Arne De Boever
Biographic Data
| ID | 1230171 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arne De Boever |
| GIVEN NAMES | Arne |
| FAMILY NAME | De Boever |
| SIGNATURE | DE BOEVER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | California Institute of the Arts |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0992-6662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Post-Exceptionalism
Postmodernism has come and gone, but the belief that artists and works of art are exceptional is alive and well. This book challenges the politics of such aesthetic exceptionalism by arguing that when postmodernism declared the death of the author and celebrated the copy, it failed to name political theology as its fundamental target. In a time when sovereignty is experiencing a dubious global revival, the moment has come to reconsider the artist…
Post-Exceptionalism
Brings together the philosophy of art and aesthetics with debates about political theology and sovereignty Develops a critique of aesthetic exceptionalism and proposes a new theory of post-exceptionalism Reconsiders postmodern commonplaces such as the copy, the fake, and the forgery outside of the limits of aesthetics, within the framework of political philosophy Breaks out of art history’s Eurocentrism and works between Western and Chinese philo…
Aesthetic Theology
Whereas by aesthetic autonomy, we mean the autonomy of the aesthetic, we typically do not take political autonomy to refer to the autonomy of the political. Starting from this non-transfer of autonomy between aesthetics and politics, this article critically tracks the progressive misunderstanding of aesthetic autonomy after its initial articulation by Immanuel Kant, as what today we can define as an aesthetic exceptionalism or theology that schol…
Out on a Limb
Brian Evenson's horror detective novel Last Days demonstrates an exhaustion with epistemology—the desire to know, and the cultic schisms between guardians of knowledge that it produces—and a turn toward ontology—specifically, a consideration of worlds in which things might not be the same from one moment to the next and a certain kind of knowledge therefore becomes impossible. In such worlds, in which “the future constancy of the real is not guar…
Giorgio Agamben's political formalism
This article takes as its point of departure Agamben's comments about how sovereign nation-states responded to the pandemic – by requiring people to wear masks, socially distance, work from home and live under lockdown. Agamben has characterized such measures as ‘fascist’ and has been criticized for that characterization. Against the inflationary critical value of Agamben's ‘camp’ as a paradigm to judge the political form of ‘sovereignty’, this a…
Iconic Intelligence (Or)
In this essay, De Boever focuses on a section titled “Idols of Unrepresentability” in the closing pages of Stathis Gourgouris's book The Perils of the One. Scrutinizing the two counterintuitive theses about iconoclasm's political theology and the artwork's desacralizing power of presentation that Gourgouris proposes there, De Boever expands on Gourgouris's examples to take on, in a productive tension with his thought, what De Boever calls “art's …
On Frédéric Neyrat's Critical Thought
On Frédéric Neyrat’s Critical Thought Arne de Boever (bio) Keywords Frédéric Neyrat, philosophy The work of the philosopher consists first and foremost in the art of distinguishing, which is another name for critique. —Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence “Western” Philosophy (Bouge de là) Frédéric Neyrat knows philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs. One might go so far as to claim—and Neyrat’s philosophical manifesto Atopias: Manifesto for…
François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought
In this article, I argue that François Jullien’s thought draws into question the exceptionalism that typically constitutes Western thought. Consider, for example, the thought of the event, which is a thought of the break, the rupture, of radical caesura—of the miracle, which Jullien (who is also a thinker of Christianity) frequently mentions. It is the thought of the subject, the author, the artist, the genius, the sovereign, and the creator. Suc…
Art and Exceptionalism
This essay reviews Santiago Zabala’s book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017). The review considers Zabala’s Heideggerian approach to art and contemporary debates about the state of exception and asks, from a political point of view, whether Zabala is not too quick to leave other debates about the state of exception (in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, for example) aside in his d…
Disconnecting Acts
In the interview, Efrain Kristal, professor and chair of UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature, and LARB’s philosophy / critical theory editor Arne De Boever talk with the renowned Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman about his entire work. The interview was conducted on November 11‐12, 2014. This publication is dedicated to the memory of Zygmunt Bauman (1925‐2017)
The Proletarianization of Sensibility
Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer. These questions confr…
Kant, Art, and Time
How is individuation possible when all knowledges are transmitted by machines? Is wanting “to be a machine” the ultimate articulation of this limit question? As for us, living as we do in the age of a new machinic turn of sensibility (the digital turn, which coincides with the end of mass media that are dying in a globally and industrially organized regressive movement in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and pathetic), w…
