Archives of the insensible : of war, photopolitics, and dead memory / Allen Feldman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Feldman, Allen, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War (Philosophy).

Just war doctrine.

War--Moral and ethical aspects.

War.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (429 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: enigmatic dispersals

Before the law at Guantánamo

The apophatic blur of war

First-person shooters: the critique of monopoly violence

The structuring enemy and archival war

Traumatizing the truth commission

Turning around scars

Expiring animality.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780226277479

022627747X

OCLC:

927592401