When: Thursday, April 3, 2025, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PMWhere: TBC
Extending rights to non-human entities is an established, and limited, strategy for stemming the destruction of nature threatening all planetary life. The human-rights-for-nature approach has been criticized for its failure to problematize the liberal humanist figure at the core of modern rights and also for its vulnerability to supervenience by capital. This talk addresses the critique and proposes an alternative reconstruction of democracy and the democratic subject.
Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and professor emerita of Political Science and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. The author and editor of more than a dozen books, she is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity; her critical analysis of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire; her account of the global political inter-regnum in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; and her study of neoliberalism’s multi-pronged assault on democratic principles and practices in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Her latest book, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber, reflects on the forces of nihilism corroding contemporary political and intellectual life. Professor Brown has held a variety of visiting professorships and her writing has been translated into more than twenty languages. She credits her thinking life to the excellent and accessible public universities of her youth and has worked in recent years to prevent their extinction.