this week minfeub watched Aftersun. rachel picked it because she was looking for movies directed by women which can be a bit hard sometimes & she hadn’t seen this one
[309] Pierre Boulez, *Conversations with Celestin Deliege* (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 68–71 (“It is not possible to introduce phenomena of tempo into music that has been calculated only electronically, in ... lengths expressed in seconds or microseconds”; p. 70).
[310] Ray Bradbury, *The Machineries of Joy (New* York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 53.
[311] [TRANS: Virginia Woolf, *Mrs. Dalloway* (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1925), p. 11.]
[312] Gustave Guillaume has proposed a very interesting conception of the verb. He distinguishes between an interior time, enveloped in the “process,” and an exterior time pertaining to the distinction between epochs *(Epoques et niveaux temporels dans lesysteme de la conjugaisonfrancaise, Cahiers de linguistique structurale* [Universite de Laval, Quebec], no. 4 <verbatim>[1955]).</verbatim> It seems to us that these two poles correspond respectively to the infinitive-becoming, Aeon, and the present-being, Chronos. Each verb leans more or less in the direction of one pole or the other, not only according to its nature, but also according to the nuances of its modes and tenses, with the exception of “becoming” and “being,” which correspond to both poles. Proust, in his study of Flaubert’s style, shows how the imperfect tense in Flaubert takes on the value of an infinitive-becoming: *Chroniques* (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 197–199.]
[313] On the problem of proper names (in what sense is the proper name outside the limits of classification and of another nature, and in what sense is it at the limit and still a part of classification?), see Alan Henderson Gardiner, *The Theory of Proper Names,* 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Levi-Strauss, *The Savage Mind,* chapter 7 (“Time Regained”), pp. 217–244.
[314] We have already encountered this problem of the indifference of psychoanalysis to the use of the indefinite article or pronoun among children: as early as Freud, but more especially in Melanie Klein (the children she analyzes, in particular, Little Richard, speak in terms of “a,” “one,” “people,” but Klein exerts incredible pressure to turn them into personal and possessive family locutions). It seems to us that Laplanche and Pontalis are the only ones in psychoanalysis to have had any inkling that indefinites play a specific role; they protested against any overrapid interpretive reduction: “Fantasme originaire,” *Les temps modernes,* no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1861, 1868.
[315] See the subjectivist or personalist conception of language in Emile Benveniste, *Problems in General Linguistics,* trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), chapters 20 (“Subjectivity in Language,” pp. 223–230) and 21 (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” pp. 231–238), especially pp. 220–221 and 225–226.
[316] The essential texts of Maurice Blanchot serve to refute the theory of the “shifter” and of personology in linguistics. See *L’entretien infini* (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556–567. And on the difference between the two propositions, “I am unfortunate” and “he is unfortunate,” or between “I die” and “one dies,” see *La part du feu* (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 29–30, and *The Space of Literature,* trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 90, 122, 126. Blanchot demonstrates that in all of these cases the indefinite has nothing to do with “the banality of daily life,” which on the contrary would be on the side of the personal pronoun.
[317] [TRANS: These quotes, the first from Nietzsche, the second from Kafka, are quoted more fully in 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” p. 353.]
[318] For example, Francois Cheng, *Chinese Poetic Writing,* trans. Donald A. Riggs and Jerome P. Seaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), his analysis of what he calls “the passive procedures,” pp. 23–42.
this movie failed to make me feel anything. if playtime was a glass of water, this is a bowl of unflavored oatmeal. idk, maybe i don’t “taste” what other people liked about this movie
[319] See the statements of the “repetitive” American musicians, particularly Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
[320] Nathalie Sarraute, in *The Age of Suspicion,* trans. Marie Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust, for example, is torn between the two planes, in that he extracts from his characters “the infinitesimal particles of an impalpable matter,” but also glues all of the particles back into a coherent form, slips them into the envelope of this or that character. See pp. 50, 94–95.
[321] See the distinction between the two Planes in Artaud. One of them is denounced as the source of all illusions: *The Peyote Dance* (translation of Las *Tarahumaras),* trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 12–13.
[322] Robert Rovini, introduction to Friedrich Holderlin, *Hyperion* (Paris: 10/18,1968).
[323] We have referred to an unpublished study of Kleist by Mathieu Carriere.
[324] “Where did the title of your second book, *A Year From Monday,* come from?” “From a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico ‘a year from next Monday.’ We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It’s a form of silence.... The very fact that our plan failed, the fact we were unable to meet does not mean that everything failed. The plan wasn’t a failure”; John Cage and Daniel Charles, *For the Birds* (Boston: Marion Boyers, 1981), pp. 116–117.
[325] That is why we were able to take Goethe as an example of a transcendental plane. Goethe, however, passes for a Spinozist; his botanical and zoological studies uncover an immanent plane of composition, which allies him to Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (this resemblance has often been pointed out). Nonetheless, Goethe retains the twofold idea of a development of form and a formation-education of the Subject; for this reason, his plane of immanence has already crossed over to the other side, to the other pole.
[326] On all of these points (proliferations-dissolutions, accumulations, indications of speed, the affective and dynamic role), see Pierre Boulez, *Conversations with Celestin Deliege,* pp. 21–22, 68–71. In another text, Boulez stresses a little-known aspect of Wagner: not only are the leitmotifs freed from their subordination to the scenic characters, but the speeds of development are freed from the hold of a “formal code” or a tempo (“Le temps re-cherche,” in *Das Rheingold Programmheft,* vol. I [Bayreuth, 1976], pp. 3–11). Boulez pays homage to Proust for being one of the first to understand this floating and transformable role of Wagnerian motifs.
[327] The themes of speed and slowness are most extensively developed in *The Captive:* “To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others even better-looking do not, we must realise that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corresponding to that which in physics denotes speed... to such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings”; vol. 3 *oi Remembrance of Things Past,* trans. C. K. Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 86–87, 88.
[328] [TRANS: The word translated as “proximity” is *voisinage,* which Deleuze and Guattari draw from set theory. The corresponding mathematical term in English is “neighborhood.”]
-avery
[329] Louis Wolfson, *Leschizo et les langues,* preface by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
[330] Rene Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem, *Co-ire, Recherche,* no. 22 (1976), pp. 76–82: see their critique of Bettelheim’s thesis, which considers the becomings-animal of the child merely an autistic symbolism that expresses the anxiety of the parents more than any reality of the child. See Bruno Bettelheim, *The Empty Fortress* (New York: Free Press, 1967).
[331] Philippe Gavi, “Les philosophes du fantastique,” *Liberation,* March 31, 1977. For the preceding cases, what we must arrive at is an understanding of certain so-called neurotic behaviors as a function of becomings-animal, instead of relegating becomings-animal to a psychoanalytic interpretation of behaviors. We saw this in relation to masochism (and Lolito explains that the origin of his feats lies in certain masochistic experiences; a fine text by Christian Maurel conjugates a becoming-monkey and a becoming-horse in a masochistic pairing). Anorexia would also have to be understood from the point of view of becoming-animal.
[333] See Trost, *Visible et invisible* (Paris: Arcanes) and *Librement m’ecanique* (Paris: Minotaure): “She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come.”
[334] See the examples of structural explanation proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, in *Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne,* pp. 15–16.
[335] On transvestism in primitive societies, see Bruno Bettelheim (who offers an identificatory psychological interpretation), *Symbolic Wounds* (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1954), and especially Gregory Bateson (who proposes an original structural interpretation), *Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of Views,* 2<sup>nd</sup> ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958).
[337] *The Diary of Virginia Woolf,* ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 209: “The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom.” On all of these points, we make use of an unpublished study on Virginia Woolf by Fanny Zavin.
[338] [TRANS: Sdren Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling,* trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 104.]
[339] Ibid., .p. 49. *Fear and Trembling* seems to us to be Kierkegaard’s greatest book because of the way it formulates the problem of movement and speed, not only in its content, but also in its’style and composition.
[341] Carlos Castaneda, *Journey to Ixtlan* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 297ff.
bye, dad
[342] Leslie Fiedler, *The Return of the Vanishing American* (New York: Stein and Day, 1968). Fiedler explains the secret alliance of the white American with the black or the Indian by a desire to escape the molar form and ascendancy of the American woman.
[343] Henri Michaux, *Miserable Miracle: Mescaline,* trans. Louise Varese (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963), p. 87: “The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas.... Now only a line... the accelerated line I had become.” See Michaux’s line drawings. In the first eighty pages of *The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones,* trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), Michaux further develops the analysis of speeds, molecular perceptions, and “microphenomena” or “microoperations.”
[344] [TRANS: A rewriting of Freud’s famous phrase, “Where id was, there ego shall be” *(New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition,* vol. 22, p. 80), and Lacan’s earlier rewriting of it in “The Freudian Thing,” *Ecrits,* trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 128–129,136.]
[346] Michaux, *Miserable Miracle* (“Remaining Master of One’s Speeds,” pp. 87–88).
[347] On the possibilities of silicon, and its relation to carbon from the point of view of organic chemistry, see the article, “Silicium,” in the *Encyclopedia Universalis.*
[348] Luc de Heusch shows that it is the man of war who brings the secret: he thinks, eats, loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the State proceeds publicly. See *Le roi ivre ou I’origine de VEtat* (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea of the State secret is a late one and assumes that the war machine has been appropriated by the State apparatus.
[349] In particular, Georg Simmel. See *The Sociology ofGeorg Simmel,* trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), chapter 3.
[350] Paul Ernest Joset clearly notes these two aspects of the secret initiatory society, the Mambela of the Congo: on the one hand, its relation of influence over the traditional political leaders, which gets to the point of a transfer of social powers; and on the other hand, its de facto relation with the Anioto, as a secret hindsociety of crime or leopard-men (even if the Anioto are of another origin than the Mambela). See *Les societes secretes des hommes-leopards en Afrique noire,* chapter 5.
[351] On the psychoanalytic conceptions of the secret, see *Du secret, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse,* no. 14 (Fall 1976); and for the evolution of Freud on this subject, the article by Claude Girard, “Le secret aux origines,” pp. 55–83.
[352] Bernard Pingaud shows, on the basis of the exemplary text of Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” *[The Novels and Tales of Henry James* (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907–1917), vol. 15—Trans.], how the secret jumps from content to form, and escapes both: *Du secret,* pp. 247–249. This text has been frequently commented upon from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis; above all, J.-B. Pontalis, *Apres Freud* (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). But psychoanalysis remains prisoner to a necessarily disguised content and a necessarily symbolic form (structure, absent cause ...), at a level that defines both the unconscious and language. That is why, in its aesthetic or literary applications, it misses the secret *in* an author, as well as the secret <em>oj</em>an author. The same goes for the secret of Oedipus: they concern themselves with the first two kinds of secret but not with the second, which is nevertheless the most important.
-mal
[353] On the fogginess of the idea of majority, see Kenneth Arrow’s two famous themes, “the Condorcet effect” and the “theorem of collective decision.”
[354] See William Faulkner, *Intruder in the Dust (New* York: Vintage, 1948), p. 216. Speaking of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families), Faulkner writes, “We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alternative but to be a Nazi or a Jew.”
[355] The subordination of the line to the point is clearly evident in the arborescent schemas: see Julien Pacotte, *Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pensee* (Paris: Hermann, 1936), and the status of centered or hierarchical systems according to Pierre Rosenthiehl and Jean Petitot, “Automate asocial et systemes acentres,” *Communications,* no. 22 (1974), pp. 45–62. The arborescent schema of majority could be presented as follows:
[356] A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or in relation to their contiguity:
[357] *The Diary of Virginia Woolf,* vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, November 28, 1928). The same thing applies to the works of Kafka, in which childhood blocks function as the opposite of childhood memories. Proust’s case is more complicated because he performs a mixture of the two. The situation of the psychoanalyst is to grasp memories or phantasies, but never childhood blocks.
[358] For example, in the system of memory, the formation of a memory implies a diagonal that turns present A into representation A’ in relation to the new present B, and into A” in relation to C, etc.:
<br>See Edmund Husserl, *The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,* ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, intro. Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 48–50.
[359] Friedrich Nietzsche, *Untimely Meditations,* trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” sec. 1, pp. 63–64.
[360] On all of these themes, see Pierre Boulez. (1) On how transversals always tend to escape horizontal and vertical coordinates of music, sometimes even drawing “virtual lines,” see *Notes of an Apprenticeship,* ed. Paule Thevenin, trans. Robert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 231 -232,295–301,382–383. (2) On the idea of the sound block or “block of duration,” in relation to this transversal, see *Boulez on Music Today,* trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 55–59. (3) On the distinction between points and blocks, “punctual sets,” and “aggregative sets” with varying individuality, see “Sonate que me veux-tu?”, *Mediations,* no. 7 (1964). The hatred of memory appears frequently in Boulez; see “Eloge de l’amnesie,” *Musique enjeu,* no. 4 (1971), pp. 5–14, and “J’ai horreur du souvenir,” in *Roger Desormiere et son temps,* ed. Denise Mayer and Pierre Souvtchinsky (Monaco: Ed. du Rocher, 1966). Confining ourselves to contemporary examples, one finds analogous declarations in Stravinsky, Cage, Berio. Of course, there is a musical memory that is tied to coordinates and is exercised in social settings (getting up, going to bed, beating a retreat). But the perception of a musical “phrase” appeals less to memory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable *blocks of forgetting:* for example, what Jean Barraque calls “slices of forgetting” and “absent developments” in the work of Debussy; *Debussy* (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 169–171. One can refer to a general study by Daniel Charles, “La musique etl’oubli,” *Traverses,* no. 4 (1977), pp. 14–23.
[361] Roland Barthes, “Rasch,” in *The Responsibility of Forms,* trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 300–302, 308–309.
a film of many dads
[362] There are many differences among painters, in all respects, but also a common movement: see Wassily Kandinsky, *Point and Line to Plane* in vol. 2 of *Complete Writings on Art,* ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 524–700; and Paul Klee, *On Modern Art,* trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966). The aim of statements like those of Mondrian on the exclusive value of the vertical and the horizontal is to show the conditions under which the vertical and horizontal are sufficient to create a transversal, which does not even have to be drawn; for example, coordinates of unequal thickness intersect inside the frame and extend outside the frame, opening a “dynamic axis” running transversally (see Michel Butor’s comments in *Repertoire* [Paris: Minuit, 1960—], vol. 3, “Le carre et son habitant”). One can also consult Michel Fried’s article on Pollock’s line, *Three American Painters* (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Henry Miller’s discussion of Nash’s line, *On Turning Eighty* (London: Village Press, 1973).
[363] “There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense was the maddened exasperation within him”; D. H. Lawrence, *Aaron’s Rod* (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 16.
[364] Although Luciano Berio indicates otherwise, it seems to us that his work, *Visage,* is composed according to the three states of faciality: first, a multiplicity of sound bodies and silhouettes, then a short symphonic and dominant organization of the face, and finally a launching of probe-heads in all directions. However, there is no question here of music “imitating” the face and its avatars, or of the voice constituting a metaphor. Instead, the sounds accelerate the deterritorialization of the face, giving it a properly acoustical power, and the face reacts musically by in turn inducing a deterritorialization of the voice. This is a molecular face, produced by electronic music. The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for an instant, and outlives it, increasing in speed—on the condition that it is unarticulated, asignifying, asubjective.
[365] Will Grohman, *Paul Klee* (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.): “Somewhat paradoxically he remarked that perhaps it had been his good fortune to develop painting, at least on the formal plane, to the stage reached in music by Mozart” (p. 71).
