Deleuze's War Machine: Nomadism Against the State

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Deleuze’s War Machine: NomadismAgainst the State

Julian Reid

This article contributes to an emerging body of post-structuralistinternational relations scholarship that focuses upon the coreproblematic of international relations theory: war. While existing post-structuralist treatments of war have generally derived their inspirationfrom the work of Foucault and Virilio, this article focuses specificallyupon the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, it deals with Deleuze’sarguments upon the nature of the relation between war and the state,detailing how he uses this debate to take issue with Foucault’s conceptof power. As I argue, the role of the concept of war within Deleuze’sphilosophy is comparable with that of the concept of desire. Further, Idemonstrate how Deleuze’s thesis on the relationship between warand the state is influenced by Nietzsche’s discourse on war, and howit serves to undermine arguments that equate Nietzsche’s concept ofwar with that of fascism.

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My genius is in my nostrils... I contradict as has never beencontradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit. I ama bringer of good tidings such as there has never been, I know tasksfrom such a height that any conception of them has hitherto beenlacking; only after me is it possible to hope again. With all that I amnecessarily a man of fatality. For when truth steps into battle with thelie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, atransposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamedof. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into awar of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have beenblown into the air — they one and all reposed on the lie: there will bewars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me willthere be grand politics on earth.1

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Many thanks to the two anonymous referees whose criticisms were very helpful.Thanks also to Eden Cole, Mick Dillon, and Jeremy Valentine for their insightfulreadings of previous versions of this article. A singular expression of gratitude toKeith Farquhar and all involved in the Charisma Police project against the back-drop of which this article was completed.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (London: Penguin, 1988), 127.

© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2003. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.32, No.1, pp. 57-85

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The ideas of Gilles Deleuze are playing an increasingly pivotal role in theretheorisation of resistance consequent upon the globalisation of power.Deleuze’s work provides the groundwork for the subversion oftraditional ontologies of power and resistance that allow for new formsof critical thinking concerned with the specific consequences ofglobalisation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the counter-strategic works of Antonio Negri, especially in his latest collaborationwith Michael Hardt, Empire.2 Through Deleuze, among others, Hardtand Negri reconceive resistance in terms different from the strategies ofdialectical negation that defined traditional critical approaches.Reconceiving resistance in Deleuzean terms of affirmation, multiplicity,and flight, Hardt and Negri posit the potentialities of a deterritorializingmultitude, outmanoeuvring the strategies of capture afforded by thepowers of capital.3

While critics of Empire within International Relations contest thenature of Hardt and Negri’s claims as to the shift in the characters ofcontemporary global power and resistance, few engage with theDeleuzean derivations of their ontology of power and resistance.4 It isnot only Deleuze’s arguments on resistance and power that have beenneglected by the discipline of International Relations. Deleuze also has alot to say on the more traditional concern of IR for the problem of warand its relationship to power. Indeed he construes state power itself interms conditioned by a set of relations to both war and resistance. Yet, inspite of the centrality of issues of state power, war and resistance to thediscipline of International Relations, there is very little establishedresearch on Deleuze in connection to IR.5 This article addresses thatlacuna. In essence, Deleuze offers an account of state power asconditioned by its appropriation of war and its institutionalisation ofwar in the form of military force and violence. He also offers an accountof resistance to the state through the invocation of the power of waragainst its capture and appropriation by the state. In this respect, thereare connections within the theorisations of power, war and resistance

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2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (New York: Harvard UniversityPress, 2001), 22-25.

3. Ibid., 357-364.4. An exception in this regard is Alex Callinicos, ‘The Actuality of

Imperialism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 319-326.5. Three notable exceptions are Michael Shapiro, ‘Sounds of Nationhood’,

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 3 (2001): 584-601; RoxanneLynne Doty, ‘Racism, Desire, and the Politics of Immigration’, Millennium:Journal of International Studies 28, no. 3 (1999): 585-606; Marianne H. Marchand,Julian Reid, and Boukje Berents, ‘Migration, (Im)mobility and Modernity:Toward a Feminist Understanding of the ‘Global’ Prostitution Scene inAmsterdam’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 4 (1998): 955-981.



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that are definitive of Deleuze’s political thought. Problems of resistanceare likewise always problems of war for Deleuze.

Indeed, rather than start from the problem of the role of resistancein Deleuze’s thought it is necessary to focus directly on his concept ofwar and its relationship to the state. Not only is the issue of the role ofwar in Deleuze’s thought of most obviously pressing relevance tointernational relations theory, it is also one of the most generally under-researched aspects of Deleuze’s thought within broader areas of inquiry.Examining his concept of war and its relation to the state helps inunderstanding the precise nature of his conceptualisation of relationsbetween resistance to power. It also provides us with a differentperspective on the relations and distinctions between Deleuze’stheorisations of war and power to that of his closest philosophical ally,Michel Foucault.

The work of Deleuze was tremendously influenced by Foucault. Inconversation not long after his death, Deleuze recalled his memory ofFoucault the ‘warrior’, always evoking the ‘dust or murmur of battle’,construing thought itself as a sort of ‘war machine’.6 This dual portrait ofFoucault as both thinker and warrior exemplifies Deleuze’s polemicalconception of the philosopher’s task. Philosophy, he argues, is the art offorming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.7 The mark of a ‘greatphilosopher’ such as Foucault is his creation of concepts that differviolently from existing and received orders of thought to the extent of‘waging war’ upon them.8

The possibility of a form of thought so radical that it wages theviolence of war on existing orders of knowledge conditions Deleuze’spolitico-philosophical project in its entirety. Deleuze perceived his roleas a philosopher to be that of creating forms of thought capable of‘willing war against past and future wars, the pangs of death against alldeaths, and the wound against all scars, in the name of becoming andnot of the eternal’.9 As such, the role of the concept of war in Deleuze’sphilosophical and political schema is analogous to that of the concept ofthought. He strives to be a ‘warrior’ necessarily because he strives to bea ‘thinker’.

Yet, participation in Deleuze’s war is not the privilege ofphilosophers alone. In theory, anyone can be a Deleuzean warrior, aparticipant in the ‘strange war’ that he conducts ‘in the name of

Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State

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6. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1990), 103.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London and NewYork: Verso, 1996), 2.

8. Ibid., 160.9. Ibid., 160.



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becoming’. Deleuze’s war, construed in terms of the exposure of existingorders of knowledge to the violence of new concepts, is not the privilegeof anyone in particular but a general capacity that accrues simply tobeing human.10 Deleuze’s concept of war is comparable with theNietzschean ‘struggle of free men’ against the forces of ressentiment inanticipation of ‘the splendor and magnificence of the event’.11 ForDeleuze, the concept of ‘the event’ represents the simple experiences ofalterity that induce novel processes of becoming and transformation inany form of life. Deleuze insists, in echo of Nietzsche, that there is anecessarily violent character to these forms of experience. So much sothat ‘battle’ is the very essence of the event.12

While in essence Deleuze’s war ‘concerns everybody’13, he isnevertheless very concerned with the forms of strategic war perpetratedby states. Indeed, the strategic codification of war by the state is ofparamount concern to him. This is most apparent in Deleuze’s workwith Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, where he forces us to recognisethe ways in which the strategisation that the state performs uponthought is consistently reflected in the development of the modernmilitary-strategic theories of the state.14

Yet, Deleuze also detects dissonance within the tradition ofmilitary-strategic theory to the strategisation of war by the state. In thisrespect, Carl von Clausewitz is a key thinker for Deleuze.15 Foucault, torecall, considers Clausewitz’s theory of the relation of war to politics tobe emblematic of the shift in the organisation of power/ knowledge thathe identifies with the origins of the modern era.16 Deleuze does notdispute this aspect of Clausewitzian strategic theory. However, hedemonstrates that the conceptualisation of a relation between war andpolitics was but one of the ways in which Clausewitz thought about war.Going beyond Foucault, Deleuze focuses on Clausewitz’s conception of‘absolute war’ and how it is conceptually distinct from the forms of‘limited’ and ‘total’ war theorised by the military strategists of modernstates.17 In effect, Deleuze uses Clausewitz to dispute Foucault’s

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10. Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze(London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 2.

11. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 149.12. Ibid., 100.13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 152.14. Ibid., 351-423.15. I discuss the relationship between Foucault and Clausewitz at length in

Julian Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship BetweenWar and Power’, Alternatives 28 no.1 (2003): 1-28.

16. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Michel Foucault, Power: TheEssential Works 3 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 203.

17. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 218.



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conceptualisation of the relation of war to power, and to bolster hisconception of a form of thought that acts as a ‘war machine’.

In addition, Deleuze uses the debate on the relationship betweenpower and military-strategic theory to account for a form of power thatFoucault has been criticised for failing to address: fascism.18 He argues thatthe genealogy of modern military-strategic theory provides us with keyinsights into the socio-epistemic conditions from which historical fascismemerged. This contrasts with Foucault’s concentration on the relationbetween the genealogy of military-strategic theory and liberal forms ofpower.19 Indeed, in spite of Deleuze’s veneration of Foucault as a kind ofwarrior of thought, Deleuze uses this debate on strategy to take issue withFoucault on the relationship between war and power in ways that echotheir well-established disagreements over the relationship between powerand desire. Deleuze argues, contra Foucault, that despite the attempts ofpower to codify the relationship between war and politics there is an‘essence’ to war that escapes these attempts at codification and that ‘has asits object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight’.20 This is instark contrast to Foucault’s bleak assessment of the ‘omnipresence’ thatpower achieves through its subsumption of laws deriving directly fromwar.21 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze takes issue with Foucault on thesubject of the relation between political sovereignty and war. Borrowingfrom the work of the comparative mythologist Georges Dumezil, heshows that at the foundation of Indo-European civilisation, war existsboth inside and outside of the domain of political sovereignty. Secondly,he shows that with the emergence of the modern state a similar process offormation occurs based both on the appropriation and exclusion of warfrom the state apparatus. This is contrary to Foucault who argued that thefoundation of the modern state is based explicitly on the conjunction ofwar with politics. Central to this argument is Clausewitz’s On War.

Deleuze’s conception of an essence of war that does not take war asits object is significant not only for the ways in which it allows him totake issue with Foucault, but also for its congruence with FriedrichNietzsche’s ideas on war. The influence of Nietzsche on Deleuze’sconception of the relationship between war and power can be tracedback to some of his earliest works. His recuperation and development of


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18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998), 119.

19. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, ‘Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics,Security, and War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no.1, (2001):115-143.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (London: Penguin,

1990), 92-102.



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Nietzsche’s discourse of war is important not least because of the extentto which it challenges the confused attempts by some political theoriststo account for fascist regimes of power through reference to Nietzscheanthought and the accusations that Nietzsche valorised the forms of warthat fascism perpetuated.22 Deleuze develops a Nietzschean account ofwar that allows him to develop a conception of resistance to power,including fascist power. In turn, it is Deleuze’s derivation of ideas fromNietzsche that facilitates his challenge to Foucault’s accounts of therelationship between war and power, echoing their related disagree-ments over the relationship between power, desire and resistance.

In the following section, I provide a brief outline of Deleuze’sconception of war and how war is essentially exterior to power. In thesecond section I concentrate on how these arguments make his theory ofthe relation of war to power distinct from those of Foucault, and how thesedifferences echo their established disagreements on the relation betweenpower and desire. In the final section I demonstrate how Deleuze’s thesison the relationship between war and power is an extension of Nietzscheanthought and how it serves to rescue Nietzsche from studies that wouldrender him an ideologue of a fascistic militarism.

Deleuze on the Exteriority of the War Machine to the State Apparatus

The concept of war is absolutely fundamental to Deleuze’s philosophyand can be traced back to his very earliest works.23 However, it is only inhis second collaborative effort with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,that he explains thoroughly the distinction between his own discourse ofwar and that of military-strategic discourse. In this work he draws adistinction between the forms of war perpetrated by states and those ofnon-state based nomadic societies. Deleuze defines the state as anapparatus of power distinct from the societies it governs and with the

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22. See, for example, the accounts offered by Mark Neocleous, Fascism(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997); Paul M. Hayes, Fascism (London:George Allen & Unwin, 1973); Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Chatto& Windus, 1995).

23. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 94;Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 107-108; Deleuze,The Logic of Sense, 148-153; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 192-193; Deleuze andGuattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351-423; Deleuze and Guattari, What isPhilosophy?, 159-160; Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London andNew York: Verso, 1998), 52; Deleuze, Negotiations, 102-118.

24. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 357.



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means for its own preservation and conservation.24 War and its attendantmilitary institutions have been traditionally interpreted as the means bywhich the state apparatus emerges and conserves its power both overthe populations it governs and against the external threats of rival stateforces. Yet this understanding of the role of war both in the creation ofstates and in their sustenance is, Deleuze argues, a limited one.Borrowing from the ethnological research of Pierre Clastres, he arguesthat war figured in nomadic societies as a means not to the creation andpreservation of state power but as a mechanism directed against thethreat of the state.25 By this, Deleuze does not simply mean that nomadsemployed warfare against the actual existing states they encountered,but that they used war as a means to fend off the emergence of a stateapparatus within their own societies. War, he argues, acted to maintainthe dispersal of nomadic groups in ways that prevented thecentralisation of a society from which a state apparatus might form.26 Inthis sense, Deleuze draws a parallel between his own conception ofthought as a war-machine directed against the strategisation of thoughtby mechanisms of power and the actual wars perpetrated by nomadicsocieties in prevention of the formation of a state apparatus. It is not,however, simply that nomadic tribes waged wars directly against statesthat interests Deleuze, but that war instilled forms of movement,thought and disposition based on an ethos of becoming and of the event.It is the commitment to that ethos among nomads, whether consciouslyunderstood or not, that acted to prevent the sedentarization andcentralization of their societies. The object of their kind of war, Deleuzeargues, is neither battle itself, nor the direct elimination of a statistadversary, or the fulfilment of some other rationally defined politicalend. Instead, it is the warding off of the very processes of state formationand the attendant strategisation of thought, movement and dispositionthat follow from the formation of a state apparatus.

The kind of warfare conducted by nomads is not only differentfrom that conducted by states, according to Deleuze. War, he argues, istheir invention.27 As such, war is exterior to the state apparatus. In orderto reinforce recognition of this exteriority, Deleuze draws a distinctionbetween what he calls the ‘war machine’ that he identifies with thenomads and the military institutions traditionally identified with thestate. Deleuze’s development of the concept of a ‘war machine’ resultspartly from the influence of Virilio.28 However, whereas Virilio’s


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25. Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Urizen, 1977).26. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 357-358.27. Ibid., 380.28. Ibid., 467; Paul Virilio, Popular Defence & Ecological Struggles (New York:

Semiotext, 1990).



