Abstract
An interview with the political theorist Wendy Brown, Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Brown is the author, inter alia, of States of Injury (1995), Politics Out of History (2001), Edgework (2005), Undoing the Demos (2015), In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), and most recently, Nihilistic Times (2023). The interview begins by discussing the pro-Palestinian encampments at US universities and the often-violent responses to these encampments by university hierarchies and the police. We debate how these encampments, and the responses to them, relate to Brown’s recent work on nihilism, developed through a reading of Max Weber’s vocation lectures. Moreover, we consider how Brown’s understanding of nihilism corresponds to her earlier work on Left melancholia. The interview then turns to Brown’s famous works on neoliberalism, charting the genealogy of the term in US political theory and accentuating the importance of understanding the intellectual history of neoliberalism. The interview finishes with a discussion of sovereignty and borders, situating the ideas that Brown introduces in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) within the contemporary geopolitical context.