How can one hope to contain the uncontainable? In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the detention centre and camps of Guantánamo Bay functioned as a vessel in which the coalition of the willing were able to detain the suspected terrorist.
However, while the rhetoric and practices of the Bush administration cast the supposed ‘war on terror’ as a force of containment, even an indefinite detention of the suspected terrorist would have been insufficient to restrain or limit the threat of global terrorism.
Drawing on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Burke, Foucault’s interpretation of power, Derridean deconstruction, and Schmitt’s application of the biblical kat’echon, this essay aims to explain why – when detention is an entirely ineffectual bulwark against the limitless threat of global terrorism – Guantánamo Bay came to occupy such a privileged position in the political frameworks of the ‘war on terror’.