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conception of the war machine is very much a faithful extension ofFoucault’s strategic model of power, Deleuze uses it to describe a formof power that is exterior to, and essentially in antagonism with, the stateapparatus.29 He argues that the war machine becomes mistakenlyidentified with the military institutions of the state only as the result ofa ‘confusion’. The war machine is ‘of another species, of another nature,of another origin’ to that of the state.30

However, he recognises that the sovereign power of the state isultimately based on forming some kind of relation to the war machine.The state is required at least to attempt to appropriate the war machine,incorporate it into its apparatus, and utilise it for its own ends. For thisargument Deleuze draws heavily on the work of the comparativemythologist Georges Dumezil.31 The value of Dumezil to Deleuze istwofold. First, Dumezil demonstrates that the attempt to strategise arelation between the state and the war machine is a manoeuvre foundrepeatedly in the mythological representations of sovereignty datingback to the earliest records of Indo-European civilisation.32 Second, hedemonstrates that in spite of this attempt of the state to strategise arelation between itself and the war machine, the latter remains in a‘milieu of exteriority’, located outside of the state apparatus andpossessing the metamorphic power which Deleuze argues accrues toalterity.33

As Dumezil details in his research, early Indo-European societieswere characterised by hierarchically ordered tripartite forms of socialorganisation involving a priestly stratum, a warrior stratum, and aherder-cultivator stratum.34 Examining ancient Sanskrit religiousliterature such as the Rig Vida, Dumezil identifies three strata of godsthat are hierarchically ranked and differentiated in function — a featurealso of later texts such as Vedas, Brahmanas, and the Mahabharata. At thesummit of the strata appear the sovereign gods, Mitra and Varuna.Dumezil argues that a specific division of labour determines the relationbetween these gods in regard to their sovereign power. While Mitra

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29. I discuss the relation of Virilio’s conception of war to that of Foucault atlength in Julian Reid, ‘The Strategisation of City Spaces: Thoughts on theRelations between War, Power, and Transurbanism’ in Steven Graham andSimon Marvin, War, Cities, and Terrorism (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2003).

30. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 354.31. See especially Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).32. Ibid., ix-xv.33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351-354.34. C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological

Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumezil (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1996).



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relates to the rational and legal aspects of sovereignty, Varuna representsthe magico-religious aspects of sovereignty. The importance ofDumezil’s thesis, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, is theabsence of war and a warrior-god from this highest strata. It is only atthe second divine level that there exist warlike gods dominated byIndra, the paragon of the warrior ideal. It is Indra who conducts war,organises armies and in contrast to Mitra and Varuna generally pursueshis will through the exertion of physical force. This one deity, therefore,comprises the second level of divinity that is an essential component ofpolitical sovereignty but significantly outside of and subject to the firstlevel of divinity. Indeed, both Indian and Roman accounts of the relationbetween first and second levels of divinity indicate a ‘deeply rootedopposition’ between the gods of sovereignty and the gods of war.35 Indraregularly commits acts in violation of laws created by the gods ofsovereignty. An essential element in the system of sovereignty, the godsof war nevertheless regularly break and challenge the law. Theirsubordinate position within the configuration of sovereignty demandsthe constant vigilance of the gods of the higher strata who mustdemonstrate such violations by the warrior gods to have been in error.The integration of war within the domain of political sovereignty, then,is necessarily conditioned by oppositions and conflict. Dumezil’sresearch supports Deleuze’s central argument that war is irreducible tosovereignty and prior to its law.36 No matter what degree the state goesto in order to integrate or realise war within its strata, there remains thisirreducible element of war — that can potentially be directed against thesovereign form.

To what extent can Deleuze’s conception of the relation of power towar be applied in an analysis of the forms of power developed bymodern states? The sovereignty of the modern state is, Deleuze argues,founded directly on a representative conjunction of the relationshipbetween war and politics that forces a reconsideration of the relation andpossible distinction between the modern state and the early state-societies. Deleuze pursues this argument by following Foucault andinvoking Clausewitz’s seminal assertion that war is the continuation ofpolitics by other means.37 Deleuze clearly identifies Clausewitz’s theoryof war and strategy with a Foucauldian shift towards the emergence ofsystems of modern power as well as the sovereignty of the modernstate.38 However, Deleuze provides a more nuanced reading ofClausewitz to the effect that he develops a quite different understanding


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35. Ibid., 121.36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 352.37. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Everman’s Library, 1993), 731.38. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 466-467.



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of the relation of war to modern power. The stress that Deleuze placeson the idea that the state ‘appropriates’ the war machine is veryimportant in distinguishing between Deleuze’s understanding of therelation between war and power and that of Foucault.

Foucault’s later works are defined to some extent by his argumentthat there is an intrinsic relationship between modern power and war.Modern power, he argues, is distinct from previous forms because, ‘theforce relationships which for a long time had found expression in war, inevery form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order ofpolitical power’.39 The formation of systems of modern power is due tothe emergence of a ‘complex strategical situation’, in which an intricaterelationship between war and politics forms.40 In his essay‘Governmentality’, Foucault underlines —what he considers —to be theimportant relationship between the emergence of modern military-strategic thought as founded by Clausewitz and the shift in theorganisation of power that he identifies with the early modern era.41 Asfar as Foucault is concerned, the importance of Clausewitz’s theory ofstrategy lies not in its direct implications for statecraft but in itsrepresentation of the basic principle of binary conjunction throughwhich the strategic model of power operates in modern societies.Clausewitz’s theory does not apply, as far as Foucault is concerned,primarily to war or practices of statecraft as such. Its main significanceis its designation of the principle through which a new form of politicalpower has emerged, that of ‘governmentality’. Thus, it applies mainly tothe ways in which the relations between concepts, as well as betweenstates and populations, change with the birth of the modern era.

Foucault, nevertheless, does not recognise the appropriativecharacter of the relation between power and war, nor the residualelement that Deleuze argues provides war with its font of resistance topower. Foucault’s argument is of course based not on the mythologicalrepresentations of sovereignty found among early Indo-Europeansocieties, but on those of modernity. Does Dumezil’s conceptualisationof the relation between political sovereignty and war resonate withmodern societies? Deleuze believes so, and demonstrates how byfocusing on the nuances of Clausewitz’s conception of war as found inhis text, On War. In particular he considers the concept of ‘absolute war’and argues that it is an altogether different concept of war from the ‘realwars’ that Clausewitz describes in terms of a relation to state politicalaims.42

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39. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 102.40. Ibid., 93.41. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 203.42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420-421.



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Deleuze urges that we understand Clausewitz’s formula of the relationbetween war and politics not as a statement about the ontology of warbut as a comment on the nature of the relation between the state and war.However, Deleuze also argues that Clausewitz does offer a different andpowerful ontological claim about war entailed in his concept of ‘absolutewar’. Indeed, he argues that Clausewitz’s concept of ‘absolute war’ isclose in essence to his own conception of the war machine. In thefollowing section, therefore, I explore Deleuze’s elaboration ofClausewitz’s concept of absolute war, demonstrating how Deleuze’sconception of nomadic war in terms of the pursuit of lines of flight andthe affirmation of chance bears comparison with Clausewitz’s insistencethat absolute war is defined by the role of chance. I further demonstratehow this is born out in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ‘supreme’ exploitation ofthe element of chance in war.

