How perceptual technologies have shaped the history of war from the Renaissance to the present

Antoine Bousquet provides a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed. Bousquet explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

This wonderfully erudite genealogy of the increasingly precise ways in which the linkage of military perception and weaponry has brought us to the point where being detected puts one within a spatio-temporally fine-grained ‘kill box’ is fascinating and important. Ranging over hundreds of years of documents, beginning with telescopes and ending with the overlap of light and death in the laser, Bousquet’s work will be both at the forefront of security studies and a crucial addition to the knowledge base of concerned citizens.

John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences