Brown, Revaoluing Critique

Revaluing Critique: A Response to Kenneth Baynes
Author(s): Wendy Brown

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Aug., 2000), pp. 469-479
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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REVALUING CRITIQUE
A Response to Kenneth Baynes
WENDY BROWN
University of California, Berkeley
IT IS A RARE PLEASURE to have one's work closely and thoughtfully

engaged. In "Rights as Critique and the Critique of Rights," Ken Baynes
offers a critical analysis of my discussion in States of Injury of the pursuit of
identity-based rights by contemporary progressive activists. As pleased as I
am with this engagement, of course, I am also distressed by Baynes's
misreadings of my work, and since distress always has its way with pleasure,
it is upon those misreadings that the initial part of my response shall dwell.
Then, I shall say a bit about the relationship of these misreadings to what I
take to be our substantive differences on the question of certain kinds of rights
deployment in contemporary American political life.
CRITIQUE: REJECTION OR SCRUTINY?
Baynes writes,
Despite a few cautionary remarks that she is not opposed to rights, the general conclusion
of Brown's inquiry is that the language of rights is likely to do more harm than good, that
rights codify and reinscribe the very powers they were designed to confront, and thus,
that radicals and progressives should think twice before including rights within their
emancipatory projects.'
This account reduces some of the most crucial strands of my argument to the
status of "a few cautionary remarks." I begin "Rights and Losses," the chapter
of States of Injury under consideration, by saying that I have no wish to par-
ticipate in an argument for or against rights as such, and I make clear that my
concern is with a particular deployment of rights in a particular historical
context. The deployment at issue is identity-based rights, especially rights
concerning specific injuries constitutive of particular groups, and the context
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 28 No. 4, August 2000 469-479

? 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
469
470 POLITICAL THEORY / August 2000
is a culture in which the disciplinary production of identity is ubiquitous

often, regulatory. This is important precisely because I seek to examine
admixture of rights discourse with disciplinary discourse and regulat
through identity and, within this context, to examine as well the
emancipatory possibilities of rights claims that take their bearings in the inju-
ries constitutive of certain identities. In conducting this examination, I con-
clude that rights are indeed important to contemporary progressive projects
but that they may be most effective to the degree that they remain empty of
specific content, that is, to the degree that they are not closely bound to partic-
ular identities nor aimed at redressing particular injuries but, instead, func-
tion to articulate a political universal that, as an ideal or a vision, operates as a
critique of status quo inequalities and hence as an incitement to address those
inequalities politically rather than legally. This is a far cry from arguing that
rights do more harm than good and that progressives should eschew rights in
their work.2
Baynes is generally a careful and judicious reader. So his failure to attend
both to the historical and political specificity of my argument and to the dis-
tinction I draw between rights that naturalize historically contingent injuries
constitutive of identity and rights that potentially mobilize the contradiction
between the universal freedom and equality they promise and the everyday
lives of citizens-this failure must itself be read. Might there be something
about Baynes's Haberrnasian frame that disallows a grasp of both the histori-
cally specific dimension of my argument and of the political distinctions I am
drawing between different kinds of rights? What generalities about the law
and rights is Baynes led into by Habermas that elide the specificities I insist
upon in evaluating the concrete operation of a certain kind of rights in our
time? There is a second set of questions to be posed here, one that concerns a
whole culture of political argument today as much as it concerns Baynes.
What leads Baynes to collapse critique into rejection, to treat my critical scru-
tiny of contemporary rights deployment as itself an argument for rejecting
rights? Why is a study of rights that examines their conservative,
depoliticizing, or disciplinary dimensions alongside their prospects for
achieving recognition, redress, or incitation to action recast by Baynes as a
case against rights? Why is Baynes, a fellow traveler in the tradition of criti-
cal theory, so reductive in his treatment of critique, equating it with dismissal
of the object under consideration rather than engaged interrogation of ele-
ments of politics that are inevitably ours to work with but are not without pli-
ability nor without availability to strategic deployment?3 What leads Baynes
(and so many other progressives today) to reduce critique, which at its best
functions as a means of strengthening our political hand by attempting to
know better the cards we are dealt, to a wholesale rejection of those cards?
Brown / RESPONSE TO BAYNES 471
Anxiety about critique, reduction of it to dismissal or mere negativit

uitous in contemporary political and legal theoretical culture today; i
we fear losing any object that we scrutinize too closely or whose ambivalent
or corrugated character we expose to the light. But what model of political
intellectual work is betokened by an anxiety that favors advocacy over
analysis, position-taking over the examination of positions and their constitu-
ent historical elements?4
LEFORT HABERMAS, MARX, AND

