1 - The War on Terror versus the War Machine

Summary

Georges Dumezil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the ‘bond’ and the ‘pact,’ etc. But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity… They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum.

It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 351–2)

Common sense would seem to suggest that the war on terror is an event within history, that it requires two competing conceptions of the state (states generated by the free consent of individuals versus states that are imposed by fiat), and that war can only be just when states of democracy are threatened by totalitarian or other existential threats. If one accepts such an account then various suspensions of democratic procedure – such as extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogation, internment camps, drone warfare, travel bans and increased surveillance – would all be necessary to allow democracy to be preserved. War would be external to the state to the extent that war would only be required to maintain the state. One dominant conception of sovereignty would make sense of today’s war on terror by scrutinising the logic whereby democracies suspend their own modes of operation. If sovereignty is achieved by establishing a domain of law, recognising citizens whose life is human insofar as it takes part in civility, self-determination and mutual recognition of right, then its exterior is one of bare life, no longer protected by the law, but the very matter excluded in order for law to generate its political legitimacy. It was felicitous that the English translation of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer in 1998 allowed for a theorisation of the post-9/11 war on terror.