[366] Dominique Fernandez, *La rose des Tudors* (Paris: Julliard, 1976) (and the novel *Porporino* [Paris: Grasset, 1974]). Fernandez cites pop music as a timid return to great English vocal music. It would be necessary to take into consideration techniques of circular breathing, in which one sings breathing in as well as out, or of sound filtering using zones of resonance (nose, forehead, cheekbones—a properly musical use of the face).
[367] Marcel More, *Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux* (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
[368] As we have seen, imitation can be conceived either as a resemblance of terms culminating in an archetype (series), or as a correspondence of relations constituting a symbolic order (structure); but becoming is not reducible to either of these. The concept of mimesis is not only inadequate, it is radically false.
[369] Francois Truffaut, *Hitchcock(New* York: Simon and Schuster, 1967): “I took the dramatic licence of not having the birds scream at all” (p. 224).
[370] See Ernesto de Martino, *La terredu remords* (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 142–170. Martino, however, retains an interpretation based on the archetype, imitation, and identification.
[371] Jean Claude *Larouche, Alexis le trotteur* (Montreal: Ed. du Jour, 1971). They quote this account: “He didn’t play music with his mouth like one of us; he had a huge harmonica we couldn’t even play.... When he played with us, he would decide all of a sudden to double us. In other words, he doubled the beat; in the time we played one beat, he played two, which required extraordinary wind” (p. 95).
HEROIN DAD
[372] [TRANS: See Kafka, *The Castle,* trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976).]
[374] Andre Tetry, *Les outils chez les etres vivants* (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), the chapter on “musical instruments,” with bibliography. An animal’s movement or labor may make noise, but we speak of a musical instrument whenever animals use apparatuses whose sole function is to produce various sounds (the musical character, to the extent that it is determinable, is quite variable, as is the case with the vocal apparatus of birds; there are veritable virtuosos among insects). From this standpoint, we distinguish: (1) stridulatory apparatuses, of the stringed instrument type: the rubbing of a rigid surface against another surface (insects, crustaceans, spiders, scorpions, pedipalps); (2) percussive apparatuses, of the drum, cymbal, or xylophone type: direct application of muscles to a vibratory membrane (crickets and certain fish). Not only is there an infinite variety of apparatuses and sounds, but the same animal varies its rhythm, tonality, intensity according to still more mysterious urgencies. “It then becomes a song of anger, anxiety, fear, triumph, love. When there is keen excitation, the rhythm of the stridulation varies: in *Crioceris lilii,* the frequency of the rubbing goes from 228 strokes per minute to 550 or more.”
[375] Gisele Brelet, “Musique contemporaine en France,” in *Histoire de la musique,* ed. Roland Manuel, “Pleiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1166.
[376] A text by Henry Miller for Varese, *The Air-ConditionedNightmare* (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. 176–177.
[377] Fernand Deligny, *Voix et Voir, Recherches,* no. 8 (April 1975), on the way in which, among autistic children, a “line of drift” deviates from the customary path and begins to “vibrate,” “toss about,” “yaw.”
[378] Paul Klee, *On Modern Art,* trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966), p. 43 [translation modified to agree with the French version cited by the authors]. See Henri Maldiney’s comments in *Regard, parole, espace* (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), pp. 149–151.
[379] On the musical nome, the ethos, and the ground or land, notably in polyphony, see Joseph Samson in *Histoire de la musique,* ed. Roland Manuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1168–1172. One may also refer to the role in Arab music of the “maqam,” which is both a modal type and a melodic formula: Simon Jargy, *La musique arabe* (Paris: PUF, 1971), pp. 55ff.
[380] Gaston Bachelard, *La dialectique de la dur’ee* (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128–129. Emphasis added.
[381] Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, *Mondesanimauxet mondehumain* (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).
[382] “Their glorious dress is constant.... The coloring of coral fish is distributed in large, sharply contrasting areas of the body. This is quite different from the color patterns not only of most fresh-water fish but of nearly all less aggressive and less territorial fish.... Like the colors of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale signals from a distance to all members of its species that a territory has found an owner.” Konrad Lorenz, *On Aggression,* trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 19–20.
dad loves heroin too much. he has a problem. but he must hide it from his daughter - she must not learn his terrible secret addiction.
[383] Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, *Ethology,* trans. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975): on monkeys, p. 487; on rabbits, p. 346; on birds, p. 171: “Zebra finches with colorful plumage maintain a certain distance from one another, while all-white birds of the same species perch much closer together.”
[384] W. H. Thorpe, *Learning and Instinct in Animals* (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 364 (Fig. 2).
[385] Lorenz has a constant tendency to present territoriality as an effect of intraspecific aggression; see *On Agression,* pp. 38–39, 42–43, 53–54, 161–162.
[386] On the aesthetic and vital primacy of “having,” see Gabriel Tarde, *L’opposition universelle* (Paris: Alcan, 1897).
[387] Details on Messiaen’s conceptions of bird song, his evaluation of its aesthetic qualities, and his methods for both reproducing it and using it as a material are to be found in Claude Samuel, *Conversations with Olivier Messiaen,* trans. Felix Aprahamian (London: Stainer and Bell, 1976), and in Antoine Golea, *Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen* (Paris: Julliard, 1961). In particular, on why Messiaen does not use a tape recorder or sonograph as ornithologists usually do, see Samuel, pp. 61–63.
[389] On all of these points, see Claude Samuel, *Conversations,* chapter 4. On the “rhythmic character,” see pp. 36–39.
[390] Pierre Boulez, “Le temps re-cherche,” in *Das Rheingold Programmheft,* vol. 1 (Bayreuth, 1976), pp. 5–15.
[391] [<sub>TRANS</sub>: Proust, *The Captive,* vol. 3 *of Remembrance of Things Past,* trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 156. Translation modified.]
[392] On mannerism and chaos, baroque dances, and the relation of schizophrenia to mannerism and dance, see Evelyne Sznycer, “Droit de suite baroque,” in *Schizophrenic et art,* ed. Leo Navratil (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1978).
[393] Lorenz, *On Aggression,* pp. 39–40. On the three rhythmic personages defined respectively as active, passive, and witness, see Messiaen and Golea, *Rencontres,* pp. 90–91.
GAY DAD
[394] [TRANS: Mircea Eliade, *Patterns in Comparative Religion,* trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: World, 1963), pp. 242–243.]
[395] [TRANS: This “close embrace” of energies recalls Proust’s description of Vinteuil’s little phrase; *The Captive,* p. 262.]
[396] On “the primary intuition of the earth as a religious form” (p. 242), see Eliade, *Patterns in Comparative Religion,* pp. 245ff.; on the center of the territory, see pp. 374ff. Eliade makes it clear that the center is simultaneously outside the territory, very difficult to attain, and inside the territory, within our immediate reach.
[397] Biologists have often made a distinction between two factors of transformation: those of the mutation type, and processes of isolation or separation, which may be genetic, geographical, or even psychical. Territoriality would be a factor of the second type. See Lucien Cuenot, *L’espece*(Paris: G. Doin, 1936).
[398] Paul Geroudet, *Lespassereaux,* 3 vols. (Paris: Delachaux et Niestle, 1951–1957), vol. 2, pp. 88–94.
[399] In *On Aggression,* Lorenz makes a clear distinction between “anonymous flocks” such as schools of fish, which form milieu blocks; “local groups,” where recognition occurs only inside the territory and, at its strongest, between “neighbors”; and finally, societies founded on an autonomous “bond.”
[400] K. Immelmann, *Beitr’age zu einer vergleichenden Biologie australischer Prachtfinken, Zoologische Jahrbucher; Abteilung fur Systematik, Okologie und Geographic de Tiere,* 90 (1962).