FOUCAULT WHOSE DEMOCRACY?
In his reduction of critique to rejection, his inattention to the cultural and

historical specificity of my argument, and his sheering off of the Foucauldian
concerns with subject production, identity as an effect of power, and forms of
domination related to disciplinary and regulatory power, Baynes essentially
reduces my position to Marx's position. He then proceeds to criticize Marx
(me) by way of the work of Lefort and Habermas on the relationship of rights
to democracy. But at this point, Baynes and I are no longer arguing about the
same dimensions of rights, nor are we operating with the same understanding
of democracy. Lefort and Habermas are interested in establishing that rights
discourse and rights claims articulate a certain kind of public sphere, one that
allows for continual contestation of the relationship between state power and
citizen power. I, on the other hand, am interested in exploring how rights dis-
course oriented to identity potentially reifies and regulates the subject pro-
duced by social powers largely taken for granted by that discourse. I would
not contest, for example, Lefort's notion that rights "are constantly aroused
by the need for the aspirations of minorities or particular sections of the popu-
lation to be socially recognized" but would, instead, plumb the source of this
arousal and the extent to which rights articulating the specific character of a
certain exclusion or lack of recognition entrench and even naturalize rather
than redress or reduce this condition.5 In passing, Lefort says these minorities
"may be the product of circumstances"; my project is to consider precisely
what (power-laden) circumstances produce them and how rights may index
that production. Similarly, while it is easy enough to concur with Lefort that
democracy and rights mutually suppose one another in a way that leaves the
relation between the universal and the particular open to contestation and that
democracy "tests out rights which have not yet been incorporated in it," this
formulation does not tell us anything about the domination in liberal democ-
racy itself, which is my central concern in the chapter under consideration.
Baynes uses Habermas and Lefort to argue that rights are constitutive of
democracy, where democracy consists in equal subjective liberties and
autonomous access to participation in a public sphere, indeed, where democ-
racy is signified by rights themselves-"the principle of democracy can only
appear as the heart of a system of rights"-while treating Marx (and me) as
the representatives of an argument that rights are antithetical to democracy.6
But what Baynes fails to acknowledge in his construction of this opposition is
that a liberal rather than Marxist-Foucauldian account of the powers and rela-
tions constitutive of democracy have come to prevail in his measure of the
relation between rights and democracy. That is, from a Marxist and
Foucauldian perspective, democracy is not reducible to "mutual recogni-
tion," to "regard[ing] one another as free and equal consociates under law,"
nor to formal or discursive participation in a hypothesized public sphere.7
Rather, for Marx, these would all be part of the ideology of rights and (liberal)
democracy, precisely the ideology he is criticizing. True democracy for Marx
requires substantive equality and freedom in civil society and, hence, a trans-
formation of the stratifying and dominating social powers (e.g., private prop-
erty) that prohibit such equality and freedom. A Foucauldian strain added to
this would require that the struggle against more subtle, normative, subject-
producing powers would also have to be part of the aspiration to democracy.
Not only recognition or participation, and not only the elimination of stratify-
ing social powers, but continuous challenges to normalizing discourses
would signify the possibility of the freedom and equality promised by
democracy. Clearly, these Marxist and Foucauldian strains of my argument
are lost in Baynes's organization of the players and the debate about whether
or not rights are compatible with democracy, but again, the loss itself is also
symptomatic. For I find myself in a position ironically familiar when in con-
versation with Habermasians: the very questions I bring to the debate- What
is democracy? What are the ingredients and dynamics of late modern subject
formation? How is the political space of liberalism organized by what it
excludes? How do rights produce the subjects they pretend only to presup-
pose? How is liberalism legitimated by its ahistorical conceptual abstrac-
tions?-are the questions buried by a set of a priori assumptions that democ-
racy is peopled by Kantian agents asserting their autonomy and engaging in
public discourse. In short, Baynes does not so much disagree with me as dis-
allow those of my questions that would destabilize the terms of his political
understanding, not through an overt proscription but through the imposition
of an apparatus that precludes them. It is an apparatus through which I cannot
be understood to the extent that I am heard, and cannot be heard except
through terms that exclude most of my queries and concerns. No amount of
rights could save me now.
ABSTRACTION, PARTICULARS, AND UNIVERSALS
Since Baynes has shorn off most of the non-Marxist dimensions of my

