Liebniz's monadology describes a world where God is the only efficient cause and every point in space reflects and is synchronized with every other. Liebniz also had a plan for universal peace which involved the French conquering Egypt rather than troubling their European neighbors. Deleuze, invented a 'nomadology' based on his own misunderstanding of Reimann's notion of a manifold which is merely a space which is locally Euclidean though it may have curvature. This leaves a 'connection' problem- solved by Cartan etc. That was for 4 dimensional Space-Time which might have singularities a la Rene Thom who inspired Salvador Dali's last pictures and popularized the term catastrophe theory.
However, for a unified physical theory, it may be that we need ten dimensions which, by supersymmetry, would be a Calabi-Yau manifold. Sadly, as the 2022 Physics Laureates proved, the Universe still won't be 'locally real'- i.e. it will be probabilistic or as Grete Hermann put it almost a century ago, causality in it would be independent of any other principle. This means, speaking generally, there are no necessary or sufficient reasons. Whatever else it may be, the world aint Liebnizian. Hermann, a student of both Emmy Noether & Leonard Nelson, sketched a sort of 'neo-Kantian' philosophy for the post-Bell inequality world predicted by her 1935 critique of Von Neumann no non-local variables theorem. But, in my view, hers is a pragmatic insight- it is a particular purpose which determines a 'context' able to give us a 'relational structure' in defiance of any unified spatio-temporal structure.
Still, String theorists are welcome to indulge in the 'Reid fantasy' that there is a unique space connected through conifold transitions which induce phase transitions. In this context, 'perverse sheaves'- mysterious 'black boxes' useful for computation - may appear to involve 'open' and therefore 'philosophical' problems. This isn't actually the case. Algebraic varieties are the set of solutions to particular polynomial equations. We know from the answer to Hilbert's tenth problem that there is no general algorithm for decidability. This means the intension for that which is locally constructible everywhere would not, generally, have a well defined 'extension' . For any given purpose, there can be a good enough stratification of an algebraic variety. Deleuze thought such 'stirations' and connections could be infinitely various. Trivially, that is the case. But for any particular purpose- i.e. where there is an objective function to be optimized- there is a 'naturality pullback' though no doubt there is an element of arbitrariness or convention. This is a laborious way of saying what is self-evident- viz. Deleuze & Guatarri's 'Nomadology : the War machine' is illiterate drivel based on a particularly useless intensional fallacy. Still, forty years ago, it might have seemed mathsy and undergirded by some particularly kinky type of paraphilia.
Axiom I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
Armies could be called 'war machines'. They are part of the State apparatus. What D&G have given, isn't an axiom. It is an empirically false proposition True, a particular State may for some reason of its own, choose to pretend its Army is exterior to it. Maybe some medieval Pope or Dalai Lama did so at some point. But they stopped doing so. No State has ever had an 'exterior Army' though, no doubt, the Pope has his Swiss Guard.
Proposition I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games.
Tribes existed before there were States or during periods when the State collapsed. Some tribes were martial- i.e. were a 'war machine'. But the tribe itself could be a Nation and, if it controlled territory, was a State.
Georges Dumézil,
a silly man who didn't understand that Indo-Iranian 'mythology' was formulated in an already Imperial age. It's just that Indo-Iranians displaced pre-existing Empires.
in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest.
Not for Indo-Iranians. The King wasn't a magician but he could kill priests and monks unless they preferred to suck up to him in return for money. Medieval Europe was an anomaly because the Pope could be more powerful than an Emperor.
Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra,
why not add 'Jesus and Mohammad'? That makes as much sense as 'Varuna and Mitra'.
the despot and the legislator,
If a despot drafts and enacts laws he is himself a legislator
the binder and the organizer.
Binding it itself a type of organizing. Anyway, this sort of thinking was purely notional. Either the King kicked ass or he had to kiss various asses to stay in power or else he was a mere figurehead.
Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the “pact,” etc.
