Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic

Description

Unexceptional Politics develops a vocabulary of terms drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV serials), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics. The book proposes a new mode of dialectical resistance, countering notions of the "state of exception" embedded in theories of the "Political" from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. Apter advances a critical model of micro-politics, or "politics with a small 'p,'" that offers a way of representing a politics that has generally eluded our conceptual grasp, and that has been unintelligible or resistant to classical political theory. Confronting us with the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be described, this experimental glossary opens the possibility of confronting the contingent and immaterial conditions of politicking that contribute to disturbance and interference within the institutional structures of our capitalo-parliamentarist systems of rule.

Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Against World Literature.

On Against World Literature Just following Emily Apter's dizzying array of texts from diverse traditions and times (including a tightly argued discussion of the philosophicality of Simone de Beauvoir, lost in translation to the best of US feminists), embracing much experimental material, all read with meticulous care, is an education. No one has thought the question of world literature in greater depth, at once re-thinking Comparative Literature as translatability studies. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak On Against World Literature: Rarely does one read a book with the title Against that is so much for important causes and ideas: writing, translation, worldliness, diversity, cosmopolitanism, whilefully aware of their promises and threats. In this moment of dispossession of the Humanities, we needed just that book to clarify matters and move beyond the contradictions. -- Etienne Balibar On Against World Literature: Emily Apter's study is essential reading for scholars working across nations and boundaries, and a chastening reminder of how crucial translation if for myriad forms of literary inquiry. -- Benjamin Poore * Times Literary Supplement * On Against World Literature: There is much value in Apter's insights into the ambiguous nature of translation and language barriers. * Sydney Review of Books * On Against World Literature: Arresting and unashamedly political * Times Higher Educational Supplement *