argument and has made Marx's critique of rights the foil for his own defense
of them, rather than further recapitulate my own argument, what I will do in
the remainder of these remarks is engage Baynes's reading of Marx. Baynes
charges me with retaining the sharp opposition Marx maintains "between the
concrete particular and the abstract universal ... in a way that leads [me] to
diminish the 'symbolic character' of rights."8 Again, it is precisely the sym-
bolic character of universal rights that I affirm as having potential political
efficaciousness in the conclusion of the chapter under discussion.9 But I want
to dwell here on the reason for maintaining this particular opposition, suggest
what is lost in Baynes's attempt to attenuate it, and suggest as well what is
dialectical about it. For Marx, as is well known, the legitimacy of the liberal
state is crucially achieved by its proclamations of universality: in declaring
all men eligible for the rights of man, the state promises to regard us as if we
were the same, without regard for our socially produced differences. How-
ever, for Marx, this very universality is both contradicted by and premised
upon what Marx calls the material elements that distinguish and stratify us in
civil society: property, education, in short, class relations. So Marx's insis-
tence on the opposition between the abstract universal and the concrete par-
ticular, which figures a homologous opposition between state and civil soci-
ety, religious life and earthly life, citizen and man, is fundamental to his
critique of liberal legitimacy, not simply to a critique of rights. Marx regards
the state's representation of itself as universal as a Hegelian trick, one that (as
Marx learned from Hegel himself) presupposes rather than abolishes the very
particulars that it claims to overcome. In Marx's view, the state would not
need to proclaim itself as universal (or, there would be no need for the univer-
sal state) if civil society were not rife with the stratifications (particulars) that
this formulation of the universal claims to transcend. The state posits its uni-
versality over and against the particular powers that distinguish and stratify
us. Crucially, in Marx's account, particularity does not signify mere differ-
ence or individuality. Rather, it signifies inequality, stratification, irreconcil-
ability-all of which are produced by social powers that the universalism of
the state veils in what Marx calls its political abolition of them, its pronounce-
ment that they are irrelevant to citizenship and the rights that attend upon it. It
is this claim about the social powers producing the particular, and the ideol-
ogy of the universal that claims to transcend those powers while actually con-
secrating them, that is utterly incommensurate with the discussion of the uni-
versal and the particular advanced by LeFort and Habermas and endorsed by
Baynes. Universal and particular have a quite different meaning in their
account, one that is not mediated by power but by a more abstract and
the same time essentialized formulation of difference or individualit
short, the universal-particular formulation in Marx's work on the Je
question expresses a relation of power that is itself productive of state
macy, not a description of human individuality and variety in a benign
ralistic society.
Moreover, it is simply wrong to call Marx's formulation of the universal
and the particular undialectical. Indeed, as sharply as he draws the distinction
between universal and particular, state and civil society, citizen and bour-
geois, Marx also insists that it is precisely the contradiction between our rep-
resentation as free, equal, and fraternal in the state and our actual lives as
stratified, unfree, atomistic individuals in civil society that produces move-
ment toward a different order of things, indeed, toward the realization of the
universalist image of freedom and equality tendered by state ideology. It is
both the articulation of fraternity, equality, and liberty as an ideal and the fail-
ure of purely political emancipation to reconcile the universal ideal with the
concrete particular that yields the motivation and agency oriented toward a
different kind of emancipation. Surely this formulation of the mutual
dependence and productivity of opposites, their effect in producing a syn-
thetic self-transformation, is dialectics at its most glorious, even if it is, by
today's postmetaphysical lights, also dialectics at its least credible. By con-
trast, what Baynes terms dialectical in Habermas and especially Lefort looks
less like dialectics than analytical imprecision. In the claim that "democracy
and rights mutually suppose one another in a way that leaves the relation
between the universal and the particular open to contestation and continuous
revision or reformulation," one can only wonder precisely what formulation
of the universal and particular are at stake here. '0 Revision and reformulation
of what sort inaugurated by what social identities in the context of what nor-
mative or hegemonic discourses? Who or what is contesting and revising?
And what guarantees that this putative contestation and revision is dialectical
rather than a mere negotiation of power and position?
RIGHTS, IDENTITY, AND DEPOLITICIZATION
For Marx, the abstract character of rights has a double character. On one
hand, the rights he discusses abstract from the particular lives citizens lead:
upon rich and poor alike are conferred the right to private property, without
regard to how this right differentially empowers or depowers differently situ-
ated members of a class-stratified society. But rights also abstract f

