War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is a book by Manuel de Landa that traces the history of warfare and of technology. It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1978), and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuze & Guattari appreciated Foucault's definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. Thus, they themselves prepared the field for a reappropriation of their concepts, that is, a different use in another context of the "same" concept, which they also theorized under the name of "actualization". Manuel de Landa wisely takes advantage of the liberty these authors offered to draw on their concepts in order to investigate his field of studies: the history of warfare and technologies.

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