[D66] Unexceptional politics

[A.O.]

9781784780852
Unexceptional Politics
On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic
by Emily Apter <https://www.versobooks.com/authors/1333-emily-apter>

  * Hardback
  * Ebook


288 pages / December 2017 / 9781784780852

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.


    Reviews

“/Unexceptional Politics/ is a book that teaches walking the walk by 
exposing the talk talked. Very few academic books of this intellectual 
quality can serve as a guide for activism in the interest of social 
justice. A text for careful reading.”

– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Emily Apter’s new book is exceptional. It doesn’t just challenge the 
current, fashionable inflation of discourse on ‘states of exception,’ 
but reveals how much of politics lies beyond the antithesis between 
‘normal’ and ‘exceptional.’ It uses the philological method, not only to 
revisit the past, but to diagnose the emerging future. A must read, I 
certify.”

– Etienne Balibar, author of /Reading Capital/

“At a moment when so much thought on the left has been reduced to an 
exercise in personal brand-building, Emily Apter has dared to produce an 
uncompromisingly serious work of political imagination. In its 
commitment to history, to theoretical precision, and to the insistent 
aliveness of the revolutionary project, it joins Joshua Clover’s /Riot, 
Strike, Riot/ as one of those rare indispensable interruptions of 
speculative business as usual.”

– Anahid Nersessian, author of /Utopia, Limited/

“Apter’s concept of unexceptional politics is an exceptional 
achievement. While most definitions of politics (or the political) 
smuggle a normative notion of politics and, as Latour strongly argued, 
fail to give a convincing account of politics as a specific dimension of 
our lives which is not a separate domain of objects (e.g. laws, state 
decisions, etc.) but rather a particular way of doing things in general, 
Apter succeeds in making it tangible maybe for the first time in such a 
thorough and subtle way by tapping in theory, literature, film and news 
with dazzling erudition. Anyone interested in contributing to an 
anthropology of politics must read this book.”

– Patrice Maniglier, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre

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