Nonsense! Stalin was as powerful as any Tzar. But the USSR actively persecuted Religion. America has plenty of Bishops but there is a complete separation of Church and State as there has been in France since about 1905. Thus there is no 'polar opposition' here. These are 'stand-alone' terms.
But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity.
The King of England is also the Governor of the Church of England. But, in Scotland, he worships as a Presbyterian. But this has no importance whatsoever.
“At once antithetical and complementary, necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the field of the function.”
Rubbish! There are three branches of Government- the Executive, which may rely on a paid Civil Service and a standing Army, a Legislature, which may be directly elected, and a Judiciary which may be wholly independent. The Church does not matter in the vast majority of countries.
They are the principal elements of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a milieu of interiority.
This simply isn't true. These two nutters don't seem to have noticed that we no longer live in the Middle fucking Ages.
It is a double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum.
It is nonsense. The State apparatus costs money. Taxes or other Government revenue is the only thing which matters.
It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus.
These guys hadn't noticed that the Government pays the salaries of soldiers and sailors and fighter pilots. There is a Ministry of Defense presided over by a senior politician.
Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war— either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function.
No. It presupposes having the money to pay soldiers or else a sufficiently martial population- like the Ukrainians- who will arm themselves and go fight the invader wherever he might appear. No fucking 'juridical integration' is needed. Justice and Politics are merely service industries- as is teaching stupid shite or pretending to be a psychiatrist- like Guattari.
As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.
No. A standing army was created by the State which may have previously relied on militias or mercenaries.
Indra, the warrior god,
He is the King of the Gods. There is a separate god of war.
is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitral
Not in Hinduism. Dumezil didn't have a Hindu Guru. He wrote stupid, ignorant, shit. This is because he was actually a Frog- as Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyay has conclusively proved through her deconstruction of Tintin comics.
He can no more be reduced to one or the other than he can constitute a third of their kind.
Except in Hinduism. All the Gods are each other.
Rather, he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity,
Nope. He's a guy with a thunderbolt just like Zeus. But he isn't the father of the other Gods.
the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact.
Nonsense! Fuck do these two fuckwits know about Hinduism? They are too stupid to understand that their own country is a secular republic.
He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty,
Indra is a sovereign. Rudra, that is Shiva, might be said to represent 'furor'- but that is a strained interpretation.
a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus.
Nope. Indra is a King. Indeed the term 'Narendra' means 'Man who is Indra'- i.e. a King.
He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times,
Yama is the God of Death and Justice.
but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds...).
Shiva is 'Pasupati'- Lord of the bound- but he can untie those bonds.
He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between “states”: a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations.
Vishnu has a female incarnation. Hanuman and Ganapati are associated with specific animals. Indra is a King with a nice wife.
In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus.
No. Kshatriyas were a professional warrior class who ruled the State and led the army.
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games.
Which is mathsy not stupid shite these two nutters pulled out of their arse.
Let us take chess and Go,
created to teach military strategy in India and China respectively. Both countries had a professional warrior class and vast armies.
from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it.
No. European Chess was only introduced to China in the nineteenth century. Chinese type Chess does not have Kings or Queens. But it has a rule that Generals can't directly face each other.
Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive.
No. Chess pieces are inert. They have no 'internal nature' or intrinsic property. It is a different matter that there are rules for playing Chess properly.
They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn,
these cretins don't even know that a pawn can be turned into a Queen or a Bishop or a horsie.
a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority.
Chess player's have 'interiority'. Chess pieces don't.
Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function. “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones.
So what? Just as we play both draughts and chess so too did the Chinese play both 'general's chess' and 'Go'.
Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.
So what?
Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural.
This is also true of Go or draughts. Game theoretically, as board games both are 'decidable' though Go is more interesting more particularly with different 'ko'.
On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only).
Nonsense! There's a reason a good chess player admits defeat without waiting for the checkmate. Any chess game has a representation in 'Go space' but not vice versa. Thus Chess is more tactical while Go is more strategic.
Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles.
