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...