See E.C.Feiss, "Response to Grant Kester's 'The Device Laid Bare,' e-flux journal 54 (April 2014) →.
Regarding the relative novelty of Wendy Brown's critique of rights discourse, I would refer Feiss to Deleuze's impassioned attack on the concept of human rights in Pierre-André Boutang's L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (1996). His stance led to a falling out with Michel Foucault during the 1970s over the violence of the Red Army Faction in Germany, which Didier Eribon discusses in Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 258—262. Brown offers an updated version of long-standing critiques of the key ideologies of liberalism ("rights," "tolerance," and so forth). There is much to be said on behalf of this critique, but the idea that it's somehow "highly contentious" in the context of an art world that happily devours Žižek's far more incendiary assaults on the evils of "liberal consensus" is puzzling to me. I suspect Feiss and I simply have different perceptions about what constitutes conventional vs. transgressive theoretical insight in contemporary art critical discourse.