social powers whose significance they claim to abolish politically, and here
we come to another important moment in Baynes's misreading of Marx and
me. Baynes misrepresents what Marx meant by the effect of rights in
depoliticizing the powers that give rise to them and hence misrepresents my
own argument about the perils of rights that closely specify the injury they
aim to redress. For Marx, the fascinating thing about the rights of man is that
they represent a politically ambiguous depoliticization of operative distinc-
tions in society: in contrast with the ancien regime (feudalism), where eco-
nomic station had immediate political significance, liberal constitutions
declare such station irrelevant to one's standing as a person and hence as a
rights-bearing citizen. Marx calls this a depoliticizing move because in
declaring powers such as race or gender to be irrelevant to one's standing as a
citizen, in achieving what Marx refers to as their political abolition, the social
power of these elements is removed from political view and from political
redress. At the moment that they are no longer relevant to one's standing
before the law in an order in which such standing is considered the measure of
equality, they are ideologically naturalized as mere differences (Lefortian
particulars?) in the realm of civil society. In short, for Marx, depoliticization
is an effect in which the power constitutive of a particular identity and life cir-
cumstance is ideologically disguised or buried. The politically ambiguous
element of this achievement lies in the fact that, again, the state figures an
ideal in which markers of class, race, gender, and so forth no longer matter
and hence in which the social powers constitutive of these markers have truly
been abolished, not simply declared irrelevant. Thus, Marx understands this
achievement as a step in the progress toward universal equality and emanci-
pation; it is an improvement over the exhaustive identification of individuals
with the social powers that stratify and dominate them.
Now, contrast this with what Baynes means by politicization and
depoliticization. Rights, he concedes, "generally operate in a way that
removes issues from the immediate political (especially legislative)
agenda."" In other words, depoliticization for Baynes refers to politics in
narrow sense: what is or is not on the agenda of elected officials. Thus, his
proof that rights do not always have the effect of depoliticization occurs in the
same idiom:
it can plausibly be argued that in the United States the inclusion of a right to abortion
within a generally recognized constitutional right to privacy has significantly contributed
to the politicization of the abortion issue as well as other issues of sex and gender
equality.12
Now, having reduced depoliticization to the removal of a particular issue

from official political debate, politicization for Baynes is signified when a
certain issue is debated, for example, abortion. But the key question-Is
women's subordination through the historical and contemporary sexual divi-
sion of labor and organization of reproductive work made more or less visible
through the right to abortion cast as a right to privacy?-is the question elided
through Baynes's definition and argument. Dozens of feminist scholars have
worried over this very question: what is analytically and politically forfeited
by discursively situating reproductive freedom and sexual equality as a pri-
vacy issue? Privacy has functioned as precisely the discursive shroud that has
covered everything from the domestic subordination and abuse of women to
their lack of control over their reproductive and economic lives, privacy is
what women emerged from to lay rights claims. Given this constitutive fea-
ture of the historical production of gender, that is, given the historical privat-
ization of women and reproduction, how has the framing of the abortion issue
in terms of privacy rights contributed to the invisibility of women's economic
and social subordination through childbearing in an inegalitarian sexual and
reproductive order? How can the full implications of a woman's lack of
reproductive freedom in a gendered political economy be featured in a for-
mulation that reduces reproduction, and in particular, unwanted pregnancy,
to a matter of privacy, and not even to a matter of equality, liberty, bodily
integrity, or individuality? Rendering reproduction as a privacy issue, many
of us have argued, is precisely what paved the way for constitutionally upheld
defunding of Medicare abortions-privacy is a wall the state promises to
police for intruders, not a particular experience or activity the state promises
to assure.'3 Moreover, since privacy is hardly an absolute right, but one that
must be balanced with others, the defense of abortion as a matter of individ-
ual privacy or choice has been wide open for trump by the claim that the fetus
is a person with rights. No one is allowed to kill in private or public; hence,
neither the question of gender nor the question of social subordination
appears relevant to the question of fetal personhood-the question explicitly
set aside by the court in Roe v. Wade as it proceeded to ground abortion in a
(dubious) right to privacy. Where is the politicization of issues of sex and gen-
der equality now? In some ways, Baynes could not have picked a better exam-
ple of how depoliticization in the Marxist sense works: grant women formal
legal equality, and grant them limited abortion rights on the basis of privacy,
and watch the analytic disappearance of the social powers constitutive of
women's unfree and unequal condition as reproductive workers. Instead,
watch the public debate for decades whether or not a fetus is a person.
The abortion issue is good example of what happens in Baynes's more
general misrepresentation of my argument as one that rejects rights. For those
who believe that access to abortion is an essential component of women's

