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<div class="edition-single--book-title">Unexceptional Politics</div>
<div class="edition-single--book-subtitle">On Obstruction,
Impasse, and the Impolitic</div>
<div class="edition-single--book-contributors"><span>by <a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/authors/1333-emily-apter">Emily
Apter</a></span></div>
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<div class="details">288 pages / December 2017 /
9781784780852</div>
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<p>A new vision of politics “below the radar”</p>
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<p>One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the
key terms in which it is discussed. <em>Unexceptional Politics</em>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
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<h2 class="edition-single--book-reviews-header">Reviews</h2>
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<p>“<i>Unexceptional Politics</i> 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.”</p>
<p class="byline">– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
<p class="byline">– Etienne Balibar, author of <i>Reading
Capital</i></p>
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<p>“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 <i>Riot,
Strike, Riot</i> as one of those rare indispensable
interruptions of speculative business as usual.”</p>
<p class="byline">– Anahid Nersessian, author of <i>Utopia,
Limited</i></p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
<p class="byline">– Patrice Maniglier, University of Paris
Ouest-Nanterre</p>
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