A Revolutionary People (Fr. la machine de guerre)

Finally, let us return now to the war (pólemos). As we recall from our earlier discussion of “the enemy” (der Feind), Plato never admits its comparison with the forms of struggle and competition that could occur between citizens—that is, with the indigenous forms of conflict (stásis) belonging to the polis; therefore, he even sought to banish the legality of civil war from the Republic and compared it to “self-laceration,” the willful destruction of one’s own organs, or body proper.1 It is around this metaphor of the body that we discover a second image of the exteriority of violence in opposition to the internal conflicts that maintain the social cohesion of the group. By contrast, the nature of violence defined by the term pólemos is characterized by its “exteriority” with regard to the body proper (i.e., the internal precincts of the city-state), which also entails a violence that cannot be internalized as a conservative function of state power. In other words, war represents a violence that is always directed outward, away from the body proper, specifically aimed at the destruction of the organs of a foreign body (or host). As already discussed, in order to poetically identify the location of this foreign body Plato often employs the term “barbarian” (barbaros) and, on other occasions, “the natural enemy” (i.e., the Persian).

With regard to the two species of violence, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, historically the state form has employed only two choices in order to distinguish between them: first, it fashions a special part of its own apparatus that is specifically invented to apply a certain expression of violence that is directed against its own citizens (i.e., its police forces, its prisons, its judges, its teachers and bureaucrats; basically, all those functionaries who are made responsible for both maintaining and reproducing the various kinds of state violence); second, it must acquire an army (une armée).2 Accordingly, the existence of the war machine is not intrinsic to the form of state power itself, since the function of state power is to conserve and to protect, even to replenish, the organs of state power; whereas the nature of the violence deployed by the war machine is not conservative but essentially destructive, since its sole objective is to destroy the enemy by laying waste to his organs, thus preventing him to either conserve or reproduce his own body proper.

For example, concerning the first species, even the violence inflicted by the police, the courts, or even prisons is made to conserve a form of state power. Crime is treated by a form of violence that seeks to either repress or to correct its inherent contradiction to the principles of law and order. The activity of the criminal represents the expression of conflict that must be dialectically remedied in order to restore the principle of identity, and it is not by chance that the form of violence or repression is made to be equivalent to that initial expression: the robber is stripped of all his possessions and imprisoned; the murderer is executed. Although crime certainly represents a form of exteriority, defined as a concrete instance of contradiction that appears against the abstract law, through the organs of state power (its police, courts, prisons, and executioners) the concrete and external existence of conflict is canceled out and the contradiction is “peacefully” resolved in the identification of the criminal with the crime. In this manner, productive violence restores unity to the normally abstract principle of law by giving it a concrete instance of identity in which it can bathe itself anew, by revitalizing its own organs and restoring their function to the choral unity of the body proper. “Order is beautiful” (kalos) and thus becomes the primary virtue of the city, the first and most primitive of all the state forms.

It is for this reason, turning now to the second species of violence, that Deleuze and Guattari come to the conclusion that “provisionally speaking, the war machine is first invented by the nomads,” since as they claim, the state itself certainly does not invent war (being itself only “an empty form of appropriation”), and so it appears that the violence of pólemos is not only exterior with regard to state power but also exists much earlier and thus appears more primitive as well. “In every respect,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus.”3 Moreover, we find that there is always something essentially lawless, random, undisciplined, and, most importantly, nondialectical about war and especially those lonely and exceptional figures who have emerged through the fog of wars and who can even appear as exterior to the form of power favored by the state. Moreover, it is precisely this lawless and solitary conceptual persona of a revolutionary people that also becomes a key feature of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the war machine (la machine de guerre).