[401] Eibl-Eibesfeldt, *Ethology,* p. 225: “Carrying nesting material for nest building evolved into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the function of staking out a territory, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gregarious and are not really territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing softly while sitting next to the females.” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, however, interprets the grass-stem behavior as a vestige.
[402] See *L’Odyss’ee sous-marine de I’equipe Cousteau,* film no. 36, *La marche des langoustes* (L. R. A.), commentary by Cousteau-Diole: spiny lobsters along the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula sometimes leave their territories. They assemble, at first in small groups, before the first winter storm, and before any sign detectable by human instruments. When the storm comes, they form long march processions, in single file, with a leader that is periodically relieved and a rearguard (the speed of the march is five-eighths of a mile per hour, for sixty miles or more). This migration does not seem to be associated with egg laying, which does not take place until six months later. Hernnkind, a lobster specialist, hypothesizes that this is a “vestige” from the last ice age (more than 10,000 years ago). Cousteau leans toward a more current interpretation, even mentioning the possibility that it is a premonition of a new ice age. The factual issue is that in this exceptional case the lobsters’ territorial assemblage opens onto a social assemblage, and that this social assemblage is connected to cosmic forces, or, as Cousteau says, “pulsations of the earth.” But “the enigma remains entirely unsolved,” all the more so because this lobster procession occasions a slaughter by fishermen, and also because lobsters cannot be tagged since they shed their shells.
[403] The best book of nursery rhymes, and on nursery rhymes, seems to be *Les complines de langue francaise,* with the commentary by editors Jean Beaucomot, Franck Guibat, et al. (Paris: Seghers, 1970). The territorial character of nursery rhymes appears in such privileged examples as “Pimpanicaille,” two distinct versions of which exist in Gruyeres on “the two sides of the street” (pp. 27–28); but it is a nursery rhyme in the strict sense only when there is a distribution of specialized roles in a game, and the formation of an autonomous game assemblage that reorganizes the territory.
dad loves men too much. he has a problem. but he must hide it from his daughter
[404] Nikolaas Tinbergen, *The Study of Instinct* (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969).
[405] On the one hand, the experiments of W. R. Hess have shown that there is not a cerebral center but instead points that are concentrated in one zone and disseminated in another, and are capable of inciting the same effect; conversely, the effect may change according to the duration and intensity of the excitation of a point. On the other hand, E. von Hoist’s experiments on “deafferented” fish demonstrate the importance of central nervous coordination in fin rhythms; Tinbergen’s schema takes these interactions into account only secondarily. The hypothesis of a “population of oscillators” or a “pack of oscillating molecules” forming systems of articulation from the inside, independent of any common measure, is most compelling in view of the problem of circadian rhythms. See A. Reinberg, “La chronobiologie,” *Sciences,* vol. 1(1970); and T. van den Dreissche and A. Reinberg, “Rythmes biologiques,” in *Encyclopedia Universalis,* vol. 14, p. 572: “It does not seem possible to reduce the mechanism of circadian rhythmicity to a simple sequence of elementary processes.”
[406] Jacques Monod, *Chance and Necessity,* trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972): on indirect interactions and their nonlinear character, pp. 69–71 and 76–77; on corresponding molecules that are least two-headed, pp. 68–69; on the inhibiting or releasing character of these interactions, pp. 63–67. Circadian rhythms also depend on these characteristics (see the chart in the *Encyclopedia Universalis* under “Rhythmes biologiques”).
[407] Eugene Dupreel elaborated a set of original notions, “consistency” (in relation to “precariousness”), “consolidation,” “interval,” “intercalation.” See *Theorie de la consolidation: La cause et I’intervalle* (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1933); *La consistance et la probabilite objective* (Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1961); *Esquisse d’une philosophic des valeurs* (Paris: Alcan, 1939); Bachelard, in *La dialectique de la dur’ee,* draws on Dupreel.
[408] [TRANS: *The Diary of Virginia Woolf* ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 209.]
[409] On the song of the chaffinch, and the distinction between the “subsong” and “full song,” see Thorpe, *Learning and Instinct,* pp. 420–426.
[410] Alexander James Marshall, *Bower-Birds* (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954).
[411] Thorpe, *Learning and Instinct,* p. 426. In this respect, songs present an entirely different problem than calls, which are often not very differentiated, and quite similar from species to species.
[412] Raymond Ruyer, *La genesedes formes vivantes* (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), chapter 7.
[413] In particular, on widow birds *(Viduinae),* parasitic birds whose territorial song is species-specific and whose courtship song is learned from their adoptive host, see J. Nicolai, *Der Brutparasitismus der Viduinae, Z. Tierps.,* vol. 21 (1964).
- she must not learn his terrible secret addiction.
CRIME FUGITIVE DAD
[414] The participation of a black hole in an assemblage appears in numerous examples of inhibition, or fascination-ecstasy, notably in the peacock: “The male peacock spreads his tail feathers.... Then he bends the spread-out tail forward and points downward with his beak, while his head is still upright. As a result, the female runs in front of him and pecks in a searching manner on the ground in the focal point of the concave mirrorlike shape of the fanned tail. The male peacock points, so to speak, with his fanned-out tail toward imaginary food,” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, *Ethology,* p. 116. But the peacock’s focal point is no more imaginary than the finch’s grass stem is a vestige or symbol; it is an assemblage converter, the passage to a courtship assemblage, in this instance, effected by a black hole.
[416] Francow *Meyer, Problematique de revolution* (Paris: PUF, 1954).
[418] Female birds, which do not normally sing, start singing when they are administered male sex hormones, “and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become imprinted.” Eibl-Eibesfeldt, *Ethology,* p. 265.
[419] [TRANS: Klee, *On Modern Art,* p. 43. Translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors.]
[421] See *Renaissance, manierisme, baroque, Actes du Xle stage international de Tours* (Paris: Vrin, 1972), part 1, “Periodizations.”
[422] Proust, *Swann’s Way,* in vol. 1 *of Remembrance of Things Past,* p. 382 [translation modified—Trans.].
[423] See the ambiguous role of the friend at the end of *Das Lied von der Erde.* Or Eichen-dorff s poem in Schumann’s lied, *Zwielicht (in* Opus 39): “If you have a friend in this world, do not trust him at this hour, for even if he is kind in eye and mouth, he dreams of war in deceitful peace.” (On the problem of the One-Alone, or “solitary Being,” in German romanticism, see Holderlin, “Le cours et la destination de l’homme en general,” trans. Emmanuel Marineau, *Poesie,* no. 4 <verbatim>[1978],</verbatim> pp. 6–22.)
[424] “The people in Mussorgsky’s *Boris* do not form a true crowd; at times one group sings, then another, and then a third, each in turn, and most often in unison. As for the people in *Maitres chanteurs,* it is not a crowd but an army that is powerfully organized in the German manner and marches in rows. What I would like is something sparser, more divided, more relaxed, more impalpable, something in appearance inorganic and yet at bottom ordered.” Quoted by Jean Barraque, *Debussy* (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 159. This problem—how to do a crowd—obviously recurs in other arts also, painting, cinema, etc. One may refer in particular to the films of Eisenstein, which proceed by this type of very special group individuation.
[425] On the relations between the cry, the voice, the instrument, and music as “theater,” see Berio’s statements introducing his records. One will recall the eminently musical Nietzschean theme of a multiple cry of all superior men, at the end of *Thus Spoke Zarathustra.*
[426] On Bartok’s chromaticism, see Gisele Brelet’s study in *Histoire de la musique,* vol. 2, pp. 1036–1072.
dad loves stealing too much. he has a problem with the scottish government. but he must hide it from his daughter - she must not learn that he is not allowed go back into the you kay.
[427] In his book on Debussy, Barraque analyzes the “dialogue of the wind and the sea” in terms offerees instead of themes: pp. 153–154. See Messiaen’s statements on his own works: sounds are no longer anything more “than vulgar means of expression intended to make durations measurable.”
[428] Odile Vivier describes Varese’s procedures for treating sound matter, in *Varese* (Paris: Seuil, 1973): the use of pure sounds acting as a prism (p. 36); mechanisms of projection onto a plane (pp. 45 and 50); non-octave-forming scales (p. 75); the “ionization” procedure (pp. 98ff.); the theme of sound *molecules,* the transformations of which are determined by forces or energies *(passim).*
[429] See the interview with Stockhausen on the role of synthesizers and the effectively “cosmic” dimension of music, in *Le Monde,* July 21,1977: “Work with very limited materials and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation.” Richard Pinhas has written an excellent analysis of the possibilities of synthesizers in this regard, in relation to pop music: “Input, Output,” *in Atem,* no. 10 (1977).
[430] The definition of fuzzy aggregates brings up all kinds of problems because one cannot appeal to a local determination: “The set of all objects on this table” is obviously not a fuzzy set. Mathematicians concerned with the question speak only of “fuzzy subsets” because the reference set must always be an ordinary set. See Arnold Kaufmann, *Introduction to the Theory of Fuzzy Subsets,* foreword L. A. Zadeh, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press, 1975), and Hourya Sinacoeur, “Logique et mathematique du flou,” *Critique,* no. 372 (May 1978), pp. 512–525. In considering fuzziness as the characteristic of certain sets, our point of departure was a functional, as opposed to a local, definition: sets of heterogeneous elements that have a territorial, or rather territorializing, function. But this is a nominal definitiion that does not take “what happened” into account. The real definition can come only at the level of processes affecting the fuzzy set; a set is fuzzy if its elements belong to it only by virtue of specific operations of consistency and consolidation, which themselves follow a special logic.
[431] Paul Klee, *On Modern Art,* p. 53: “The legend of the childishness of my drawing must have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to present man ‘as he is,’ then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have been vagueness beyond recognition.”
[432] Paul Virilio, *L’insecurite du territoire* (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 49. Henry Miller develops this theme in *The Time of the Assassins. A Study ofRimbaud*(Norfolk, Conn.: J. Laughlin, 1956), and in the text he wrote for Varese, “Lost! Saved!” *(The Air-Conditioned Nightmare* [New York: New Directions, 1945]). It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in *Sexus.*
[433] On the relation of colors to sound, see Messiaen and Samuel, *Conversations,* pp. 15–17. Messiaen faults drug users for oversimplifying the relation, which they make into a relation between a noise and a color, instead of isolating complexes of sounds-durations and complexes of colors.
[434] On the crystal, or the crystalline type, added and subtracted values, retrograde motion, see also Messiaen’s texts in Samuel, *Conversations,* and those of Paul Klee in his diary, *The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918,* ed. and intro. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
[435] See Roland-Manuel’s article, “L’evolution de l’harmonie en France et le renouveau de 1880” (pp. 867–879), and the article by Delage on Chabrier (pp. 831–840), in *Histoire de la musique,* vol. 2. And especially, Brelet’s article on Bartok: “Are not the difficulties learned music experiences in utilizing popular music due to this antinomy between melody and theme? Popular music is melody, in its fullest sense, melody persuading us that it is self-sufficient and is in fact synonymous with music itself. How could it not refuse to bend to the learned development of a musical work pursuing its own ends? Many symphonies inspired by folklore are only symphonies *about* a popular theme, to which the learned development remains alien and exterior. The popular melody could never constitute a true theme; and that is why, in popular music, the melody is the entire work, and why once it is over it has no other resource than to repeat itself. But can’t the melody transform itself into a theme? Bartok solves this problem, which was thought insoluble” (p. 1056).
[436] Marcel More, *Ledieu Mozart etlemondedesoiseaux*(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 168. And, on the crystal, pp. 83–89.
DIVORCED DAD
[437] See Alban Berg’s famous analysis of “Reverie” in *Ecrits* (Paris: Ed. du Rocher, 1957), pp. 44–64. 12.1227: Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine
[438] Georges Dumezil, *Mitra-Varuna* (Paris: Gallimard, 1948 [forthcoming in English translation from Zone Books]). On *nexum* and *mutuum,* the bond and the contract, see pp. 118–124.
[439] “The first pole of the State (Varuna, Uranus, Romulus) operates by magic bond, seizure, or immediate capture: it does not wage battles, and has no war machine, it binds, and that is all.” Its other pole (Mitra, Zeus, Numa) appropriates an army but imposes upon it juridical and institutional rules that become nothing more than a piece in the State apparatus: thus Mars-Tiwaz is not a warrior god, but a god who is a “jurist of war.” See Dumezil, *Mitra-Varuna,* pp. 113ff., 148ff., 202ff.
[440] Dumezil, *The Destiny of the Warrior,* trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of Chicaga Press, 1970).
[441] For the role of the warrior as one who “unties” and opposes both the magic bond and the juridical contract, see Dumezil, *Mitra-Varuna,* pp. 124–132. See also the analysis *of furor* in the works of Dumezil.
[442] [TRANS: The first quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Genealogy of Morals,* second essay, sect. 17, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 86; the second is from Franz Kafka, “An Old Manuscript,” *The Complete Stories,* ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 416.]
[443] Luc de Heusch emphasizes the public nature of Nkongolo’s actions, in contrast to the secrecy of the actions of Mbidi and his son; in particular, the former eats in public, whereas the others hide during their meals. Later, we will see the essential relation of the war machine with the secret, which is as much a matter of principle as a result: espionage, strategy, diplomacy. Commentators have often underlined this link. *Le roi ivre ou I’origine de I’Etat* (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
[444] For an analysis of the three sins in the cases of the Indian god Indra, the Scandinavian hero Starcatherus, and the Greek god Hercules, see Dumezil, *Mythe et epopee,* vol. 2, pp. 17–19 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also Dumezil, *The Destiny of the Warrior.*
[445] Dumezil, *Mitra-Varuna,* p. 13 5. Dumezil analyzes the dangers and causes of the confusion, which could be due to economic variables. See pp. 153, 159.
[447] On Ajax and the tragedy of Sophocles, see the analysis of Jean Starobinski, *Trois Fureurs* (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Starobinski explicitly raises the question of war and the State.
the wife isn’t too happy with this dad. he only gets to see her on turkish holidays and weekends. he must use this court-allotted time wisely.
[448] These themes are analyzed by Mathieu Carriere in an as yet unpublished study of Kleist.
[449] Pierre Clastres, *Society against the State,* trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Uri-zen, 1977), and “Archeologie de la violence: la guerre dans les societes primitives” and “Malheur du guerrier sauvage” in *Recherches d’anthropologie politique* (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 171 -208, 209–248. In the last text, Clastres depicts the destiny of the warrior in primitive society and analyzes the mechanism that prevents the concentration of power (in the same way that Mauss demonstrated that the potlatch was a mechanism preventing the concentration of wealth).
[450] Jacques Meunier, *Les gaminsde Bogota* (Paris: Lattes, 1977), p. 159 (“blackmail for dispersion”) and p. 17 7: if necessary, “it is the other street children who, by means of a complicated interplay of humiliations and silence, get the idea across that he must leave the gang.” Meunier emphasizes the degree to which the fate of the ex-gang member is jeopardized: not only for health reasons, but because he finds it hard to integrate himself into the criminal underworld, a society too hierarchical, too centralized, too centered on organs of power for him to fit into (p. 178). On child gangs, see also the novel by Jorge Amado, *Capitaes de areia* (Sao Paolo: Livraria Martins, 1944).
[451] See I. S. Bernstein, “La dominance sociale chez les primates” in *La Recherche,* no. 91 (July 1978).
