Wendy Brown's sharp eye and even sharper pen have been used in her previous publications to dissect issues of tolerance, sovereignty and walls, feminism, power, and knowledge. By analysing the various meanings he assigned to the notion of critique I arrive at a different, less totalising understanding of the relationship between resistance, power, and the subject. In order to open up the space needed to think resistance differently, I turn to Michel Foucault’s late work on power and subjectivity. By reconstructing this understanding I show that Brown’s critique of neoliberalism assumes that the subject is the passive product of power, which leads her to conclude that resistance cannot come from the subject herself and instead has to be informed by what she calls ‘a counterrationality’ if it is to be affirmative. This depiction of resistance, whilst not theorised in her work on neoliberalism, is underpinned by a theoretical understanding of resistance and its relationship to power and the subject, as elaborated in Brown’s earlier work. Across her various writings on neoliberalism, Brown tends to either leave aside the theme of resistance or dismiss resistant practices as mere reaction, incapable of producing an alternative, liveable future. In this article I offer a close reading of Wendy Brown’s critique of neoliberal rationality, focusing in particular upon the role it assigns to practices of resistance.

Brown undoing the demos