In their “Treatise on Nomadology,” Deleuze and Guattari provide a detailed account of the long history of the appropriation of the war machine by the state form, and it is here that we find frequent references to the solitary, exceptional, and even suicidal characters like Homer’s Achilles or Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas and Penthesilea. Why? To be exceptional or “alone” means in some way to be found outside the circle of society (and often against it) but not in any way that could be compared to the criminal who merely represents the law’s own internal contradiction (which can be peacefully resolved). By contrast, the warrior who kills himself in one suicidal act, destroying his own organs, represents a kind of violence that cannot ultimately be internalized by the state form, despite its efforts to recoup this suicidal character of violence in the myths of martyrdom or patriotic sacrifice. Nevertheless, something always remains exterior and excessive in these acts or in the exceptional individuals who become capable of undergoing them, even to the point of representing a form of exteriority that can assume what Deleuze elsewhere defines as a “terrible supersensible Primary Nature that knows no Law.”4 Therefore, to be “alone,” or solitary, also represents another form of individuation that is not consistent with the forms that can be found within the state. This form of individuation, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, need not be numerically defined but can also be the individuality of a pack, a band, a minority, and, finally, a revolutionary people. In other words, like the solitary figure of the warrior, can a people also be found to exhibit the contradictory traits of lawlessness and even, occasionally, suicide? That is, a people can fashion itself into a war machine precisely in order to expel or to ward off the state form, as Deleuze and Guattari claim (following the thought of sociologist Pierre Clastres); however, they only end up alone, wandering on the outside, distributed across a vast open space that lies between states (like a steppe or desert) but gradually disappearing from the face of the earth—that is, a people who commit suicide (or are “gradually led to suicide by society”) after a long struggle or ordeal.5

Here we find a romantic image of a people that has often been ascribed to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual personae of the nomad and the “becoming-minor.” Of course, one can find a similar version of this image in movies and historical docudramas, especially depicting aboriginal peoples who first encounter the state form, leading eventually to struggle and then a kind of gradual suicide after a “long trail of tears,” as if accepting their own fate as a people and disappearing from the face of the earth. As Deleuze and Guattari write, as the result of each new extermination and genocidal act, the war machine never fails to create new quantities: “the extermination of a minority engenders a minority of that minority.”6 Nevertheless, one can see that this kind of epic representation of “a people who are missing” clearly belongs to the state form, and the gradual (i.e., historical) and, above all, voluntary suicide can be understood as representing, from its own point of view, a relatively “peaceful” solution to the problem of new quantities. On the other hand, this nostalgic and essentially romantic image of “a people who are missing” has, as its natural double, the Messianic image of “a people still to come.” This latter image has a long history and is usually ascribed to religions and to the storytelling function of subjugated and colonized peoples, but it also has an abstract representation in contemporary post-Marxist philosophy. And yet, were not Deleuze and Guattari also talking about real peoples, and is there not something essentially risky and inherently contradictory in the concept of a revolutionary people today? It seems many want to ignore this contradictory and often volatile aspect in their portrait of a people who are either found to be missing or still to come. Either we have the sad and tragic image of an oppressed or colonized people or the saintly and otherworldly image of a super-proletariat. In other words, all the possibilities of real violence are subtracted as the condition of both representations; either a people are purely subjected to violence of the state form or they are composed of a completely different nature like those marvelous and enlightened peoples we often encounter in science fiction.

By contrast, what I am suggesting is that the conceptual persona of “a revolutionary people” that we find in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings bears the same bipolar (or schizoid) characteristics that they also ascribe to the war machine. For example, here is the conclusion of their “Treatise on Nomadology,” where this bipolar tendency is stated with unmistakable clarity:

The difference between the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organization and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communication between these two lines of planes, that each takes nourishment from the other, borrows from the other: the worst of world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, and its smooth spaces that live and blaze a way for a new earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of qualities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles.7

I return to comment on the above passage below, but for now I want to recall my earlier question: Does this mean, then, that the people share the same species, nature, and origin as the war machine?