[452] Clastres, *Society against the State,* p. 169: “The emergence of the State brought about the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History.” In order to account for this emergence, Clastres cites first a demographic factor (“but there is no question of replacing an economic determinism with a demographic determinism”; p. 180), then the possibility of a warring machine (?) running amok; he also cites, more unexpectedly, the indirect role of a certain mode *of prophetic speech,* which, directed first against the “chiefs,” produces a formidable new kind of power. But one obviously cannot prejudge more elaborated solutions Clastres might have found for this problem. On the possible role of prophetic speech, refer to Helene Clastres, *La terre sans mal, le prophetisme tupi-guarani* (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
[453] Michel Serres, *La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbulences* (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Serres was the first to make the first three points given in the text; the fourth seems to follow from them.
[454] [TRANS: According to Serres, the *clinamen,* or declination of the atom, is the “minimal angle leading to the formation of a vortex, and appears by chance in a laminar flow” *(La naissance de la physique,* p. 14). The *clinamen* is the angle between a curve and its tangent, or “the smallest [angle] one can make, preventing anything from coming between the two lines which form it.... In other words, the angle appears at the same time as curvature” (p. 18). “The *clinamen* is a differential” (p. 11).]
[455] [TRANS: A flow is laminar when, “no matter how small we make the layers (or lamellae) into which we divide the flow, they remain strictly parallel to one another in their movements”; Serres, ibid., p. 12.]
[456] [TRANS: *Turba* “designates a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult.” *Turbo* “is a round form in movement... a revolving cone or vortical spiral.” “The origin of things and the beginning of order consists simply in the subtle passage from *turba* to *turbo”;* Serres, ibid., pp. 38–39.]
[457] This is the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between two kinds of space-time in music: in striated space, the measure can be irregular or regular, but it is always assignable; in smooth space, the partition, or break, “can be effected at will.” *Boulez on Music Today,* trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 85.
SPITS DAD
[458] Greek geometry is thoroughly marked by the opposition between these two poles, the theorematic and problematic, and by the relative triumph of the former: in his *Commentary of the First Book of Euclid’s Elements,* trans, and intro. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Proclus analyzes the difference between the poles, taking the Speusippus-Menaechmus opposition as an example. Mathematics has always been marked by this tension also; for example, the axiomatic element has confronted a problematic, “intuitionist,” or “constructivist” current emphasizing a calculus of problems very different from axiomatics, or any theorematic approach. See Georges Bouligand, *Le d’eclin des absolus mathematico-logiques* (Paris: Ed. d’Enseignement Superieur, 1949).
[459] Paul Virilio, *L’insecurite du territoire* (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 120: “We know that the youth of geometry, geometry as free, creative investigation, came to an end with Archimedes.... The sword of a Roman soldier cut the thread, tradition says. In killing geometrical creation, the Roman State lay the foundation for the geometrical imperialism of the West.”
[460] With Monge, and especially Poncelet, the limits of sensible, or even spatial, representation (striated space) are indeed surpassed, but less in the direction of a symbolic power *(puissance)* of abstraction than toward a transspatial imagination, or a transintuition (continuity). See Leon Brunschvicg’s commentary on Poncelet, *Les etapes de la philosophic mathematique* (Paris: PUF, 1947).
[461] Michel Serres *(La naissance de la physique,* pp. 105–107) analyzes the opposition d’Alembert-Bernoulli from this point of view. More generally, what is at issue is the difference between two models of space: “In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and the *clinamen* seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow. Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters.... Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines” (p. 106).
[462] See Ben veniste, “The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression” in *Problems in General Linguistics,* trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 281–288. This text, often considered decisive, seems ambiguous to us because it invokes Democritus and atomism without dealing with the hydraulic question, and because it treats rhythm as a “secondary specialization” of the form of the body (p. 286).
[463] Anne Querrien, *Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de I’Etat* (Paris: Cerfi). We have drawn from this book, as well as from unpublished studies by Anne Querrien.
[464] See Raoul Vergez, *Les illumines de I’art royal. Huit siecles de compagnonnages* (Paris: Julliard, 1976), p. 54. [TRANS: In the present context, *trait* refers to the cutting line followed by the artisan and to the working sketch of the construction under way. Vergez gives the following definition: “The Trait is a kind of graphic poem derived from geometry, which indicates the building plan in sketches drawn with precision on the ground, showing sections, elevations and all other projections, the three dimensions of a volume”; p. 86.]
[465] Gerard Desargues, *Oeuvres* (Paris: Leiber, 1864). See also the text by Michel Chasles *[Apercu historique sur I’origine et le developpement de methodes en geometrie...* (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1837)—Trans.], which establishes a continuity between Desargues, Monge, and Poncelet as the “founders of a modern geometry.”
[466] Anne Querrien, *Devenir fonctionnaire,* pp. 26–27: “Is the State founded upon the collapse of experimentation?... The State is not under construction, its construction sites must be short-lived. An installation is made to function, not to be socially constructed: from this point of view, the State involves in the construction only those who are paid to implement or command, and who are obliged to follow the model of a preestablished experimentation.”
[467] On the question of the “Colbert lobby,” see Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet, “Le Lobby Colbert. Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?” *Annates,* 30, no. 6 (November-December 1975), pp. 1303–1336.
like gay dad but doesn’t swallow
[468] See Ibn Khaldun, *The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History,* trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). One of the essential themes of this masterpiece is the sociological problem of the esprit de corps, and its ambiguity. Ibn Khaldun contrasts bedouinism (the bedouin life-style, not the ethnic group) with sedentarity or city living. The first aspect of this opposition is the inverted relation between the public and the secret: not only is there a secrecy of the bedouin war machine, as opposed to the publicity of the State city dweller, but in the first case “eminence” is based on a secret solidarity, while in the second case the secret is subordinated to the demands of social eminence. Second, bedouinism brings into play both a great purity and a great mobility of the lineages and their genealogy, whereas city life makes for lineages that are very impure, and at the same time rigid and fixed: Solidarity has a different meaning at either pole. Third, and this is the main point, bedouin lineages mobilize an esprit de corps and integrate into it, as a new dimension: this is *asablyah,* or *ikhtilat,* from which the Arabic word for socialism is derived (Ibn Khaldun stresses the absence of any “power” residing in the tribal chief, who has no State constraints at his disposal). On the other hand, in city living the esprit de corps becomes a dimension of power and is adapted for “autocracy.”
[469] The principal texts of Husserl are *Ideas,* trans. W. R. Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), part 1, sec. 74, and *Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,* trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stoney Brook, N.Y.: N. Hayes, 1978) (with Derrida’s very important commentary, pp. 118–132). On the issue of a vague yet rigorous science, we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical figure called the *salinon:* “It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a metrics is exact” *(Naissance de la physique,* p. 29). Gaston Bachelard’s book *Essai sur la connaissance approch’ee* (Paris: Vrin, 1927) remains the best study of the steps and procedures constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science.
[470] Gilbert Simondon has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the hylo-morphic schema and of its social presuppositions (“form corresponds to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible”). To the form-matter schema, Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different conception of the relations between science and technology. See *L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique* (Paris: PUF, 1964).
[471] In *Timaeus,* 28–29, Plato entertains for an instant the thought that Becoming is not simply the inevitable characteristic of copies or reproductions, but could itself be a model rivaling the Identical and the Uniform. He states this hypothesis only in order to reject it; for it is true that if becoming is a model, not only must the duality of the model and the copy, of the model and reproduction, disappear, but the very notions of model and reproduction tend to lose all meaning, [TRANS: Deleuze develops this point in “Plato and the Simulacrum,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, *October,* 27 (Winter 1983), pp. 45–56. See especially p. 53.]
[472] [TRANS: Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Will to Power,* trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 630(1885), p. 336.]
[473] The situation is in fact more complex than that, and gravity is not the only feature of the dominant model: there is heat in addition to gravity (already in chemistry, combustion is coupled with weight). Even so, the problem was to know to what extent the “thermal field” deviated from gravitational space, or on the contrary was integrated with it. Monge is a typical example; he began by grouping heat, light, and electricity as “variable affections of bodies,” the concern of “specific physics,” while general physics would deal with extension, gravity, and movement. It was only later that Monge unified all of the fields under general physics (Anne Querrien).
[475] Carlos Castaneda, *The Teachings of Don Juan* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 88.
[476] Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, admit a Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the parallelism of two neighboring vectors; this being the case, instead of exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multiplicity is treated as though “immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of dimensions.” See *Les sch’emas de structure* (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23–24, 43–47.
[477] In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very complex, and they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand’s theme is also relevant here: the dualism of the two mathematical elements, the “problem” and the “global synthesis,” is developed only when they enter a field of interaction in which the global synthesis defines the “categories” without which the problem would have no general solution. See *Le d’eclin des absolus math’ematico-logiques.*
[478] Marcel Detienne, in *Les maitres de v’erit’e dans la Grece archdique* (Paris: Maspero, 1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, which correspond to the two aspects of sovereignty according to Dumezil: the magico-religious speech of the despot or of the “old man of the sea,” and the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, etc.) situated in relation to these poles, but Detienne interposes between the two poles a distinct group, the Warriors, which brings about transition or evolution.
CANCER DAD
[479] There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official political philosophy and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre Kojeve (“Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, *On Tyranny* [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil *(Hegel et I’Etat. Philosophiepolitique* [Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the modern State to Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. If it is objected that this rationality, already present in the archaic imperial State, is the *optimum* of the governors themselves, the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form of the rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right, gives it “reason” *(lui donner necessairement “raison”).*
[480] On the role of the ancient poet as a “functionary of sovereignty,” see Dumezil, *Servius et la Fortune* (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and Detienne, *Les maitres de v’erit’e,* pp. 17ff.
[481] See Michel Foucault’s analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of exteriority of thought: “La pensee du dehors,” *Critique,* no. 229 (June 1966), pp. 523–548.
[482] Nietzsche, *Schopenhauer as Educator,* in *Untimely Meditations,* trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177–178.
[483] A curious text of Karl Jaspers, entitled *Descartes und die Philosophie* (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1956), develops this point of view and accepts its implications.
[484] Kenneth White, *Intellectual Nomadism.* The title of the second volume of this unpublished work is *Poetry and Tribe.*
[485] [TRANS: Arthur Rimbaud, *A Season in Hell,* trans. Louise Varese (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1952), pp. 9, 13, 17, 39.]
[486] Anny Milovanoff, “La seconde peau du nomade,” *Nouvelles litt’eraires,* no. 2646 (July 27, 1978), p. 18: “The Larbaa nomads, on the border of the Algerian Sahara, use the word *triga,* which generally means road or way, to designate the woven straps serving to reinforce the cords holding the tent to the stakes.... In nomad thought, the dwelling is tied not to a territory but rather to an itinerary. Refusing to take possession of the land they cross, the nomads construct an environment out of wool and goat hair, one that leaves no mark at the temporary site it occupies.... Thus wool, a soft material, gives nomad life its unity.... Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they cross. They leave space to space.... Woolly polymorphism.”
[487] See W. Montgomery Watt, *Mohammed at Medina* (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 85–86, 242.
[488] Emmanuel Laroche, *Histoire de la ratine “Nem “ en grec ancien* (Paris: Klincksieck, 1949). The root “Nem” indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked. In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies no parceling out of land: “The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary.” *To take to pasture* (nemo) refers not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon that Nomos came to designate the principle at the basis of the laws and of right (Thesmo’i and Dike), and then came to be identified with the laws themselves. Prior to that, there was instead an alternative between the city, or polis, ruled by laws, and the outskirts as the place of the nomos. A similar alternative is found in the work of Ibn Khaldun: between *hadara* as city living, and *badiya* as nomos (not the town, but the preurban countryside, the plateau, steppe, mountain, or desert).
holy shit he’s going to die soon. these are the last precious moments in his daughter’s life. he must make them good and lovely at all costs!! cmon!! let’s have fun!!!!!
[489] Arnold Toynbee, *A Study of History* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), abridged by D. C. Somerwell, vol. 1, pp. 164–186: “They flung themselves upon the Steppe, not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it” (p. 168).
[490] See Pierre Hubac, *Les nomades* (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948), pp. 26–29 (although Hubac tends to confuse nomads and migrants).
[491] On the nomads of the sea, or of the archipelago, Jose Emperaire writes: “They do not grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner, by juxtaposing in order its various successive stages, from campsite to campsite in the course of the journey. For each of these stages, they estimate the length of the crossing and the successive changes in direction marking it.” *Les nomades de la mer* (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 225.
[492] Wilfred Thesiger, *Arabian Sands* (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 112–113, 125, 165–166.
[493] See the two admirable descriptions, of the sand desert by Wilfred Thesiger and of the ice desert by Edmund Carpenter, in *Eskimo* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964): the winds, and tactile and sound qualities; the secondary character of visual data, particularly the indifference of the nomads to astronomy as a royal science; and yet the presence of a whole minor science of qualitative variables and traces.
[494] EmileFelixGautier,*Le passe del’AfriqueduNord (Paris:* Payot, 1952), pp. 267–316.
[495] From this perspective, Clastres’s analysis of Indian prophetism can be generalized: “On one side, the chiefs, on the other, and standing against them, the prophets.... And the prophetic machine worked perfectly well since the *karai* were able to sweep astonishing masses of Indians along behind them.... the insurrectional act of the prophets against the chiefs conferred on the former, through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power than was held by the latter.” *Society against the State,* pp. 184–185.
[496] One of the most interesting themes of the classic work by Paul Alphandery *(La chretiente et Videe de croisade* [Paris: Albin Michel, 1959] is his demonstration that the changes in course, the pauses, the detours were an integral part of the Crusade: “this army of crusaders that we envision as a modern army, like those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, marching with absolute passivity, obeying the will of a diplomatic officer and staff. Such an army knows where it is going, and when it makes a mistake, it is not for lack of reflection. A history more attentive to differences accepts a more realistic image of the army of the Crusade. The army of the Crusade was freely, sometimes anarchically alive.... This army was motivated from within, as a function of a complex coherence by virtue of which nothing happened by chance. It is certain that the conquest of Constantinople had its reason, necessity and a religious character, like the other deeds of the Crusades” (vol. 2, p. 7). Alphandery shows in particular that the idea of a battle against the Infidel, *at any point,* appeared early on, along with the idea of liberating the Holy Land (vol. 1, p. 219).
[497] Modern historians have been inspired to fine analyses by this confrontation between the East and the West, which began in the Middle Ages (and is tied to the question, Why did capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?). See especially Fernand Braudel, *Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800,* trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 97–108; Pierre Chaunu, *L’expansion europeenne du Xllle au XVe siecle* (Paris: PUF, 1969), pp. 334–339 (“Why Europe? Why not China?”); Maurice Lombard, *Espaces et reseaux du hautMoyen Age* (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), chapter 8 (and p. 219: “What is called deforestation in the East is named clearing in the West. The first deep cause of the shift of the dominant centers from the East to the West is therefore a geographical reason: forest-clearing proved to have more potential than desert-oasis”).
[498] Marx’s observations on the despotic formations of Asia have been confirmed by the African analyses of Max Gluckman, *Custom and Conflict in Africa* (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959): at the same time immutability of form and constant rebellion. The idea of a “transformation” of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the “destruction” of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine. Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads (see Louis Chevalier, *Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,* trans. Frank Jellenck [New York: H. Fertig, 1973], pp. 362–366).
RUG DAD
[499] See Lucien Musset, *Les invasions. Le secondassaut* (Paris: PUF, 1965), for example, the analysis of the Danes’ three “phases,” pp. 135–137.
