The war on terror versus the war machine

Claire Colebrook in ‘The War on Terror versus the War Machine’ shows how the English translation of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer in 1998 allowed for a theorisation of the post-9/11 war on terror. Agamben’s claim was that Western power, down to its very conception of the subject and language, was premised upon a sovereignty that constituted itself by marking out a political mode of life that would set itself off from bare life. Agamben was indebted to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, both of whom – in different ways – regarded the emergence of sovereignty and law as necessarily violent events that could always (in moments of crisis or emergency) require the violent suspension of law for the sake of preserving the law. Colebrook inquires about better ways to think about the war on terror that mostly rely on suspension of law for the sake of sovereign expediency. She suggests that there is indeed a better way, and that another conception of power, law, war, terror and the state was offered by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.