Description: 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.
Brief description: Wendy Brown (PhD, Political Philosophy, Princeton) is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton, 2006) and coauthor (with Rainer Forst) of The Power of Tolerance (Columbia, 2014), among a number of other titles. Her interests include political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, democratic theory, capitalism, and neoliberalism.
Review Quotes: Brown attends to the perceived puzzles of neoliberalism that have baffled other analysts and solves them outright. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism offers a complete rethinking of our current political reality.--Nicholas Xenos, Director of the Amherst Program in Critical Theory