In responding to this question, I might first propose this equivalence in the following manner: just as the state has no war machine of its own, since it is of “another species, another nature, another origin than the state apparatus,” we can also say that the state has no people of its own—that is, being itself an “empty form of appropriation.”8 We might find the above hypothesis confirmed when we realize that the state form entertains a relationship with the people that runs parallel to the predicament it faces with its own war machine, one of exteriority and occasionally extreme volatility. First of all, the people are always posited as being “outside” the state form and, in some sense, precede its arrival and accompany the stages of its development all the way to the future in which the people are yet to actually arrive. Second, just as in the case of the war machine, the state does not create “a people” but rather attempts to internalize already existing peoples, even though this existence may be purely virtual and nomadically distributed across an open space or territory that precedes the arrival of the state form.

It is the specific mythology created by the state form that attempts to reverse this precedence by turning the people into an “idea” that first occurs in the mind of those subjects who are already found to be internal to the state form. (This is the myth of the Founding Fathers, for example, when they say, “We, the people . . .”) At the same time, this might allow us to perceive the inherent problem of political idealism and utopian thinking: the failure of a people to truly arrive, because of the internalization of the people into the form of the state. This was equally the problem of fascism as it is of the idealism of the democratic state; consequently, it should not come as a surprise that Hitler ordered the German people to join him in an act of suicide for their failure in realizing the Reich. By contrast, in its late-democratic form, the state entertains a fundamentally ambivalent relationship with its own people, one that is often prone to become extremely volatile. There are always too many resisting elements, too many numbers; but even worse, the people are always failing to live up to the democratic ideals of the state—either lacking altogether or exhibiting the tendency to go a little insane, returning to religion and the authority of the family, or, if pushed to the extreme limit, becoming terrorists or serial killers.9 In saying this, I realize that this last association has become extremely inconvenient today in relation to the image of the suicide bomber, the member of an anomalous terrorist cell who walks into a public square to explode his own organs precisely in an effort, it seems, to ward off a certain state form. In this context we might recall Arendt’s prescient observation that it is “isolation” and not merely loneliness that becomes a breeding ground for terror, whether this form of isolation refers to the archaic figure of the sovereign, the sacred victim, or the (self-)isolation of an entire people as the result of the “logicality of ideological thinking” of racist exceptionalism or religious fundamentalism.10 Moreover, there is no natural form of isolation, since every state of exception must be politically and ideologically contrived (also recalling the statement by Benveniste quoted earlier that every stranger is a particular and hence there is “no stranger as such”).

At this point I turn to the brief, albeit infamous, commentary by Foucault on the Iranian Revolution that can be understood to raise a similar question concerning the people and the war machine.11 It is in this text that Foucault first speaks to the “enigma of revolts” that are “outside history” and also within an official history that fails to grasp their real causality. As he argues, over the last two hundred years a quasi-scientific theory of “revolution” has been created “in a gigantic effort to domesticate revolts within a rational and controllable history: it gave them a legitimacy, separated their good forms from their bad, and defined the laws of their unfolding; it set their prior conditions, objectives, and defined the laws of their unfolding . . . a marvelous and formidable promise.”12 But what happens, Foucault asks, when a people actually revolt? Here we can see the same dilemma announced above under the concept of democracy: the failure of a people to actualize the ideals already ascribed to them by “history.” In other words, they revolt in the wrong way, often by turning back to religion with its “promises of the afterlife, time’s renewal, anticipation of the savior or the empire of the last days” (which also have their secularized versions in the various scientific theories of revolutions as well).13 Foucault’s criticism is aimed at the traditional leftist intelligentsia and its classical antipathy toward the people who do not resist power according to their prescriptions. Is it any wonder that the traditional Left shares the same fundamental antipathy toward the people as do most bureaucrats and jurists, which is why most leftist critics tend to err on the side of proposing some alternative version of the politburo? At least an intensely ambivalent relationship, sometimes even a hatred of the people that already exist—is this not the historical legacy of the Left? Moreover, is this not also the reason for the constant calls for the creation of “another people” that would replace the people that are always found to be missing (i.e., lacking in their own existence)? Of course, Deleuze and Guattari share in Foucault’s criticism of the Left, particularly in their complete rejection of the concept of ideology, which they regard as an alibi that functions to preserve an idealistic image and essentially good nature of a people prior to the trappings of power and desire. Nevertheless, invoking the statement by Wilhelm Reich, they constantly claim that the people were not duped or tricked into endorsing fascism or racism, or in dedicating their own organs to the destructive war machine. In fact, recent events have shown that the people who are missing can be quite mad; therefore, to echo the statement made by Max Horkheimer, maybe real revolution is less than desirable.14 It is for these reasons that in the future we must construct a more realistic and sober portrayal of the conceptual personage of “the revolutionary people” as a fundamental component of political philosophy.

