States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

by Wendy Brown

Whether in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. "Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands," writes Brown, "the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.


Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several of the last two centuries' most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, and Foucault.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Feminism, Nonfiction, Theory, Gender, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 1995

About the author

Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is Class of 1963 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Vicky "phenkos" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read chapter 4, a critique of Catharine MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. I'm inclined to side with Brown on this on account of the victimisation of women that marks MacKinnon's thought. The chapter also includes an interesting critique of Marx, premised on Baudrillard. In a nutshell, Brown argues that MacKinnon adopts the more problematic aspects of Marx's thought and leaves out the more promising ones. Defo tbc!

[Peter N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so happy to have come across this book! Finally, a feminist post-Marxist/Foucauldian critique of the state and of state-oriented activism that points out something which should be obvious but is always sidestepped in just about all leftist theory, namely - wait for it! - the state is an apparatus of domination. It doesn't just represent some "interests" to the exclusion of others, as though it would cease to dominate if it only started including more interests, because it is fundamentally premised on that exclusion. She offers a stunning series of meditations on the state-centredness of a number of contemporary feminist theorists (particularly Catherine MacKinnon, but also Patricia Williams and Nancy Hartsock), and the ways that their theories work to supplant male domination with "protection" and interference from the state, the very institution which has been - historically and discursively - essential to the development of patriarchy in late modernity. Brown argues instead for reinvigorating desires for radical freedom, freedom disentangled from its masculinist liberal connotations of "freedom against" the will of others (other male individuals) or "freedom from" social constraints (the family, reproductive obligations, sexual availability). But this isn't a simplistic anarcho-purist rejection of all "reformist politics" - she just wants to move from efforts to utilise state power to protect socially-subordinated groups, which only end up producing subjects that fall in line with state disciplinary regimes of subordination, to a politics of manipulating and undermining state power, sometimes accepting its concessions for strategic purposes, as part of a radically democratic project of building the future together. It's intricately argued, clearly written, and packs dynamite on every page - even the footnotes. Solid gold.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always raise an eyebrow to people who say, "This book changed my life" -- especially about political theory!! -- but this book truly did. This is probably the first book I read where I really got into the argument, the way it was structured, the words and metaphors used to describe it. I am always a captive reader of Brown, and although I am usually not like this (i.e., acolyte), I eagerly await everything Brown publishes. Aside from the sheer quality and power of her arguments, she is a very thoughtful and clever (and many times, witty) writer as well. She is especially sharp in questioning the law's reach into our lives, our desire for equality over and against what she sees as a stifled desire for freedom (see Catharine MacKinnon), and in her creative descriptions of identity-based fights for rights. I wish I had it with me so I could re-read it right now.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brown is a really probing thinker who has a remarkable ability to read power in all kinds of interesting ways. The final 3 chapters drag a bit (they are also a lot longer) as she waits until the last 10 pages or so to really drop the interesting bits. But lots of good stuff in here and I can see why it’s been so foundational.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

so incredibly satisfying

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written in 1995 and somewhat depressingly it is still quite relevant, the critiques within it have not been adequately answered by anyone and the problems it outlines persist. It's a very good analytical work that looks at various "left" and "centre-left" ideas, philosophies and ideologies critically and avoiding totalising statements (a favourite one to debunk seems to be MacKinnon's conception that all patriarchy is grounded in heterosex). It also looks at the usefulness AND limits of Marx in a lot more detail than most people I've read. People seem to polarise as pro- or anti- Marx wheras Brown is more nuanced than many. I also found it easier to see the usefulness of Foucault which in the past I have tended to dismiss. I'm not sure to what extent this is the fact I've now read so much more widely and have been exposed to Foucault's ideas in reference to many other thinkers or whether Brown is just particularly clear.

She is clear. I had no trouble understanding this and I recommended my son who is smart but still an undergrad to read chapter 6. She has managed to retain the complexity and learnedness without forcing the reader to struggle for understanding. I'd like to develop the ability to write this lucidly (I am told I am far from it so far).

In the beginning Brown advocates that "the left" retain freedom as an ideal, but she doesn't really give a recipe or definition of freedom, apart from showing that it has been replaced by things that are mostly counter-productive. The state in her view (which she persuasively argues) cannot deliver gender equity as it exists to be a mechanism of masculine power. She critically examines feminist calls for various legislations (especially MacKinnon's anti-pornography arguments which sound like they were controversial even before Brown got to them). Even when she is being critical there seems to be some level of wry understanding and humour/compassion that comes through (it's a tone thing so maybe I imagined it). This is very far from the pompous and bombastic man-who-knows-everything book that have so irritated me in the past.

I'm tired, I have COVID. I have pages upon pages of notes on this book. The stuff about women's "place" in the home and women's "work" being tenuously recognised only is useful for my thesis (I hope). I'll read more of Wendy Brown sometime because I like this level of incisive criticism when it is also so clear and so respectful.

[javiersioux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una joya.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

"wounded attachments" changed the game 4ever
What you can do with Nietzsche, Foucault and a bit sarcasm!

[Boka · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I’m a little unsure about how the issues raised especially in the last two chapters may have changed in the last two decades, I found this book to provide inspiring critiques of state power and white feminist appeals to state power.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly useful book for thinking through current conflicts over "identity politics", both for the strengths of its arguments as well as its limitations and shortcomings. A large motivator for Brown in writing this was the anti-pornography feminism of Cat MacKinnon, which argued for the legal restriction of pornography as a means of overcoming what she saw as a totalizing male domination -- an argument that, more or less, a fuller realization of "women's rights" required the end or serious curtailment of liberalism.

Brown makes the excellent points that such a politics requires forms of ahistorical essentialism and claims of absolute knowledge about what exactly women's oppression consists of, while defining women's subjectivity as fully formed in response to male domination -- a politics that enshrines the regulation of historically specific, unevenly applied, and contingent power relations in the law in the name of ending them. She rehearses Marx's arguments in "On the Jewish Question" that rights presuppose rather than overcome the material structures they rest atop, and serve as means of adjudicating and governing life within those structures, ultimately perpetuating the powers from which they claim to emancipate the oppressed. She adds to this the critique that the putatively radical new rights proposed by the likes of MacKinnon result in the ever-greater colonization of the social world by state power, with ever more disciplinary mechanisms required to regulate and crack down on newly discovered and exotic forms of "discrimination" against an endlessly multiplying array of "marginalized identities".

Yet Brown's analysis of what causes illiberal identitarian politics leaves something to be desired, as do her arguments about how precisely masculine power persists after the institutionalization of what seem to be rather comprehensive rights for the subjects of gendered oppression. Her analysis of its origins do not extend much further than the conventional frame of the left, which waves them away as a sign of organizational weakness and social atomization in the wake of neoliberal onslaught. This, I have come to believe, is a line that now functions largely as an excuse for avoiding a search for a more difficult critique -- it defines the problem as an absence of emancipatory structure rather than examining the presence and contents of repressive structures. It is also, moreover, not borne out by history, as identitarian feuding and repression have only become more omnipresent in "leftist" circles with the revival of socialism and generational radicalization, and major events with emancipatory potential, such as the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, appear to stoke a direct effort by the ruling class to recuperate them into MacKinnon-style politics, which finds its new face in the likes of personalities like Robin DiAngelo and Frank Wilderson.

Along these lines, Brown's critique of identity politics as a form of Nietzschean ressentiment is, I think, a good but incomplete one. It's true, as this analysis indicates, that rights discourse -- even in its MacKinnonite form -- is a species of liberalism premised on individuals in a structureless world. But the ressentiment frame is also misleading insofar as it suggests that its psychological source can properly be identified in trauma or hurt rather than itself manifesting a will to power, which invokes trauma and hurt precisely because trauma and hurt are the keys to unlocking domination and control over others. (She hints at this later, in her discussion of Patricia Collins' work on rights, suggesting that her self-abasing confessions of marginalization as a Black woman are rendered so totalizing precisely because Collins is in search of rights, and such marginalization is the premise on which rights are issued from above).

