Reid, J. - Deleuze - S War Machine. Nomadism Against The State

Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism
Against the State

Julian Reid
This article contributes to an emerging body of post-structuralist

international relations scholarship that focuses upon the core
problematic of international relations theory: war. While existing post-
structuralist treatments of war have generally derived their inspiration
from the work of Foucault and Virilio, this article focuses specifically
upon the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, it deals with Deleuze’s
arguments upon the nature of the relation between war and the state,
detailing how he uses this debate to take issue with Foucault’s concept
of power. As I argue, the role of the concept of war within Deleuze’s
philosophy is comparable with that of the concept of desire. Further, I
demonstrate how Deleuze’s thesis on the relationship between war
and the state is influenced by Nietzsche’s discourse on war, and how
it serves to undermine arguments that equate Nietzsche’s concept of
war with that of fascism.
––––––––––––––––––––––––
My genius is in my nostrils... I contradict as has never been

contradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit. I am
a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been, I know tasks
from such a height that any conception of them has hitherto been
lacking; only after me is it possible to hope again. With all that I am
necessarily a man of fatality. For when truth steps into battle with the
lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a
transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed
of. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a
war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been
blown into the air — they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be
wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will
there be grand politics on earth.1
____________________
Many thanks to the two anonymous referees whose criticisms were very helpful.
Thanks also to Eden Cole, Mick Dillon, and Jeremy Valentine for their insightful
readings of previous versions of this article. A singular expression of gratitude to
Keith 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
57
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Millennium
The ideas of Gilles Deleuze are playing an increasingly pivotal role in the
retheorisation of resistance consequent upon the globalisation of power.
Deleuze’s work provides the groundwork for the subversion of
traditional ontologies of power and resistance that allow for new forms
of critical thinking concerned with the specific consequences of
globalisation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the counter-
strategic works of Antonio Negri, especially in his latest collaboration
with Michael Hardt, Empire.2 Through Deleuze, among others, Hardt
and Negri reconceive resistance in terms different from the strategies of
dialectical negation that defined traditional critical approaches.
Reconceiving resistance in Deleuzean terms of affirmation, multiplicity,
and flight, Hardt and Negri posit the potentialities of a deterritorializing
multitude, outmanoeuvring the strategies of capture afforded by the
powers of capital.3
While critics of Empire within International Relations contest the
nature of Hardt and Negri’s claims as to the shift in the characters of
contemporary global power and resistance, few engage with the
Deleuzean derivations of their ontology of power and resistance.4 It is
not only Deleuze’s arguments on resistance and power that have been
neglected by the discipline of International Relations. Deleuze also has a
lot to say on the more traditional concern of IR for the problem of war
and its relationship to power. Indeed he construes state power itself in
terms conditioned by a set of relations to both war and resistance. Yet, in
spite of the centrality of issues of state power, war and resistance to the
discipline of International Relations, there is very little established
research on Deleuze in connection to IR.5 This article addresses that
lacuna. In essence, Deleuze offers an account of state power as
conditioned by its appropriation of war and its institutionalisation of
war in the form of military force and violence. He also offers an account
of resistance to the state through the invocation of the power of war
against its capture and appropriation by the state. In this respect, there
are connections within the theorisations of power, war and resistance
____________________
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (New York: Harvard University
Press, 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; Roxanne
Lynne 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 in
Amsterdam’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 4 (1998): 955-981.
58

Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State
that are definitive of Deleuze’s political thought. Problems of resistance

are likewise always problems of war for Deleuze.
Indeed, rather than start from the problem of the role of resistance
in Deleuze’s thought it is necessary to focus directly on his concept of
war and its relationship to the state. Not only is the issue of the role of
war in Deleuze’s thought of most obviously pressing relevance to
international 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 in
understanding the precise nature of his conceptualisation of relations
between resistance to power. It also provides us with a different
perspective on the relations and distinctions between Deleuze’s
theorisations of war and power to that of his closest philosophical ally,
Michel Foucault.
The work of Deleuze was tremendously influenced by Foucault. In
conversation not long after his death, Deleuze recalled his memory of
Foucault the ‘warrior’, always evoking the ‘dust or murmur of battle’,
construing thought itself as a sort of ‘war machine’.6 This dual portrait of
Foucault as both thinker and warrior exemplifies Deleuze’s polemical
conception of the philosopher’s task. Philosophy, he argues, is the art of
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.7 The mark of a ‘great
philosopher ’ such as Foucault is his creation of concepts that differ
violently 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 the
violence of war on existing orders of knowledge conditions Deleuze’s
politico-philosophical project in its entirety. Deleuze perceived his role
as a philosopher to be that of creating forms of thought capable of
‘willing war against past and future wars, the pangs of death against all
deaths, and the wound against all scars, in the name of becoming and
not of the eternal’.9 As such, the role of the concept of war in Deleuze’s
philosophical and political schema is analogous to that of the concept of
thought. He strives to be a ‘warrior’ necessarily because he strives to be
a ‘thinker ’.
Yet, participation in Deleuze’s war is not the privilege of
philosophers alone. In theory, anyone can be a Deleuzean warrior, a
participant in the ‘strange war’ that he conducts ‘in the name of
____________________
6. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1990), 103.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London and New
York: Verso, 1996), 2.
8. Ibid., 160.
9. Ibid., 160.
59

Millennium
becoming’. Deleuze’s war, construed in terms of the exposure of existing

orders of knowledge to the violence of new concepts, is not the privilege
of anyone in particular but a general capacity that accrues simply to
being human.10 Deleuze’s concept of war is comparable with the
Nietzschean ‘struggle of free men’ against the forces of ressentiment in
anticipation of ‘the splendor and magnificence of the event’.11 For
Deleuze, the concept of ‘the event’ represents the simple experiences of
alterity that induce novel processes of becoming and transformation in
any form of life. Deleuze insists, in echo of Nietzsche, that there is a
necessarily violent character to these forms of experience. So much so
that ‘battle’ is the very essence of the event.12
While in essence Deleuze’s war ‘concerns everybody’13, he is
nevertheless very concerned with the forms of strategic war perpetrated
by states. Indeed, the strategic codification of war by the state is of
paramount concern to him. This is most apparent in Deleuze’s work
with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, where he forces us to recognise
the ways in which the strategisation that the state performs upon
thought is consistently reflected in the development of the modern
military-strategic theories of the state.14
Yet, Deleuze also detects dissonance within the tradition of
military-strategic theory to the strategisation of war by the state. In this
respect, Carl von Clausewitz is a key thinker for Deleuze. 15 Foucault, to
recall, considers Clausewitz’s theory of the relation of war to politics to
be emblematic of the shift in the organisation of power/ knowledge that
he identifies with the origins of the modern era.16 Deleuze does not
dispute this aspect of Clausewitzian strategic theory. However, he
demonstrates that the conceptualisation of a relation between war and
politics 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 modern
states.17 In effect, Deleuze uses Clausewitz to dispute Foucault’s
____________________
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 Between
War and Power’, Alternatives 28 no.1 (2003): 1-28.
16. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Michel Foucault, Power: The
Essential Works 3 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 203.
60