Deleuze on Clausewitz’s Concept of Absolute War

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault makes much play of Clausewitz’sseminal assertion that war is the continuation of politics by othermeans.43 However, Deleuze argues that this is not the sum ofClausewitz’s conceptualisation of war. Clausewitz uses this conceptionof war in relation to politics to describe the forms of ‘real war’perpetrated by modern states and to prescribe the subjugation ofmilitary means to political ends. Clausewitz, however, also distinguishesbetween this definition of ‘real war’ in terms of a relation purelybetween war and politics and what he describes as ‘absolute war’, thathe defines by a more complex set of relations between three elements. In‘absolute’ terms, Clausewitz argues that,

its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity— composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, whichare to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chanceand probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam;and of its elements of subordination, as an instrument of policy,which makes it subject to reason alone.44

This conceptualisation of war as a product of the contending forces ofviolence, reason and chance is a far more ambiguous statement about the


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43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102.44. Clausewitz, On War, 101.



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ontological status of war than that of the dictum that war is subjectnecessarily to political reason. The dictum treats war only in itsinstrumentalised form as a subordinate tool of a rationally conditionedpolitical will.

In the view of Clausewitz there is, however, nothing inherent inwar that renders it subject to reason or the state. It is possible to conceiveof wars within Clausewitz’s framework that develop towards theextremes of violence in disregard of political reason. Indeed, it wasprecisely through such a formulaic reversal of the subjugation of war bypolitics that strategists of the Third Reich justified their policies of ‘totalwar’.45 Rather, the subjugation of war to politics that we tend to associatewith the Clausewitzian concept of strategy is specific to particular formsof political order. It occurs in a comparable fashion to the binding of thewarrior to the rational and legal representatives of sovereignty in myth.

Dumezil, to recall, conceives of sovereignty in terms of triadicrelations between the warrior, the priest and the politician. Thestratification of violence in the name of sovereignty occurs through thebinding of the warrior to these two other forces. Likewise, we could saythat for Clausewitz, unspecified military violence is superseded when itis brought into stratified relation with political reason. Regardless, heargues that the relation of war to politics is unstable, and this instabilityleads Clausewitz to insist that the state pursue the subjugation of war tothe political realm. Although Clausewitz prescribes the subjugation ofviolence to reason in the formulation of war, this is not to say that hedoes not allow for other definitions of war. What of the third element ofthe trinity, chance? Given the trinitarian structure with which he defineswar, could we not conceive of Clausewitzian wars that bear the hallmarkof neither reason or violence, but of chance, that realm ‘within which thecreative spirit is free to roam’? 46

Napoleon Bonaparte figures within Clausewitz’s On War as theparagon of a strategist who knows best how to exploit the third elementof the trinity: chance. Bonaparte’s penchant for a sudden turn, anunexpected advance along unforeseen and unlikely lines of attackrendered him ‘supreme’ according to Clausewitz, along with Frederickthe Great, in the use of chance.47 Clausewitz cites Bonaparte’s surpriseattack on Blücher’s forces along the Marne in 1814 as an example of how‘the desire to surprise the enemy by our plans and dispositions’ can takepowerful effect through the exploitation of chance.48 Bonaparte’s wars

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45. P.M. Baldwin, ‘Clausewitz in Nazi Germany’, Journal of ContemporaryHistory 16 no. 1 (1981): 4-26.

46. Clausewitz, On War, 101.47. Ibid., 235.48. Ibid., 233-236.



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were, of course, ultimately as defined by violence as they were bychance. However, there is a comparison to be made between the stressthat Clausewitz places on Bonaparte’s exploitation of chance incontributing to his military genius and the ways in which Deleuzeconceptualises the necessity of risk and chance in contributing to themetamorphic power of the war machine.

Whereas state wars can always be defined, according to Deleuze, interms of differing forms of relations between reason and violence,Deleuze conceptualises a form of absolute war that takes effect when thewar machine effects a form of warfare oblivious to either reason orviolence, leading to ‘the drawing of a creative line of flight’.49 The line offlight is ‘a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, afterhaving destroyed everything one could’.50 By destruction, Deleuze doesnot mean the nihilistic forms of physical destruction that are most oftenassociated with state wars, but rather a Nietzschean form of ‘activedestruction’ through which thought is engaged by the power ofbecoming.51 It involves, as John Hughes has described, ‘adeterritorialisation, through a movement which interrupts or suspendsfamiliar, confining, formal possibilities and their prescribed organic andsocial requirements... a movement out of which the participating bodiesare drawn along new vectors in experimental ways’.52 This notion ofaffirming the power of becoming by engaging with chance andexperiment is a theme at the very heart of Deleuze’s philosophy and canbe traced back to his early work on Nietzsche where Deleuzeconceptualises the struggle of ‘free men’ against ressentiment in terms ofthe throwing of a dice against the earth.53 Yet, entailed in thisexperimental affirmation of chance is the risk that one either does notcome back or is seriously damaged by the experience. Of course, this isa conception of a kind of war very different from that pursued byBonaparte, but there are clear similarities between the nomadic strategyof the war machine premised on the exploration and exploitation ofunforeseen forms of movement in escape of the formal possibilities ofthought and the use of chance that Bonaparte deployed when at warwith the allied forces during the early nineteenth century. Deleuze’sconceptualisation of the nomadic pursuit of a line of flight recallsClausewitz’s depiction of Bonaparte making unexpected advancesformulated as ‘thrusts into thin air’ which dually ‘cost him time and


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49. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.50. Ibid., 229.51. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 70.52. John Hughes, Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad,

Woolf (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 46.53. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 25-27.



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casualties’ as at Dresden in 1813, as well as yielding him major successas at the Marne in 1814.54

Modern strategic theory does Clausewitz a disservice, then, whenit reduces his definition of strategy to that of a binary relation betweenwar and politics. Instead, Deleuze argues that Clausewitz’s theoryprovides scope for a conceptual differentiation between the forms of warconditioned by the strategies of modern states and the anti-strategy ofthe nomadic war machine. This is apparent, Deleuze argues, whenClausewitz maintains that there is a distinction between the concept ofpure, unconditioned and absolute war, and the ‘real wars’ conducted bystates.55 To date, commentators on Clausewitz have tended to interprethis concept of ‘absolute war’ as war that is waged to the extreme ofviolence.56 As such, it is argued, the ‘real wars’ perpetrated by modernstates never meet the absolute and unconditioned ideal of an extremityof violence, conditioned as they are by political interference. Is itnecessary, however, to conceptualise ‘absolute war’ in these terms?Deleuze pursues a quite different interpretation. As he argues, all warsmanifest by and between states occur after the assimilation of war by thestate. This means that,

real wars swing between two poles, both subject to Statepolitics: the war of annihilation which can escalate to total war(depending on the objectives of the annihilation) and tends toapproach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to extremes;and limited war, which is no ‘less’ a war, but one that effects adescent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere‘armed observation’.57

Wars that approximate towards the extremity of violence do not fail torealise the Clausewitzian ideal of ‘absolute war’ because they in someway lack sufficient violence. Rather, absolute war is different from bothlimited and total war because it is not necessarily conditioned by arelation between reason and violence. In spite of the attempts of the stateto subjugate its violence to the discipline of reason, Deleuze maintainsthat there persists a certain pure idea of war which ‘remain(s) anabstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual’ to the state.58

This is a quite different take on Clausewitz to that provided by

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54. Clausewitz, On War, 235.55. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 419-420.56. Michael Howard, ‘The Genesis of On War’, in Clausewitz, On War, 23.57. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420.58. Ibid., 420.



