Description
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.
About the Author
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.
Book Information
ISBN 9780226277332
Author Allen Feldman
Format Paperback
Page Count 432
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 652g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 15mm * 3mm
About the Author
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.
Book Information
ISBN 9780226277332
Author Allen Feldman
Format Paperback
Page Count 432
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 652g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 15mm * 3mm