conceptualisation of the relation of war to power, and to bolster his

conception of a form of thought that acts as a ‘war machine’.
In addition, Deleuze uses the debate on the relationship between
power and military-strategic theory to account for a form of power that
Foucault has been criticised for failing to address: fascism.18 He argues that
the genealogy of modern military-strategic theory provides us with key
insights into the socio-epistemic conditions from which historical fascism
emerged. This contrasts with Foucault’s concentration on the relation
between the genealogy of military-strategic theory and liberal forms of
power.19 Indeed, in spite of Deleuze’s veneration of Foucault as a kind of
warrior of thought, Deleuze uses this debate on strategy to take issue with
Foucault on the relationship between war and power in ways that echo
their well-established disagreements over the relationship between power
and desire. Deleuze argues, contra Foucault, that despite the attempts of
power to codify the relationship between war and politics there is an
‘essence’ to war that escapes these attempts at codification and that ‘has as
its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight’.20 This is in
stark contrast to Foucault’s bleak assessment of the ‘omnipresence’ that
power achieves through its subsumption of laws deriving directly from
war.21 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze takes issue with Foucault on the
subject of the relation between political sovereignty and war. Borrowing
from the work of the comparative mythologist Georges Dumezil, he
shows that at the foundation of Indo-European civilisation, war exists
both inside and outside of the domain of political sovereignty. Secondly,
he shows that with the emergence of the modern state a similar process of
formation occurs based both on the appropriation and exclusion of war
from the state apparatus. This is contrary to Foucault who argued that the
foundation of the modern state is based explicitly on the conjunction of
war with politics. Central to this argument is Clausewitz’s On War.
Deleuze’s conception of an essence of war that does not take war as
its object is significant not only for the ways in which it allows him to
take issue with Foucault, but also for its congruence with Friedrich
Nietzsche’s ideas on war. The influence of Nietzsche on Deleuze’s
conception of the relationship between war and power can be traced
back to some of his earliest works. His recuperation and development of
____________________
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.
21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (London: Penguin,
1990), 92-102.
61

Millennium
Nietzsche’s discourse of war is important not least because of the extent

to which it challenges the confused attempts by some political theorists
to account for fascist regimes of power through reference to Nietzschean
thought and the accusations that Nietzsche valorised the forms of war
that fascism perpetuated.22 Deleuze develops a Nietzschean account of
war that allows him to develop a conception of resistance to power,
including fascist power. In turn, it is Deleuze’s derivation of ideas from
Nietzsche that facilitates his challenge to Foucault’s accounts of the
relationship 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’s
conception of war and how war is essentially exterior to power. In the
second section I concentrate on how these arguments make his theory of
the relation of war to power distinct from those of Foucault, and how these
differences echo their established disagreements on the relation between
power and desire. In the final section I demonstrate how Deleuze’s thesis
on the relationship between war and power is an extension of Nietzschean
thought and how it serves to rescue Nietzsche from studies that would
render 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 philosophy
and can be traced back to his very earliest works.23 However, it is only in
his second collaborative effort with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
that he explains thoroughly the distinction between his own discourse of
war and that of military-strategic discourse. In this work he draws a
distinction between the forms of war perpetrated by states and those of
non-state based nomadic societies. Deleuze defines the state as an
apparatus of power distinct from the societies it governs and with the
____________________
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 and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351-423; Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, 159-160; Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London and
New York: Verso, 1998), 52; Deleuze, Negotiations, 102-118.
62

means for its own preservation and conservation.24 War and its attendant
military institutions have been traditionally interpreted as the means by
which the state apparatus emerges and conserves its power both over
the populations it governs and against the external threats of rival state
forces. Yet this understanding of the role of war both in the creation of
states and in their sustenance is, Deleuze argues, a limited one.
Borrowing from the ethnological research of Pierre Clastres, he argues
that war figured in nomadic societies as a means not to the creation and
preservation of state power but as a mechanism directed against the
threat of the state.25 By this, Deleuze does not simply mean that nomads
employed warfare against the actual existing states they encountered,
but that they used war as a means to fend off the emergence of a state
apparatus within their own societies. War, he argues, acted to maintain
the dispersal of nomadic groups in ways that prevented the
centralisation of a society from which a state apparatus might form.26 In
this sense, Deleuze draws a parallel between his own conception of
thought as a war-machine directed against the strategisation of thought
by mechanisms of power and the actual wars perpetrated by nomadic
societies in prevention of the formation of a state apparatus. It is not,
however, simply that nomadic tribes waged wars directly against states
that 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 consciously
understood or not, that acted to prevent the sedentarization and
centralization of their societies. The object of their kind of war, Deleuze
argues, is neither battle itself, nor the direct elimination of a statist
adversary, or the fulfilment of some other rationally defined political
end. Instead, it is the warding off of the very processes of state formation
and the attendant strategisation of thought, movement and disposition
that follow from the formation of a state apparatus.
The kind of warfare conducted by nomads is not only different
from that conducted by states, according to Deleuze. War, he argues, is
their invention.27 As such, war is exterior to the state apparatus. In order
to reinforce recognition of this exteriority, Deleuze draws a distinction
between what he calls the ‘war machine’ that he identifies with the
nomads and the military institutions traditionally identified with the
state. Deleuze’s development of the concept of a ‘war machine’ results
partly from the influence of Virilio.28 However, whereas Virilio’s
____________________
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).
63

Millennium
conception of the war machine is very much a faithful extension of

Foucault’s strategic model of power, Deleuze uses it to describe a form
of power that is exterior to, and essentially in antagonism with, the state
apparatus.29 He argues that the war machine becomes mistakenly
identified with the military institutions of the state only as the result of
a ‘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 is
ultimately 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 this
argument Deleuze draws heavily on the work of the comparative
mythologist Georges Dumezil.31 The value of Dumezil to Deleuze is
twofold. First, Dumezil demonstrates that the attempt to strategise a
relation between the state and the war machine is a manoeuvre found
repeatedly in the mythological representations of sovereignty dating
back to the earliest records of Indo-European civilisation.32 Second, he
demonstrates that in spite of this attempt of the state to strategise a
relation between itself and the war machine, the latter remains in a
‘milieu of exteriority’, located outside of the state apparatus and
possessing the metamorphic power which Deleuze argues accrues to
alterity.33
As Dumezil details in his research, early Indo-European societies
were characterised by hierarchically ordered tripartite forms of social
organisation involving a priestly stratum, a warrior stratum, and a
herder-cultivator stratum.34 Examining ancient Sanskrit religious
literature such as the Rig Vida, Dumezil identifies three strata of gods
that are hierarchically ranked and differentiated in function — a feature
also of later texts such as Vedas, Brahmanas, and the Mahabharata. At the
summit of the strata appear the sovereign gods, Mitra and Varuna.
Dumezil argues that a specific division of labour determines the relation
between these gods in regard to their sovereign power. While Mitra
____________________
29. I discuss the relation of Virilio’s conception of war to that of Foucault at

length in Julian Reid, ‘The Strategisation of City Spaces: Thoughts on the
Relations between War, Power, and Transurbanism’ in Steven Graham and
Simon Marvin, War, Cities, and Terrorism (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2003).
31. See especially Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
32. Ibid., ix-xv.
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).
64

relates to the rational and legal aspects of sovereignty, Varuna represents

the magico-religious aspects of sovereignty. The importance of
Dumezil’s thesis, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, is the
absence of war and a warrior-god from this highest strata. It is only at
the second divine level that there exist warlike gods dominated by
Indra, the paragon of the warrior ideal. It is Indra who conducts war,
organises armies and in contrast to Mitra and Varuna generally pursues
his will through the exertion of physical force. This one deity, therefore,
comprises the second level of divinity that is an essential component of
political sovereignty but significantly outside of and subject to the first
level of divinity. Indeed, both Indian and Roman accounts of the relation
between first and second levels of divinity indicate a ‘deeply rooted
opposition’ between the gods of sovereignty and the gods of war.35 Indra
regularly commits acts in violation of laws created by the gods of
sovereignty. An essential element in the system of sovereignty, the gods
of war nevertheless regularly break and challenge the law. Their
subordinate position within the configuration of sovereignty demands
the constant vigilance of the gods of the higher strata who must
demonstrate 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’s
research supports Deleuze’s central argument that war is irreducible to
sovereignty and prior to its law.36 No matter what degree the state goes
to in order to integrate or realise war within its strata, there remains this
irreducible element of war — that can potentially be directed against the
sovereign form.
To what extent can Deleuze’s conception of the relation of power to
war be applied in an analysis of the forms of power developed by
modern states? The sovereignty of the modern state is, Deleuze argues,
founded directly on a representative conjunction of the relationship
between war and politics that forces a reconsideration of the relation and
possible distinction between the modern state and the early state-
societies. Deleuze pursues this argument by following Foucault and
invoking Clausewitz’s seminal assertion that war is the continuation of
politics by other means.37 Deleuze clearly identifies Clausewitz’s theory
of war and strategy with a Foucauldian shift towards the emergence of
systems of modern power as well as the sovereignty of the modern
state.38 However, Deleuze provides a more nuanced reading of
Clausewitz to the effect that he develops a quite different understanding
____________________
35. Ibid., 121.

37. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Everman’s Library, 1993), 731.
65

Millennium
of the relation of war to modern power. The stress that Deleuze places
on the idea that the state ‘appropriates’ the war machine is very
important in distinguishing between Deleuze’s understanding of the
relation between war and power and that of Foucault.
Foucault’s later works are defined to some extent by his argument
that there is an intrinsic relationship between modern power and war.
Modern power, he argues, is distinct from previous forms because, ‘the
force relationships which for a long time had found expression in war, in
every form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order of
political power’.39 The formation of systems of modern power is due to
the emergence of a ‘complex strategical situation’, in which an intricate
relationship between war and politics forms.40 In his essay
‘Governmentality’, Foucault underlines —what he considers —to be the
important relationship between the emergence of modern military-
strategic thought as founded by Clausewitz and the shift in the
organisation of power that he identifies with the early modern era.41 As
far as Foucault is concerned, the importance of Clausewitz’s theory of
strategy lies not in its direct implications for statecraft but in its
representation of the basic principle of binary conjunction through
which 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 significance
is its designation of the principle through which a new form of political
power has emerged, that of ‘governmentality’. Thus, it applies mainly to
the ways in which the relations between concepts, as well as between
states and populations, change with the birth of the modern era.
Foucault, nevertheless, does not recognise the appropriative
character of the relation between power and war, nor the residual
element that Deleuze argues provides war with its font of resistance to
power. Foucault’s argument is of course based not on the mythological
representations of sovereignty found among early Indo-European
societies, but on those of modernity. Does Dumezil’s conceptualisation
of the relation between political sovereignty and war resonate with
modern societies? Deleuze believes so, and demonstrates how by
focusing on the nuances of Clausewitz’s conception of war as found in
his 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 ‘real
wars’ that Clausewitz describes in terms of a relation to state political
aims.42
____________________
39. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 102.

40. Ibid., 93.
41. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 203.
66

Deleuze urges that we understand Clausewitz’s formula of the relation

between war and politics not as a statement about the ontology of war
but as a comment on the nature of the relation between the state and war.
However, Deleuze also argues that Clausewitz does offer a different and
powerful ontological claim about war entailed in his concept of ‘absolute
war’. Indeed, he argues that Clausewitz’s concept of ‘absolute war’ is
close in essence to his own conception of the war machine. In the
following section, therefore, I explore Deleuze’s elaboration of
Clausewitz’s concept of absolute war, demonstrating how Deleuze’s
conception of nomadic war in terms of the pursuit of lines of flight and
the affirmation of chance bears comparison with Clausewitz’s insistence
that absolute war is defined by the role of chance. I further demonstrate
how this is born out in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ‘supreme’ exploitation of
the element of chance in war.
Deleuze on Clausewitz’s Concept of Absolute War

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault makes much play of Clausewitz’s
seminal assertion that war is the continuation of politics by other
means.43 However, Deleuze argues that this is not the sum of
Clausewitz’s conceptualisation of war. Clausewitz uses this conception
of war in relation to politics to describe the forms of ‘real war’
perpetrated by modern states and to prescribe the subjugation of
military means to political ends. Clausewitz, however, also distinguishes
between this definition of ‘real war’ in terms of a relation purely
between war and politics and what he describes as ‘absolute war’, that
he 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, which
are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance
and 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 of

violence, reason and chance is a far more ambiguous statement about the
____________________
43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102.

44. Clausewitz, On War, 101.
67

Millennium
ontological status of war than that of the dictum that war is subject
necessarily to political reason. The dictum treats war only in its
instrumentalised form as a subordinate tool of a rationally conditioned
political will.
In the view of Clausewitz there is, however, nothing inherent in
war that renders it subject to reason or the state. It is possible to conceive
of wars within Clausewitz’s framework that develop towards the
extremes of violence in disregard of political reason. Indeed, it was
precisely through such a formulaic reversal of the subjugation of war by
politics that strategists of the Third Reich justified their policies of ‘total
war’.45 Rather, the subjugation of war to politics that we tend to associate
with the Clausewitzian concept of strategy is specific to particular forms
of political order. It occurs in a comparable fashion to the binding of the
warrior to the rational and legal representatives of sovereignty in myth.
Dumezil, to recall, conceives of sovereignty in terms of triadic
relations between the warrior, the priest and the politician. The
stratification of violence in the name of sovereignty occurs through the
binding of the warrior to these two other forces. Likewise, we could say
that for Clausewitz, unspecified military violence is superseded when it
is brought into stratified relation with political reason. Regardless, he
argues that the relation of war to politics is unstable, and this instability
leads Clausewitz to insist that the state pursue the subjugation of war to
the political realm. Although Clausewitz prescribes the subjugation of
violence to reason in the formulation of war, this is not to say that he
does not allow for other definitions of war. What of the third element of
the trinity, chance? Given the trinitarian structure with which he defines
war, could we not conceive of Clausewitzian wars that bear the hallmark
of neither reason or violence, but of chance, that realm ‘within which the
creative spirit is free to roam’? 46
Napoleon Bonaparte figures within Clausewitz’s On War as the
paragon of a strategist who knows best how to exploit the third element
of the trinity: chance. Bonaparte’s penchant for a sudden turn, an
unexpected advance along unforeseen and unlikely lines of attack
rendered him ‘supreme’ according to Clausewitz, along with Frederick
the Great, in the use of chance.47 Clausewitz cites Bonaparte’s surprise
attack 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 take
powerful effect through the exploitation of chance.48 Bonaparte’s wars
____________________
45. P.M. Baldwin, ‘Clausewitz in Nazi Germany’, Journal of Contemporary

