Nomadology: The War Machine

by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi (Translator)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and "schizophrenic lines of flight," this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways. Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology, aesthetics, history, and military strategy, Nomadology carries out Deleuze's desire to "leave philosophy, but to leave it as a philosopher."

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Anthropology, War, History

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1986

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[D.S. Mattison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look out on your current skyline and ask yourself about the geometrical configuration of space. Think about the war in Iraq and the genocide in Darfur and ask yourself why humans continue to plow one another over creating an unceasing river of blood. We are bound by metal and operate through a metallurgic medium. Deleuze and Guattari mind fuck you into a catatonic swiss cheese state of understanding space, time, and politics. This is a great companion to Guns, Germs, and Steel. Don't worry if it takes you longer to digest these one hundred odd pages than it does Diamond's 800 - you are perfectly normal (and most likely don't speak French).

[ramezan]

اگر اشتبا نکنم، بعد از ترس و لرز کیرکگور این دومین متن فلسفی‌ای بود که خوندم. لذا کاملا مشخصه که چقدر فضا و مفاهیم برام بیگانه بودن. با این که متن (لااقل از نظر من ناوارد) به شدت فشرده و پر از ارجاعات بود و باعث می‌شد الزاما متوجه همه چی نشم ولی باز هم تجربه جالب و شیرینی بود و همون مقدار اندکی هم که فهمیدم و ازش یاد گرفتم فوق‌العاده جذاب بود. حداقل حسن این کتاب این بود که باعث شد به خیلی از پدیده‌هایی که در طول عمرم باهاشون مواجه شده‌بودم از زاویه جدید و باحالی نگاه کنم و توجیه‌های جدیدی براشون پیدا کنم و تنوع این پدیده‌ها از کتابای فانتزی و حماسه‌ها و اساطیر بود تا تاریخ صدر اسلام و درگیری‌های تاریخ معاصر تو ایران خصوصا دوران بعد از دفاع مقدس. و این نگاه جدید (فارغ از درست و غلط بودنش) برام قشنگ بود. اون قدری که فکر کنم بعد از یه وقفه کوتاه برم سراغ بازخوانیش از روی متن ترجمه انگلیسی.

پ.ن. یه ایده قشنگی که تو بعضی کارهای انتشارات صهبا (مثل از هراره تا تهران یا دغدغه‌های فرهنگی) دیدم این بود که یه سخنرانی از رهبر رو می‌ذاشت وسط و بعد همون رو تیکه پاره می‌کرد و با چسبوندن تیکه‌هایی از سخنرانی‌های دیگه یا متون توضیحی برای شرح و بسط تاریخ پشت یه مثال و... اون رو شرح و بسط می‌داد. همچین کاری می‌تونه به خوندن متون پیچیده یا فشرده فلسفی مثل این خیلی کمک کنه. انتظار زیادیه ولی کاش یکی پاشه همچین کاری کنه :)

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

We've got to stop letting French people study history/politics.

[Hinch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s certainly very interesting and full of ideas. It spends most of its time describing things using metaphors (Are they really metaphors? Or deadly literal?) and approaching things through heterodox framings and interdisciplinary excursions.

The conception of the state/war-machine antagonism is cool and definitely changes the way you think about history, in an interesting way. The meditations on the state’s (and thought’s, and science’s, and etc..) interiority/exteriority is insightful.

I think a lot of your takeaway will be based on if you care about what they’re using as models, and what captures your imagination. I found it really difficult to take much from their meditation on metal, metallurgy and smiths, for instance.

[Daniel Rainer · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Speech with nomads is impossible. They do not know our language, indeed they hardly have a language of their own... Our way of living and our institutions they neither understand nor care to understand... They do it because it is their nature to do it. Whatever they need, they take. You cannot call it taking by force. They grab at something and you simply stand aside and leave them to it... The Emperor's palace has drawn the nomads here but does not know how to drive them away again... This is a misunderstanding of some kind; and it will be the ruin of us." -Kafka, An Old Manuscript

[howtovaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

que serí de nosotros sin estos dos hombres.....

de los mejores libros que he leido, recomendao a todos

[Lara Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way these authors write, and their subject matter....be still my beating heart!

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for some paper in class. Fairly intresting. I have to read this again along with the entire A Thousand Plateaus.