Returning now to a second point of comparison between Foucault’s earlier remarks and Deleuze and Guattari’s observations on the war machine, in addition to defining revolt by a form of exteriority, Foucault also defines a people as “a singularity,” which might also resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s exceptional or monomaniacal individuality—a “rogue,” as Derrida would say, following Kant’s remark in Toward Perpetual Peace (i.e., “let justice reign even if all the rogues should perish”). As Foucault writes, “People do revolt; that is a fact. That is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it.”15 Thus, “a singularity revolts,” despite that we do not know what form a real revolt will take. In Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, we are given several images of “exceptional individuals” who revolt, most of which are drawn from literary personae. Michael Kolhaas mounts his horse and sets off in a struggle he has already lost from the beginning. Ahab revolts against the white whale. These two species or types, in fact, may represent the two extreme poles of revolt in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings—between the monumental portraits of Ahab (or Moby-Dick), Kleist’s Penthesilea, and Richard III. Consequently, there is more than a little Shakespearean resonance to Deleuze’s use of these various figures, in particular, to portray the “world-historical” characteristics of the people they are made to portray. Taken together, in fact, I would argue that these figures represent “a people” in various states of revolt, or of “becoming-revolutionary,” including the state of war when a people assume the nature of a war machine.

For example, I have found no more truthful and realistic portrait of the American people than the one offered by Deleuze in his 1989 appendix to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Here we find two figures, each of which represents the extreme poles of becoming that define the American people: the monomaniacal figure of Ahab (or Moby-Dick, the Great White Whale of American imperialism) and the anomalous figure of Bartleby, the minor functionary who “prefers not to” perform his assigned or allotted role in the division of labor. Concerning ourselves only with the first pole, why is it that Deleuze always underlines the event of betrayal, “the breaking of a pact or bond,” as if stepping over a certain abstract line, or going too far, as the most essential aspect of this figure? In choosing to pursue Moby-Dick, Ahab must break a pact and betray the whaler’s law, which says that the violence unleashed in the hunting of whales must always be rationalized by its productive, economic justification; above all, it must never become an “object” in itself, apart from this rationalized, legal ground. (It is only in strict observance of this law, moreover, that God will “bless the harvest.”) How, then, do we understand the violence of Ahab? Is this not an image of revolt, if not absolute war? Does Ahab’s vengeance not express the kind of violence remarked by Deleuze and Guattari where the war machine takes war as its direct object and, in doing so, introduces a form of exteriority to any law that is so extreme in its own justification that it surpasses mere contradiction and introduces the figure of an “innately deprived being”—that is, a form of stupidity that surpasses mere ignorance and a spirit of real malice that is beyond good and evil? And yet, returning to the usual portrayal of the people, we must ask: Was Ahab absolutely alone? Did he not also share this primary nature with his crew who follow him to his death, who touch the burning lance and make a blood pact with the demonic Ahab? Were the seamen simply duped? Or rather, does this constitute one of the poles of any “revolutionary becoming”? It is because of the existence of this pole that the pilot of any revolution tends to steer toward war, as if it constituted the position of true north on the compass.