History 16 no. 1 (1981): 4-26.
47. Ibid., 235.
48. Ibid., 233-236.
68

were, of course, ultimately as defined by violence as they were by

chance. However, there is a comparison to be made between the stress
that Clausewitz places on Bonaparte’s exploitation of chance in
contributing to his military genius and the ways in which Deleuze
conceptualises the necessity of risk and chance in contributing to the
metamorphic power of the war machine.
Whereas state wars can always be defined, according to Deleuze, in
terms of differing forms of relations between reason and violence,
Deleuze conceptualises a form of absolute war that takes effect when the
war machine effects a form of warfare oblivious to either reason or
violence, leading to ‘the drawing of a creative line of flight’.49 The line of
flight is ‘a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after
having destroyed everything one could’.50 By destruction, Deleuze does
not mean the nihilistic forms of physical destruction that are most often
associated with state wars, but rather a Nietzschean form of ‘active
destruction’ through which thought is engaged by the power of
becoming.51 It involves, as John Hughes has described, ‘a
deterritorialisation, through a movement which interrupts or suspends
familiar, confining, formal possibilities and their prescribed organic and
social requirements... a movement out of which the participating bodies
are drawn along new vectors in experimental ways’.52 This notion of
affirming the power of becoming by engaging with chance and
experiment is a theme at the very heart of Deleuze’s philosophy and can
be traced back to his early work on Nietzsche where Deleuze
conceptualises the struggle of ‘free men’ against ressentiment in terms of
the throwing of a dice against the earth. 53 Yet, entailed in this
experimental affirmation of chance is the risk that one either does not
come back or is seriously damaged by the experience. Of course, this is
a conception of a kind of war very different from that pursued by
Bonaparte, but there are clear similarities between the nomadic strategy
of the war machine premised on the exploration and exploitation of
unforeseen forms of movement in escape of the formal possibilities of
thought and the use of chance that Bonaparte deployed when at war
with the allied forces during the early nineteenth century. Deleuze’s
conceptualisation of the nomadic pursuit of a line of flight recalls
Clausewitz’s depiction of Bonaparte making unexpected advances
formulated as ‘thrusts into thin air’ which dually ‘cost him time and
____________________

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.
69

Millennium
casualties’ as at Dresden in 1813, as well as yielding him major success

as at the Marne in 1814.54
Modern strategic theory does Clausewitz a disservice, then, when
it reduces his definition of strategy to that of a binary relation between
war and politics. Instead, Deleuze argues that Clausewitz’s theory
provides scope for a conceptual differentiation between the forms of war
conditioned by the strategies of modern states and the anti-strategy of
the nomadic war machine. This is apparent, Deleuze argues, when
Clausewitz maintains that there is a distinction between the concept of
pure, unconditioned and absolute war, and the ‘real wars’ conducted by
states.55 To date, commentators on Clausewitz have tended to interpret
his concept of ‘absolute war’ as war that is waged to the extreme of
violence.56 As such, it is argued, the ‘real wars’ perpetrated by modern
states never meet the absolute and unconditioned ideal of an extremity
of violence, conditioned as they are by political interference. Is it
necessary, however, to conceptualise ‘absolute war’ in these terms?
Deleuze pursues a quite different interpretation. As he argues, all wars
manifest by and between states occur after the assimilation of war by the
state. This means that,
real wars swing between two poles, both subject to State

politics: the war of annihilation which can escalate to total war
(depending on the objectives of the annihilation) and tends to
approach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to extremes;
and limited war, which is no ‘less’ a war, but one that effects a
descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere
‘armed observation’.57
Wars that approximate towards the extremity of violence do not fail to

realise the Clausewitzian ideal of ‘absolute war’ because they in some
way lack sufficient violence. Rather, absolute war is different from both
limited and total war because it is not necessarily conditioned by a
relation between reason and violence. In spite of the attempts of the state
to subjugate its violence to the discipline of reason, Deleuze maintains
that there persists a certain pure idea of war which ‘remain(s) an
abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual’ to the state.58
This is a quite different take on Clausewitz to that provided by
____________________

56. Michael Howard, ‘The Genesis of On War’, in Clausewitz, On War, 23.
58. Ibid., 420.
70

Foucault. The importance of Clausewitz according to Foucault is his

representation 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 his
prescriptions for how to conduct wars, but in the insight that the essence
of strategy is to implement and maintain the binary relation between the
political and military apparatus of the state. In this sense, Foucault
argues that Clausewitz was a strategist of what Deleuze describes as the
‘state apparatus’ rather than a military theorist of the conduct of war. His
work reveals the strategy by which the state maintains its cohesion as a
sovereign entity rather than dictating how it pursues war functionally.
Contra Foucault, the emergence of a strategy of power based upon the
appropriation of war is, according to Deleuze, not a modern
phenomenon but a reworking of something essential to the foundation
of all forms of sovereignty within the Indo-European world. The modern
theorisations of the conjunction between war and politics merely
reformulate this mythic representation of the formation of political
sovereignty. While Clausewitz is, according to Deleuze, to some extent
complicit in the reformulation of that myth in the development of the
modern state, he also provides the scope to think beyond it by
recognising what Deleuze describes as the ‘exteriority’ of the ‘essence’ of
war to the systems of modern power.60
These arguments act as another instigation for the critical
reassessment of Clausewitz in terms of the profundity of his theory for
conceptions of power beyond those developed within the mainstreams
of strategic studies. Here I want to reflect further on how Deleuze uses
Clausewitz in order to undermine Foucault’s account of the relationship
between war and power. In the following section I detail how their
differing conceptions of the relation between war and power mirror
their well-documented disagreements over the relationship between
power and desire.
Deleuze vs. Foucault: Power, War, and Desire

The task of this section is to consider the relationship between Deleuze’s
concept of the war machine and the theory of the relationship between
war and power that Foucault offers. Foucault’s theory of the relationship
between war and power certainly grounded the contemporary
development of interest in war in continental thought in general. Yet,
____________________
59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102; Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz’.