Brown's critique falls the flattest in the last two chapters of the book, in which she explicitly claims to offer a theory of continued male domination under liberalism that transcends past conjunctural forms and explains what is still persisting in the wake of the midcentury social movements. She provides some excellent background on the ways in which gendered domination was used to construct and enforce the boundaries between "the family" and "civil society" in the origins of liberalism, drawing on thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Hegel. In contrast to the "free", unattached, rights-bearing men in "civil society", women were relegated to a zone of naturalized domination and dependence, charged with reproducing their husbands and children (and therefore their property).

Yet Brown argues that this historically enforced gender domination is somehow *intrinsic* to the very concepts of family and civil society, and that liberal theory cannot survive the degendering of these separated zones without collapsing on its own terms. The fact that liberalism was able to absorb the critiques of the women's movement shows that this is quite clearly false. In the final chapter, she reiterates in several places the line that the state is still actively assigning women to particularized social positions, yet her evidence for these points rests primarily upon the facts that it did so *historically*; that material progress towards the degendering of "civil society" has been slow (as illustrated by things like wage gaps); and that the extension of rights into zones coded as "familial" (such as reproductive rights and spousal protections against abuse) has been highly contested and halting process. In other words, her analysis of how gender domination persists post-rights rests primarily on history which no longer applies; on conjunctural factors; and ultimately, crucially, on the absence of rights. She quite clearly outlines the traps that other feminist critics have fallen into, and then falls directly into them herself.

That Brown falls into these traps is not a demonstration that she is in fact ideologically aligned with those she critiques elsewhere, but rather of the supreme difficulty of explaining what she seeks to explain. Yet what I believe are the seeds of the fully fledged critique of post-rights domination do emerge in the midst of these final chapters. Brown finds herself reaching repeatedly for words such as "disavowal" and "repudiation" to explain how women's perspectives are devalued and women are thereby contained. In a particularly promising moment, she outlines briefly the author Kathy Ferguson's argument in "The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy". One component of Ferguson's critique is that the forms of knowledge attained by women in their state of gender domination -- namely those of need and care -- are dismissed and treated as alien by the bureaucratic apparatus' preoccupation with values like hierarchy and procedure.

In other words, the abstractness of the bureaucratic state contains women through a denial of their socially situated distinctiveness -- a distinctiveness produced by historically prior gender domination, whose material effects on women's social positions and their corresponding subjectivities persist even after the original relations of force have been swept away. This dismissal of women's "lived experiences" serves to reproduce the bureaucratic state as male -- not in the essentialized way which defines maleness as the denial of women's lived experiences, but in a literal, material sense that it is disproportionately men who will seek out jobs in bureaucratic leadership and succeed in them if this denial is the requirement. To put it in the terms of existentialism (which I think are required to understand these phenomena), the state now marks women as women through a denial of their facts rather than an explicit denial of their freedom. Abstract equality rests atop a foundation of disavowed, socially produced difference and disadvantage, which is reproduced through this disavowal.