I turn now to a text where Deleuze paints a similar portrait of the Palestinian people by invoking the figure of Yasser Arafat, “like something straight out of Shakespeare.”16 Like Foucault’s earlier statement on the Iranian Revolution, this has in some ways become a scandalous text. It is from September 1983, written in response to the 1982 massacre of Sabra and Shatila and condemned by some for its hints of anti-Semitism.17 In his remarks, Deleuze’s first observation concerns the failure to recognize the Palestinians as a people like any other; rather, they are only recognized as “the Arab populations that occupy Palestine” and “who have ended up there by chance or by accident” as justification for the plans for the “depopulation” of the territory.18 In the context of these events and the history that preceded them, Deleuze asks: How do the Palestinians resist, being both outside of their territory and without a state? It is here that he evokes the exceptional figure of Arafat as “the grand historical character like something directly out of Shakespeare!”19 Thus, Arafat represents this solitary figure or rogue who becomes the living persona of “a people who revolt.” (Of course, it goes without saying that this was not a convenient image for some, given that Arafat was also an organizer of worldwide terrorism at this moment.) And yet, Deleuze’s allusion to Shakespeare allows us to interpret the figure of Arafat alongside the figures that also appear in the appendix on Melville written around the same period in the mid-1980s. In other words, like the monomaniacal figure of Ahab, the figure of Arafat should be accurately conveyed so that it retains its bipolar and essentially ambiguous characteristics, which would be consistent with the war machine he represents.

By means of this allusion, Deleuze is not comparing Arafat to the mythological and romanticized image of the magical sovereign; Arafat is not King Arthur. Rather, his figure would more resemble that of Richard III, who emerges from the same violence, murder, and perversion that so often accompanies the production of good kings, to create a bastard lineage. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “A disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, claiming a ‘secret close intent’ totally different from the conquest of State Power),” which is to say, different from a line of state domination.20 If this was the Shakespearean figure Deleuze had in mind in reference to Arafat at precisely this “world-historical moment,” it would certainly not be an idealistic portrayal but could just as easily allude to the possibility that Arafat may be leading the Palestinians into a suicide pact, like Ahab leads the crew of Pequot. For this reason, the same question asked of Ahab could also be asked concerning Arafat: “What is he doing when he lets loose his harpoons of fire and madness?”21 Perhaps, in reply to this question, as Deleuze writes in 1989: “He is breaking a pact . . . he is putting his crew in mortal danger.”22

Let us now return to the “Treatise on Nomadology,” where this suicidal tendency is specifically ascribed to the figure of Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas, who invents a war machine that sets itself against the state apparatus in “a struggle that appears to be lost from the start.”23 The example is used throughout their analysis to illustrate one of the two poles in which the war machine tends when it takes war (pólemos) as a direct object rather than as what they call a “supplementary” or “synthetic” object. Moreover, it is precisely the problem introduced by this first kind of war machine that breaks with “the imperial order of alliances and armies,” which often risks turning against itself according to the first pole, which motivates their entire discussion of the war machine. The question they ask in response is not the same as the refrain of Marxist criticism—that is, “why do all revolutions fail?”—but rather, why are the war machines created as a condition of any “revolutionary becoming” most often those that tend toward the destructive pole and at an extreme point toward “a line of destruction prolonging to the limits of the universe”—that is, “Total war”?24 Why, in other words, does this particular kind of war machine so often lead directly to suicide and “to the double suicide machine of a solitary man and a solitary woman”?25 By contrast, the other pole they define as creative, when war is only the means for the creation of something else, which they name “new nonorganic social relations.” It is according to the second pole that they explicitly link the figures of popular revolt, revolutionary war, minority warfare, and guerilla warfare, which they claim are “in conformity with the essence” of the war machine. This would imply, however, that the other pole, the one that takes “total war” as its object, is per accidens (as the Schools would say). In other words, war is not an essential attribute of the war machine, even though it may be the most common one, historically speaking, because the war machine has “displayed from the beginning all the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the other pole [i.e., destruction], and swing toward it from the start.”26