71

Millennium
Deleuze’s discourse of war can be seen to play a more fundamental role

in his philosophy, defining his research from its very beginnings and
characterising his work throughout. Foucault’s arguments on how the
‘omnipresence’ of modern power has been achieved through the gradual
investment of the laws of war within the organisation of Western
societies may well have provoked Deleuze to clarify his concept of war
and to differentiate it from the concept of war associated with the state
model. It is quite possible indeed to interpret the disparity between their
respective positions on the relationship of power to war as a further
expression of the forms of disagreement that soured their relationship
toward the end of the seventies. In terms of their theoretical divergence,
these disagreements became most apparent with the publication of
Foucault’s final work, The History of Sexuality, and of Deleuze’s two
volume work with Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.61 Pivotal
to the disagreement were the different ways in which Foucault and
Deleuze thought about the relationship between power and desire. 62
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze seeks to ground a new politics of
experimental practice based upon the potential of desire for resistance to
power. He argues that the relationship of desire to power is, at the very
least, twofold. On the one hand, an essential feature of the operations of
power is the codification and regulation of desire. On the other, desire
nevertheless possesses a transformative potential over and against the
attempts on the part of power to repress it. Desire is not offered by
Deleuze as a means to the solution of the problem of power or as a tool
to somehow annihilate it. Rather, Deleuze argues that power — modern
power defined under the terms of capitalism especially — incorporates
the scope for societies to explore their productive potential of desire as a
means to transform its systems. There are, Deleuze emphasises, express
limits to the capacity of desire to afford such change. As he argues,
‘capitalism liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions
that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is
constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that
drives it toward this limit’.63
This view of desire possessing a transformative potential in respect
to its relation to power is challenged by Foucault in The History of
____________________
61. Foucault, History of Sexuality; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
62. Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations
from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 161; John
Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 115-
119.
63. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 139-140.
72

Sexuality. There, Foucault attempts to problematise what he views as

received notions of the repressive and transgressive relations between
power and desire. It is facile, he argues, to suggest that power codifies,
regulates and ultimately represses desire, and to then posit transgression
of such repressions as a means through which to pursue resistance to
power.64 Rather, we must view power operating strategically through
the conjunction of repressive mechanisms on the one hand, and through
the incitement of transgression on the other.65 Transgression is never in a
position of exteriority in relation to power.66 Much rather, power
functions by inciting the very practices that nominally emerge in
transgression of it. This is a feature of the modern strategy of power that
differentiates it from antecedent forms and explains the gradual
development of discourses throughout the modern era that aim at the
incitement of transgression of laws and norms in regard to desires. As he
asks, ‘did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to
act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated
unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same
historical network as the thing that it denounces (and doubtless
misrepresents) by calling it ”repression”?’.67 As such, Foucault claims,
incitements to explore desire in disregard of repressive mechanisms
offer no ultimate way out, no absolute means of escape, from power
itself. Indeed, this is an argument that Foucault applies not only to
resistance in terms of the exploration of desire but to resistance in
general. Rather than conceptualising resistance as occurring exterior to
and in antagonism with the strategies of power, it is necessary to
conceive resistance as acting to produce changes from within.
To what extent does this undermine Deleuze’s conceptualisation of
resistance through desirous experimental practices? Does Deleuze reify
the capacities of transgression of prohibitionary and repressive
mechanisms to challenge power? It is fair to say that Deleuze does
conceptualise resistance largely in terms that express a search for means
of escape, flight and movement away from a form of interior of power
towards an exterior. Yet, he is quite explicit as to the impossibility of ever
deserting the interior of power altogether and of reaching a terminal
position that is exterior to power. In terms of conceptualising the
operation of resistance to power, Deleuze conceives bodies entering onto
lines 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.
73

Millennium
however, from correlative processes of ‘reterritorialisation’. Lines of

flight are entered upon, which perform deterritorialisation upon power
only to be reterritorialised in ways that reinscribe the order that they
originally challenged.69 This is essentially Deleuze’s manner of
confirming Foucault’s arguments on the relation of power to resistance.
However, the recognition that acts of resistance ultimately fail to realise
the forms of exteriority to power which they aim for does not undermine
the purpose of their undertaking. While he invokes the notional power
of the concept of an absolute deterritorialisation, of an absolute line of
flight from which there is no consequent reterritorialisation, indeed of an
absolute war, he does so with the awareness that such a state of
transcendence is not realisable.70 It is not, therefore, a question of
occupying a position of exteriority to power. Rather, the exterior is a
limit towards which a body projects.
In fact, the debate between Foucault and Deleuze over the
relationship between power and desire bears close correspondence to
the differences in their argumentation in respect of the relation of war to
power. In respect of war, Deleuze insists on a differentiation between the
forms of war that are codified by the state and a form of ‘absolute war’
that is qualitatively different in its defiance of state codification. Deleuze
insists on a very similar differentiation in respect of our
conceptualisation of desire. We have to be careful in differentiating, he
argues, between the forms of desire that are created, organised and
planned for by the state, and desire ‘in and of itself’.71 It is a function, he
argues, specifically of the state to organise wants and needs through the
existence and deployment of prohibitionary mechanisms. Through
prohibition, the state incites the very ‘wants and needs’ that are broadly
recognised as being expressions of social desire.72 In doing so it renders
certain forms of desire transparent, which in turn renders them more
malleable to efficient regulation and codification. However, ‘wants and
needs’ are very different entities from desire ‘in and of itself’. We would
do better, he insists, to make a clear distinction between desire on the one
hand, and ‘lack’ on the other.73 It is lack that is created, planned, and
organised in and through social production. Desire, alternatively, is
revolutionary, disorganising the very processes by which lack is
planned and catered for by the state.74 Whereas a lack is always formed
in relation to scarcity or the prohibition of law, desires are formed in
____________________
69. Ibid., 509.

70. Ibid., 508-509.
71. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 27.
72. Ibid., 114-115.
73. Ibid., 28.
74. Ibid., 116.
74

transgression of the topography of wants and needs that emerge in

correspondence with the strategies of power. Desire does not actually
lack anything, it needs very few things.75 This distinction between
desire in and of itself on the one hand, and forms of desire that are
conditioned by the organisational powers of the state mirrors Deleuze’s
distinction between war in its essence, what Clausewitz called ‘absolute
war’, and the ‘limited’ and ‘total’ forms of war that are conditioned by
their strategic relation to the political sphere of the state. Both Deleuze’s
theory of desire and his theory of war are not necessarily susceptible to
Foucault’s line of critique. Both defy the virtuosity that Foucault
assumes power to possess in respect of its capacity to subsume forms
and forces that display any kind of alterity towards it. Deleuze does not
contest that it is a capacity of the state to codify and regulate forms and
forces that might otherwise undermine it, yet he challenges Foucault on
the extent to which the strategy of power achieves such aims.
This debate over the relationships between power and desire, and
between power and war, shaped two very different perspectives upon
the possibilities of resistance. A frequent criticism of Foucault has been
that his perspective provides very little latitude for conceptualising
ways with which to escape the force of a form of power that he himself
describes as ‘omnipresent’ and that functions expressly through the
organisation of resistance.76 For Deleuze, on the other hand, the defining
feature of the liberal capitalist mechanisms of modern power is its very
inability to utterly master desire or war. As he argues, ‘unlike previous
social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code
that will apply to the whole of the social field... capitalism tends toward
a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it
a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as
a deterritorialised field’.77 Likewise, he argues that the state is formed
on the basis of an appropriation of the war machine which nevertheless
fails to realise the ‘essence’ of war, provoking the redirection of that
essence ‘against the state and against the worldwide axiomatic
expressed by states’.78
For Deleuze, the problems of war and desire are irrevocably bound
up with the broader problem of the strategy of power. Like Foucault,
Deleuze recognises the importance of the relation between the
emergence of systems of modern power and the formation of a series of
____________________
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.
75