Plastic Sovereignties
Does sovereignty have a future in the 21st century? Through a sustained engagement with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and against the background of contemporary political phenomena, Arne De Boever explores what positive political possibilities the notion of sovereignty might still hold. Using the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, he argues that these possibilities reside in an aesthetic reconceptualisation of sovereignty as …
Book Symposium on The Philosophy of Simondon
Individuation and Knowledge
Individuation and Knowledge: The "refutation of idealism" in Simondon's Heritage in France Jean-Hugues Barthélémy (bio) Translated by Mark Hayward (bio) and Arne De Boever 1. The "double fundamental problem" in Stiegler's relation to Simondon In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler's book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is…
Prométhée littéraire
Que se passe-t-il si l'on considère le mythe de Prométhée à partir de la notion de « mythe interrompu » de Jean-Luc Nancy ? Si les mythes sont habituellement racontés autour du feu, ce mythe à propos du vol du feu expliquerait les origines de sa propre narration - n'expliquant rien d'autre que lui-même. Dès lors, comme Kafka le savait déjà, le mythe serait interrompu par la matérialité allégorique du roc sur lequel Prométhée est attaché, et autou…
The Allegory of the Cage
This article reconsiders the relations between Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment and adds Giorgio Agamben’s essay “What is an Apparatus?” to this constellation. It explores, specifically, the relations between Foucault’s definition of enlightenment and the central notion of Agamben’s philosophy: potentiality. The relation between potentiality and enlightenment is then mobilized in the article in the context of a disc…
Agamben and Marx
The Proletarianization of Sensibility
Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer. These questions confr…
Agamben and Marx
François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought
In this article, I argue that François Jullien’s thought draws into question the exceptionalism that typically constitutes Western thought. Consider, for example, the thought of the event, which is a thought of the break, the rupture, of radical caesura—of the miracle, which Jullien (who is also a thinker of Christianity) frequently mentions. It is the thought of the subject, the author, the artist, the genius, the sovereign, and the creator. Suc…
Art and Exceptionalism
This essay reviews Santiago Zabala’s book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017). The review considers Zabala’s Heideggerian approach to art and contemporary debates about the state of exception and asks, from a political point of view, whether Zabala is not too quick to leave other debates about the state of exception (in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, for example) aside in his d…
Kant, Art, and Time
How is individuation possible when all knowledges are transmitted by machines? Is wanting “to be a machine” the ultimate articulation of this limit question? As for us, living as we do in the age of a new machinic turn of sensibility (the digital turn, which coincides with the end of mass media that are dying in a globally and industrially organized regressive movement in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and pathetic), w…
Individuation and Knowledge
Individuation and Knowledge: The "refutation of idealism" in Simondon's Heritage in France Jean-Hugues Barthélémy (bio) Translated by Mark Hayward (bio) and Arne De Boever 1. The "double fundamental problem" in Stiegler's relation to Simondon In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler's book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is…
Agamben and Marx
The Allegory of the Cage
This article reconsiders the relations between Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment and adds Giorgio Agamben’s essay “What is an Apparatus?” to this constellation. It explores, specifically, the relations between Foucault’s definition of enlightenment and the central notion of Agamben’s philosophy: potentiality. The relation between potentiality and enlightenment is then mobilized in the article in the context of a disc…
Prométhée littéraire
Que se passe-t-il si l'on considère le mythe de Prométhée à partir de la notion de « mythe interrompu » de Jean-Luc Nancy ? Si les mythes sont habituellement racontés autour du feu, ce mythe à propos du vol du feu expliquerait les origines de sa propre narration - n'expliquant rien d'autre que lui-même. Dès lors, comme Kafka le savait déjà, le mythe serait interrompu par la matérialité allégorique du roc sur lequel Prométhée est attaché, et autou…
Individuation and Knowledge
Individuation and Knowledge: The "refutation of idealism" in Simondon's Heritage in France Jean-Hugues Barthélémy (bio) Translated by Mark Hayward (bio) and Arne De Boever 1. The "double fundamental problem" in Stiegler's relation to Simondon In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler's book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is…
Book Symposium on The Philosophy of Simondon
Plastic Sovereignties
Does sovereignty have a future in the 21st century? Through a sustained engagement with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and against the background of contemporary political phenomena, Arne De Boever explores what positive political possibilities the notion of sovereignty might still hold. Using the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, he argues that these possibilities reside in an aesthetic reconceptualisation of sovereignty as …