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Foucault. The importance of Clausewitz according to Foucault is hisrepresentation of the conjunctive relationship between war and politics.The establishment of that relationship represents, according to Foucault,the point at which the modern ‘strategy of power’ comes into action.59

The profundity of Clausewitz, Foucault tells us, lies not in hisprescriptions for how to conduct wars, but in the insight that the essenceof strategy is to implement and maintain the binary relation between thepolitical and military apparatus of the state. In this sense, Foucaultargues that Clausewitz was a strategist of what Deleuze describes as the‘state apparatus’ rather than a military theorist of the conduct of war. Hiswork reveals the strategy by which the state maintains its cohesion as asovereign entity rather than dictating how it pursues war functionally.Contra Foucault, the emergence of a strategy of power based upon theappropriation of war is, according to Deleuze, not a modernphenomenon but a reworking of something essential to the foundationof all forms of sovereignty within the Indo-European world. The moderntheorisations of the conjunction between war and politics merelyreformulate this mythic representation of the formation of politicalsovereignty. While Clausewitz is, according to Deleuze, to some extentcomplicit in the reformulation of that myth in the development of themodern state, he also provides the scope to think beyond it byrecognising what Deleuze describes as the ‘exteriority’ of the ‘essence’ ofwar to the systems of modern power.60

These arguments act as another instigation for the criticalreassessment of Clausewitz in terms of the profundity of his theory forconceptions of power beyond those developed within the mainstreamsof strategic studies. Here I want to reflect further on how Deleuze usesClausewitz in order to undermine Foucault’s account of the relationshipbetween war and power. In the following section I detail how theirdiffering conceptions of the relation between war and power mirrortheir well-documented disagreements over the relationship betweenpower and desire.

Deleuze vs. Foucault: Power, War, and Desire

The task of this section is to consider the relationship between Deleuze’sconcept of the war machine and the theory of the relationship betweenwar and power that Foucault offers. Foucault’s theory of the relationshipbetween war and power certainly grounded the contemporarydevelopment of interest in war in continental thought in general. Yet,


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59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102; Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz’.60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 354-355.



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Deleuze’s discourse of war can be seen to play a more fundamental rolein his philosophy, defining his research from its very beginnings andcharacterising his work throughout. Foucault’s arguments on how the‘omnipresence’ of modern power has been achieved through the gradualinvestment of the laws of war within the organisation of Westernsocieties may well have provoked Deleuze to clarify his concept of warand to differentiate it from the concept of war associated with the statemodel. It is quite possible indeed to interpret the disparity between theirrespective positions on the relationship of power to war as a furtherexpression of the forms of disagreement that soured their relationshiptoward the end of the seventies. In terms of their theoretical divergence,these disagreements became most apparent with the publication ofFoucault’s final work, The History of Sexuality, and of Deleuze’s twovolume work with Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.61 Pivotalto the disagreement were the different ways in which Foucault andDeleuze thought about the relationship between power and desire. 62

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze seeks to ground a new politics ofexperimental practice based upon the potential of desire for resistance topower. He argues that the relationship of desire to power is, at the veryleast, twofold. On the one hand, an essential feature of the operations ofpower is the codification and regulation of desire. On the other, desirenevertheless possesses a transformative potential over and against theattempts on the part of power to repress it. Desire is not offered byDeleuze as a means to the solution of the problem of power or as a toolto somehow annihilate it. Rather, Deleuze argues that power — modernpower defined under the terms of capitalism especially — incorporatesthe scope for societies to explore their productive potential of desire as ameans to transform its systems. There are, Deleuze emphasises, expresslimits to the capacity of desire to afford such change. As he argues,‘capitalism liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditionsthat define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it isconstantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement thatdrives it toward this limit’.63

This view of desire possessing a transformative potential in respectto its relation to power is challenged by Foucault in The History of

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61. Foucault, History of Sexuality; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Deleuze andGuattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

62. Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviationsfrom Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 161; JohnMarks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 115-119.

63. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 139-140.



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Sexuality. There, Foucault attempts to problematise what he views asreceived notions of the repressive and transgressive relations betweenpower and desire. It is facile, he argues, to suggest that power codifies,regulates and ultimately represses desire, and to then posit transgressionof such repressions as a means through which to pursue resistance topower.64 Rather, we must view power operating strategically throughthe conjunction of repressive mechanisms on the one hand, and throughthe incitement of transgression on the other.65 Transgression is never in aposition of exteriority in relation to power.66 Much rather, powerfunctions by inciting the very practices that nominally emerge intransgression of it. This is a feature of the modern strategy of power thatdifferentiates it from antecedent forms and explains the gradualdevelopment of discourses throughout the modern era that aim at theincitement of transgression of laws and norms in regard to desires. As heasks, ‘did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come toact as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operatedunchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the samehistorical network as the thing that it denounces (and doubtlessmisrepresents) by calling it ”repression”?’.67 As such, Foucault claims,incitements to explore desire in disregard of repressive mechanismsoffer no ultimate way out, no absolute means of escape, from poweritself. Indeed, this is an argument that Foucault applies not only toresistance in terms of the exploration of desire but to resistance ingeneral. Rather than conceptualising resistance as occurring exterior toand in antagonism with the strategies of power, it is necessary toconceive resistance as acting to produce changes from within.

To what extent does this undermine Deleuze’s conceptualisation ofresistance through desirous experimental practices? Does Deleuze reifythe capacities of transgression of prohibitionary and repressivemechanisms to challenge power? It is fair to say that Deleuze doesconceptualise resistance largely in terms that express a search for meansof escape, flight and movement away from a form of interior of powertowards an exterior. Yet, he is quite explicit as to the impossibility of everdeserting the interior of power altogether and of reaching a terminalposition that is exterior to power. In terms of conceptualising theoperation of resistance to power, Deleuze conceives bodies entering ontolines of flight that perform the function of what he describes as‘deterritorialisation’.68 Processes of deterritorialisation are inseparable,


64. Marks, Gilles Deleuze, 118.65. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3-8.66. Ibid., 95.67. Ibid., 10.68. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 508.



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however, from correlative processes of ‘reterritorialisation’. Lines offlight are entered upon, which perform deterritorialisation upon poweronly to be reterritorialised in ways that reinscribe the order that theyoriginally challenged.69 This is essentially Deleuze’s manner ofconfirming Foucault’s arguments on the relation of power to resistance.However, the recognition that acts of resistance ultimately fail to realisethe forms of exteriority to power which they aim for does not underminethe purpose of their undertaking. While he invokes the notional powerof the concept of an absolute deterritorialisation, of an absolute line offlight from which there is no consequent reterritorialisation, indeed of anabsolute war, he does so with the awareness that such a state oftranscendence is not realisable.70 It is not, therefore, a question ofoccupying a position of exteriority to power. Rather, the exterior is alimit towards which a body projects.

In fact, the debate between Foucault and Deleuze over therelationship between power and desire bears close correspondence tothe differences in their argumentation in respect of the relation of war topower. In respect of war, Deleuze insists on a differentiation between theforms of war that are codified by the state and a form of ‘absolute war’that is qualitatively different in its defiance of state codification. Deleuzeinsists on a very similar differentiation in respect of ourconceptualisation of desire. We have to be careful in differentiating, heargues, between the forms of desire that are created, organised andplanned for by the state, and desire ‘in and of itself’.71 It is a function, heargues, specifically of the state to organise wants and needs through theexistence and deployment of prohibitionary mechanisms. Throughprohibition, the state incites the very ‘wants and needs’ that are broadlyrecognised as being expressions of social desire.72 In doing so it renderscertain forms of desire transparent, which in turn renders them moremalleable to efficient regulation and codification. However, ‘wants andneeds’ are very different entities from desire ‘in and of itself’. We woulddo better, he insists, to make a clear distinction between desire on the onehand, and ‘lack’ on the other.73 It is lack that is created, planned, andorganised in and through social production. Desire, alternatively, isrevolutionary, disorganising the very processes by which lack isplanned and catered for by the state.74 Whereas a lack is always formedin relation to scarcity or the prohibition of law, desires are formed in

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69. Ibid., 509.70. Ibid., 508-509.71. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 27.72. Ibid., 114-115.73. Ibid., 28.74. Ibid., 116.



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transgression of the topography of wants and needs that emerge incorrespondence with the strategies of power. Desire does not actuallylack anything, it needs very few things.75 This distinction betweendesire in and of itself on the one hand, and forms of desire that areconditioned by the organisational powers of the state mirrors Deleuze’sdistinction between war in its essence, what Clausewitz called ‘absolutewar’, and the ‘limited’ and ‘total’ forms of war that are conditioned bytheir strategic relation to the political sphere of the state. Both Deleuze’stheory of desire and his theory of war are not necessarily susceptible toFoucault’s line of critique. Both defy the virtuosity that Foucaultassumes power to possess in respect of its capacity to subsume formsand forces that display any kind of alterity towards it. Deleuze does notcontest that it is a capacity of the state to codify and regulate forms andforces that might otherwise undermine it, yet he challenges Foucault onthe extent to which the strategy of power achieves such aims.

This debate over the relationships between power and desire, andbetween power and war, shaped two very different perspectives uponthe possibilities of resistance. A frequent criticism of Foucault has beenthat his perspective provides very little latitude for conceptualisingways with which to escape the force of a form of power that he himselfdescribes as ‘omnipresent’ and that functions expressly through theorganisation of resistance.76 For Deleuze, on the other hand, the definingfeature of the liberal capitalist mechanisms of modern power is its veryinability to utterly master desire or war. As he argues, ‘unlike previoussocial machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a codethat will apply to the whole of the social field... capitalism tends towarda threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make ita body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body asa deterritorialised field’.77 Likewise, he argues that the state is formedon the basis of an appropriation of the war machine which neverthelessfails to realise the ‘essence’ of war, provoking the redirection of thatessence ‘against the state and against the worldwide axiomaticexpressed by states’.78

For Deleuze, the problems of war and desire are irrevocably boundup with the broader problem of the strategy of power. Like Foucault,Deleuze recognises the importance of the relation between theemergence of systems of modern power and the formation of a series of


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75. Ibid., 26-27.76. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93; Jon Simons, Foucault & the Political

(London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 49-50.77. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 33.78. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.



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binary conjunctions between concepts such as war and politics, law anddesire, reason and nature etc. In contrast to Foucault, however, Deleuzedoes not conceive of this distribution of binary distinctions betweenconcepts as a manoeuvre peculiar to the systems of modern power.Instead, he sees it as a strategy of power attested to in representations ofpolitical sovereignty throughout the Indo-European world from itsearliest origins. Moreover, he views this formation of binary distinctionstaking place in the shape of an ‘appropriation’ or ‘capture’.79 The actionof ‘capture’ according to which these binary distinctions are formed isimportant because in the process the form of the very object that isappropriated becomes distorted.80 The ‘desire’ that is appropriated bythe strategy of power is formed into an organised opposition to ‘law’.The ‘war’ that is appropriated by the strategy of power is reshaped intoan organised opposition to ‘politics’. In this process, a new distinctionemerges between the concepts of war and desire as they exist within adialectical system of organised oppositions on the one hand and theconcepts of war and desire as they exist in and of themselves. Thequestion for Deleuze, in seeking to resist this strategy of ‘doublearticulation’, is how to provide an invocation for forms of thought basedon a principle of difference rather than contradiction. The invocation ofthis principle of difference is itself both an act of war and of desiresimultaneously. It is a case of bringing ‘a furor to bear againstsovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, apower (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against theapparatus’.81

The heat of this disagreement became apparent in Foucault’s workin ways that were slightly more obvious than in the work of Deleuze.The thrust of Foucault’s critique of the repression-hypothesis of therelation between power and desire in The History of Sexuality wasdirected in name, among others, at the work of Wilhelm Reich.82 It wasReich’s groundbreaking work on the relation between desire and thesocial field that partly inspired Deleuze to pursue the lines of argumentthat he did in Anti-Oedipus.83 In this sense, it is difficult not to read TheHistory of Sexuality, at least in part, as a critique of Deleuze’s attempt tocreate a new philosophy of social resistance based upon desire. This isnot to suggest that the writing of The History of Sexuality was conditioned

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79. Ibid., 460.80. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London, Athlone Press, 1997), 51.81. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 352.82. Reich’s ideas were widely disseminated and represented by others such as

Marcuse. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 131.83. Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (London:

Routledge, 1999), 6-7.



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entirely by the dispute between Deleuze and Foucault. It is to recognisethe extent to which these two particular texts represented an importantpoint of passage and divergence in the development of the relationshipbetween these two seminal thinkers.

While The History of Sexuality acted to undermine Deleuze’sassertions as to the relation between power and desire developed inAnti-Oedipus, Deleuze partly used A Thousand Plateaus to respond to thatattack by undercutting Foucault’s thesis on the relation between war andpower as developed in The History of Sexuality. Surprisingly, this aspectof the Deleuze-Foucault debate has been utterly ignored by critics ofboth their works. It is important not only in terms of qualifying thediffering approaches to the problem of power developed by Deleuze andFoucault respectively, but also in terms of the ways in which it shedslight on their differing claims to the legacy of Nietzsche. While it iscommonly asserted that both display a ‘fundamental Nietzscheanism’ intheir work, Deleuze’s understanding of war is much closer to Nietzschethan that of Foucault. In the following section, therefore, I reflect on theextent to which Deleuze’s discourse of war is informed by Nietzsche andon how Deleuze’s redevelopment of Nietzsche’s understanding of waracts to counter critiques of Nietzsche’s philosophy that accuse him ofhaving venerated the idea of war in ways that helped legitimate fascism.

Deleuze on Nietzsche: Fascism, War and the State

The will of Deleuze to invoke the power of the war machine recallsNietzsche’s promise that his philosophy would produce ‘wars such asthere have never yet been on earth’.84 Of the many differentphilosophical influences that preyed upon Deleuze, Nietzsche’s was oneof the most significant. Certainly, I would argue that Deleuze’sdeployment of the concept of war within his philosophy derives directlyfrom his reading of Nietzsche. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuzedifferentiates between the warrior-thought of Nietzsche and thelegislator-thought of the Enlightenment.85 It is Nietzsche who firstprovokes Deleuze into arguing that the concept of the warrior invokes adifferent image of thought to that of the man of the state whom heassociates with the Enlightenment. The object of thought — wisdom —is for Deleuze as much as it is for Nietzsche the object of the warrior, for


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84. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 127.85. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 94.86. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994); Christopher Coker, War and the Illiberal Conscience(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).



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wisdom loves only a warrior.86 To be a warrior, he argues, is to yield aforce ‘which seizes thought in order to make it something affirmativeand active’ over and against the reactive forces that condition thoughtinto falling within the state model of Enlightenment.87

This hostility to the influence of the Enlightenment is, again,something that Deleuze shares with Nietzsche. One of the centralthemes of Deleuze’s philosophy is a deliberate continuation ofNietzsche’s efforts to combat the particular influence of Hegel. In hisoriginal study of Nietzsche, Deleuze describes Hegel as the ‘target’, the‘opponent’, and the ‘enemy’ at which Nietzsche directs the promise ofwar.88 It is in the same vein that Deleuze attempts to conceptualise thegrounds on which a war will be conducted against the sovereignty of thestate, for Hegel’s philosophy is, according to Deleuze, a kind ofvindication of the strategy by which the state maintains its hold overthought.89 It is what he calls ‘state philosophy’.90 The war that Deleuzeurges upon the state apparatus is, importantly, a war upon the Hegelianconception of thought. When Deleuze refers to ‘the sovereignty of thestate’ he does not only mean the specific institutions by which statesachieve the subservience of citizens and the recognition of other states.Rather, he means this strategy of the ‘double articulation’ of thought thathe identifies with the strategy of the state, as represented in Indo-European myth, and recapitulated with the birth of the modern era andthe emergence of the Hegelian tradition in philosophy. Deleuze drawsno direct distinction between this strategy of the state as it is attested toin myth and as it is represented in modern philosophical thought,particularly Hegel. Deleuze’s main philosophical task is to pursue thequestion of whether there is a way to extricate thought from theHegelian state model. As he argues, ‘the less people take thoughtseriously, the more they think in conformity with what the state wants.Truly, what man of the state has not dreamed of that paltry impossiblething — to be a thinker?’.91

The fact that Deleuze builds on Nietzschean thought to constructhis concept of war against the state is inevitably controversial, given theextent to which the latter has been associated with the so-called‘fascicisation’ of social and political thought in the late nineteenthcentury and the consequent war that fascism waged upon the existing

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87. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 108.88. Ibid., 8.89. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 460.90. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1988), 41.91. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 376.92. Neocleous, Fascism, 2.



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state-system.92 Yet Deleuze, like Nietzsche, is dedicated expressly tocontesting fascism. One other way of summarising his politico-philosophical project is, as Foucault otherwise did, in terms of a struggleto combat the ‘major enemy’ and ‘strategic adversary’ of fascism.Deleuze ventures on a search for strategies through which tooutmanoeuvre and outmobilise ‘not only historical fascism... but also thefascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, thefascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing thatdominates and exploits us’.93

The ‘affirmative and active’ character of thought that definesDeleuze’s war is absolutely pivotal in differentiating between the formof war discourse that he develops and the wars of modern states,especially those of fascistic states. Examining the war discourse ofDeleuze, it is difficult to underestimate the extent to which he builds onNietzsche’s original understanding of war in order not only to provide acounter-discourse to that of fascism, but also to rehabilitate theNietzschean discourse of war. Deleuze offers us an understanding of therelationship between war and fascism that is distinct from the mainstayof traditional interpretations of that link. In turn, he develops his owndiscourse of war, exhibiting a fundamental Nietzscheanism that offersus, as Foucault has said in summary of Deleuze’s project, a guide to the‘art of living counter to all forms of fascism’.94 In the process, heextricates Nietzschean thought from its embodiment within thehistorical legacy of fascism.

Critical appraisals of Deleuze’s theorisation of fascism have alltended to focus squarely upon his arguments as to the relation betweenfascism and desire.95 There exists no substantial interpretative criticismof his work on the relationship between fascism and war. In respect ofthe relationship between fascism and desire, Deleuze concurs stronglywith Reich, who argued that fascism cannot be explained as a form ofideology that somehow deceived the populations engaged by it. Themasses were not fooled, as others have tended to suggest, intocomplying with the fascistic programmes of their respective states.96

Much rather, they actually desired it. Hence, Deleuze argues that toaccount for fascism it is necessary to seek an understanding in terms ofdesire rather than ideology. Deleuze’s first co-authored work withGuattari, Anti-Oedipus, is dominated by this very debate over therelation between fascism and desire. However, in their second volume,


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93. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii.94. Ibid.95. Marks, Gilles Deleuze, 92-93.96. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 118-119.



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A Thousand Plateaus, desire plays a much smaller role. They engagelargely with the relationship between fascism and war. Again thisreflects the extent to which Deleuze’s concept of war and its relation topower compliments his conception of desire and of the relation betweendesire and power.

Fascism, according to Deleuze, functions by turning the desire of abody or of a population in upon itself, ultimately to the point of its ownsuicidal self-destruction. Rather than desire operating according toprinciples dictated to it by the rational interests of an establishedpopulation, desire pursues the subjugation and ultimate destruction ofthe body or population in which those rational interests are invested.Accordingly, the fascist state is the ‘suicidal state’ that desires its owndeath.97 In this sense, Deleuze’s understanding of the relation betweendesire and fascism resembles other traditional understandings of theorigins of fascism as a form of revolt against the commitment of theEnlightenment to the subjugation of nature by reason. Similar to Adornoand Horkheimer’s account, Deleuze stresses that fascism represents aspecific type of revolt that is itself a product of a system of thoughtspecific to the socio-historic conditions of the Enlightenment.98 Whenfascism invoked the power of desire, nature and war over and againstthe forces of reason, humanity and politics, it did not contest thedefining presupposition of Enlightenment thinking that there areessential binary forces that hold these concepts in necessary relationshipto each other. Fascism merely contested the traditional hierarchicalarrangements of Enlightenment thought through which the categories ofdesire, nature and war are held in relational subjugation within a moralorder enforced by reason, humanity, and politics. Fascism did not, forexample, contest the construction of nature within Enlightenmentdiscourse as barbarism. Rather, fascism invoked a concept of nature asbarbarism in order to contest the discipline of Enlightenment thought. Inthe same way, fascism did not challenge the state’s concept of war as aforce of violence that requires conditioning by political reason. Rather, itinvoked the very violence with which war was identified with insubjugation of the state in its rational form. Fascism attempted to reversethe flow of force within the relational order of the Enlightenment. Assuch it was itself a product of that very form of thought contingent to thebirth of the modern era.

As long as thought is conditioned by the conceptual framework ofthe Enlightenment, fascism remains a threat. This is Deleuze’s

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97. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 230-231.98. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

(London: Verso, 1979).



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argument for attempting to wage a war upon the ‘state philosophy’ ofdialectical thinkers such as Hegel. While fascism attempted merely toreverse the order of dialectical relations through which desire was heldin check by reason, Deleuzean strategies operate in distinction, byallowing desire to escape upon what he calls ‘lines of flight’.99 A line offlight is the operation of deterritorialisation by which the dialecticalstratification of relations between reason and desire becomes rupturedto the point where the objectives of desire are no longer defined inrelation to reason, but take on aims of their own. Deleuze cites thewritings of Kleist and Kafka as examples of forms of thought that havepursued a line of flight in disregard of the established genealogies of thetraditions of literature in which they were produced.100 In this sense, hebelieves they contested the ways in which power shapes and conditionsthe very framework of development according to which ideas emerge,even when such ideas are nominally considered to offer some elementof transcendence of existing structures of thought. The lines of flightthat thinkers such as Kleist or Kafka traversed are to be distinguishedfrom the ways in which power strategises the lines of developmentupon which thought traverses. The line of flight is also, importantly, tobe distinguished from the ‘line of destruction’ that defines the reversalof relations that occurs within the order of fascist power between desireand reason.101

The fascist state being the ‘suicidal state’ required a modus operandiupon which to fulfil its objective of destruction. In order to pursue thedestruction of its own population, Nazism required a military strategywith which to legitimise the destruction of its own people.102 As such, itis in the genealogy of fascist military strategy that one finds the mostvivid representation of the ways in which this perversion of the relationbetween desire and reason was played out. In A Thousand Plateaus,Deleuze demonstrates this by exploring the dialectical development ofmodern military strategic thought that occurs, as he argues, in the shapeof an oscillation between total and limited forms of war.103 Thisoscillation, dependent upon the shifting mechanics of a dialecticalrelation between politics and war within the Clausewitzian paradigm ofstrategy, mirrors closely the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ that is depictedas occurring between reason and nature by Adorno and Horkheimer.104

As they construed fascism emerging in the form of a revolt on the part


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99. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 229.100. Ibid., 24-25.101. Ibid., 229-230.102. Ibid., 231.103. Ibid., 420-421.104. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.



