Brown, 'Women's Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics' (2003)

Brown highlights the question of how to live 'after' the promise of a revolutionary feminism. She argues that we are now urged 'to think feminism and women's studies in this condition of afterness, in this temporal condition of "knowing better" about our naive yet founding past, and thus also to grieve what we now know we never should have loved... a tortured and guilty grieving to be sure' (3). Brown wants to question what it might take to live in this temporality, having given up the hope for a radical overthrow of the social relations of the present. Further, she wants to delineate what indeed has been lost, what the loss of revolution is.

Indeed, she argues that what we mourn when we mourn revolution is not necessarily clear, or even necessary to delineate. Brown points to the lack of boundaries in mourning in a similar way to Butler. 'The condition of mourning is a stumbling and stuttering one, a condition of disturbed ground, of inarticulateness, of disorientation in and about time' (4). Brown also argues that a mourning being 'learns a new temporality' that punctures 'conceits of linearity with a different way of living time' (5).

Brown argues that a loss of revolution, or a fear that revolution equals totalitarian might seem to consign us to the present. 'It is this conviction about the inevitable triumph of the people over the illegitimate powers of wealth and rule that exploit, dominate or disenfranchise whose loss washes over us today' (6). Brown pushes to seeing this as melancholic instead of mourning precisely because there can be no closure in mourning a 'promise.' 'So we cannot even see or say what we mourn, gather at the site of its disappearance, weep over its remains, hold its lively embodiment in our memory as we must if the mourning is to come to an end' (7).

Brown declares that revolution is 'unquestionably finished' but then wonders why we should mourn it. For her, quite simply, it means letting go of dreams for something better. 'A severe critique that does not articulate with anticipation of a different future... an illness with no cure... how to proceed when this has become our condition?' (13) Indeed, she seems to be searching for an alternative way to live through this diagnosis. 'What as yet unpracticed political sensibility is required to dwell here?' (13)

Brown's solution seems to be to keep alive a utopian impulse while giving up indeed the blueprint of revolution. 'Above all, how to suspend this utopian impulse in a different temporality such that it could fuel rather than haunt or taunt left political life in our time?' (14) 'The task, then, would be to recuperate a utopian imaginary in the absence of a revolutionary mechanism for its realization such that this imaginary could have a political use, that is, participate in the making of social transformation and not only constitute an escape from the felt impossibility of such transformation' (14).

Brown concludes with suggesting that sitting in mourning might be productive. Through this 'dwelling,' it perhaps becomes possible to see how a 'seemingly unendurable loss is also the opening of possibility to live and think differently' (15). In other words, trying to let go of loss or disavow it or discredit it might also mean not using loss as a means to see differently. Indeed, that loss might be a pivotal place for learning to live and think differently.