The Low-Res Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in preparation for the public lecture, studio visits, and post-lecture discussion.
EMILY APTER: Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French
MONDAY, JULY 22, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. CT
SAIC Ballroom
Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She co-edited and wrote the Foreword to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Living Translation, a collection of Spivak’s contributions to translation theory. Nearing completion is What is Just Translation?, a book that maps translation and justice across media. Essays have appeared in Public Culture, e-flux, Law and Literature, Diacritics, October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum and Critical Inquiry. Since 2000 she has edited the Translation/Transnation series at Princeton University Press. In 2023 she received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Liège. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017-18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University and in 2003-2004 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
Photo credit: Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT, YouTube, Whitney Museum of American Art, May 11, 2009
Corporate Persons and the Leviathan of the Contracepted
Emily Apter | Philosophy World Democracy | July 15, 2022
Live Free or Die? Psychopolitical Infrastructures of Denialism
Emily Apter | e-flux | June, 2022
Shibboleth: Policing by Ear and Forensic Listening in Projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan*
Emily Apter | October, Vol. 156 | p.100-115 | April, 2016
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Aliza Shvarts and Emily Apter on Purported
e-flux [Podcast] | 2018 | Please note this podcast does not provide transcripts
Unexceptional Politics by
A new vision of politics "below the radar" One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the key terms in which it is discussed. Unexceptional Politics develops a political vocabulary drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics. The book reviews and renews modes of thinking about micropolitics that counter notions of the "state of exception" embedded in theories of the "political" from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. Emily Apter develops a critical model of politics behind the scenes, a politics that operates outside the norms of classical political theory. She focuses on micropolitics, defined as small events, happening in series, that often pass unnoticed yet disturb and interfere with the institutional structures of capitalist parliamentary systems, even as they secure their reproduction and longevity. Apter's experimental glossary is arranged under headings that look at the apparently incidental, immaterial, and increasingly virtual practices of politicking: "obstruction," "obstinacy," "psychopolitics," "managed life," "serial politics." Such terms frame an argument for taking stock of the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be described.
Against World Literature by