emancipation from the historically subordinating powers of gender, the ques-
tion is not whether women should have rights but what kind of rights will pro-
cure emancipation from those powers rather than reinscribe them (e.g., as
matters of privacy) or, rather than continue to regulate women through them
(e.g., by installing the state, the economy, and the medical establishment as
brokers of women's access to abortion as Roe v. Wade and subsequent abor-
tion rulings have done). What kind of rights to freedom and equality would
figure all humans as appropriately cultivating some measure of power and
control over their sexual and reproductive activities (without the conceit of
absolute sovereignty that Foucault warns against) rather than specifying this
power and control according to historically gendered matrices?'4 More
generically, what kind of rights bring into view, and potentially into public
discourse, inequalities and subordination produced by social powers? And
what kind keep this production process ideologically naturalized and discur-
sively buried? This is the question that animates my exploration of contem-
porary rights discourse and its intersection with contemporary disciplinary
productions. This is the question Baynes excises from my own work and
eschews in his own.
Power, power, power. In the first and the last instance, in both Marxist and
Foucauldian terms, historically specific modalities of power are what I
attempt to track in the vicissitudes of identity-based rights that often appear
to exacerbate and accelerate the disciplinary productions that give them
impetus. My question is always, "What kind of subject, produced by what
kind of powers, is led to seek what kind of rights, in the context of what kind
of legal cultural and state discourses, with what kind of effects?" Or trans-
lated directly into the terms of power, "In a given historical context, what
kinds of powers produce what kind of rights claims that might become the
instruments of what kinds of regulation or domination even as they confer
recognition or redress of subject-specific injuries?" Baynes works on a dif-
ferent intellectual plane, one whose currency is not power and history but, on
one hand, concepts (e.g., autonomy, awareness, recognition), and on the
other, modifiers (e.g., reflexive, procedural, communicative). The beacons in
his considerations of rights are Habermas and Lefort, and behind them, Kant
and Hegel. In his arguments and those of his guiding lights, the term power
literally disappears from the page, and when it reappears in a sentence
attached to my name, the rhetorical feel of this surfacing is one of crudeness,
of realpolitik, where something more delicate, procedural, or ethical is pre-
sumably wanted.'" Similarly, while Baynes calls for attention to historical
change in his arguments about rights, there is no explicitly historical quality
to his conceptual work with rights-indeed, "modern democracy," drawing
on a "model of constitutionalism," appears to exist outside of time and inde-

