Unexceptional Politics
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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.