In this new review in Radical Philosophy, Martina Tazzioli contemplates the theoretical and political points raised in Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture:Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“ Weizman’s book equips us with the relevant tools to interrogate the contemporary tasks of academic research and production of critical knowledge. More precisely, Weizman’s book helps to raise the issue of how to rethink critique. What does it mean to engage in a critical research practice where, in many political contexts, states themselves deliberately act against the law? What is the force of critique, beyond bringing forth proofs of human rights violations, when many such proofs are already in front of our eyes? The practice of investigative journalism which is echoed in forensic architecture could be productively put into communication here with a somewhat different conception of journalism – that is, with a ‘philosophical journalism’ of the kind suggested by Foucault’s conceptualisation of philosophy as itself a practice of ‘radical journalism’. The latter consists of advancing the question of the present and of our critical engagement with it as the primary philosophical task: a ‘permanent critique of our historical being’. Instead of proving or bringing evidence, it engages in a transformative attitude that builds on a detailed diagnosis of power relations so as to grasp ‘the points where change is possible and desirable’, and to determine ‘a specific form to give to such a change’. ”