Arne De Boever (PhD, Columbia University, 2009) teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts (USA), where he directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program from 2011 until 2023.
Arne’s research focuses on the contemporary US novel in an internationalist frame. His writing and teaching take place at the crossroads of literary criticism and critical theory. At CalArts, Arne’s undergraduate courses have dealt with the novel after 9/11, the novel and the biopolitics of care, posthumanism, the relations between finance and fiction, vulnerability, unexceptional art, and silent music. His graduate courses have focused on the concept of sovereignty and more broadly the problematic of exceptionalism in both political and aesthetic theory.
Arne is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh UP, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham UP, 2018), Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (U of Minnesota P, 2019), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and Being Vulnerable: Contemporary Political Thought (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023). He is also the co-editor of Gilbert Simondon (Edinburgh UP, 2012) and The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part 1 (Archive Books, 2013), and the editor of Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy (Duke UP, 2017). His book Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. With Michael Pisaro-Liu in CalArts’ School of Music, he is at work on a new book titled Silent Music: Towards a Philosophy of the Most Subtle Sound.
For over a decade, Arne was the editor of the Critical Theory/ Philosophy genre section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he remains editor-at-large. He is also a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective and an advisory editor for several other journals, including the Oxford Literary Review. His work has been widely quoted and reviewed in academic publications and has been referenced and reviewed in general audience publications such as T: The New York Times Style Magazine (special issue on the arts today), Ny Tid (Norway), Télérama (France), La Maleta de Portbou (Spain), and De Standaard (Belgium).
In addition to his teaching at CalArts, Arne has twice been a Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature as well as in Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California (Los Angeles). He has also been a Visiting Professor in the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), where he twice delivered the prestigious Leonardo Art, Science, and Technology lecture.
