Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory - Softcover

Feldman, Allen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022627733X ISBN 13: 9780226277332

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantánamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty’s claims to transcendental right —whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic—by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war.

Excavating a scenography of trials—formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal—Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible.

About this title

About the Author

Allen Feldman is professor in the Department of Media Culture and Communication at New York University.

Review

"I am struck by the rich and provocative detail of this remarkable book and by the disturbing insights it offers into the performance of violence in our time and how its representations make it banal and acceptable." (Social Text Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 022627733X
• ISBN 13: 9780226277332
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 432