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The book engages in a polemical critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, etc) on the grounds that they construct their curricula on an assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what Apter calls the "untranslatable" are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by de Man, Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Édouard Glissant, as well as on the way in which "the untranslatable" is given substancein the context of Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, the aim is to activate Untranslatability as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature with bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, the politics of periodization, the translation of philosophy and theory, and the bounds of non-secular proscription and cultural sanction

Shoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objects—the topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture. Analyzing works by authors in the naturalist and realist traditions as well as making use of documents from a contemporary medical archive, she considers fetishism as a cultural artifact and as a subgenre of realist fiction. Apter traces the web of connections among fin-de-siècle representations of perversion, the fiction of pathology, and the literary case history. She explores in particular the theme of "female fetishism" in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.

The term "écosophie" – a conflation of ecology and philosophy – was coined by the Norwegian philosopher-mountaineer Arne Naess in 1973 and idiosyncratically reworked by Félix Guattari in Qu'est-ce que l'écosophie?, a posthumous collection of essays and interviews from the late 80s and early 90s. For Guattari, écosophie was a critical concept, warding off the tendency, in the ecology movements of his time, to "turn the defense of species into a kind of identity nature politics" all too easily turned to conservative ends. In many respects a perfect example of a philosophical "untranslatable," écosophie was notably absent from Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004). In exploring the term's applications, historical and potential, this paper focuses on écosophie as a vital political concept with a planetary remit, interrogating where Guattari's usage overlaps with and diverges from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of "planetarity." Broadly speaking, whereas Guattarian ecosophy is weighted towards micropolitics, and Spivak's planetarity is weighted towards ethics, both rely on a translative praxis conducive to new modes of cognizing (and naming) nomos, cosmos, agency, alterity and value-forms. The essay concludes with some critical reflections on écosophie/ecosophy as an anchor term for emerging glossaries of environmental justice that seek to undercut colonial epistemologies and monolingual idioms of climate-speak. ; Le terme « écosophie » – un mot-valise qui rassemble les mots écologie et philosophie – ­a été inventé par l'alpiniste-philosophe Arne Næss en 1973, puis revisité à sa façon idiosyncratique par Félix Guattari dans Qu'est-ce que l'écosophie ?, un recueil posthume d'essais et d'entretiens de la fin des années 1980 et du début des années 1990. Pour Guattari, l'écosophie était un concept critique destiné à contrecarrer la tendance des mouvements écologiques de son temps à faire de la défense des espèces une sorte d'identity politics aisément ...

Emily Apter, 'Afterword: Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation', in The Work of World Literature , ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 209–28

The 'work' of world literature, as this volume underscores in its title, and as Derek Attridge lays out in his case for translation as 'creative labour', points to theories of translational praxis that challenge the status of a nationally fortressed standard language.

Abstract
This article summarizes a broader project on "just translation" that attempts to rethink translation in the framework of Western philosophies of right, Sittlichkeit (ethical norms, customs, practices), and theories of justice (Plato, Hegel, Rawls), as well as of recent work on "postcolonial justice" that negotiates the collision between the drive toward universality and the normative, on the one hand, and the drive toward difference, on the other. Devising a critical approach that "does justice" to the nuances of words associated with adjudication in all the world's languages is the larger aspiration. But given practical limitations, this means scaling down to select terms and cases that signal translational injustice under conditions of violence and legal disputation. These conditions include gender violence and sexual safety across languages, the untranslatability of terms like refugee and migrant, the fraught vocabulary of settlement and unsettlement (involving the translation of terms like indigeneity, occupation, detention zone, and camp), shibboleth tests and the foreclosure of the right to residency (which amounts to the passporting of speech), and the multilingual scripts of biopolitical surveillance and patrol relied on in forcible-entry raids, stop and frisk, and executions of orders to "report and deport."

Taking Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time" as its point of departure, this article considers contemporary feminist theory and its contributions to recent theoretical paradigms of temporality. From Kristeva's understanding of women's subjectivity in relation to "linear time as the time of project and history," this essay engages the various ways that feminism has thought the temporal, arriving at a notion of the démodé. The démodé, in its multivalent capacity as an aesthetic function of women's time, is explored in the photographs of Moyra Davey, whose work, this article argues, enables us to see the démodé as a mechanism that makes possible the radical dispossession of time.

This essay considers the digital avatar not simply as a name for a virtual double of the player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have informed technical constructions of the subject, it applies in particular an important moment in Lacan's description of the drive to the concept of the gaming "avatar." It argues that the avatar is a variant of precursor representations of the drive specific to the technical imaginary of videogames.

Commenting on the judicial scandal of the conviction of Mohammed Yousry, the official translator for the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, Emily Apter argues that translators occupy an increasingly dangerous position in the post-9/11 world. Through her analysis of the trial and the accompanying controversy on translation, she shows that translators are assumed to have divided loyalties and the ability to move incognito among language communities that touch but do not cohere. Hence, Yousry's case reveals how translators become scapegoats in the culture and language wars over migration and Islam in the aftermath of 9/11. In accordance with her recently published book The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, she pleads for an "English Plus" movement that might thwart the drive to monolingualization, cultural isolationism, and political unilateralism, which characterize current policies of the United States.