Arne De Boever

Arne De Boever (PhD Columbia, 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). He directed the MA program from 2011-2019 and returned to that role in 2020. 

De Boever’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, De Boever’s undergraduate courses have dealt with the novel after 9/11, the novel and the biopolitics of care, and the relations between finance and fiction. His graduate courses have focused on the concept of sovereignty and more broadly the problematic of exceptionalism in both political and aesthetic theory.

De Boever has published numerous articles, translations, and reviews and is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham, 2018), and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota, 2019). He is the editor or co-editor of Gilbert Simondon (Edinburgh, 2012), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part 1 (Archive Books, 2013), and Bernard Stiegler (Duke, 2017). De Boever is also active as the editor of the Philosophy/ Critical Theory genre section of the Los Angeles Review of Books and as a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective. At CalArts, he is the founding editor of Contrapuntal Media, a yearly anthology of work-in-progress by MA Aesthetics and Politics faculty and friends.

De Boever’s current research, which is gathered under the heading “unexceptional thought”, considers the orientalist construction of China in Western thought; non-Eurocentric genealogies for key concepts in Western thought; theories of vulnerability; and the connections between art and injury.