Millennium
binary conjunctions between concepts such as war and politics, law and
desire, reason and nature etc. In contrast to Foucault, however, Deleuze
does not conceive of this distribution of binary distinctions between
concepts as a manoeuvre peculiar to the systems of modern power.
Instead, he sees it as a strategy of power attested to in representations of
political sovereignty throughout the Indo-European world from its
earliest origins. Moreover, he views this formation of binary distinctions
taking place in the shape of an ‘appropriation’ or ‘capture’.79 The action
of ‘capture’ according to which these binary distinctions are formed is
important because in the process the form of the very object that is
appropriated becomes distorted.80 The ‘desire’ that is appropriated by
the strategy of power is formed into an organised opposition to ‘law’.
The ‘war’ that is appropriated by the strategy of power is reshaped into
an organised opposition to ‘politics’. In this process, a new distinction
emerges between the concepts of war and desire as they exist within a
dialectical system of organised oppositions on the one hand and the
concepts of war and desire as they exist in and of themselves. The
question for Deleuze, in seeking to resist this strategy of ‘double
articulation’, is how to provide an invocation for forms of thought based
on a principle of difference rather than contradiction. The invocation of
this principle of difference is itself both an act of war and of desire
simultaneously. It is a case of bringing ‘a furor to bear against
sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a
power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the
apparatus’.81
The heat of this disagreement became apparent in Foucault’s work
in ways that were slightly more obvious than in the work of Deleuze.
The thrust of Foucault’s critique of the repression-hypothesis of the
relation between power and desire in The History of Sexuality was
directed in name, among others, at the work of Wilhelm Reich.82 It was
Reich’s groundbreaking work on the relation between desire and the
social field that partly inspired Deleuze to pursue the lines of argument
that he did in Anti-Oedipus.83 In this sense, it is difficult not to read The
History of Sexuality, at least in part, as a critique of Deleuze’s attempt to
create a new philosophy of social resistance based upon desire. This is
not to suggest that the writing of The History of Sexuality was conditioned
79. Ibid., 460.

80. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London, Athlone Press, 1997), 51.
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.
76

entirely by the dispute between Deleuze and Foucault. It is to recognise

the extent to which these two particular texts represented an important
point of passage and divergence in the development of the relationship
between these two seminal thinkers.
While The History of Sexuality acted to undermine Deleuze’s
assertions as to the relation between power and desire developed in
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze partly used A Thousand Plateaus to respond to that
attack by undercutting Foucault’s thesis on the relation between war and
power as developed in The History of Sexuality. Surprisingly, this aspect
of the Deleuze-Foucault debate has been utterly ignored by critics of
both their works. It is important not only in terms of qualifying the
differing approaches to the problem of power developed by Deleuze and
Foucault respectively, but also in terms of the ways in which it sheds
light on their differing claims to the legacy of Nietzsche. While it is
commonly asserted that both display a ‘fundamental Nietzscheanism’ in
their work, Deleuze’s understanding of war is much closer to Nietzsche
than that of Foucault. In the following section, therefore, I reflect on the
extent to which Deleuze’s discourse of war is informed by Nietzsche and
on how Deleuze’s redevelopment of Nietzsche’s understanding of war
acts to counter critiques of Nietzsche’s philosophy that accuse him of
having 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 recalls
Nietzsche’s promise that his philosophy would produce ‘wars such as
there have never yet been on earth’.84 Of the many different
philosophical influences that preyed upon Deleuze, Nietzsche’s was one
of the most significant. Certainly, I would argue that Deleuze’s
deployment of the concept of war within his philosophy derives directly
from his reading of Nietzsche. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze
differentiates between the warrior-thought of Nietzsche and the
legislator-thought of the Enlightenment.85 It is Nietzsche who first
provokes Deleuze into arguing that the concept of the warrior invokes a
different image of thought to that of the man of the state whom he
associates with the Enlightenment. The object of thought — wisdom —
is for Deleuze as much as it is for Nietzsche the object of the warrior, for
____________________
84. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 127.

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).
77

Millennium
wisdom loves only a warrior.86 To be a warrior, he argues, is to yield a

force ‘which seizes thought in order to make it something affirmative
and active’ over and against the reactive forces that condition thought
into 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 central
themes of Deleuze’s philosophy is a deliberate continuation of
Nietzsche’s efforts to combat the particular influence of Hegel. In his
original study of Nietzsche, Deleuze describes Hegel as the ‘target’, the
‘opponent’, and the ‘enemy’ at which Nietzsche directs the promise of
war.88 It is in the same vein that Deleuze attempts to conceptualise the
grounds on which a war will be conducted against the sovereignty of the
state, for Hegel’s philosophy is, according to Deleuze, a kind of
vindication of the strategy by which the state maintains its hold over
thought.89 It is what he calls ‘state philosophy’.90 The war that Deleuze
urges upon the state apparatus is, importantly, a war upon the Hegelian
conception of thought. When Deleuze refers to ‘the sovereignty of the
state’ he does not only mean the specific institutions by which states
achieve the subservience of citizens and the recognition of other states.
Rather, he means this strategy of the ‘double articulation’ of thought that
he identifies with the strategy of the state, as represented in Indo-
European myth, and recapitulated with the birth of the modern era and
the emergence of the Hegelian tradition in philosophy. Deleuze draws
no direct distinction between this strategy of the state as it is attested to
in myth and as it is represented in modern philosophical thought,
particularly Hegel. Deleuze’s main philosophical task is to pursue the
question of whether there is a way to extricate thought from the
Hegelian state model. As he argues, ‘the less people take thought
seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the state wants.
Truly, what man of the state has not dreamed of that paltry impossible
thing — to be a thinker?’.91
The fact that Deleuze builds on Nietzschean thought to construct
his concept of war against the state is inevitably controversial, given the
extent to which the latter has been associated with the so-called
‘fascicisation’ of social and political thought in the late nineteenth
century and the consequent war that fascism waged upon the existing
____________________