pendent of cultural and economic context as well.'6 Baynes' political con-
cepts move about on their own self-enclosed stage, achieving great feats of
awareness, recognition, dialectical transmutation, and reconciliation."7 Per-
haps it is a more elegant and soothing intellectual model, but does it speak to
the complexities of our condition? Does it capture the powers that produce,
organize, constrain, differentiate, and mobilize us?
NOTES
1. Kenneth Baynes, "Rights as Critique and the Critique of Rights: Karl Marx, Wend
Brown, and the Social Function of Rights," Political Theory 28 (2000): 444, in this issue.
2. In a forthcoming essay, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," I have furtherelaborated
analysis of the paradoxical functioning of rights in identity-based political efforts. Con
tions 7, no. 2 (2000).
3. In the chapter Baynes engages, I argue that "to suggest that rights sought by politicized
identities may cut two (or more) ways-naturalizing identity even as they reduce elements of its
stigma, depoliticizing even as they protect recently produced political subjects, empowering
what they also regulate-is not to condemn them. Rather, it is to refuse them any predetermined
place in an emancipatory politics and to insist instead upon the importance of incessantly query-
ing that place." States of Injury, 121.
4. Janet Halley and I have authored a longer discussion of the fallen status of critique in con-
temporary left intellectual work in the introduction to Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. J. Halley
and W. Brown (forthcoming).
5. Lefort, cited in Baynes, "Rights as Critique," 451.
6. Habermas, cited in Baynes, "Rights as Critique," 453.
7. Baynes, paraphrasing Habermas, in "Rights as Critique," 464.
8. Baynes, "Rights as Critique," 451.
9. "If, as Marx argued 150 years ago, the democratizing force of rights discourse inheres in
its capacity to figure an ideal of equality among persons qua persons ... then the political potency
of rights lies not in their concreteness, as Patricia Williams argues, but in their idealism, in their
ideal configuration of an egalitarian social, an ideal that is contradicted by substantive social
inequalities.... If rights figure freedom and incite the desire for it only to the degree that they are
void of content, empty signifiers without corresponding entitlements, then paradoxically they
may be incitements to freedom only to the extent that they discursively deny the workings of the
substantive social power limiting freedom. In their emptiness, they function to encourage possi-
bility through discursive denial of historically layered and institutionally secured bounds, by
denying with words the effects of relatively wordless, politically invisible, yet potent material
constraints. Still more paradoxically, when these material constraints are articulated and speci-
fied as part of the content of rights, when they are brought into discourse, rights are more likely to
become sites of the production and regulation of identity as injury than vehicles of emancipation.
In entrenching rather than loosening identities' attachments to their current constitutive injuries,
rights with strong and specified content may draw upon our least expansive, least public, and
hence least democratic sentiments. It is, rather, in their abstraction from the particulars of our
lives-and in their figuration of an egalitarian political community-that they may be most valu-
able in the democratic transformation of these particulars." States of Injury, 134.
10. Baynes, "Rights as Critique," 452.
11. Ibid., 456.
12. Ibid. 467.
13. See, for example, Catharine MacKinnon, "The Male Ideology of Privacy: A Feminist
Perspective on the Right to Abortion," Radical America 17 (July-August 1983); Wendy Brown,
"Reproductive Freedom and the 'Right to Privacy': A Paradox for Feminists," Families, Politics
and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State, ed. I. Diamond (New York:
Longman, 1984); Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1997).
14. For an example of this effort with regard to abortion, see Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary
Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 2.
15. See, for example, the discussion commencing on the bottom of page 456 through page
457 of Baynes, "Critique of Rights."
16. Ibid., 457.
17. Recall Marx's polemic against the work of the Young Hegelians in The German Ideol-
ogy: "It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was child's play, a world struggle
beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another,
heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45
more of the past was swept away in Germany than at othertimes in three centuries. All this is sup-
posed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought." The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C.
Tucker, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 147, emphasis mine.
Wendy Brown is professor of political science and women's studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her most recent books include States of Injury: Power and Free-
dom in Late Modernity; Politics out of History (forthcoming); and Left Legalism/Left
Critique, coedited with Janet Halley (forthcoming).

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Revaluing Critique: A Response to Kenneth Baynes

Author(s): Wendy Brown

A Response to Kenneth Baynes

IT IS A RARE PLEASURE to have one's work closely and thoughtfully

CRITIQUE: REJECTION OR SCRUTINY?

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 28 No. 4, August 2000 469-479

is a culture in which the disciplinary production of identity is ubiquitous

Anxiety about critique, reduction of it to dismissal or mere negativit

LEFORT HABERMAS, MARX, AND

In his reduction of critique to rejection, his inattention to the cultural and

ABSTRACTION, PARTICULARS, AND UNIVERSALS

Since Baynes has shorn off most of the non-Marxist dimensions of my

RIGHTS, IDENTITY, AND DEPOLITICIZATION

ated members of a class-stratified society. But rights also abstract f

Now, having reduced depoliticization to the removal of a particular issue

who believe that access to abortion is an essential component of women's

on a "model of constitutionalism," appears to exist outside of time and inde-

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