It is in this last statement, I believe, that we have revealed the entire problematic that motivates Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, which explains why they seek to go back to the beginning, prior to the moment when one pole is chosen over another—that is, before the state apparatus is erected and, in order to shield itself against the violence of the war machine it has appropriated as its own supplemental organ, must assign to the latter an object that is external to its own organs. In what might appear as a blatantly contradictory assertion, in the end they even claim that the personality of the state enjoys no “natural” affiliation with the idea of war. As they write, “States were not the first to make war; war, of course, is not a phenomenon one finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence.”27 In other words, there is no such thing as “an original State of War in Nature” (i.e., “unspecific violence”); all violence is specific in that it is invented to have an aim (technologically, ideologically, politically, economically, etc.). This is the same principle expressed in the invention of weaponry, which underscores the emphasis Deleuze and Guattari place on the assertion that the war machine is “invented” and not natural: “We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war machine as such was invented.”28 Therefore, after establishing the specific origins of the relationships between the nomadic war machines and the state-form, they ask, who, then, is ultimately responsible for creating war in the first place, the state or the nomads? Deleuze and Guattari do not attempt to answer this question, which in some ways can be compared to what Foucault called the “enigma of revolts.” However, they do at least offer a partial explanation when they say that this happens when one pole is mistaken for another: a line of destruction is often confused for creation, death is sometimes seen as the only means of escape, or, to echo the final statement made by Ahab himself, death is a wall shoved too close to me, and so there is only nothingness beyond!

And yet, I believe the real problem lies elsewhere, and this explains why Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the war machine ultimately fails to distinguish between the two types of violence, expressed according to the two species of violence described in the beginning of this chapter. Consequently, from the very start Deleuze and Guattari must admit that “violence is found everywhere, but only under different regimes and economies.”29 In other words, the real problem, as I have argued earlier concerning the enemy, is separating violence from violence in the first instance—that is, in pretending to distinguish purely destructive violence from creative and productive conflict. This was the same problem for Plato, as we saw, and his solution was also an attempt to distinguish the two poles of violence by causing one to always be directed outward, away from the city, precisely toward the nomadic bands and the “natural enemy” (i.e., the Persian); at the same time, he wanted to preserve creative violence and conflict as a form internal to the social segments in the city and assign to this pole the production of friendship (i.e., “political economy”). Was this simply Plato’s error? Was the belief that he could separate and keep separate the two poles of violence, keep them distinguished so that one pole would never be confused with another and keep the objects distinct so that “the friend” would never be mistaken for “enemy,” somewhat naïve? (Is this not, as Derrida will later also say of Schmitt, “Plato’s Dream”)?30 And yet, is this not the error of all “political economies,” including that of Marx? The pretension to distinguish one kind of violence from the other, but most of all, to make violence productive, to put it to work for a higher goal; to cause it to become creative, just, even “pure” and “reasonable” (i.e., rationalized under certain specific conditions, such as jus belli). Perhaps no other contemporary philosopher has addressed this power and concerted rationalization better than Derrida when he writes that, on the basis of its historical abuses, “there is essentially no longer anything today that could in all rigor be called war or terrorism, even if there can still be, here and there, in a secondary sense, surviving vestiges of this paradigm” (i.e., the paradigm of foundational or emancipatory violence as a justification of war, or the right of the peoples to wage war as a mean of liberation).31 Finally, is this not the same paradigm compounded by all the political theories that have spread across the face of the earth, particularly from the West, that have only served to create a worldwide order from the initial chaos of violence that may actually be, in the end, “a peace more terrifying than fascist death”?32

But here we might also consider whether Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of an image of “revolutionary becoming of a people” merely serves to recapitulate the same species of error on a different plane. After all, do they not also pretend to discern the difference between the two kinds of violence, described throughout, as the difference between the kind of violence effected by a war machine and the kind of violence effected by the state, or between a line of flight that is creative (even if it must sometimes pass through war) versus a line of destruction and domination? But who ultimately decides? Of course, our answer will depend on how we take the objective of their theories concerning these two kinds of violence. In the conclusion, they write: “The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles.”33 According to the earlier statement quoted above, there is one point of view where the difference between the two poles is greatest: death. In other words, it is by inhabiting this perspective that one might introduce a maximal difference in order to separate violence from violence, in order to cause something to appear. As Deleuze and Guattari speculate, this something = x would have to do with what they call the “incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine.”34