No. It is just a game.
But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.
No. Go is a strategic game about gaining and holding territory.
Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces.
Nonsense! You don't aim to lose a lot of pieces.
In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.
You can win on points in Go. But, it's just a game. War is about killing people. That costs money.
The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomas of Go against the State of chess, nomas against polis.
Meaningless shite. Both are just games. Premchand's 'Chess players' shows that playing lots of chess isn't going to keep some bunch of foreigners from taking over your country.
The difference is that chess codes and decodes space,
No it doesn't. The board is pre-specified. There are 'codes' about acceptable movements for different pieces.
whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it
No. There is occupation and evacuation. Territory remains territory.
(make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within;
Even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Chess and Go and Mario are just games. They have a complete mathematical representation and are 'decidable'. There is no complete representation of war or peace or diplomacy or the economy.
deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere...).
As opposed to what? Building yourself a house on the board? If these two nutters get so excited about Go, they'd fucking lose their minds if they got to hear about 'Monopoly'.
Another justice, another movement, another space-time. “They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext...” “In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital.
They either walked there or rode there on horses or mules. That's totes incomprehensible- right?
At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.” Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to the hunter Mbidi,
a guy who came from an important tribe with martial qualities.
who assists him and then leaves.
No. He stays as a general but the King fears he has grown over-mighty and might usurp the throne. But before he can strike him down, Mbidi runs away.
Mbidi’s son, a man of secrecy,
No. He is the King's nephew and serves him as General. It is quite usual to trust your sister's son because you can be sure you share DNA. This is the Price equation pure and simple. Anyway, all the proto-States and evanescent Empires of the region featured such matrimonial alliances.
joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army.
Like his Daddy, he was the King's Army commander. The army was inside, not outside.
He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a new State.
Nope. The nephew continues building up the same Empire.
“Between” the magical-despotic State and the juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriving from without.
This is nonsense. Nkongolo became King of the Luba- a commercially successful people with a diversified economy- in 1585. He was overthrown by his nephew who had the excuse the old man might grow suspicious of him, as he had grown suspicious of his Dad, and thus strike him down unless he killed him first.
The fact is, the Luba were economically successful. Africans generally are if they don't sell each other off as 'Black Gold'. But this is true of any peoples.
For the Luba, as with other sub-Saharan proto-Empires, marital alliances with other tribes (who could supply mercenaries) played a big role in military expansion and control of trade routes. Africa's big problem was that everybody wanted the handsome, hard-working, skilled, slaves who could be taken from that region. Having once been enslaved is no great stigma. The Gokturks and the Jews had once been slaves. Their descendants either ruled half the world temporally or spiritually.
From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin.
Nonsense! The problem faced by tribal chiefs who want to turn into Kings and Emperors is that their own people might not display the sort of personal loyalty and ruthlessness which foreign mercenaries (or foreign 'slaves') might do. The trouble is that the 'Praetorian guard' may prefer to put one of their own on the throne. There have been plenty of 'Slave Dynasties'.
Dumézil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition:
He had shit for brains. There is a big difference between a professional army drawn from and loyal to the people and institutions of a country, and a despot backed by foreign mercenaries.
against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).
All this is nonsense. 'Laws of war' are bilateral, not unilateral. You fight by the other guys rules- if he is winning- or else you give up and run away.
The warrior is in the position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing.
No. Speaking generally, Kings and Princes had some military training or themselves led military campaigns.
It happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he “didn’t understand” the phenomenon of the city.
Soviet historians could be astonishingly racist. The Mongols know that there had been great cities in the vicinity of Genghis's capital centuries previously. Genghis didn't just understand cities, he understood siege-craft.
An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize.
Not for anybody since the time of Gilgamesh.
It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus.
It isn't- though it may be said of a recently conquered territory which didn't have a State apparatus.
It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.
These two cretins were in the habit of thinking shit.
