War and Vision on New Terms

Archives of the Insensible is a potent collection of discrete and dense chapters that are both closely interrelated and individually very expansive. A number of crucial issues are threaded across its parts and philosophical deliberations. At first, some of these may be familiar from Allen Feldman’s earlier work on formations of violence, the logics of counterinsurgency, and violence and vision (1991; 1994; 1997). But this book takes these meditations into new metaphysical, ethnographic, and aesthetic terrains to address recent wars “on terror” and interweaves them with histories of slavery, race and speciation.

Put very minimally, Archives of the Insensible explores different truth regimes. The book is an “itinerary of different trials,” with each chapter “a crime scene.” Here, counteractuality is the “founding principle and submedial structure of the war on terror” (80), where subjects “are made and unmade through rights as a mode of political design” (81). The book considers how the (mainly US) state produces a series of “violent materialisations at site-specific political installations.” The often compacted argument cleaves to a mode of writing that Feldman terms bifrontal. Here political philosophy draws on “ethnographic and social historical specificities,” and these in their turn “ethnographize” political philosophy through “micrological deconstructive description” (22).

One of the implications of this mode of writing—which includes many neologisms and (to this reader) less familiar classical Greek terms—is that it is often impossible to transcribe or render in any other terms that would convey the import with any justice, which is why this essay is burdened with many strategic quotations from the text. Another implication is that the writing is highly wrought, resulting in considerable difficulty or opacity, for which Feldman is already justly renowned and which poses a legitimate challenge to expand one’s vocabulary. Essentially, he uses a sovereign mastery of language against those cheating sovereignties who have attempted and often succeeded in making their own workings inscrutable, this at the vast expense of subject peoples and races. There are occasions, however, in the play of language when an excess of suggestiveness somewhat mis-fires or becomes opaque, where the reader may really doubt herself or himself, and I shall return to this later. But just to be clear: there can be no doubt of the profundity and significance of the political and philosophical-archaeological journey Feldman takes the reader in Archives of the Insensible, moving (often in the same chapter) from the different ages of thought from Greek antiquity through recalibrations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy to the contemporary political ordering of violence in a truly prodigal sequence of taut postulations. My own particular interests in this book stem from its radical approach to political visibilities and invisibilities; its sustained, historically nuanced critique of what used to be called counterinsurgency warfare; and its focus (in two chapters) on a South African theater for these questions. My comments, then, are necessarily limited: this book is grander than what I might say here.

The book is divided into three parts, designated as “Desisting Sovereignties,” “Amputating Archives,” and “Committing Anthropology,” respectively. Each part comprises two or three chapters, structured into substantial sections. The Introduction speaks of “enigmatic dispersals” and states the problem of how factuality is sheared off from actuality in order to “render war just.” Furthermore, there is a “determination of sovereignty as indeterminate and always in self-altering motion” (1). The first chapter in Part I breaks down the transcribed exchanges between one prisoner, Ashraf Salim, and his assigned tribunal judge at Guantanamo to examine how the prisoner-subject is made. Parallels are suggested between Kafka’s The Trial and the Guantanamo prisoner standing before the “infinite regress of the law,” an “illusory depth of field” (49). The state’s promise of law is a “non-deliverable.” There is in fact no depth, “only the act of making a border.” Given that it was impossible for Salim to access the information he needed for his own trial, Feldman cites Denbeaux’s notion of “No...