War is philosophical and whatever its destructive power, it always maintains itself within the limits of the philosophical, and it even maintains those very limits. I am in enriching debt to the political intensity and theoretical passion of Mangalika de Silva, who has never failed to incite and inﬂame in me the thinking through of justice.Įnigmatic Dispersals In Memoriam Ernesto Laclau A version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Disputation of Ashraf Salim,” in Cultural Studies 27, no. 6 (2013) and chapter 4 builds on and signiﬁcantly expands the core argument of “The Structuring Enemy and Archival War,” which appeared in PMLA 124, no. Earlier attempts to engage the themes of this text appeared as sections of various publications, which are hereby superseded. I am in debt to Gerhard Richter and Juan Genoves, eminent visual ethnographers of violence, for making their art available for this book. I am grateful to George Molebatsi, of the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC, for allowing me to sit in on their brieﬁng sessions with witnesses during the course of hearings. In South Africa I would like to acknowledge the war veterans of Western Cape Action Tours for brokering my introduction to the herbal healers, and Mitzpah Botho, my Xhosa translator, and her nuanced reception of the multiplex speech of the “social mothers” and herbal healers. I also owe much to the generous and incisive interlocution of Jon Beller and Debbora Battaglia, and the unﬂagging support of my erudite editor, T. Avital Ronell, though she has not sought this role, continues to personify a rigorous ethics of politicized deconstruction, or “take down,” that beams like a searchlight on the lee shore of our grim contemporaneity. The seeds of these writings began in conversations with thinkers, both explicitly discussed in these pages or tacitly mediating foremost are Reiner Schürmann, Ernesto Laclau, Talal Asad, Stanley Diamond, and Abram Engelman-their styles of thought and political integrity have been an irrevocable metahistorical inﬂuence that resonated with a voice and vision I encountered only in logos-Jacques Derrida. Traumatizing the Truth Commission / 229

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War / 185 First-Person Shooters: The Critique of Monopoly Violence / 117 P A R T I I : A M P U TAT I N G A R C H I V E S U22.F44 2015 172′.42-dc23 2015017185 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).Īcknowledgments / vii Introduction: Enigmatic Dispersals / 1 PART I: DESISTING SOVEREIGNTIES Archives of the insensible : of war, photopolitics, and dead memory / Allen Feldman. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. He is the author of The Northern Fiddler and Formations of Violence, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press Chicago and LondonĪllen Feldman is associate professor at the Department of Media Culture and Communication at New York University. Archives of the Insensible Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory

Galela kingdom of the dead