Allen Feldman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3617232 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allen Feldman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allen |
| FAMILY NAME | Feldman |
| SIGNATURE | FELDMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Development and Research Institutes |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 997 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Double Binds: The Hunger Strike as Differential Contamination
The political import of the liquidated and self-liquidating subject pervades this volume — to be liquidated is literally to be depleted of substance. This essay is concerned with the relation between substance depletion and the striking-of-the-subject as abstinence, abstention, assaulting the subject, and the striking out of the category of the subject placed under erasure. This essay asks: does insurrectionary bodily self-alteration merely play …
Introduction: From Black Famine to the Wildcat Hunger Strike
This introduction examines the cultural reception of Gandhian and Irish Republican hunger strikes circa World War 1. In 1922 W. Norman Brown in this journal dichotomized hunger striking into practices diversely legitimated by a precolonial moral economy (Gandhian) and military instrumentalism (Irish Republican). This binary analytically pivots between the processual dimension of striking as expressive ritual versus stressing the political justifi…
Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery
This book seeks a reconsideration of the phenomenon of sorcery and related categories. The contributors to the volume explore the different perspectives on human sociality and social and political constitution that practices typically understood as sorcery, magic and ritual reveal. In doing so the authors are concerned to break away from the dictates of a western externalist rationalist understanding of these phenomena without falling into the tr…
The Front, the Frontier, Police Anarchy, and the Solidarity of the Shaken
This essay opens the question of the political genesis of fractal topologies from monolithic fronts of power and privation. The political front can no longer be encapsulated as a continuous norm-provisioning ground. Emerging frontier zones of violence jettison anachronistic centralized fronts of law and procedure in their wake. The political frontier is exemplified by the current fusion of warfare and lawfare - the extrajudicial violence of racia…
Epilogue: Turning around the right to look
The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk’s classification of terrorism (including state terror) in ‘Airquakes’ (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and pri…
Violence: An Anthology
Administering Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law
Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the ar…
From Desert Storm to Rodney King via ex-Yugoslavia: On Cultural Anaesthesia
Cultural anaesthesia is a reflexive passageway into historical consciousness and representation, as Alain Corbin pointed out when he complained that western history, as written, has no odor. In the mass media cultural anaesthesia takes many forms. Less than two months into Operation Desert Storm the effaced body of the Other reappeared close at hand with the televised beating of Rodney King. Originally visualized outside the prescribed circuits o…
War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance
Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy and survivance, 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 wa…
Precarious Rhetorics
OUR COLLEC TION has come together in the midst of the rise of the global Right.It will likely be received and circulate in a global context wherein this ascendency has been consolidated through an entrenched hard-right populism, marked by xenophobia and racialized social orderings, and characterized by nativist, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and heteropatriarchal leadership styles and structures.Such structures are apparent in the authoritaria…
Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory
The Disputation of Ashraf Salim: Apophatic sovereignty before the law at Guantanamo
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 …
Inhumanitas: Political Speciation, Animality, Natality, Defacement
War
As viewed through the lens of work published in Social Text on the governmentality of terror] this essay proposes that the trope of the terrorist signals the departure of a reliable and calculable enemy and the “unleashing of the incommensurable— that we now know as asymmetric war, as the unending war of and against terror, and other emblematica of the immeasurable such as shock and awe. However, this is also a war of political effects and conseq…
Mediating Inhumanization: The Emblem and the Animorph
With Ice in Their Ears
Research Article| June 01 2008 With Ice in Their Ears Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2008) 26 (2 (95)): 111–112. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-032 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; With Ice in Their Ears. Social Text 1 June 2008; 26 (2 (95)): 111–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007…
The Gnat and the Sovereign
This short essay interprets a narrative from the Talmud to explore Agamben's concept of bare life and Benjamin's concept of messianic violence
Allen Feldman
On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
Since the first Gulf War, we have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and techniques of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public cult…
Deterritorialized Wars of Public Safety
Loader concludes his analysis of the trend in Britain and elsewhere toward private security systems by suggesting that “the value of other more deliberative ways of addressing the crime question and structuring the relationship between the police and the ‘publics’ they serve; ways that seek to subject ‘consumer’ demands for particular kinds of policing and security to the test of public discourse oriented to the common good, and so temper with de…
Securocratic wars of public safety: Globalized policing as scopic regime
New strategies for the reproduction of American state sovereignty have emerged in the last decade or so which can be characterized as de-territorialized campaigns of public safety. These wars are not exclusively focused on territorial conquest, or on an easily locatable or identifiable enemy with its own respective goals of territorial conquest. Rather, they are focused on countering imputed territorial contamination and transgression - 'terroris…
Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic
To enclave the human rights violation story at a primordial scene of violence is already to preselect the restorative powers of legal, medical, media, and textual rationalities as post-violent. Where violence is and is not positioned in the narrative of witness and the witnessing of narrative is the concern of this essay. I pose this question: Does the cultural intelligibility of the biographical and witnessing artifact depend on the violence of …
Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology
An alternative anthropology: exercising the preferential option of the poor / Leigh Binford
Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities
Research Article| January 01 2003 Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2003) 2003 (85): 58-73. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2003-85-58 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; Political Terror and the Technologies o…
Strange Fruit: The South African Truth Commission and the Demonic Economies of Violence
At no other time more than in the present day has individual, social and institutional memory come under such concerted pressure, critique and exposure as a fragile foundation for truth and facticity. This current reluctance to authenticate social memory is intimately tied to well-known postmodernist depredations, which profoundly disenchanted the authority of tradition and authenticity, and emptied core institutionalised myths of their temporal …
Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
In Formations of Violence, Allen Feldman argues that the political violence of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1989 was shaped by cultural narratives about the body, producing a "theatre of terror" where both the state and paramilitary groups used violence to inscribe their political claims onto the bodies of their victims. Feldman analyzes a range of cultural practices, including political murals, funerary rituals, hunger strikes, and paramilitary…
Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology
An alternative anthropology: exercising the preferential option of the poor / Leigh Binford
On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King
Securocratic wars of public safety: Globalized policing as scopic regime
New strategies for the reproduction of American state sovereignty have emerged in the last decade or so which can be characterized as de-territorialized campaigns of public safety. These wars are not exclusively focused on territorial conquest, or on an easily locatable or identifiable enemy with its own respective goals of territorial conquest. Rather, they are focused on countering imputed territorial contamination and transgression - 'terroris…
Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery
This book seeks a reconsideration of the phenomenon of sorcery and related categories. The contributors to the volume explore the different perspectives on human sociality and social and political constitution that practices typically understood as sorcery, magic and ritual reveal. In doing so the authors are concerned to break away from the dictates of a western externalist rationalist understanding of these phenomena without falling into the tr…
Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory
Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror
On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
Since the first Gulf War, we have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and techniques of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public cult…
Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic
To enclave the human rights violation story at a primordial scene of violence is already to preselect the restorative powers of legal, medical, media, and textual rationalities as post-violent. Where violence is and is not positioned in the narrative of witness and the witnessing of narrative is the concern of this essay. I pose this question: Does the cultural intelligibility of the biographical and witnessing artifact depend on the violence of …
Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities
Research Article| January 01 2003 Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2003) 2003 (85): 58-73. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2003-85-58 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; Political Terror and the Technologies o…
Philoctetes Revisited
Research Article| September 01 2001 Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC SAFETY Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2001) 19 (3 (68)): 57–89. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-19-3_68-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY…
On Formations of Violence
The Event and its Shadow: Figure and Ground in Violence
Faux Documentary and the Memory of Realism
Enigmatic Tibet. 1942. 105 minutes. Schäer expedition, private copy
X–children and the militarisation of everyday life: Comparative comments on the politics of youth, victimage and violence in transitional societies
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Ireland and South Africa, this paper contends that the so–called ‘children of violence’ are perceived in terms of the serious cultural contradictions of the adult world and rarely in their own terms. Does the concept and norm of childhood give us permission to give violence a defining site of origination? Does childhood have a discursive function similar to penal incarceration as a limit–category of soc…
The World Trade Center and Global Crisis
The World Trade Center disaster is an event of such significance that it exhausts interpretation. This is not because of the enormity of the event itself. Numerous humanly caused destructed of just the last hundred years dwarf it in scale, and the attention now addressed to it may over the next year appear disproportionate. But events are never significant in the imagination of human beings independently of the way they are socially constructed i…
Commodification and commensality in political violence in South Africa and Northern Ireland1
This essay proposes that political violence can be informed by the symbolic logic of commodity fetishism. The political commodification/fetishization of emblematic bodies through violence enables harmed, ill-treated, and tortured bodies and corpses to circulate as ideological signifiers in situations of social conflict. This process involves rituals of depersonalization, the fabrication of racial and ethnic specimens or somatypes through attacks …
The Front, the Frontier, Police Anarchy, and the Solidarity of the Shaken
This essay opens the question of the political genesis of fractal topologies from monolithic fronts of power and privation. The political front can no longer be encapsulated as a continuous norm-provisioning ground. Emerging frontier zones of violence jettison anachronistic centralized fronts of law and procedure in their wake. The political frontier is exemplified by the current fusion of warfare and lawfare - the extrajudicial violence of racia…