What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the State,
The State does actual violence. It is not the case that the Police rely on Voodoo.
at other times with the State’s military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and secrecy;
Nope. Everybody invents speed and secrecy when the surreptitiously run the fuck away from these two nutters.
but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war.
The greater danger is that some stupid grad student will believe the stupid lies told by these two nutters.
Dumézil cites the lineage of the Roman kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an “evil king,” Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegitimate character.
So what? Rome was a shitty little place back then.
Shakespeare’s kings could also be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing “good” kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine
Fuck off! The Yorkists had won. Richie boy was a good enough soldier but he didn't invent or reinvent shit.
and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a “secret close intent” totally different from the conquest of State power, and another —an other—relation with women).
If you believe Lancastrian propaganda. Plenty of people from York don't. Anyway, it was William the fucking conqueror who fucking conquered England. He had a big army. His 'harrying of the North' was probably the worst humanitarian disaster this country has ever experienced.
In short, whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets muddled;
Not in England. William's 'War power' changed the country for good. Interestingly, some of the Bretons who came over with him had been displaced centuries previously by Anglo-Saxons. Karma is a bitch.
the war machine can then be understood only through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State.
The Church remained outside the Norman State. Fuck is wrong with these two cretins?
But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin.
The Franks, like the Normans, were a militarized tribe who, under Clovis, created a State which would, at a later point, appear more 'unitary' (though this is not actually the case) than that of Germany or Spain.
One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other.
There were no 'two heads'. Neither in Clovis's time nor that of William did the Church claim anything like equal authority.
But “between” the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own;
Yes it does. It's called 'the Army' you fucking moron!
it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems.
What problems have the British or American armies caused their own people? France, it is true, had Napoleon. But, in the old days, France was rather proud of him.
This explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz
a Prussian. The Prussian Army was utterly devoted to the Hohenzollern dynasty who, in turn, utterly doted on it.
has a general sense of this situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to which they are more or less good “conductors.”
Nonsense! Clausewitz had fought Napoleon as part of both the Prussian and Russian army. He says absolute war gives the defensive position the advantage. But political considerations are a constraining factor. French dudes should understand this because they surrendered to Hitler.
Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself.
Fuck off! The man of war gets his salary and then a nice pension. He isn't furious at all.
The descendants of Hercules, Achilles, then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from Agamemnon, a man of the old State.
Agamemnon was a King and Commander in Chief. So what?
But they are powerless when it comes to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State,
he was a stockbroker from Chicago. He kept trying to get the Trojans to vote Republican.
the first man of the modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms, only to convert them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State
what State? Ithaca? It was tiny, so the dude got on his ship and went forth seeking adventures and nice gifts.
— not Ajax, who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.
Ajax killed himself because he didn't get Achilles's armour. He is depicted as using his great strength more for defensive purposes though he killed his share of Trojans.
No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and condemned, better than Kleist.
Fuck off! Where is Sophocles and where is Kleist?
In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated from his power:
nope. He is still strong. He just wants the girl to think she beat him in battle so that she can marry him (in accordance with the Amazon tradition). Later he goes to meet her for a second fight, but he goes unarmed. The silly bint does not realize this and kills him. Sad.
the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode.
They were imaginary. On the other hand, plenty of Greek dudes are actually centaurs.
Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring forth like lightning, “between” the two States, the Greek and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their path.
If these cunts get so excited by Kleist's Penthesileia, they would go fucking bonkers if they watched Wonder Woman.
Achilles is brought before his double, Penthesilea.
No. She didn't have a dick. She wasn't his double. She was a girl.
And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine,
He had pretended to be a girl so as to escape conscription. But he wasn't 'married' to the war machine. He was simply a soldier.
or from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time.
Did he let the war machine fuck him in the ass? No. He threw it out of the house and then sued it for alimony.
Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State
there was no fucking 'Greek State' at that time. There were just lots of little Kingdoms and maybe some tribal republics.
that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the pack that prohibits “choosing” the enemy and entering into one-to-one relationships or binary distinctions.
