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The Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) held at Guantanamo Prison constitute an archival apocalypse of the unhearable, unreadable, the inaudible and the unwitnessable; an archive that is the eschatological terminus of the archive. The breach of procedure that is the CSRT hearing is the inscription of a territory, a space, and a speculum where the sovereignty of the state can be performed as a political project of deliberate inadequation, as a counterfeit topography of a democratic or neo-liberal sublime that does not readily permit the stability, positionality and commensurations of ethical witnessing, positivistic description, nor of media or ethnographic realism. Law at Guantanamo holds to its bare-life of withholding law and to the bared and exposed life from which law is withheld. 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 where it is consigned to a black site from which all other black sites of the state are authored and transmitted.
Allen Feldman, (Associate Professor Media, Culture and Communication, New York University) is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research on the photo-ontology, the body, the senses and the state in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the post 9/11 global war of terror. His research and teaching interests include visual culture, political aesthetics, political animality, transitional justice and practice-led media research. Feldman is the author of the critically acclaimed book Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991), numerous essays on political violence as visual and performance culture, and the forthcoming book Archives of the Insensible: On War, Aisthesis, and Dead Memory (2013).
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