Nihilistic Times

Resumen del libro

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from the retreat of God and tradition in the face of science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

In search of remedies, Brown turns to Max Weber's Vocation Lectures. Weber famously decries the effects of nihilism on scholarly and political life and proposes to keep the two separate, restricting academic work to the pursuit of facts and the political realm to the legislation of values. Without accepting Weber's arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times.

She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and she challenges the left to make good on its commitments to critical thinking and democratization.

Biografía del autor

Wendy Brown es Emamuel Heller Professor de Ciencias Políticas en la Universidad de California, en Berkeley. Ha escrito ensayos sobre política contemporánea, teoría crítica y teorías del neoliberalismo, en los que aborda cuestiones como el poder, la identidad política, la ciudadanía y la subjetividad en las democracias liberales. Ha profundizando en las tesis de Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, la escuela de Frankfurt, Foucault y otros pensadores contemporáneos. Es autora de diversos libros, entre los que destacan, junto a este, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006); Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (2005); y Politics Out of History (2001).