UNEXCEPTIONAL
POLITICS
ON OBSTRUCTION, IMPASSE, AND THE IMPOLITIC
EMILY APTER
First published by Verso 2018
© Emily Apter 2018
Images courtesy of William Powhida and Postmasters Gallery, New York
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-085-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-086-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-087-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text (UK) Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
Introduction: Unexceptional Politics
I.Resistant to Political Theory
“Small P” Politics
Micropolitics
Microsociologies
Nanoracisms
II.Scenes of Obstruction
Impolitic
Disentrenchment
Interference
Obstinacy
III.Political Fictions
Political Fiction
Psychopolitics
Collateral Damage
Thermocracy
Milieu
IV.Economies of Existence
Schadenfreude
Managed Life
Occupy Derivatives!
Serial Politics
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction: Unexceptional Politics
Overflowing the bounds of Realpolitik or informal politics, what I call unexceptional politics could be thought of as the material and immaterial stuff of politics that encompasses everything from government gridlock and dysfunction to political cunning (Machiavellianism in its modern historical mutations), from politicking (backroom deals, information trafficking, the petitions of local constituents, jousting and ousting) to Occupy or Maidan, with their neo-anarchist strategies of occupation, assembly, riot, strike, obstination (utopianism against all odds, resistance to primitive expropriation), interference, and creative leveraging.
Unexceptional politics, as an umbrella rubric, subsumes and exceeds micropolitics insofar as it is pointedly posed against the ideological exceptionalism enshrined in nationalist compacts and the American heritage of manifest destiny. It conceptually engages, in the form of dialectical resistance, the “state of exception,” foundationally inscribed in theories of “the Political,” from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Thinking politics exceptionally, however—through states of emergency or sublations of political subjectivity—blocks the representation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political theorization, while thinking politics unexceptionally spools into explanatory structures of historical epic and of classical political theory, muddying their structural coherence, obfuscating mainstream political and diplomatic ends. This is politics that eludes conceptual grasp, 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 called.
Claude Lefort laments the “no there there” view of statecraft that leaches out of decentralized structures of governance and systems of controlled information.
How, in fact, can we cling to the idea that politics invades everything? If there is no boundary between politics and that which is not political, politics itself disappears, because politics has always implied a definite relationship between human beings, a relationship governed by the need to answer the questions on which their common fate depends.1
If there is no demonstrable boundary between politics and the non-political, then how can we not accept the idea that politics invades everything? The problem, it would seem, lies with classical political theory and philosophy, whose language has a relatively limited vocabulary for describing the allness and everywhereness of political atmosphere and milieu.
Hence the impetus to initiate a glossary of terms that have no ready standing in political theory, yet share something in challenging the assumption that “the Political” is always for tomorrow. Rather than treat politics (“small p,” or “la politique”) as nothing more than the foreclosure of the possibility of a critical politics, or a concession to what Ross McKibbin calls “what-works” politics, or a “realist” politics that is supposedly party-neutral and beyond ideology (though it is anything but), this vocabulary focuses instead on (1) terms for the political that have no standing in classical political theory, particularly in relation to psychopolitical forms of obstruction and impasse to direct action; (2) an “untheologized politics” “where there is no Homo Sacer”2 (as argued by Stathis Gourgouris, who has