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of nature against reason, so Deleuze identifies in the military strategictheory of the Third Reich a revolt and reverse subjugation upon the partof war against politics. The Nazi state was ‘the suicidal state’ defined byits adoption of a military strategy of total war. Total war was justified bythe military strategists of the Third Reich by reversing the Clausewitziantradition of limited war in which war is construed as the continuation ofpolitics by other means, arguing instead that it was necessary tosubjugate politics to the ends of war.105 Although Deleuze does notdirectly cite Nazi military strategists, the veracity of his observations isconfirmed in the writings of, for example, the Nazi general Ludendorff’sclaims that Nazi Germany’s military strategy had ‘superseded’Clausewitzian thought.106 This reversal was, Deleuze argues, highlysignificant. It represented not ‘a state army taking power, but a warmachine taking over the state’.107

In this sense, Deleuze confers with traditional conceptualisations oftotal war as emerging when and where the state loses control of theinstitutions of war which it originally founded in order to ground itssovereignty. Total wars involve the subjugation of the politicalinstitutions of the state apparatus by those of the military. In theseinstances, war conditions the ends of the state rather than performing afunctional role in pursuit of political ends. This in effect is a reversal ofthe doctrine of limited war which explicitly dictates the subjugation ofwar to the ends of the state where the state defines its ends in accordancewith some conception of political reason. As Deleuze argues, however,the conditions for total war remain within the remit of the evolution ofthe state form. Drawing on the work of John U. Nef, he argues that ‘totalwar is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takesas its “centre” not only the enemy army, or the enemy state, but theentire population and its economy’.108 As such, this form of war does notseek to challenge the economic and socio-political bases of the state.Rather it ‘realizes the maximal conditions of the appropriation of the warmachine by the state apparatus’.109 Deleuze’s project is to deterritorialisewar from its mode of subjugation by the state and send it on a ‘mutantline of flight’ rather than the ‘cold line of abolition’ that it assumes underthe guise of fascism. Such a project is not based upon the direct objectiveof the destruction of actual, existing states or even of the state-system,but of the state-form inclusive of its reduction of thought to the status of

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105. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420-421.106. Ludendorff, The Nation at War (London: Hutchinson, 1936), 12.107. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 230.108. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421.109. Ibid.



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state philosophy. Deleuze seeks ‘the composition of a smooth space andof the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machinedoes indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object,now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomaticexpressed by the State’.110

Deleuze offers us a twofold concept of war. The strategy of the stateis dependent upon its capacity to facilitate the integration of war withinits apparatus and the consequent organisation of a military function byturning the war machine into a state army. Indeed, this integration ofwar, or ‘appropriation’ as Deleuze conceptualises it, is itself a function ofthe strategy of the state rather than simply facilitating the pursuit ofstrategy vis-à-vis other states. However, the appropriation of the warmachine by the state is never fully achieved to its satisfaction becausethe war machine in itself is irreducible to the state apparatus, existingoutside its sovereignty and prior to its law.111 There is, then, always adistinction to be drawn between the forms of ‘real war’ theorised,conceptualised and conducted by states, and ‘absolute war’, the pureidea of which ‘is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary butthat of a war machine that does not have war as its object and that onlyentertains a potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war’.112

The stress Deleuze places on this twofold differentiation between aconcept of war conditioned by state philosophy and practised by stateinstitutions, and a concept of a war machine the object of which is notwar itself, is important in so far as it serves to complexify Foucault’sconception of a strategy of modern power premised on the ‘realisation’of the laws of war within Western societies.113 For if there is a warmachine that escapes the definition of war as conditioned by statephilosophy, then there is still hope that war itself might serve as aprincipal for forms of thought that neither bulwark the strategy of statepower as Foucault portrays, nor send the state upon a suicidal line ofdestruction as fascist counter-discourses on war have done, but insteaddraw a creative line of flight in disregard of the state apparatus.

Indeed, he argues that there does already exist such a tradition ofwhat we might call ‘anti-strategic thought’ constituted in the work ofthinkers that he identifies with the war machine: Kleist, Kafka, Shestovand Kierkegaard among others. Deleuze also advances the argumentthat Clausewitz, ordinarily assumed to be an archetypal strategist of thestate, in fact provides the theoretical means for the distinction between


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110. Ibid., 422.111. Ibid., 352.112. Ibid., 420.113. Dillon and Reid, ‘Global Liberal Governance’, Reid, ‘Foucault on

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the real wars of states and the absolute wars of the nomad war machine.This conceptualisation of the relation between war and thought inDeleuze’s work owes, as I demonstrated, more to Nietzsche than anyother source. For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, there is an essence to war thatescapes its codification by state power. It is comprehension of thisdistinction that allows Deleuze to argue for the willing of ‘war againstpast and future wars’ with the same seemingly paradoxical irony thatNietzsche promised a ‘war of spirits’ against the wars posited byexisting power structures.114

The impact of Deleuze’s conception of the war machine and thepolemical subjectivity that forms within it can be seen even more clearlyin the development of the ‘counter-strategic’ thought of Antonio Negri,culminating in his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, Empire.115

Deleuze’s ideas on war are providing the impetus for the reinvention ofthe strategic imaginary that informs the war against the existing globalliberal order. As a result, war no longer figures as a type of means thatcan be distinguished from the forms of resistant subjectivity that employit but is figurative of a new form of subjectivity. Orthodox variants ofMarxism understood themselves as performing a necessary utilisation ofthe instruments of war as a means with which to pursue grandidealisations of society, the ethical and political repercussions of whichwere accepted as exceeding the immediate repercussions of war. ThisDeleuzean project of reconceiving a polemical subjectivity is bornprecisely out of a rejection of the implications of any attempt to treat waras some form of passage, a utile instrument to be suborned and put towork in the name of some universal set of ideals that can be pursuedbereft of prudence. It is in this context that Deleuze’s work is inspiringthe development of a form of subjectivity that seeks war as its condition,but also reappropriates the form of war from the sovereign power ofstate-thought. Under conditions of a form of society and a form of powerthat creates peace through war, that strategises the human through the

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114. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 160; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 127.115. On the role of the concept of war in Negri’s thought see Hardt and Negri,

Empire, 74-79. See also Antonio Negri, ‘Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation ofthe Class Situation Today’ in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casirino, and Rebecca E.Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 149-160. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics andPolitics (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 108-119.



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deployment of sciences and knowledge forms that derive from war, theonly viable response is the commitment to an engagement with thepermanent ongoing reactivation of the principle activity of war. Not warsubject to the conditions of the sovereign power of state-thought. Rather awar that eschews sovereignty as the basis of its politics. A war without end.

Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Political Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London.

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Documents

Deleuze's War Machine: Nomadism Against the State