The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU, invites you to join us for the launch and panel discussion of Allen Feldman’s new book Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015), featuring Talal Asad (CUNY), Avital Ronell (NYU), Drucilla Cornell (Rutgers), Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU), Jon Beller (Pratt), and Allen Feldman (NYU).

Allen Feldman pioneered the ethnography of embodied and sensorial violence as political philosophy. This jarring book weds warfare or biapolitics to photopolitics. Feldman argues that sovereign power installs itself in infinite war as a will to truth and implants regimes of truth as a will to war. He excavates the sensory defacement of war that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. Feldman uses deconstructive description to place accelerationist power at a standstill to salvage the embodied actualities that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites.

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