[ecrea] New Book Announcement: Archives of the Insensible: of War Photopolitics and Dead Memory

  Archives of the Insensible


    OF WAR, PHOTOPOLITICS, AND DEAD MEMORY


  Archives of the Insensible

  ALLEN FELDMAN
  <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/F/A/au5841521.html>

  432 pages | 31 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2015
  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.
  Close
  <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo20619377.html#>

    * REVIEW QUOTES

<http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo20619377.html#tab-quotes>

  *Avital Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority*
  “Feldman delivers an essential dossier on the conceptual
  straitjacketing to which every terrestrial being, whether ethically
  bound or in the wild, is currently subjected. Scouring the political
  unconscious with exquisite precision and sovereign decisiveness—all
  the while leaving intact the blurs and shudders of discursive power
  failures—/Archives of the Insensible/ will become the go-to work to
  help us confront unmanageably traumatizing realities by which we are
  seized and the cutthroat politics of our era. From media-theoretical
  downloads to subtle philosophical sting operations, the book doesn’t
  let up. /Ever./”
  *Talal Asad, author of On Suicide Bombing*
  “/Archives of the Insensible/ is a remarkable diagnosis of our time,
  tracing with great subtlety the multiple ways in which violence is
  transformed into justice and justice gives birth to destruction. This
  is a startling book written with passion and insight, and a valuable
  contribution to our understanding of the relationship of violence to
  international law in the contemporary world.”
  *Jonathan Beller, author of The Cinematic Mode of Production*
  “The indefatigable rigor with which Feldman limns the media, archives,
  practices, and metaphysics of contemporary sovereignty, along with its
  myriad forms of victimage, has the potential to educate and inspire a
  generation or more of counter-hegemonic, social-justice workers across
  multiple institutions, media, and national contexts. Feldman
  relentlessly pursues a mode of geopolitically emergent sovereignty
  that is fundamentally inseparable from war, terror, torture,
  clandestinity, and the programmed prohibition of the comprehension of
  these violent processes.”

  *Anthropology: *Cultural and Social Anthropology
  <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su2/su2_1.html>

  *Film Studies* <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su21.html>

  *Media Studies* <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su39.html>

  *Political Science: *Political and Social Theory
  <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su48/su48_6.html>

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