I now know that there exists another punctum (another “stigmatum”) than the “detail.” This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me to the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What points me, pricks me, is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

If we think of tactics as the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy as the art of assembling battles in order to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic, and industrial resources that make it possible. If a war machine could be said to have a body, then tactics would represent the muscles and the strategy the brain, while logistics would be the machine’s digestive and circulatory systems: the procurement and supply networks that distribute resources throughout an army’s body.

—Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth—one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint.

—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

One can no longer assume that war is fought according to the structures of friend/enemy, them/us. Instead, it is that the production of these categories (and the multiple sub-categories that populate them) which itself is internal to ‘war.’ In turn, this necessitates a change in the way in which we think about war, which becomes less associated with transcendent categories of power (good/evil, friend/enemy) such as are associated with a moment of sovereign decision, and more concerned with the immanent production of identities and lives: with what we might call a political economy whereby the production of life is itself the production of war. Economy thus becomes as great a concern in the analysis of contemporary war as the transcendent principles of law and sovereignty. Hence, whilst the ‘exceptional’ instances of transcendent sovereign domination are easy to find in the recent past—as with, for example, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib—these, Evans and Hardt suggest, may not be the essence of the current paradigm of war. Indeed, there is a potential danger for a politics of resistance or criticism in focusing exclusively on these dramatic examples of sovereign rule. This has the potential to conceal the ‘normalised’ ways in which power operates, through the juridical policing of humanity, through the production and organisation of life, through the regulation of flow and exchange in accordance with the predicates of the economising facets of global Liberal rule. It is to these that we must turn if we are to conceive a politics of resistance adequate to the task of confronting the multifaceted dimensions of war and the martial economy.

—Brad Evans and Laura Guillaume, “Deleuze and War: Introduction”

The process by which the war machine is captured by the state is not itself military, because the military is the outcome of this process. Rather, it is territorial and relates to the circulation of men and things within the state. In the current system, the state has lost control of the war machine, and thus the war machine no longer has war as its object, as this would have to be given by the state. Rather, it is through the political economy, and the interstices of society themselves, that the war machine operates, manifesting itself as a global security order rather than an exceptional moment of war. Although states of exception still present a challenge, the war machine becomes associated with the very fabric of normality as such which, no longer driven by the state, becomes disaggregated from politics: a technocracy of order which presents itself as being the very underlying conditions of life itself.

—Brad Evans and Laura Guillaume, “Deleuze and War: Introduction”