Yet how is this disavowal to be overcome? It is MacKinnon and her ilk who provide the answer from the standpoint of the state: liberal universality must be violated through the creation of particularized coercive powers tailor-made to do battle with the powers that formal equality could not abolish. The achievement of the promises of liberalism for the dominated must come through the revocation of their promises for the dominant; liberalism must be destroyed in order to be saved. But the promises of this reactionary identity politics are ultimately self-destructive: by promising the full achievement of universality through the individualization of state power, they deconstruct the liberal state down to its very foundations, bestowing on each person their own unique powers of coercion and control tailored to their own unique subjective experiences of unfreedom and generating a Hobbesian war of all against all -- now figured ideologically in the form of an endless parade of new "marginalized identities" and games of "oppression olympics". This is the critique left unmade by Brown and most theorists of identity politics, which I feel is becoming ever more crucial to understand as identity claims become an ever more explicit tool of division and control by the ruling class in late liberalism.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one does biting, lefty political critique quite like Wendy Brown. With an impeccable critical pedigree (i.e. Marx, Foucault, Weber, feminist political theory) and a dazzling analytic ability to match, these essays are simply some of the finest pieces of modern political theory around. Questioning, in particular, the way in which freedom has increasingly been framed in terms of both rights and the state (as in: "to be free is to have the right to X", or, "The role of the state is to guarantee my freedom by means of..."), Brown's table-turning operation works to ask if these very 'instruments of freedom' are not themselves constitutive of an 'unfreedom' all the more insidious on account of their freedom affirming rhetoric. Taking seriously the Foucaultian insight into the way in which regulatory apparatuses do not merely 'regulate' but equally produce the very subjects they bear upon, Brown explores the ways in which legalist conceptions of freedom also end up engendering the very 'wounded' subjects they are designed to protect.

Targeted in particular are liberal conceptions of the state, which, by treating it as a kind of neutral arbiter or protector of already-existing interests, ends up not only 'naturalizing' very particular constellations of societal power (in contrast to liberal pretensions to impartiality), but also 'depoliticizes' them too: that is, places them 'out of running' to be contested in a political way at all. It's this double move - the massive exercise of power on the one hand and its depoliticization on the other - that is everywhere tracked by Brown in her marvellously cutting assessments of the thinkers and discourses here engaged with. Attendant too, to the gendered dimension of all political theorizing, there's a kind of magic in watching Brown more or less run through - as she does in one of the chapters here - almost every major liberal concept (equality, autonomy, liberty, etc) in order to expose them for the gender-saturated ideas that they are. In the wake of reading Brown, it'd simply be impossible to remain blind to the operations of either power or gender at work in political theory.

Thus while it's true that many of the essays here are 'critical' in the negative, 'undoing' sense of the term (Brown herself admits that her essays "develop no political or even theoretical program"), the very lenses through which Brown approaches her subjects are themselves instructive. Indeed, in the last analysis, it's the impulse to a kind of (radical?) democratic vision that properly drives the essays collected herein, each of which ultimately serves as a bulwark against political complacency - any (institutional) 'guarantee' of freedom is more than likely exactly the sort of thing that would undermine it. A final thing to note is Brown's unapologetically High-Theory infused style: in bringing the work of critical theory into political philosophy, Brown holds nothing back by way of either vocabulary and speed - her writing pops and zags with the roughness of both expediency and mastery, and while it's possible to find this daunting, to me - and to anyone who has ever wondered how 'Theory' can be made politically relevant - this is simply a work of electrifying reading.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been hugely influential in a number of fields, though reading it now, it's hard to imagine it could be written today, especially because of how Brown discusses racial politics. It's very much a creature of the 1990s. Let's call it "peak Foucault." I'd say it was "peak Postmodern" except for the lack of clarity for many about what that term means, but she uncritically uses Nietzsche's theories of "ressentiment"and "slave morality" to attack what were essentially movements to her left at the time. The essays at the end of the book, on Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and on liberalism's family values are the strongest and most provocative critiques of liberalism. The discussion of gender and the identity of woman is also a clearer articulation of anti-essentialist feminism than available in Judith Butler's work, and could be valuable for teaching. On the other hand, I found Brown's discussion of race and "identity politics" to be both remarkably polemical and poorly historically informed. The book's emphasis on combating Catherine MacKinnon is a bit like an attack on an already collapsed pinata. I was a grad student in a feminist studies program in the 1990s, and I still don't recall any serious feminist academic agreed with her about anything, so it is hard to understand why she comes up so frequently in the book, unless it's to critique others by association.

[Andrew Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had given this a first reading ten years ago. Immensely detailed analysis of political identities and notions of freedom. Quite breath taking and will require multiple reads for me to even get half of what Brown is driving at.

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting and stimulating books I've read recently. So much to think about!

