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Allen Feldman, Associate Professor of Media,
Culture, and Communication, New York University will speak on “Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at
Guantanamo”Abstract: 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 visual culture and philosophy of
media at New York University.
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