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IAS Visiting Fellow Mario Tel貌 will give a paper drawing on part of his book, currently in production, on Edward Said (The Late Animal: Edward Said, Classicism, and the Limits of Humanism, under contract with Oxford University Press). What does it mean to read Apuleius鈥檚 Metamorphoses in the current global crisis? How do images of Palestinian donkeys—moribund yet carrying the burden of transporting people and food in Gaza—change our view of this novel, in which a human turned into donkey is subjected to unceasing physical abuse? This paper answers these and other questions by reading for and with the donkey鈥檚 beaten corpus. It considers the necropolitics of form, proposing that we read against the novel鈥檚 plot (against its futurist teleology) and focus on the constantly self-renewing present of abuse, and that we interpretively embrace the linguistic difficulty of the text, its burdensome untranslatability (which is disavowed by classicists鈥� obsession with linguistic mastery) in order to push against our own desire for the abuse to continue. Apuleius鈥檚 novel is placed in dialogue with Edward Said鈥檚 idea of 鈥渂ristling鈥� lateness, with Adorno鈥檚 notion of musical late style, with recent theoretical work on necropolitics and, especially, with Afropessimism. These approaches help us understand why it matters to read and re-read Apuleius now.

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