Archives of the Insensible
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A01=Allen Feldman
afghanistan
anthropologist
anthropology
archeology
archival
Author_Allen Feldman
Category=JHMC
civilization
community
contemporary
criminal
democracy
dogma
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gerhard richter
guantanamo
humanitarian
international
justice
killing
lynching
mass destruction
memory
neoliberal
philosophy
photography
photos
political
politics
power
reconciliation commission
rodney king
south africa
sovereign
technology
terror
terrorism
threat
trials
tribunal
violence
visual theory
war
wartime
weapons
Product details
- ISBN 9780226277165
- Weight: 794g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 08 Dec 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Guantanamo 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.
Allen Feldman is associate professor at the Department of Media Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of The Northern Fiddler and Formations of Violence, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
