impleri

There is something that is absolute difference.  Deleuze sees it in what he calls the War-Machine.  It is without respect or reason, without emotion or attachment.  It borders on the suicidal and self-defeating.  It is always and absolutely conflictive difference.  It does not accept “community” or the contemporary notion of “diversity.”  It rejects the Hegelian subsumption of difference under identity.  It does not believe in “unity in diversity.”  It engenders hate.  It follows no rules, no laws, no structures.  It does not act for some “good.”  It does not even act for some “evil.”  It simply acts.

Deleuze believes that the best example of the War-Machine is Genghis Khan and his Mongolian warriors.  Even though they conquered the Chinese empire and large portions of the Muslim one, they slept in tents.  They razed cities, drove around the Great Wall, and killed for kicks.  Yet they never built (or rebuilt) cities, did not institute a new government, nor even made it mandatory for the people they destroyed to adhere to their laws.  This is because they had none.  There was no hierarchy.  They were rhizomatic….like weeds.  Yet, because of their lack of respect for laws, rules, and structures, they were also suicidal.  At any moment, they could have brought about their own destruction.  Yet they would still act without remorse.

Another example is that of Geronimo.  Here was a man upset at the Spanish.  Along with just two troops, he snuck past the guards and into the center of the Spanish encampment…and opened fire.  They were able to shoot 20 people dead.  It was a massacre by three.  That is the intensity of the War-Machine.

Today, there are many groups surfacing in this mode.  I say “mode” because it is not something one can always avoid.  Currently, the Christian Right, as well as other groups of neofundamentalists (e.g. the al Qaeda brand), are becoming machinic.  They are moving towards that suicidal grasp.  The recent problem with Ted Haggard is one such example.  One cannot become the War-Machine without losing control, ethics, and morality.  The War-Machine is pre-philosophic, pre-ethical, pre-morality.  It is passion and intensity.  It deterritorializes its past (i.e. removes the context of its past in which it is situated) and creates a new context which disregards both its contemporary locality and its historical context.  As Nietzsche said (On the Genealogy of Morals, of which Deleuze quotes often), “They come like fate, without resaon, consideration, or pretext…”  The War-Machine becomes the face of the other: a blank wall with two dark eyes.  It is the completely unknown.