Edgework brings together seven of Wendy Brown’s most provocative recent essays in political and cultural theory. They range from explorations of politics post-9/11 to critical reflections on the academic norms governing feminist studies and political theory. Edgework is also concerned with the intellectual and political value of critique itself. It renders contemporary the ancient jurisprudential meaning of critique as krisis, in which a tear in the fabric of justice becomes the occasion of a public sifting or thoughtfulness, the development of criteria for judgment, and the inauguration of political renewal or restoration. Each essay probes a contemporary problem—the charge of being unpatriotic for dissenting from U.S. foreign policy, the erosion of liberal democracy by neoliberal political rationality, feminism’s loss of a revolutionary horizon—and seeks to grasp the intellectual impasse the problem signals as well as the political incitement it may harbor.

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Politics Out of History and States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (both Princeton).