Reclaiming Democracy. An Interview with Wendy Brown on Occupy, Sovereignty, and Secularism

Abstract

Wendy Brown is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California in Berkeley. She has published numerous articles and books in which she intertwines the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown’s current research concerns the relation of religion, secularism and capital in Marx’s work along with the novel predicaments of democratic citizenship in contemporary neoliberal governmentality. Recent books are: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), Is Critique Secular? Injury, Blasphemy and Free Speech, co-authored with Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006).