interpelações do humano. Brown apresenta, primeiro, uma leitura crítica da teorização do homo oeconomicus que Foucault formulou em suas aulas sobre o neoliberalismo no Collège de France. A autora censura Foucault por não ter atentado suficientemente para o homo politicus, lócus da soberania popular que conseguiria resistir à hegemonia do homo oeconomicus. Em seguida, reflete sobre a morfologia do homo oeconomicus e do homo politicus nos trabalhos de Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Bentham e J. S. Mill. Por último, analisa o gênero do homo oeconomicus contemporâneo e discute sua disseminação por meio de uma razão normativa e de uma racionalidade governante.

Patrick Wolfe notes that in settler colonization, invasion is a “structure rather than an event”. Put differently, violence is the invisible yet ongoing condition for the possibility of settler colonies as such. This is as true in Canada today, as in any settler colony. In this paper I examine how the ubiquity of this violence is sublated through the production of the settler as political subject. Studying a conflict that occurred between the Chippewas of Nawash and the City of Owen Sound in the 1990s, I explore how settler colonization invests settlers with psychic attachments to the processes that efface ongoing presences of Indigenous peoples. Further examining how anti-Indigenous backlash is an expression of psychosis as the settler subject faces dissolution.

Over the last years and, especially, during the last months, the building of new walls around the states, as well as the reinforcement and control of the borders, have had an enormous political and social presence. Wendy Brown (2010) defends that the phenomenon of building new walls all around the world can be understood as an icon of nation-state sovereignty's erosion. In this way, the loss of the theological sovereignty promised by the nation-states has several consequences for the subjects that fantasize with the protection and containment of walls. Using the category of Homo munitus as the modern subject that both constructs walls and is constructed by them, " making securitization a way of life " and defining a distinction between an "external they" and a "reactionary we" (Brown, 2010 pag.42), I frame these new walls within Roberto Esposito's (2015) immunitarian paradigm. This paradigm is useful to analyse the tensions between community and its opposite, immunity, namely, between the self-preservation and the disintegrative forces of the munus which constitutes the community and poses a menace for the self and the identity. In this sense, I focus on the other side of the tension, on the excessive defensive mechanism that turns into an auto-immunitarian disease that, as Derrida (2003) and Esposito (2010, 2015) proposed, threats to destroy the community.

This paper explores the tensions between community and auto-immunity, between Eros forces that constitute the community and the self-preservation and culture as protective measures or immunitarian mechanisms. My aim is not to draw a parallel between current philosophical theories and analysis, and Sigmund Freud’s (2011) dual instinct’s theories, but to notice some suggestive meeting points as well as some particular insights that can feedback each other and open up new possibilities for their understanding.

Beyond the current desire for walling and protection, this article stresses the disintegrative forces for the community and the drive to death implied in this struggle which has so many material, psychological and political consequences in our everyday life.

Anti-austerity politics are often theorised with an implicit intentionality of aiding the subaltern struggle against an oppressive government. Yet such perspectives tend to undermine the role of the people in seeking to validate their struggles, expressed in such a manner that the philosopher can expound upon to justify their own interventions into politics. Utilising new social research by Konings (2015a), I seek to undermine this logic of the populace being exploited by the cold rational hand of austerity. Instead, we should understand how it is that social relations themselves structure and perpetuate these moral bonds which ensure the functioning of a social order. On such a reading, we can more fruitfully understand the successes and failures of various contemporary revolutionary movements, such as Occupy. While avoiding a top-down dismissal of populist politics, we can nonetheless articulate how far from breaking free of their social bonds, populism is a key mechanism for the perpetuation of oppressive social structues. Instead, a politics of redemption, of the kind articulated in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History should be embraced, once which transcends these very social bonds through its Messianic potential. In looking at the trials of Syriza in their efforts to undermine austerity within Greece, I argue utilising original photography that it is impossible to redeem a reality which itself is plagued with austerity and its moral logic. I thus conclude that such redemptive politics are not only a feature of anti-austerity politics which should be accentuated, but that indeed they may offer the only manner of successful socialist politics.

Kapitel aus: U. Bittlingmayer et al. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Kritische Theorie, Springer 2017
Das Verhältnis von Rechtlichem und Nichtrechtlichem ist weder gegensätzlich, noch komplementär, sondern paradox. Diese Behauptung will der vorliegende Text begründen. Zuerst wird Jürgen Habermas Konzept der Verrechtlichung rekonstruiert. In einem zweiten Schritt wird Axel Honneths Theorie der Verabsolutierung rechtlicher Freiheit vorgestellt. Abschließend soll Honneths Hinweis weiterverfolgt werden, wonach zum Verständnis zeitgenössischer Anerkennungskämpfe ein neuer Politikbegriff notwendig ist, der die traditionelle Staatszentrierung des Liberalismus überwindet. Der Vorschlag lautet, die Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Verrechtlichung zu verschieben und es aus dem Blickwinkel der Akteur_innen neu zu betrachten.

The notion of sovereignty was invested with the claim to end the natural state of war, to make social life accessible to political decisions, to liberate man from heteronomy, to protect us from danger and despotism. My book aims to show that none of these goals can be achieved by means of sovereignty and that, on the contrary, sovereignty condemns us to endlessly perpetuate the circle of counter-legal and legal violence. I therefore suggest that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community – the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws – much more radically than before: that it must become a critical theory of sovereignty. The program of which is the elimination of coercion from the law.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. In following the development of this concept from absolutism to liberal democracy, I apply Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of a “dialectic of Enlightenment” to the political sphere. I attempt to demonstrate that whenever humanity deemed itself progressing from chaos and despotism, it at the same time underhand prolonged exactly the violent forms of interaction it wanted to rid itself from.
The second part assembles critical theories of sovereignty. I use Walter Benjamin’s distinction between ‘law-positing’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence as a terminological source, but add several other dimensions of violence in order to draw a more complete picture. Sovereignty is law-positing in that it creates an independent sphere that tends to present itself to the members of the political community as alien and abstract (Marx and Arendt); it is law-preserving in that it relies on the permanent actualization of police force and disciplinary institutions (Benjamin and Foucault); it is law-withholding in that is founded on exclusion both of life forms within and outside of its territory (Agamben); it is law-interpreting in that the irreducible contingency of legal adjudication necessarily maintains a decisionistic and thus unjustifiable moment (Cover and Derrida); and finally it is law-splitting in that the universal grammar of the law suppresses women’s specific everyday life experiences (feminist critiques of sovereignty). Furthermore, I discuss the problem of law-replacing violence: How can we liberate ourselves from the historically constituted sovereignty without becoming sovereigns ourselves and thus relapsing into the old forms of domination?
The third part proposes the idea of non-coercive law as a consequence of a critical theory of sovereignty. I try to make this concept more conceivable by reminding us of Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian criticism of coercion as unreasonable and wrongful to autonomy, and of Franz Rosenzweig’s Jewish criticism of the state. Finally, I propose to reformulate these accounts in a secular way by replacing the social integration of shared faith by the illocutionary binding energies resulting from the mutual experience of deliberation and shared participation in a radically democratic decision making process.