“Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo”
Allen Feldman, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Date: Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Time: 6-8 PM
Location: 6 East 16th Street, Room 1103
SPONSORED BY THE POLITICS DEPARTMENT, NSSR
In Kafka’s fable “Before the Law” the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law, that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo (2004-2005) similarly inscribed a territory, a space, and a speculum where the sovereignty of the state was performed as the event of withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authored and transmitted.
Allen Feldman is the author of three books, including Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland and the forthcoming Archives of the Insensible: On Aisthesis, War and Dead Memory that engages the political photology of the war on terror, transitional justice and political animality. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Ireland on political violence and hunger striking, in South Africa on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and in New York City on the criminalizing spatialization of AIDs affected homelessness. He has published numerous articles on political violence, the political philosophy of the body and the senses, and on transitional justice. He teaches the politics of the gaze and philosophy of media at New York University. He received his Ph.D with a dissertation honors in “political and legal thought” from the Graduate Faculty where he studied under Stanley Diamond, Reiner Schürmann, Talal Asad and Ernesto Laclau.
