Emily Apter – Unexceptional Politics After May ’68
“Voids in Events: Unexceptional Politics After May ’68”
Emily Apter (NYU)
- Monday, December 3, 2018
- 5:00 pm
- Room 110 (Thompson Room), Barker Center, Harvard University
- The France and the World Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center
Situating May ’68 at the crux of debates around “theory and event,” (Badiou) or the “philosophical moment” (Patrice Maniglier, Louis Althusser’s “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon”), the talk will view May ’68 through the lens of what Apter has termed in a recent book “unexceptional politics.” A kind of micro or “small p” politics, unexceptional politics is forged as a fluid paradigm in relation to Foucault’s notion of the microphysics of power, Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics of desire, Kris Manjapra’s concept of colonial entanglements, and the late Hayden White’s historical construct of the practical past, which refers to tactics of living, and archived memories, affects and dreams. The talk will conclude with an analysis of the artist Mary Kelly’s work “Circa 1968,” which foregrounds an iconic image from the days of demonstration, and raises the question of feminist legacies of ’68 in a material present both practical and unfinished.
