States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, by Wendy Brown. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 202 pp. $39.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-691-02990-3. $12.95 paper. ISBN: 0-691-02989-X.

Wendy Brown, in States of Injury, presents a compelling rethinking of the feminist pursuit of emancipatory political aims in postmodernity. Her book sets the stage for feminist academics to engage in the kind of inquiry that is made necessary by the conditions of domination in our times; a politics that "must be heterogeneous, roving, relatively noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the point of exhaustion" (p. 50). Her own writing is in this vein, and she presents in this book a series of provocative questions that fuel critical insight into the contemporary workings of American politics while reimagining strategies of resistance from a perspective deeply informed about the elusiveness of freedom in the modern age. In this important book, Brown embarks upon a feminist tour de force through contemporary political theory and arrives at a point at which she reformulates the questions feminists should be asking about the creation of "dependent subjects" in law and the modern state.

The insights in States of Injury consolidate much of the scholarship written over the past decade on the critique of the "subject" and emergence of "identity" politics as the means for group recognition by the state. Brown takes on those who "panic" in response to postmodern feminist decentering and denaturalizing of identity by suggesting the ways in which these critics are attached to a conception of the liberal, masculinist subject. In retelling portions of the Nietzschean story, she argues that "much of North Atlantic feminism partakes deeply of both the epistemological spirit and political structure of ressentiment and that this constitutes a good deal of our nervousness about moving toward an analysis as thoroughly Nietzschean in its wariness about truth as postfoundational political theory must be." She persuasively argues for a disruption of a feminist moral high ground, and posits the possibilities for a feminist politics "without ressentiment." Brown suggests how a "loosened attachment" to identity and morality will lead to a feminist politics that creates more space for individuals to exercise political judgment.

Brown's analysis leads her to the insight that identity politics, and in particular the articulation of wounds of subordination in the language of rights, creates a form of politicized identity that reinscribes pain and suffering of contemporary "victims." She questions whether the efforts of those who seek justice in terms of the "legal recognition of identity corroborate and abet rather than contest the `political shape' of domination in our time" (p. 28). Moreover, the book advances the more general claim that when the injured enlist the protection and regulation of the state, any redress may often come at the expense of political freedom. She parts ways with critical race theorists and other feminist theorists, including Catherine MacKinnon and Patricia Williams, largely because she believes they fail to appreciate the Foucauldian understanding that rights, while appearing as a means to contest state power, also articulate identity according to the social norms and regulatory discourse that produce the regime.

Brown engages in a complex critique of Patricia Williams's scholarship; in particular, she argues against what she sees as Williams's overinvestment in a "concrete, immediate, and available character of rights" (p. 128). Brown cautions that the proliferation of rights will increase the forms of privatization that Williams condemns as "life crushing disenfranchisement" while also intensifying the rights-based idealism of liberal thought. In her critique of Williams, Brown holds true to Nietzsche's insights about the causes of ressentiment, and argues that rights can only be seen as restaging the invasion of black people's lives if they are also seen as fulfilling a natural and unhistorical desire to expose oneself without injury. Yet Brown also reveals what may be seen as a controversial assumption, that Williams's defense of rights is "falsely dependent" on a "concrete" notion of rights, rather than recognizing how rights are part of the mythologies of liberalism. In this fashion, Brown asserts that Williams has failed to elaborate a subjectivity that can "deeply comprehend" the ruses of the masculinist liberal state (p. 196). Readers of States of Injury may struggle with her rejection of Williams's political sensibilities, yet ultimately Brown's critique rests upon her aspiration to imagine subjects who not only bear responsibilities but who also develop the capacities to outmaneuver the forces of domination in the modern state.

States of Injury succeeds in illuminating the fiction of the "dependent subject" and questioning how this fiction is maintained by the masculinist norms of the state. In a promising fashion, Brown begins to identify the strategic dilemmas for welfare mothers, battered women, and "victims" of class and sexual identity who may appear to be suffering harms experienced in their private lives, but who are subjected to an expanding and perilous involvement with a masculinist state. She explores how the family is constituted by liberal discourse, and claims that the modern family remains an important locus for challenges over the empirical fictions and normative ideals about women. As women assert themselves as "self-interested" individuals, they begin to unravel the family as a necessary prop for the maintenance of male selfhood. For Brown the dilemma for women who have become the "dependent subjects" of the state is how to claim equality and autonomy without reiterating the masculinist norms that govern political life. For example, from her perspective she shows how the welfare mother or battered woman is always at risk of trading one form of dependency for another-when she seeks protection outside the family she is multiply constituted by a variety of state powers and extralegal forces. In this evocative and powerful analysis of the "gendered ideological moments of liberalism," Brown has given feminist theorists an agenda for challenging the potency of the state as an invasive force in the lives of female subjects.