Art's Assemblies: Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue
by Claudia Breger

Art's Assemblies presents a new political aesthetics for the present. Claudia Breger makes a case for art's power to act politically in significant, manifold ways by reconnecting twenty-first-century philosophical frameworks to the more boldly political aesthetics of European modernisms, particularly as developed in response to historical fascism. Thus, the book develops dialogues between recent work in actor-network theory, Black radical thought, neo-marxism, affect, and queer studies, and the twentieth-century tradition of Critical Theory, with literature, film, TV, and art installation examples from both contexts. As acts of political alignment as well as imaginative prefiguration, "art's assemblies" bring together heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) "political concert." This includes how artworks "track" and "trace" pieces of real-world materials even in fantastic contexts; how they work through unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization by "animating" archival documents; how they "fabulate" different historical accounts without engaging in the "forging" actions of fake news; and how they counter the accumulated nightmares surrounding us through practices of "dreaming" interwoven with actions of "drafting" or "demanding." In this challenging political moment, Breger's work speaks across disciplines to articulate a new vision of how art can engage with the world—and imagine different futures.

About the Author

Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary culture, with emphases on film, literature, performance, and literary and cultural theory, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in a transnational framework. Recent publications--before Art's Assemblies--include Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism: Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics (co-edited with Olivia Landry, Camden House, 2024).

About the Speakers

Madeleine Dobie is the Department of French Chair; Director of French Graduate Studies and French Graduate Admissions; Graduate Placement Officer; and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism (2001), Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (2010), Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antilles dans l’espace colonial français (2012), and articles on the Thousand and One Nights, the field of Mediterranean Studies, and the contemporary literature of migration.

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages from 1986-1992 and again from 2005-2008. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique (1974-), and he serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations, Germanic Review, Transit, Key Words (UK), Critical Space (Tokyo), Memory Studies (UK), Lumina (Brazil),

Oliver Simons is Professor of German and current chair of the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He is Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, and the author of several books, including the monographs Literary Conclusions: The Poetics of Ending in Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist (2024) and, most recently, Reading as Method (2026).

Simone Stirner is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She researches and teaches at the intersections of poetry and poetics, memory studies, Jewish studies, and queer studies. She is the author of Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism (Fordham University Press, 2026), a comparative study that advances a new understanding of post-Holocaust poetry by centering the relation between poetic form and the affective experience of grief. Her current work includes a project on aesthetic forms of queer memory and one on the intersection between modernist poetics and textile crafts.

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