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When social "hurt" is conveyed to the law for resolution, political ground is ceded to moral and juridical ground. Social injury such as that conveyed through derogatory speech becomes that which is "unacceptable" and "individually culpable" rather than that which symptomizes deep political distress in a culture; injury is thereby rendered intentional and individual, politics is reduced to punishment, and justice is equated with such punishment on the one hand and with protection by the courts on the other. It is in this vein that, throughout the ensuing chapters, I question the political meaning and implications of the turn toward law and other elements of the state for resolution of antidemocratic injury. In the course of such questioning, I worry about the transformation of the instrumental function of law into a political end, and about bartering political freedom for legal protection" (p.27).

Some profoundly interesting essays on identity and ressentiment.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of astute, well written essays considering how certain well-intentioned contemporary political projects and theoretical postures inadvertently redraw the very configurations and effects of power that they seek to vanquish. These include liberal, capitalist and disciplinary origins of the force of ressentiment (the moralising revenge of the powerless) in late modern political and theoretical discourse; the gendered characteristics of late modern state power; and the gendered sexuality of liberal political discourse.

The essays criticising MacKinnon's ahistoric position on the feminist porn debates and on gendered violence were particularly sharp, taking aim at her failure to develop a specific theory of sexuality and gender - as opposed to adapting a theory of work and class. Considering the relationship of sex to gender and work to class, then the author asks presumably a theory of sexuality, rather than a theory of work applied to sex, as MacKinnon does, would be required for a feminist critique and theory of emancipation
Another highlight was the analysis of legal and political theorist Bruce Ackerman's "gender neutral" language in his work on abortion, which reinscribes and renaturalises - by rendering invisible - both the gender subordination enacted in women's lack of control over the terms and conditions of sexuality and reproduction and the distinctive masculinist psychic stakes in the abortion dilemma

[Alessandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's right.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Political theory in its finest.

[Ian Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun to read, but ultimately unconvincing

[Raj Karan Gambhir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was only like 190ish pages but felt so long. Still p good

[rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spent 2 hours of my life talking about what the owl of minerva means in terms of how we understand the concept of freedom. I will never get that time back.

[Dulnath · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Judi]

1971 Booker Prize winner.

[Shannon Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruh. so good

[Sagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this.

[Leonardo]

...para el marxismo de lo que se trata es precisamente de que en la propia realidad hay una ruptura estructuralmente necesaria de la distinción: no solo el poder político es en última instancia un poder (un monopolio del poder) para aplicar la violencia, sino que él mismo está basado en la violencia (en la amenaza de la violencia). Hay que vincular este punto débil a la omisión que hace Arendt de la economía, de la esfera de la producción, de la política propiamente dicha: lo que pasa por alto es la perspectiva clave de Marx sobre cómo la lucha política es un espectáculoque, para poder ser descifrado, tiene que ser referido a la esfera de la economía. Citando a Wendy Brown: «Si el marxismo tenía algún valor analítico para la teoría política, estaba en la insistencia en que el problema de la libertad se hallaba contenido en las relaciones sociales implícitamente declaradas “apolíticas” –es decir, naturalizadas– en el discurso liberal» (Pág.14).

Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.398-399

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yay!!!!! I am FINALLY finished reading this book. This was probably one of the most painful things I have ever had to read. The language made it very difficult to understand. Everyone once in a while i would start to understand what was going on, and I was able to find some real gems, but boy did I have to work for it. I wouldn't recommend this to the faint of heart or those with a limited vocabulary.

[Cara G · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me ages because I had this rule that I wasn't allowed to read political theory before bed but that's actually when I get most reading done so I gave up. I really enjoyed this book. I love her writing and the way she does theory is so bloody good.

[Oren Whightsel · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an amazing book...her chapter "wounded attachments" is mind boggling and a must for anyone interested in political theory and identity politics.

[Cristina DiChiera · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my grad school books that stuck wth me. Makes you think about politics and society through a very different lense. Dense language but readable.