Brown’s Paradox: Speed,ressentiment and global politics

Abstract

This article is an engagement with the effects of speed in global politics through the lens of what it terms “Brown’s Paradox,” Wendy Brown’s insight that, in a radically accelerating world we “feel a greater political impotence than humans may have felt before, even as we occupy a global order more saturated by human power than ever before.” It begins by discussing the two dominant responses to Brown’s Paradox: the first, the neoliberal embrace and valorization of the uncertainty of an accelerating world, and the second, the reactionary attempt to aggressively (re)secure the foundations of politics and society (in this latter discussion, the article engages with the specific case study of the treatment of Tamil refugees in Canada). The discussion of this latter approach will lead us to the central concept of this article, the idea of a ressentiment against speed. The article will discuss how this ressentiment inhibits our ability to productively respond to the challenges of an accelerating world, while at the same time frequently authorizing policies of violence, marginalization, and exploitation against those constituencies which are already most subject to the conditions of accelerating globalization. Conversely, this understanding of ressentiment against speed will be used to point the way to a politics which, while not resolving the contradiction inherent in Brown’s Paradox, might teach us to live with it—and within it—in a productive and ethical manner.