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately, Deleuze seems to very accurately describe the world we inherited. From JSOC to the Iran war to the CIA, the war machine concept is an extremely compelling framework. It’s not a book to completely grasp, but to allow it to take you to new vistas and understandings. It’s hard to keep it in my head. But when I was watching the movie sorcerer the other night, it all clicked for me, and I perceived the nomadic quality of the film and it was incredible.

[Dr. A · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Page nine. The deterritorialization velocity of affect is an invented sense of exteriority that will change the very rhythm of time. Yes, but of course!
One, deterritorialization: to "make the outside a territory in space"; to shatter an enemy's territory from within." (4) Two, velocity of affect: "feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a 'subject', to the exteriority..." (9) Three, to change the rhythm of time through the control of space qua territory.
Time changes rhythm according the space and place, then. The idea that we are productive because we are terribly busy all the time is a way of consuming space, doing away with the gaps, of not allowing any obvious void to show.
It is the place that will tell you what is to be done. If in the bedroom, sleep or fuck. If in the study, read and work; if at the park, recreate. Is there any place not already filled with activity, with purpose, with intelligence or end? But then that would mean no room for idleness, for thinking, for refusals or freedom, even.
...exteriority comes to be absorbed by the "subject" who rides it like a motor, all the better not to think, not to feel, the shell, the boredom-anxiety that prepares the way for the new.

Th Situationists had it almost right; they would navigate the streets of Paris according to a map of Amsterdam, or Brussels, etc. But according to this exercise, place is made by plot or trajectory, not inhabited. What if we were able to invent new space-logics, beginning by violating some of the old ones. Don't tell me that time and thoughts would not be different, were we not all working in offices, but on the floor of the public restroom, or in the isle of some Safeway.

...we must give up some of our modern day comforts, so called.

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Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of www.BestPhilosophyBooks.org (a thinkPhilosophy Production).
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[Bryn Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, has this extravaganza of French philosophy any insight for a student of real, historical steppe nomads?

Yes.

It's a helluva lot better (on the nomads) than Azar Gat War in Human Civilization or John Keegan A History of Warfare. They have no inkling about nomads.

I'll study this further.

PS. If you're here for steppe research in a strict sense, you can safely start on p.50. Not that there wasn't food for thought beforehand. On waterworks, I thought of the human control of water in China, a story told in The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.

[Sherwin]

It is semantically dense, due to its brevity...

[lucian · Rating 4 out of 5]

FINALLY someone prefers Go over chess

[Ari Partrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my discussion post in a film course I’m taking on George Romero:

“‘The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems.’

Nomadology is a fascinating read. To me, it—while in a position somewhat against Marx in its conception of the reformation of governing bodies post-impact—illuminates the inner mechanisms of what drives Marx’s historical materialist conception of history, what brings about the revolutions that define state apparatuses, how that third party exists in relation to the hegemony it revolutionizes. This work almost functions as a through-point between this course and a course I am taking in the Medicine, Health, and Society department entitled “War and the Body,” where these anthropological studies on insurgent groups and their public conceptions collide with the revolutionary push of every zombie outbreak. Zombies are portrayed by “stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, and sin” in our public consciousness just as the situational insurgent groups our military fights abroad are, both, through our America-tinted glasses, only objectified as such and never examined as subjects to reveal the material contexts that created them. Zombies are a deterritorialized entity, destabilizing bourgeois symbols of class status (private property, malls) and proceeding, not occupying, like nomads, to their next source while the governmental agencies of Romero’s zombie worlds comb the grounds, “cod[ing] and decod[ing] space.” Even we likely, as a class, collectively couldn’t put a thorough definition to what Romero’s zombies represent without provided secondary literature. The zombies are exterior at all levels of viewing. We never know—or rather are never told—their aims or intentions, only what they mean to the state (destabilization), which is not only quite reminiscent of the war machines outlined by Deleuze & Guattari but also quite reminiscent of a media/cultural environment (that would soon prophetically proceed the two zombie films we’ve viewed) that stokes the flames of war via Islamophobia and enables less-than-lethal warfare. It had never dawned upon me that Are the phantoms of terrorism that overlay America’s spatial fixes abroad finally actually reaching American soil—or American interests—through Romero? What does it mean that they arise from American soil itself?

NotLD’s ending also finds a close connection to Nomadology in its conception of crisis and the state apparatus’ response to crisis. The magician-king TV pundit or magician-king radio broadcaster becomes the jurist-priest zombie hunters dressed in police clothing, quelling crisis and beginning a new ‘order’ of the state apparatus… until the nomadic war machine arises again.”

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

. What struck me about the Cain/Abel reading is that it retroactively clarified the entire metallurgy argument. Initially I was unclear on why D&G devoted so much space to metallurgy — it seemed like an elaborate metaphor for something that could be stated more directly. The Cain passage made me realize it was never a metaphor. D&G are arguing that metallurgy is the practice that makes the machinic phylum visible — the material activity where the autonomous zone between form and matter becomes impossible to deny. And the biblical genealogy of Cain encodes this in mythological form: Cain is expelled from agriculture (striated space) and has already killed Abel the pastoralist (smooth space), so his lineage has no surface to inhabit. It goes underground — into the subsoil, into metalwork, into holey space. The myth preserves a structural insight: the smith is a third figure, neither nomadic nor sedentary, whose space connects the other two from below rather than separating them. What I found brilliant was that the biblical narrative arrives at the same topology D&G built through Husserl, Simondon, and the analysis of the machinic phylum — three irreducible spaces, with the subterranean one as the communicating medium — but in compressed mythological form.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[learnedHamster]

“The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical move- ment that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the recent studies on rhythm, on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather that it designates “form” in general, and more specifically the form of a “measured, cadenced” movement. However, rhythm is never the same as measure.”

[Regn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although very dense at points, this essay is fantastic in many ways. It’s a great example of D&G’s transdisciplinary approach, connecting political philosophy, history, sociology, mathematics, anthropology, etc. all together in a very engaging manner. It also fills some of the gaps left by the ‘The Smooth and the Striated’ when it comes to space, although their phrasing does get difficult to follow at times. All in all, maybe not the first thing to read by Deleuze & Guattari, but a very interesting work nonetheless.

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outlines Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "nomad"—a deterritorialized body operating within a smooth plane, standing in opposition to the state apparatus. The nomad is a mode of being, defined by its resistance of rigid structure and a constant, fluid idea of creative becoming. It further discusses the war machine, or the nomadic force that opposes the state through constant, decentralized movement and the ability to foster new possibilities. Contrasts the state's striated, hierarchical, territorially-defined structure

[Shleepybears · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea that the war machine actually is the Internal human impulse to revolt and struggle just for the sake to be different compared to the monopoly on violence that the state has in order to control the people and to use against other people they see as enemies of the state (terrorist). You also don't need to be a state to enact war but can be done in order to stop a future state to exist. It makes sense in my head at least.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last third of a Thousand Plateaus (which I read the first half of six months ago). Basically, Deleuze (more obviously Deleuze than Guattari), says that war is used by the state but not a part of the state because labor wasn’t necessarily originally part of the state either.

[James Strande · Rating 5 out of 5]

the zenith of french philosophy

[Alan Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

word, yeah, totally.

[Heath Creel]

I was reading their Treatise on Nomadology directly from A Thousand Plateaus, but I’m not sure if what I read matches this book on Goodreads. Nonetheless, amazing

[宗儒 李 · Rating 4 out of 5]

不管他嗑了什麼都給我來一點⋯

[asha · Rating 2 out of 5]

seems to rest heavily on finding the idea of the war machine as a rebel against the state sexy, which is a little masculinist/targeted at a certain audience for me. but some points made on space

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got hosed on this one.

It's actually just a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus. This one is a nice little review, but should be taken in the broader context of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Read that instead. After you've finished reading Anti-Oedipus.

Then people will think your smart because you've read Deleuze.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Deleuze & Guattari, particularly for its illustration of nomadic structures that are prevalent in corporate transformations. Approachable for those new to D&G, especially for those with a background in Mann or Serres.

[Roger Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a readable little excerpt from A Thousand plateaus. A good "think piece" but I stress that it's an excerpt and hard to get the gist of terms like "nomadology" without some background in other works. Still, it's handy.

[Joelle]

I should have read this by now...

[Kasparas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe one of the great books of nowaday political strategy and tactics, the one that academic activist must read and use as their tool in revolution of everyday life.