88. Ibid., 8.
90. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 41.
92. Neocleous, Fascism, 2.
78

state-system.92 Yet Deleuze, like Nietzsche, is dedicated expressly to

contesting fascism. One other way of summarising his politico-
philosophical project is, as Foucault otherwise did, in terms of a struggle
to combat the ‘major enemy’ and ‘strategic adversary’ of fascism.
Deleuze ventures on a search for strategies through which to
outmanoeuvre and outmobilise ‘not only historical fascism... but also the
fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the
fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that
dominates and exploits us’.93
The ‘affirmative and active’ character of thought that defines
Deleuze’s war is absolutely pivotal in differentiating between the form
of war discourse that he develops and the wars of modern states,
especially those of fascistic states. Examining the war discourse of
Deleuze, it is difficult to underestimate the extent to which he builds on
Nietzsche’s original understanding of war in order not only to provide a
counter-discourse to that of fascism, but also to rehabilitate the
Nietzschean discourse of war. Deleuze offers us an understanding of the
relationship between war and fascism that is distinct from the mainstay
of traditional interpretations of that link. In turn, he develops his own
discourse of war, exhibiting a fundamental Nietzscheanism that offers
us, 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, he
extricates Nietzschean thought from its embodiment within the
historical legacy of fascism.
Critical appraisals of Deleuze’s theorisation of fascism have all
tended to focus squarely upon his arguments as to the relation between
fascism and desire.95 There exists no substantial interpretative criticism
of his work on the relationship between fascism and war. In respect of
the relationship between fascism and desire, Deleuze concurs strongly
with Reich, who argued that fascism cannot be explained as a form of
ideology that somehow deceived the populations engaged by it. The
masses were not fooled, as others have tended to suggest, into
complying with the fascistic programmes of their respective states.96
Much rather, they actually desired it. Hence, Deleuze argues that to
account for fascism it is necessary to seek an understanding in terms of
desire rather than ideology. Deleuze’s first co-authored work with
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, is dominated by this very debate over the
relation between fascism and desire. However, in their second volume,
____________________
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.
79

Millennium
A Thousand Plateaus, desire plays a much smaller role. They engage

largely with the relationship between fascism and war. Again this
reflects the extent to which Deleuze’s concept of war and its relation to
power compliments his conception of desire and of the relation between
desire and power.
Fascism, according to Deleuze, functions by turning the desire of a
body or of a population in upon itself, ultimately to the point of its own
suicidal self-destruction. Rather than desire operating according to
principles dictated to it by the rational interests of an established
population, desire pursues the subjugation and ultimate destruction of
the body or population in which those rational interests are invested.
Accordingly, the fascist state is the ‘suicidal state’ that desires its own
death.97 In this sense, Deleuze’s understanding of the relation between
desire and fascism resembles other traditional understandings of the
origins of fascism as a form of revolt against the commitment of the
Enlightenment to the subjugation of nature by reason. Similar to Adorno
and Horkheimer’s account, Deleuze stresses that fascism represents a
specific type of revolt that is itself a product of a system of thought
specific to the socio-historic conditions of the Enlightenment.98 When
fascism invoked the power of desire, nature and war over and against
the forces of reason, humanity and politics, it did not contest the
defining presupposition of Enlightenment thinking that there are
essential binary forces that hold these concepts in necessary relationship
to each other. Fascism merely contested the traditional hierarchical
arrangements of Enlightenment thought through which the categories of
desire, nature and war are held in relational subjugation within a moral
order enforced by reason, humanity, and politics. Fascism did not, for
example, contest the construction of nature within Enlightenment
discourse as barbarism. Rather, fascism invoked a concept of nature as
barbarism in order to contest the discipline of Enlightenment thought. In
the same way, fascism did not challenge the state’s concept of war as a
force of violence that requires conditioning by political reason. Rather, it
invoked the very violence with which war was identified with in
subjugation of the state in its rational form. Fascism attempted to reverse
the flow of force within the relational order of the Enlightenment. As
such it was itself a product of that very form of thought contingent to the
birth of the modern era.
As long as thought is conditioned by the conceptual framework of
the Enlightenment, fascism remains a threat. This is Deleuze’s
____________________

98. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
(London: Verso, 1979).
80

argument for attempting to wage a war upon the ‘state philosophy’ of

dialectical thinkers such as Hegel. While fascism attempted merely to
reverse the order of dialectical relations through which desire was held
in check by reason, Deleuzean strategies operate in distinction, by
allowing desire to escape upon what he calls ‘lines of flight’.99 A line of
flight is the operation of deterritorialisation by which the dialectical
stratification of relations between reason and desire becomes ruptured
to the point where the objectives of desire are no longer defined in
relation to reason, but take on aims of their own. Deleuze cites the
writings of Kleist and Kafka as examples of forms of thought that have
pursued a line of flight in disregard of the established genealogies of the
traditions of literature in which they were produced.100 In this sense, he
believes they contested the ways in which power shapes and conditions
the very framework of development according to which ideas emerge,
even when such ideas are nominally considered to offer some element
of transcendence of existing structures of thought. The lines of flight
that thinkers such as Kleist or Kafka traversed are to be distinguished
from the ways in which power strategises the lines of development
upon which thought traverses. The line of flight is also, importantly, to
be distinguished from the ‘line of destruction’ that defines the reversal
of relations that occurs within the order of fascist power between desire
and reason.101
The fascist state being the ‘suicidal state’ required a modus operandi
upon which to fulfil its objective of destruction. In order to pursue the
destruction of its own population, Nazism required a military strategy
with which to legitimise the destruction of its own people. 102 As such, it
is in the genealogy of fascist military strategy that one finds the most
vivid representation of the ways in which this perversion of the relation
between desire and reason was played out. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze demonstrates this by exploring the dialectical development of
modern military strategic thought that occurs, as he argues, in the shape
of an oscillation between total and limited forms of war.103 This
oscillation, dependent upon the shifting mechanics of a dialectical
relation between politics and war within the Clausewitzian paradigm of
strategy, mirrors closely the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ that is depicted
as occurring between reason and nature by Adorno and Horkheimer.104
As they construed fascism emerging in the form of a revolt on the part
____________________

100. Ibid., 24-25.
101. Ibid., 229-230.
102. Ibid., 231.
103. Ibid., 420-421.
104. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
81

Millennium
of nature against reason, so Deleuze identifies in the military strategic

theory of the Third Reich a revolt and reverse subjugation upon the part
of war against politics. The Nazi state was ‘the suicidal state’ defined by
its adoption of a military strategy of total war. Total war was justified by
the military strategists of the Third Reich by reversing the Clausewitzian
tradition of limited war in which war is construed as the continuation of
politics by other means, arguing instead that it was necessary to
subjugate politics to the ends of war.105 Although Deleuze does not
directly cite Nazi military strategists, the veracity of his observations is
confirmed in the writings of, for example, the Nazi general Ludendorff’s
claims that Nazi Germany’s military strategy had ‘superseded’
Clausewitzian thought.106 This reversal was, Deleuze argues, highly
significant. It represented not ‘a state army taking power, but a war
machine taking over the state’.107
In this sense, Deleuze confers with traditional conceptualisations of
total war as emerging when and where the state loses control of the
institutions of war which it originally founded in order to ground its
sovereignty. Total wars involve the subjugation of the political
institutions of the state apparatus by those of the military. In these
instances, war conditions the ends of the state rather than performing a
functional role in pursuit of political ends. This in effect is a reversal of
the doctrine of limited war which explicitly dictates the subjugation of
war to the ends of the state where the state defines its ends in accordance
with some conception of political reason. As Deleuze argues, however,
the conditions for total war remain within the remit of the evolution of
the state form. Drawing on the work of John U. Nef, he argues that ‘total
war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes
as its “centre” not only the enemy army, or the enemy state, but the
entire population and its economy’.108 As such, this form of war does not
seek to challenge the economic and socio-political bases of the state.
Rather it ‘realizes the maximal conditions of the appropriation of the war
machine by the state apparatus’.109 Deleuze’s project is to deterritorialise
war from its mode of subjugation by the state and send it on a ‘mutant
line of flight’ rather than the ‘cold line of abolition’ that it assumes under
the guise of fascism. Such a project is not based upon the direct objective
of 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
____________________

