Shoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objects—the topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture. Analyzing works by authors in the naturalist and realist traditions as well as making use of documents from a contemporary medical archive, she considers fetishism as a cul...

À l’heure où les échanges culturels sont véhiculés par un anglais standardisé, même si d’autres langues de portée mondiale commencent à modifier l’équilibre des forces dans la production de la culture, Emily Apter mène une réflexion sur les zones de traduction. Traduire, est-ce perpétuer ou effacer la mémoire culturelle ? Tout est-il traduisible ?À travers une grande variété de champs – de l’« invention » de la littérature comparée par Leo Spitzer et Erich Auerbach à la situation d...

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the "Untranslatable"-the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution.In the place of "World Literature"-a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one groun...

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature.Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea tha...

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 crit...

This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This “singular plural” dimension of thought in Nancy’s philosophical writings demands explication.In this book, some of today’s leading scholars in the theoretical hu...

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought.The book shows the continuin...

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of 'literature' has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. It takes as its starting point Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, from which it then travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Among its many concerns are the legacies of Goethe's idea, variable understandings of the term 'literature' itself, cross-cultural encounters,...

Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the representations in foreign characters.This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pr...

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger's famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the "age of the poets," which stretches from H�lderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, "The Autonomy of the...

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience "the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship"? Citizen Subject is the summation of Étienne Balibar’s career-long project to think the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this magnum opus, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousse...