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Join the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution (CNCR) in welcoming cultural anthropologist Dr. Allen Feldman, Associate Professor Media, Culture, and Communication of New York University, as he shares his recent work on Guantanamo. Dr. Feldman has conducted ethnographic research on the political photo-ontology of 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).
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.