106. Ludendorff, The Nation at War (London: Hutchinson, 1936), 12.
109. Ibid.
82

state philosophy. Deleuze seeks ‘the composition of a smooth space and

of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine
does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object,
now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic
expressed by the State’.110
Deleuze offers us a twofold concept of war. The strategy of the state
is dependent upon its capacity to facilitate the integration of war within
its apparatus and the consequent organisation of a military function by
turning the war machine into a state army. Indeed, this integration of
war, or ‘appropriation’ as Deleuze conceptualises it, is itself a function of
the strategy of the state rather than simply facilitating the pursuit of
strategy vis-à-vis other states. However, the appropriation of the war
machine by the state is never fully achieved to its satisfaction because
the war machine in itself is irreducible to the state apparatus, existing
outside its sovereignty and prior to its law.111 There is, then, always a
distinction to be drawn between the forms of ‘real war’ theorised,
conceptualised and conducted by states, and ‘absolute war’, the pure
idea of which ‘is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary but
that of a war machine that does not have war as its object and that only
entertains a potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war’.112
The stress Deleuze places on this twofold differentiation between a
concept of war conditioned by state philosophy and practised by state
institutions, and a concept of a war machine the object of which is not
war itself, is important in so far as it serves to complexify Foucault’s
conception of a strategy of modern power premised on the ‘realisation’
of the laws of war within Western societies.113 For if there is a war
machine that escapes the definition of war as conditioned by state
philosophy, then there is still hope that war itself might serve as a
principal for forms of thought that neither bulwark the strategy of state
power as Foucault portrays, nor send the state upon a suicidal line of
destruction as fascist counter-discourses on war have done, but instead
draw a creative line of flight in disregard of the state apparatus.
Indeed, he argues that there does already exist such a tradition of
what we might call ‘anti-strategic thought’ constituted in the work of
thinkers that he identifies with the war machine: Kleist, Kafka, Shestov
and Kierkegaard among others. Deleuze also advances the argument
that Clausewitz, ordinarily assumed to be an archetypal strategist of the
state, in fact provides the theoretical means for the distinction between
____________________
110. Ibid., 422.

111. Ibid., 352.
112. Ibid., 420.
113. Dillon and Reid, ‘Global Liberal Governance’, Reid, ‘Foucault on
Clausewitz’.
83

Millennium
the real wars of states and the absolute wars of the nomad war machine.
This conceptualisation of the relation between war and thought in
Deleuze’s work owes, as I demonstrated, more to Nietzsche than any
other source. For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, there is an essence to war that
escapes its codification by state power. It is comprehension of this
distinction that allows Deleuze to argue for the willing of ‘war against
past and future wars’ with the same seemingly paradoxical irony that
Nietzsche promised a ‘war of spirits’ against the wars posited by
existing power structures.114
The impact of Deleuze’s conception of the war machine and the
polemical subjectivity that forms within it can be seen even more clearly
in 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 of
the strategic imaginary that informs the war against the existing global
liberal order. As a result, war no longer figures as a type of means that
can be distinguished from the forms of resistant subjectivity that employ
it but is figurative of a new form of subjectivity. Orthodox variants of
Marxism understood themselves as performing a necessary utilisation of
the instruments of war as a means with which to pursue grand
idealisations of society, the ethical and political repercussions of which
were accepted as exceeding the immediate repercussions of war. This
Deleuzean project of reconceiving a polemical subjectivity is born
precisely out of a rejection of the implications of any attempt to treat war
as some form of passage, a utile instrument to be suborned and put to
work in the name of some universal set of ideals that can be pursued
bereft of prudence. It is in this context that Deleuze’s work is inspiring
the development of a form of subjectivity that seeks war as its condition,
but also reappropriates the form of war from the sovereign power of
state-thought. Under conditions of a form of society and a form of power
that creates peace through war, that strategises the human through the
____________________
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 of
the 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 and
Politics (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 108-119.
84

deployment of sciences and knowledge forms that derive from war, the
only viable response is the commitment to an engagement with the
permanent ongoing reactivation of the principle activity of war. Not war
subject to the conditions of the sovereign power of state-thought. Rather a
war 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.
––––––––––––––––––––––––
85

Reid, J. - Deleuze - S War Machine. Nomadism Against The State

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Reid, J. - Deleuze - S War Machine. Nomadism Against The State

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism

Against the State

This article contributes to an emerging body of post-structuralist

My genius is in my nostrils... I contradict as has never been

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

that are definitive of Deleuze’s political thought. Problems of resistance

6. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

becoming’. Deleuze’s war, construed in terms of the exposure of existing

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

conceptualisation of the relation of war to power, and to bolster his

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Nietzsche’s discourse of war is important not least because of the extent

Deleuze on the Exteriority of the War Machine to the

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

conception of the war machine is very much a faithful extension of

29. I discuss the relation of Virilio’s conception of war to that of Foucault at

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

relates to the rational and legal aspects of sovereignty, Varuna represents

35. Ibid., 121.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

39. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 102.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Deleuze urges that we understand Clausewitz’s formula of the relation

Deleuze on Clausewitz’s Concept of Absolute War

its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity

This conceptualisation of war as a product of the contending forces of

43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

45. P.M. Baldwin, ‘Clausewitz in Nazi Germany’, Journal of Contemporary

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

were, of course, ultimately as defined by violence as they were by

49. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

casualties’ as at Dresden in 1813, as well as yielding him major success

real wars swing between two poles, both subject to State

Wars that approximate towards the extremity of violence do not fail to

54. Clausewitz, On War, 235.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Foucault. The importance of Clausewitz according to Foucault is his

Deleuze vs. Foucault: Power, War, and Desire

59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92-102; Reid, ‘Foucault on Clausewitz’.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Deleuze’s discourse of war can be seen to play a more fundamental role

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

Sexuality. There, Foucault attempts to problematise what he views as

64. Marks, Gilles Deleuze, 118.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

however, from correlative processes of ‘reterritorialisation’. Lines of

69. Ibid., 509.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

transgression of the topography of wants and needs that emerge in

75. Ibid., 26-27.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

79. Ibid., 460.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

entirely by the dispute between Deleuze and Foucault. It is to recognise

Deleuze on Nietzsche: Fascism, War and the State

84. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 127.

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015

wisdom loves only a warrior.86 To be a warrior, he argues, is to yield a