Disconnecting Acts
In the interview, Efrain Kristal, professor and chair of UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature, and LARB’s philosophy / critical theory editor Arne De Boever talk with the renowned Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman about his entire work. The interview was conducted on November 11‐12, 2014. This publication is dedicated to the memory of Zygmunt Bauman (1925‐2017)
The Proletarianization of Sensibility
Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer. These questions confr…
Kant, Art, and Time
How is individuation possible when all knowledges are transmitted by machines? Is wanting “to be a machine” the ultimate articulation of this limit question? As for us, living as we do in the age of a new machinic turn of sensibility (the digital turn, which coincides with the end of mass media that are dying in a globally and industrially organized regressive movement in which the technical, transitional object becomes monstrous and pathetic), w…
Art and Exceptionalism
This essay reviews Santiago Zabala’s book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017). The review considers Zabala’s Heideggerian approach to art and contemporary debates about the state of exception and asks, from a political point of view, whether Zabala is not too quick to leave other debates about the state of exception (in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, for example) aside in his d…
François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought
In this article, I argue that François Jullien’s thought draws into question the exceptionalism that typically constitutes Western thought. Consider, for example, the thought of the event, which is a thought of the break, the rupture, of radical caesura—of the miracle, which Jullien (who is also a thinker of Christianity) frequently mentions. It is the thought of the subject, the author, the artist, the genius, the sovereign, and the creator. Suc…
On Frédéric Neyrat's Critical Thought
On Frédéric Neyrat’s Critical Thought Arne de Boever (bio) Keywords Frédéric Neyrat, philosophy The work of the philosopher consists first and foremost in the art of distinguishing, which is another name for critique. —Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence “Western” Philosophy (Bouge de là) Frédéric Neyrat knows philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs. One might go so far as to claim—and Neyrat’s philosophical manifesto Atopias: Manifesto for…
Giorgio Agamben's political formalism
This article takes as its point of departure Agamben's comments about how sovereign nation-states responded to the pandemic – by requiring people to wear masks, socially distance, work from home and live under lockdown. Agamben has characterized such measures as ‘fascist’ and has been criticized for that characterization. Against the inflationary critical value of Agamben's ‘camp’ as a paradigm to judge the political form of ‘sovereignty’, this a…
Iconic Intelligence (Or)
In this essay, De Boever focuses on a section titled “Idols of Unrepresentability” in the closing pages of Stathis Gourgouris's book The Perils of the One. Scrutinizing the two counterintuitive theses about iconoclasm's political theology and the artwork's desacralizing power of presentation that Gourgouris proposes there, De Boever expands on Gourgouris's examples to take on, in a productive tension with his thought, what De Boever calls “art's …
Post-Exceptionalism
Postmodernism has come and gone, but the belief that artists and works of art are exceptional is alive and well. This book challenges the politics of such aesthetic exceptionalism by arguing that when postmodernism declared the death of the author and celebrated the copy, it failed to name political theology as its fundamental target. In a time when sovereignty is experiencing a dubious global revival, the moment has come to reconsider the artist…
Post-Exceptionalism
Brings together the philosophy of art and aesthetics with debates about political theology and sovereignty Develops a critique of aesthetic exceptionalism and proposes a new theory of post-exceptionalism Reconsiders postmodern commonplaces such as the copy, the fake, and the forgery outside of the limits of aesthetics, within the framework of political philosophy Breaks out of art history’s Eurocentrism and works between Western and Chinese philo…
Aesthetic Theology
Whereas by aesthetic autonomy, we mean the autonomy of the aesthetic, we typically do not take political autonomy to refer to the autonomy of the political. Starting from this non-transfer of autonomy between aesthetics and politics, this article critically tracks the progressive misunderstanding of aesthetic autonomy after its initial articulation by Immanuel Kant, as what today we can define as an aesthetic exceptionalism or theology that schol…
Out on a Limb
Brian Evenson's horror detective novel Last Days demonstrates an exhaustion with epistemology—the desire to know, and the cultic schisms between guardians of knowledge that it produces—and a turn toward ontology—specifically, a consideration of worlds in which things might not be the same from one moment to the next and a certain kind of knowledge therefore becomes impossible. In such worlds, in which “the future constancy of the real is not guar…
Philosophy (13 works) · Art (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)