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War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance

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Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

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Birkbeck Centre for Law & the Humanities presents

War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance
Lecture by Allen Feldman (NYU)

Respondents: Moniza Rizzini Ansari (Birkbeck), Kojo Koram (Birkbeck)

Chair: Başak Ertür (Birkbeck)

Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy, this essay anatomizes the Derridean contretemps - the essential accident - as the time out of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war. Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance constitute a temporal counterweight to the indivisibility of sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shapeshifting indeterminacy that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.

Allen Feldman has authored three books, including Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (2015, U. of Chicago Press) and Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991/1995, U. of Chicago Press). He has published numerous articles on the political aesthetics and philosophy of violence, the political sensorium and (dis)embodiment in journals such as Theory and Event, Public Culture, Social Text, Radical History Review, PMLA and American Ethnologist. Trained as a political and medical anthropologist he has conducted ethnographic field research on political violence and transitional justice in Northern Ireland (1984-87), South Africa (1997-2000), in Sri Lanka, (2014-2016) and on policing the homeless affected and infected by HIV-AIDS in New York City (1992-2000). Since 2001 he has been writing on the visual culture of state formation in the “war on terror.” He is Professor of the philosophy of media and visual culture at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University where he is currently working on the political theology and media archaeology of techno-political regimes of omnivoyance.

Moniza Rizzini Ansari is a PhD student at Birkbeck School of Law. Her research and writing focuses on the aesthetics of poverty and the militarization of urban space in Latin America.

Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the editor of an upcoming book, The War on Drugs and The Global Colour Line, to be published by Pluto Press in March 2019.

Başak Ertür is a Lecturer in Law and co-director of the Centre for Law and the Humanities at Birkbeck.

The Centre for Law and the Humanities at Birkbeck builds on the School of Law's research strengths in the area of law and the humanities including law and aesthetics; law and literature; law and psychoanalysis; critical legal theory; legal history; law and film; and law, space and architecture. The Centre facilitates and promotes research in law and the humanities within the School and College through the organisation of seminars, workshops, conferences and visits by distinguished scholars.

This event is free however booking is required via this page.

Image: Cara a la pared, Juan Genovés (1967)

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