Speaking generally, soldiers are supposed to kill the enemy not marry them and have their babies.
Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start.
He was writing during the Napoleonic wars. But the girl kills the dude at the end of his play. I prefer the version where Achilles fucks her corpse and gets angry when Thersites sniggers.
Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine
it was tribal. Apparently, German women joined in the sport.
that breaks with the imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman State.
These stupid fuckers have never heard of the Holy Roman Empire.
But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State.
The sentence is quashed. The whole thing was silly.
As for Kohlhaas,
a merchant who, angry at not receiving justice, took to arson and terrorism
his war machine can no longer be anything more than banditry.
because he wasn't a fucking soldier
Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman?
These nutters haven't heard of George Washington. You can win a war against an occupying power and establish a civilian government. There may then be no need for a standing army.
Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist has lost from the start.
So what? We are talking about boring Teutonic nutters who wrote way way too much.
Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity lies with him?
He is of his period- rather an exciting one, it must be owned.
It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed and affect.”
Superman has a secret identity. Also he can fly really fast. But he lurves Lois Lane and thus has 'affect' as well. Had these two nutters read comic books instead of Kleist they mightn't have written this shite.
And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself.
because 'exteriority' is external to itself. That's how come I can take off my boots.
Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject,”
you stop fantasizing about kissing your own lips and start thinking it might be nice to kiss the lips of the girl next door- right?
to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects and these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs).
When these dudes feel hungry they turn into the very frogs' legs they leap about trying to devour. Also, their dicks turn into vaginas. I've been to Paris and know whereof I speak. Admittedly, I was very drunk all through my visit. Still.
Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war.
No wonder the French are so shit at fighting. They are throwing hissy fits at an enemy who prefers to shoot bullets at them.
The deterritorialization velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg’s, Pentheselea’s) are externalized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine.
Very true. Martin Luther King had a dream. It emigrated to Paris and got a job as an Actuary. Sadly, it turned out that the French Army was a client of its company. Thus, the great Doctor King's dream ended up belonging to the war machine- except, being French, that machine was shit at fighting. I need hardly add that 'King's dream' was Grothendieck. Indeed, it is only because of the latter's theory of dreams that Delueze is of interest to us.
Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to invent—
because good writers don't want to invent stupid shit.
will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic episodes or fainting spells,
or people saying Kleist is a boring kunt. Fuck him.
and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is- “This affect is too strong for me,” and a flash is: “The power of this affect sweeps me away,”
These two cunts were swept away by an 'affect' whose import was that they weren't as stupid as shit.
so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of death.
Boredom. Guys acting in plays or characters in novels don't actually die. They are imaginary, not real.
Such is Kleist’s personal formula: a succession of nights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains There is much of the East in Kleist:
coz he took it up the ass from Chinese sailors- right?
the Japanese fighter, interminably still who then makes a move too quick to see.
The French fighter throws a hissy fit at the enemy and then surrenders too quickly to see.
The Go player. Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist.
He was a baby compared to them- that's true enough. But, what we must remember is those fuckers were German- i.e. as boring as shit. Incidentally, I was born in Germany.
Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State,
The war machine ceases to exist when the State stops paying the salaries of soldiers. Defunding aint conquest though it may presage defeat.
that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?
This could be if it were also the case that at the very moment these cunts chop off their own heads and shove it up their own arses they will have achieved the aristeia, or apotheosis, of their own oeuvre.
Problem I. Is there a war of warding off the formation of a State apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?
Yes. Don't pay taxes or permit the State to own any property.
Proposition II. The exteriority o f the war machine is also attested to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).
Clastres broke with the Communist Party and turned into a Marshall Sahlin's type philosophical anarchist. Then, he died. God is good- even to egg-headed froggie cunts.
Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies without a State,
In the same way that gorillas are thus characterised.
in other words, societies in which distinct organs of power do not appear.
Because those organs get their fucking skulls smashed in so everybody can snack on raw grey matter- right?
