<i>Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire C. Michael Hurst (bio) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire By Wendy Brown; Princeton, 2006 Wendy Brown's latest book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, offers a probing account of the ways that discourses of tolerance function within networks of power as a mode of Foucauldian governmentality. Brown associates a wide range of figures, including George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Samuel Huntington, Susan Okin, Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Lewis, and Seyla Benhabib, with tolerance discourse to demonstrate that tolerance talk knows no bounds and transcends all political affiliation. Brown exposes a blind spot in the debate about multiculturalism by showing that the terms of that argument depend upon the essentialization of cultures that are perceived to fall beyond the purview of liberalism. Huntington's apparent embrace of global cultural relativism (180), Okin's failure to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the liberal assumptions that undergird her critique of multiculturalism (191–99), and the acultural perspective Benhabib assumes to negotiate multicultural complexities (168) all conceal a submerged liberal political agenda: "an exercise of hegemony that requires extensive political transformation of the cultures and subjects it would govern" (202). According to Brown, tolerance enacts these core transformations through a process of depoliticization that reframes the differences between cultures and subjectivities, particularly "radical" ethnic, racial, and sexual subjectivities, as differences of essence rather than as differences occasioned by historical experience and specific discursive manipulations. After outlining the way in which tolerance discourse is deployed as a tactic of power in the first two chapters, Brown shows impressive scope and ambition [End Page 157] by offering an assessment of tolerance as it functions both domestically and globally. Although Brown identifies many distasteful aspects of tolerance, including the sense of superiority that accompanies the act of toleration, its investment in managing rather than resolving conflict, and its association of difference with distaste, her primary critique of tolerance is that the act of tolerating a given individual or group always occurs as an uneven sociopolitical power relation: "Tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful" (178). Tolerance can only be extended to the margin by the center; as a unidirectional domination, it assumes the authority to limn the parameters of belonging. Tolerance describes the boundaries of group identity by positioning its objects as the limit cases of that identity, and rather than obviating difference, toleration sustains it through a process of reification that "involves the simultaneous incorporation and maintenance of the otherness of the tolerated element" within a central body that reserves the right to revoke the conditions of that membership at any time (28). Moreover, because "[a]lmost all objects of tolerance are marked as deviant, marginal, or undesirable" (14), the terms of this incorporation maintain a hierarchy that superordinates the ethical and moral value of the dominant center over the groups it marginalizes through the rhetoric of tolerance. In order to analyze the protective function of tolerance discourse in a national context, Brown seeks to determine why the Woman Question was framed as a question of rights while the Jewish Question was framed as a question of tolerance in nineteenth-century Europe. Brown argues that the thoroughgoing subjugation women faced in the domestic sphere limited the real impact of their potential enfranchisement, thereby eliminating the need for tolerance talk. By contrast, because Jewish oppression was primarily maintained by a legal apparatus, the extension of formal equality to Jews represented a far more potent threat to the national power structure. Since there was no extralegal check, like domesticity, to exorcise the specter of Jewish equality, one had to be invented. This is where tolerance discourse came into play. By incorporating Jews in a highly qualified manner that insisted on the maintenance of innate Jewish difference as the terms of that incorporation, the discourse of tolerance contained and nullified [End Page 158] the threat they posed to a cohesive national identity. According to Brown, this is an early example of the conflation of culture...