Who is the enemy? On the contemporary transformation of military-strategic and political discourses

This presentation discusses the contemporary transformations of the political and military-strategic discourses. More specifically, it offers an archaeological description of the discourse of the ‘war against terrorism’ by unpacking it, in order to show how this discourse disarticulates the conceptual matrix of modern war by dislocating some of its crucial concepts when it tries to capture, and therefore shapes in very specific ways the hostility involved in the contemporary terrorism/counterterrorism cycle. I develop the argument that the ‘martialisation’ of the terrorism-discourse releases violence from the tight regime of limits under which the modern discourse of war had confined it, paving the way for a ‘War against terrorism’ without limits in either time or space. This is enacted by a series of conceptual shifts that were initiated long before 9.11.