Bøger af Wendy Brown

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization?Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

Wendy Brown diagnoses a late-modern nihilism that trivializes values-including truth itself-and reduces politics to narcissism and power-mongering. Rereading Max Weber, who saw a similar predicament in his own time, Brown seeks to reground political action in responsibility and reorient classrooms to the critical thinking citizens need today.

As a Red-hot Lover, you're not just into mind-blowing sex. There's a big part of you that's also up for regal, passionate love replete with heartbreak, challenge, pursuit, gallantry, vindication and attention (the six passions.) You have a sneaking feeling that you could be a Lovesick Lover, Prince/Princess, Lover's Fool, White Knight, Black Knight or Drama King/Queen. Your passion is your guide; it gives you a delicate, intuitive sense along with a wild and crazy side. You could well be a Red-hot Lover, capable of one of the great love stories of our time.

Featuring stunning photos of the Australian landscape along with pictures from the author's own Christmas celebrations throughout the years, A Very Australian Christmas describes how Christmas is different, and sometimes the same, in Australia as in other countries. Written in simple rhyme, this book appeals to children of all ages.

Join Helen and Wendy as they take you on a journey into days gone by. Visit with family and friends in a simpler time, when hard work was the order of the day, family was everything, and life in Australia was challenging but rewarding.

Argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography legitimize the state. This book insists that true democracy requires sharing power, not regulation by it. It applies this argument to various 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.

Wendy Brown explains the hard-right turn in Western politics. She argues that neoliberalism's intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white-male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

Four leading thinkers confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values.

Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness?

Edgework brings together seven of Wendy Brown's most provocative recent essays in political and cultural theory. They range from explorations of politics post-9/11 to critical reflections on the academic norms governing feminist studies and political theory. Edgework is also concerned with the intellectual and political value of critique itself. It renders contemporary the ancient jurisprudential meaning of critique as krisis, in which a tear in the fabric of justice becomes the occasion of a public sifting or thoughtfulness, the development of criteria for judgment, and the inauguration of political renewal or restoration. Each essay probes a contemporary problem--the charge of being unpatriotic for dissenting from U.S. foreign policy, the erosion of liberal democracy by neoliberal political rationality, feminism's loss of a revolutionary horizon--and seeks to grasp the intellectual impasse the problem signals as well as the political incitement it may harbor.

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.

"e;Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"e;In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Ranciere highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

The constant urging of my psychiatrist led me to put pen to paper to create this book. It describes my busy childhood, my life as a nun, life after leaving the convent, marriage and motherhood, and the trials and tribulations of living with a chronic illness.

Looks at qustions, such as: What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent and subjective?