But the conclusion has been that these societies did not reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differentiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people “don’t understand” so complex an apparatus.
Nope. There just isn't enough money or other resources for a State to exist. Also, your relatives keep cracking your skull open coz your brains are so tasty.
The prime interest in Pierre Clastres’s theories is that they break with this evolutionist postulate.
They break with common sense. Marshall Sahlins was a fucking cretin.
Not only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive societies to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand.
You can't ward of guys with superior weapons who decide to take over your land and either kill or enslave you.
Indigenous peeps either fight back or are slaughtered. Interestingly, the 'Ik'- a tribe supposedly too poor for Morality- started to kick ass.
Guns matter. Anthropolo-shit-heads don't.
Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such.
True. But then those guys get conquered or else have to create a war machine which turns into a State to finance itself.
To be sure, primitive societies have chiefs. But the State is not defined by the existence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power.
Those organs are people. There is a Chief of Defence Staff and a Chief Justice and so forth.
The concern of the State is to conserve.
Unless it is to modernize or Islamize or whatever.
Special institutions are thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but diffuse, collective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief from becoming one.
Nonsense! Chiefs have become Kings whether or not such 'collective mechanisms' existed.
Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no instituted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense of the group’s desires.
In which case, the title of 'Chief' is merely honorary. It doesn't mean shit.
The chief is more like a leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people.
But men of power can lose that power when 'people' tell them to fuck the fuck off.
But Clastres goes further, identifying war in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.
I suppose he was thinking of the Ache in Paraguay. Apparently half of all deaths of the forest Ache were violent. They may have lived in small groups but they were good at killing each other. Then loggers and ranchers turned up and enslaved them and grabbed their land. Hopefully things have gotten better for them as they gained political representation. Clastres died young. Perhaps he would have spoken out about the genocide in Paraguay. I'm joking. The fucker was French.
Proposition I I I. The exteriority of the war mac hi n e i s also attested to by epistemology which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a “nomad” or “minor science.”
It isn't attested by any epistemology known to Military Science. It is something these two kooks cooked up.
There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify,
Fuck off! Your treatment of 'Science' is equivalent to that of any fucking illiterate paranoid nutjob.
whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are referring to are not “technologies” in the usual sense of the term. But neither are they “sciences” in the royal or legal sense established by history.
There is no such sense. These cunts are French and utterly shit shitheads.
According to a recent book by Michel Serres,
who, contrary to his own theory of translation, is untranslatable probably because his prose is as senseless as it is sonorous.
both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked by it.
Because they weren't really physicists or mathematicians.
The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science
proto-science- maybe. Eccentric science is what Dr. Frankenstein gets up to in his Castle.
would seem to be the following; 1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.
Consistency is not a flow or a flux or a property of reality.
2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant.
Either there is a Structural Causal Model or there is nothing 'scientific' in the thing.
It is a “paradox” to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy;
No. It is a manner of speaking- a meta-metaphor. No paradox is involved in saying that your g.f's eyes are a garden in which the angels themselves taste of forbidden fruit- sodomy to be precise. You promised we could try it on my birthday.
in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science.
Useful science- at least, that is the charitable view.
By contrast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of the atom.
Which does not exist.
The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between a straight line and a curve,
No. It just means an unpredictable or non-deterministic 'swerve' of the atom.
the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of the movement of the atom.
No. It is wholly non-deterministic and thus wholly ergodic.
The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path.
There is no such thing. These stupid fuckers don't know that there is no smallest real number.
It is a passage to the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical “exhaustive” model.
Nope. It is just non-deterministic.
The same applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as “the shortest path between two points,” is just a way of defining the length of a curve in a predifferential calculus.
No it isn't. This is nonsense. A straight line is not a fucking curve.
One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow,* but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest angle.
There is no smallest angle. Also slopes decrease as the angle decreases.
From turha to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations. The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things.
