Archive of Wendy Brown
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Resisting Left Melancholia
Published in 2000, Without Guarantees — edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie — brings together more than 30 essays inspired by, or written in honor of, the great cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who died three years ago this week. "It is appropriate," the editors write in their preface:
given the spirit of Stuart's own commitments that this volume has a second, subsidiary purpose. Cultural studies have been subjected to much abuse lately and the fragile institutional initiatives with which those words are entangled are now under great and growing pressure. In these circumstances it seemed right to try to make this public gift a modest interventionist act in its own right. Here then are some implicit and explicit reflections on what cultural studies can be and what it might become.
Below, we present one of the essays collected in the volume: Wendy Brown's now classic reflection on Hall and the condition that Walter Benjamin termed "left melancholia." First published in boundary 2 in 1999, Brown's essay spurred a debate that has continued through the present day.
via Stuart Hall Foundation
“In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. ... only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”1 Walter BenjaminIt has become commonplace to lament the current beleaguered and disoriented condition of the Left. Stuart Hall is among the few who have tried to diagnose the sources and dynamics of this condition. From the earliest days of the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich Right in Europe and North America, Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he charged, this ascendency was consequent to the Left's own failure to apprehend the character of the age, and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character.
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Letter of support for Greece
Signed by Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas, Barbara Spinelli, Rowan Williams, Immanuel Wallerstein, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Mansfield, Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe, Homi Bhabha, Wendy Brown, Eric Fassin, and Tariq Ali.
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No to the Return to Dictatorship in Greece - an open letter
by Étienne Balibar, and 47 other signatoriesWe, citizens of Europe and beyond, call on all our fellow citizens to support the Greek workers’ and journalists’ general strike.
At a moment when the IMF has implicitly admitted that the privatisations and restructuring imposed by the Troika in exchange for loans – supposedly meant to reduce Greek sovereign debt – have in fact driven the country to ruin, this same Troika (also including the European Commission and European Central Bank) has come to Athens to make fresh demands. Its terms were such that the Greek government has decided to speed up the enslavement of Greece to domestic and foreign neoliberal dictatorship.