Therefore, in order to occupy the perspective, or “point of view,” of death, as if staring out from death’s own eyes, one line of research to pursue would be to continue to analyze the conceptual personae that Deleuze and Guattari themselves privilege. Yet there is Ahab, and death is equal to the vision of a white wall and the nothingness beyond. To this image corresponds the specific death produced by one kind of war machine: pure destruction, extermination, and genocidal extinction. “Nothingness, Nothingness!”35 Historically speaking, human societies have created a dizzying number of manners of producing death. It is in this area that our species is exceptionally creative—much more so than prodigious nature herself, as Kant might say. For example, Albert Camus, who once said that if one has difficultly imagining the death caused by a plague, one only has to think of an audience in a movie theater being piled up in the town square. And yet, nowadays such quantities are not so difficult to imagine, are they? Moreover, through the technological development of late-capitalist societies, we have created a kind of death that is aimed at entire populations. This is the death created by the technological advancement of the war machine of the first kind: total extermination, absolute extinction, and the production of nearly infinite quantities along a scale that corresponds to final-stage universal capitalism. In the final pages of their 1984 treatise, Deleuze and Guattari already forecast the development of worldwide total war against an “unspecified enemy” as the final stage in the development of the war machine appropriated by globalized capitalist societies, which they posit as the second, postfascist figure of a war machine that poses “the peace of Terror or Survival” as an absolute decision. As they write:

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace that is more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, nor even another regime, but the “unspecified enemy.”36

Yet Deleuze and Guattari will also speak of a more rare kind of death that aims for something positive (an object) beyond the wall, thus making use of death as a pure transition or becoming. And yet, what images do they use to represent this second kind of death? The guerilla fighter? The minority? Clearly, it seems that today we lack a distinctive image for this second point of view. Maybe this is because the death produced by the second kind of war machine, according to the second pole (the creative one), is too populous and is animated by a different character of quantity that directly confronts the death of the first kind, according to the first pole? It goes without saying that there can be small bands of minorities, and minorities of minorities, who can join together in fewer quantities, and necessarily so, and these groups may also constitute new nonorganic social relations. But is our only hope to become survivors and refugees of a “total war against an unspecified enemy” produced by a war machine that today covers the entire surface of the earth?37 Perhaps it is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari admit, even twenty years before 9/11 and the “worldwide war on terror,” that “the present situation is highly discouraging,” since the war machine has grown like a creature in science fiction, “has taken charge of the aim, world-wide order, and the States are now [even then] no more than objects or means adapted to that machine.”38

To conclude—and here I am only speculating—perhaps the point of view of this second kind of death, according to the second pole, would be a purely impersonal one. Here I am thinking of the scene from a story by Charles Dickens that appears in Deleuze’s final meditation written shortly before his own suicide, concerning a character who is first described as “supple to the twist and turn as a Rogue has ever been,” someone who was not even liked that much as an individual but whose moment of approaching death occasioned in everyone who witnessed this moment something resembling “a feeling of beatitude.”39 In other words, perhaps all the contemporary philosopher would have to do is open his or her eyes again to see that often the most common and ordinary death can offer us the greatest occasions for resistance. That is, only if we choose to see it. Does this secret of a common death refer to an event only meant to be shared between friends, between members of the family, or can it be shared with others, including strangers as well? Has it not been philosophy’s highest task to become equal to this image of a purely impersonal life (and thus of a purely common death) in order to provide an adequate concept that would also be the basis for the creation of new nonorganic social relations? Could this image become revolutionary or “political” under certain definite conditions, especially when the real possibilities of either transformative politics or real revolution seem to be lacking today? To quote a line from Jeremy Bentham that also serves as the epigraph to this study: “Let it not be objected that the age is not ripe for such a proposal: the more it wants of being ripe, the sooner we should begin to do what can be done to ripen it; the more we should do to ripen it. A proposal of this sort, is one of those things that can never come too early nor too late.”