Nope. Firstly there is no fucking model. Vortices are named but not described. But one could use Brouwer choice sequences to represent how they may be constructed if not in Hilbert space then maybe Skorokhod space or something peeps younger than me would have been taught in Skool.
It is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space:
This is based on Lautman's account of Reimann manifolds which was a generalization of Gauss's proof that curvature can be measured locally and regardless of the embedding space. Nash gave a theorem showing that a Reimann manifold has a pullback to Euclidean space (though some remarkable information about symmetries will be lost). It is obvious that we live in a (pseudo) Reimannian universe which features black holes and variable curvature of Space-Time as explained by Einstein's General Theory. That isn't a big scandal. When making maps we can use contour lines. The fact that there is a mountain and a valley does not mean we live in a 'heterogenous' or 'un-connnected' space. Anyway, Cartan, developing a 'moving frame' theory, himself proposed a solution- the Cartan connection- such that zero curvature gives you a Kleinian geometry. Change the curvature and you get into Reimann territory. But Hawking/ Susskind and String, fucking, Theory, had made this type of psilosophy stupid and obsolete BEFORE these two ultracrepidarian cunts wrote this nonsense. When you have sufficiently serious singularities or topological 'holes', you simply aren't going to be able to use sheaves or fiber bundles or anything else to render the thing determinate.
Cartan, Weil, Grothendieck etc. made great technical advances and anything 'philosophical' they wrote might well be of interest to those working at the cutting edge in Mathematical Physics but we can't say that their work was similar to that of Newton or Einstein in changing the prevalent world-view.
Thus these stupid cunts were playing an ignorant type of catch up with... nothing at all. Grothendieck universes with 'fibre bundles' or sheaves or what have you are merely formalisms- unless they have 'witnesses', in which case they are intuitionistic or Gentzen type ' natural deductions'. Currently it seems that Nature has no pullback to 'Naturality'. Still it is true that Grothendieck cut off ties with Institutes which contributed to National Defense. Then he went mad. Maybe that is what these two cunts wanted.
in the first case “space is occupied without being counted,”
Smooth spaces have a metric. What are these cretins babbling about? With a Cartan type connection locally smooth spaces are stitched into a larger manifold which thereby has a metric.
and in the second case “space is counted in order to be occupied.”
Manifolds and metrics are abstractions of a useful sort. So is Space and Time and Beauty and Justice. These two nutters think these things are real and could give you a blow-job or re-train as a dental hygienist.
Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them- sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections.
Mathematicians are raping triangles! Call the Police!
One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species,
like how when an astronaut goes to Outer Space he makes sure he connects it to its Mummy Space and discovers who its Ancestral Space was.
or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it,
Nobody has seen a stable essence. Such deductions are hot air.
but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it.
We want better Structural Causal Models so as to change outcomes. We are interested in Outer Space coz them planets and asteroids have a lot of precious raw materials we would like to get our greedy mitts on.
This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature,
because it was raped by evil mathematicians!
the cube of a cubature the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an “obstacle”; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection, in other words, a war machine.
Mathematicians are committing genocide on innocent triangles! This is totes triggering for me!
All of this movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element.”
Royal Science is very wicked. Democratic Science would give this fucking Cretin a fucking Nobel Prize.
This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in an essential way with the war machine: iheproblemataaie the war machine itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vortices, and projections.
Fuck you Mathematics! You are part of the war machine! Kindly tell us who to surrender to because we are French.
It would seem that the war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the State apparatus.
It would only seem that if you are as stupid as shit.
It would seem that a whole nomad science develops eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences.
If you eat your own shit- sure.
Furthermore, this nomad science is continually “barred,” inhibited or banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol.
Sadly the Yanks liberated Paris which is why these French fuckers couldn't also become symbols. Worse yet, De Gaulle got nukes for France and thus gave it a proper offensive doctrine. Fuck you De Gaulle! The French should be nomads hiding from a Nazi super-state while talking bollocks to each other. Sadly, French nukes, not to mention NATO, kept these two nutters safe.
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