Imaginary Ethics and Prehistoric Paradigms
The Music of Corktown
The Northern Fiddler: Music and Musicians of Donegal and Tyrone
Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
In Formations of Violence, Allen Feldman argues that the political violence of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1989 was shaped by cultural narratives about the body, producing a "theatre of terror" where both the state and paramilitary groups used violence to inscribe their political claims onto the bodies of their victims. Feldman analyzes a range of cultural practices, including political murals, funerary rituals, hunger strikes, and paramilitary…
On Formations of Violence
On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King
Imaginary Ethics and Prehistoric Paradigms
Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror
Faux Documentary and the Memory of Realism
Enigmatic Tibet. 1942. 105 minutes. Schäer expedition, private copy
Commodification and commensality in political violence in South Africa and Northern Ireland1
This essay proposes that political violence can be informed by the symbolic logic of commodity fetishism. The political commodification/fetishization of emblematic bodies through violence enables harmed, ill-treated, and tortured bodies and corpses to circulate as ideological signifiers in situations of social conflict. This process involves rituals of depersonalization, the fabrication of racial and ethnic specimens or somatypes through attacks …
The Event and its Shadow: Figure and Ground in Violence
Philoctetes Revisited
Research Article| September 01 2001 Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC SAFETY Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2001) 19 (3 (68)): 57–89. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-19-3_68-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY…
Strange Fruit: The South African Truth Commission and the Demonic Economies of Violence
At no other time more than in the present day has individual, social and institutional memory come under such concerted pressure, critique and exposure as a fragile foundation for truth and facticity. This current reluctance to authenticate social memory is intimately tied to well-known postmodernist depredations, which profoundly disenchanted the authority of tradition and authenticity, and emptied core institutionalised myths of their temporal …
X–children and the militarisation of everyday life: Comparative comments on the politics of youth, victimage and violence in transitional societies
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Ireland and South Africa, this paper contends that the so–called ‘children of violence’ are perceived in terms of the serious cultural contradictions of the adult world and rarely in their own terms. Does the concept and norm of childhood give us permission to give violence a defining site of origination? Does childhood have a discursive function similar to penal incarceration as a limit–category of soc…
The World Trade Center and Global Crisis
The World Trade Center disaster is an event of such significance that it exhausts interpretation. This is not because of the enormity of the event itself. Numerous humanly caused destructed of just the last hundred years dwarf it in scale, and the attention now addressed to it may over the next year appear disproportionate. But events are never significant in the imagination of human beings independently of the way they are socially constructed i…
Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology
An alternative anthropology: exercising the preferential option of the poor / Leigh Binford
Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities
Research Article| January 01 2003 Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2003) 2003 (85): 58-73. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2003-85-58 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; Political Terror and the Technologies o…
Deterritorialized Wars of Public Safety
Loader concludes his analysis of the trend in Britain and elsewhere toward private security systems by suggesting that “the value of other more deliberative ways of addressing the crime question and structuring the relationship between the police and the ‘publics’ they serve; ways that seek to subject ‘consumer’ demands for particular kinds of policing and security to the test of public discourse oriented to the common good, and so temper with de…
Securocratic wars of public safety: Globalized policing as scopic regime
New strategies for the reproduction of American state sovereignty have emerged in the last decade or so which can be characterized as de-territorialized campaigns of public safety. These wars are not exclusively focused on territorial conquest, or on an easily locatable or identifiable enemy with its own respective goals of territorial conquest. Rather, they are focused on countering imputed territorial contamination and transgression - 'terroris…
Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic
To enclave the human rights violation story at a primordial scene of violence is already to preselect the restorative powers of legal, medical, media, and textual rationalities as post-violent. Where violence is and is not positioned in the narrative of witness and the witnessing of narrative is the concern of this essay. I pose this question: Does the cultural intelligibility of the biographical and witnessing artifact depend on the violence of …
On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
Since the first Gulf War, we have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and techniques of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public cult…
Allen Feldman
Mediating Inhumanization: The Emblem and the Animorph
With Ice in Their Ears
Research Article| June 01 2008 With Ice in Their Ears Allen Feldman Allen Feldman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2008) 26 (2 (95)): 111–112. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-032 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Allen Feldman; With Ice in Their Ears. Social Text 1 June 2008; 26 (2 (95)): 111–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007…
The Gnat and the Sovereign
This short essay interprets a narrative from the Talmud to explore Agamben's concept of bare life and Benjamin's concept of messianic violence
War
As viewed through the lens of work published in Social Text on the governmentality of terror] this essay proposes that the trope of the terrorist signals the departure of a reliable and calculable enemy and the “unleashing of the incommensurable— that we now know as asymmetric war, as the unending war of and against terror, and other emblematica of the immeasurable such as shock and awe. However, this is also a war of political effects and conseq…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Citation (6 works)