A review by ralowe
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

4.0

wendy brown got me thinking i need to read friedrich hayek after she gave a lecture at the university of california because i was worried that hayek's intense conviction as a progenitor of neoliberalism to disavow the social and replace it with the market might be inadvertently bolstered by (or otherwise be related to) my own jaded understanding that dialogue with one's oppression is impossible. at first blush there might be a number of jumps and false equivalences involved in that train of thought. however consider that neoliberalism is the precondition of our current historical moment, at that its arrival consists, as wendy brown carefully elaborates, the utter evisceration of politics from the sign of the political so that the scene of dialogue is wholly illusory if the power dynamics can never be meaningfully acknowledged or remedied as an crucial requirement for dialogue to ever truthfully occur: so my jaded understanding lives or just barely lives in the wake of hayek's intense convictions. hayek writes massive books decrying the social extensively and i was hoping that brown in *undoing the demos* would offer some clue as to which works were essential, expecting a continuation of the lecture i saw. unfortunately, i was given no clear recommendation; but importantly, after reading brown's book, i no longer thought it necessary to consult hayek, so thorough is brown's description of neoliberalism in a number of relevant spheres. it's interesting that i read eva cherniavsky's *neocitizenship* before this book of brown's, since it now appears to me at least that cherniavsky was writing primarily in response to brown's text here. cherniavsky overreaches through a brisk inquiry into the occupy movement as a straw proxy for a counter to neoliberalism that was ultimately deeply unsatisfying; brown wisely limits mention of occupy to a sentence or two in the concluding chapter: the net effect is that *undoing* is more encouraging of resistance than *neocitizenship*. across the reading of these two books recently, and i would say more emphatically with brown's book, a clearer denomination of what on multiple fronts and in various forms i've been fighting against for years. also: the important yet imperfect analogy that suggests that human capital might be haunted by chattel enslavement (thereby imbuing perspectives on the arrival of neoliberalism as novel with a degree of unavoidable antiblackness) is something brown never explores, although cherniavsky leaves the ready to infer some possible association (perhaps) with a seemingly random excursion through afropessimism. sometimes less is more.