This paper asks what happens when we examine Levinasian exposure—understood as performative articulation of political concepts—in light of what Fred Moten calls the “social aesthetics of Black radicalism.” It will consider Moten’s critique of Levinas while simultaneously “exposing” the notion of exposure to poetry and rhythm, which can be seen (or heard) as opening his thought beyond the limits that Moten ascribes to it.

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab, Acting Director of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and head of the international “Women in Theory” collective. She is author of Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008), and is currently completing a book on experimental transmedial aesthetics.