[500] Paul Virilio, *Speed and Politics,* trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), pp. 12–13 *andpassim.* Not only is the “town” unthinkable apart from the exterior flows with which it is in contact, and the circulation of which it regulates, but specific architectural aggregates, the fortress, for example, are veritable transformers, by virtue of their interior spaces, which allow an analysis, prolongation, or restitution of movement. Virilio concludes that the issue is less confinement than the management of the public ways, or the control of movement. Foucault was already moving in this direction with his analysis of the *naval hospital* as operator and filter; see *Discipline and Punish,* trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 143–146.
[501] On Chinese, and Arab, navigation, the reasons behind their failure, and the importance of this question in the East-West “dossier,” see Braudel, *Capitalism and Material Life,* pp. 300–309, and Chaunu, *L’expansion europeenne,* pp. 145–147.
[502] Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical consequences: “The fleet in being... is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when ... it is a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation... but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency....Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates ... the notion of displacement without destination in space and time.... The strategic submarine has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain invisible ... the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves neither departure nor arrival....If, as Lenin claimed,‘strategy means choosing which points we apply force to,’ we must admit that these ‘points’, today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might be... *geographic localization* seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the *delocalization of the vector,* of a vector in permanent movement”; *Speed and Politics,* pp. 38,40–41,134–135. Virilio’s texts are of great importance and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimilation of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolutionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, converted, appropriated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and makes a general case for the “fascist” character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses that make these distinctions possible.
[503] Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, *Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs* (Paris: Maspero, 1971 -1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is subordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato’s ideal state. The Pythagorean or Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why Numbers become *ideal,* but not strictly speaking “numbering.”
[504] Dumezil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See *Servius et la Fortune* and *Le troisieme souverain* (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of the two principal poles.
[505] Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strategy: *On War,* trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214–216 (“The Geometrical Factor”).
[506] See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the war machine, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, *The Records of the Grand Historian,* trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155–193 (“The Account of the Hsiung-nu”).
[507] Frank Herbert, *Children of Dune* (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number: “arrangement,” “plural and contingent distribution,” “infini-point,” “rigorous approximation,” etc. *Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse* (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293–297.
[508] Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov, *Le regime social des Mongols,* trans. Michel Carsow (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, “antrustions,” is borrowed from the Saxon regime, in which the king’s *company,* or “trust,” was composed of Franks.
this dad loves expensive turkish rugs. eighty hundred fifty pounds is very good deal for all this symbolism and all these motifs. holy smokes check that shape out.
[509] A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg, called the *Enaden* (the “Others”); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See Rene Pottier, “Les artisans sahariens du metal chez les Touareg,” in *Techniques et civilisations,* vol. 1 *(M’etaux et civilisations),* no. 2 (1945), pp. 31–40.
[510] Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, *The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia,* trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy. But one of Vladimirtsov’s main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the sedentary land they took over into fiefs, true or false.
[511] J. F. C. Fuller, *Armament and History* (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), p. 5.
[512] Paul Virilio, “Metempsychose du passager,” *Traverses,* no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11–19. Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when women served as “portage or pack” animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a relation of “homosexual duel” transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites us to make a distinction between *speed,* as projector and projectile, and *displacement,* as transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the second relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action.
[513] J. F. C. Fuller, *Armaments and History,* pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war through “ever-increasing shell fire” (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a “landship” (p. 139), reconstituted a kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and “superimposed naval tactics on land warfare” (p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artillery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine that is very different from innovation in the work machine.
[514] On this general distinction between the two models, “work-free action,” “consuming force/conserving force,” “real effect/formal effect,” etc., see Martial Gueroult’s exposition, *Dynamique et metaphysique leibniziennes* (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55, 119 ff., 222–224.
[515] Marcel Detienne, “La phalange, problemes et controverses,” in *Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes,* no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119–143: “Technology is in a way internal to the social and the mental,” (p. 134).
[516] On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., *Medieval Technology and Social Change* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has been shown in the case of dry rice cultivation in Asia that the digging stick, the hoe, and the plow depend upon collective assemblages that vary according to population density and the fallow period. This enables Braudel to conclude: “The tool, according to this theory, is the result and no longer the cause”; *Capitalism and Material Life,* p. 116.
[517] Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist’s *About Marionettes,* trans. Michael Lebeck (Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously oriental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the center of gravity is still “mechanical” and relates to something more “mysterious” that concerns the soul and knows nothing of weight.
[518] See Paul Pelliot, “Les systemes d’ecriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols,” *Asia Major* 2 (1925), pp. 284–289: The Mongols used the Uighur script, with the Syriac alphabet (it was the Tibetans who produced a phonetic theory of Uighur writing); the two versions of the *Secret History of the Mongols* that have been passed down to us are a Chinese translation and a phonetic transcription in Chinese characters.
YOGA DAD
[519] Georges Charriere, *Scythian Art* (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), p. 185 [translation modified].
[520] See Lucien Musset, *Introduction a la runologie* (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1965).
[521] There are, of course, forms of cooking and architecture that are part of the nomad war machine, but they fall under a different “trait,” one distinguishing them from their sedentary form. Nomad architecture, for example, the Eskimo igloo orthe Hunnish wooden palace, is a derivative of the tent: its influence on sedentary art came by way of domes and half-domes, and above all of *space starting very low,* as in a tent. As for nomad cooking, it consists literally of break-fast (the paschal tradition is nomadic). And it is under this trait that it can be part of a war machine: for example, the Janissaries used a cooking pot as their rallying point; there were different ranks of cooks, and their hat had a wooden spoon through it.
[522] Itisinthe *Trait’edu rebelle* (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that Jiinger takes his clearest stand against national socialism and develops certain points contained in *Der Arbeiter:* a conception of the “line” as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this remains in Heidegger’s notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Jiinger).
[523] Lynn White, Jr., who is actually not inclined to ascribe much power of innovation to the nomads, sometimes establishes extensive technological lineages with surprising origins: he traces hot-air and turbine technologies to Malaya *(Medieval Technology and Social Change,* p. 95 and note): “Thus a chain of technological stimuli may be traced back from some of the major figures of early modern science and technology through the later Middle Ages to the jungles of Malaya. A second, and related, Malay invention, the fire piston, may have had significant influence upon the European understanding of air pressure and its applications.”
[524] On the particularly thorny question of the stirrup, see Lynn White, Jr., *Medieval Technology and Social Change,* chapter 1.
[525] See the fine article by A. Mazaheri, “Le sabre contre l’epee,” *Annates* 13, no. 4 (October-December 1958), pp. 669–686.
[526] Henri Limet, *Le travail du metal au pays de Sumer au temps de la life dynastie d’Ur* (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), pp. 33–40.
[527] Along these lines, Mazaheri effectively demonstrates that the saber and sword belong to two distinct technological lineages. In particular, *damasking (damassage),* which does not come from Damascus at all, but rather from the Greek or Persian word for diamond, designates the treatment of cast steel that makes it as hard as a diamond and the designs in this steel resulting from the crystallization of the cement (“true damask was made in the centers that had never experienced Roman domination”). But on the other hand, *damascening (damasquinage),* which did come from Damascus, designates only inlay in metal (or in fabric), intentional designs imitating damasking using entirely different means.
[528] Andre Leroi-Gourhan, *Milieu et techniques* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), pp. 356ff. Gilbert Simondon, discussing short series, takes up the question of the “absolute origins of a technological lineage,” or of the creation of a “technical essence”: *Du mode d’existence des objects techniques* (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 41–49.
this is downward dog dad. this dad has centered chakras. this dad knows tai chi. this dad has a clear and calm mind.
[529] On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, *Du mode d’existence,* pp. 2 8–50 (“modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner”; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the technological operation but to the social model of *work* subsuming that operation (pp. 47–49).
[530] Simondon feels no special attraction for the problems of metallurgy. His analysis is not, in fact, historical and prefers to deal with examples drawn from electronics. But, historically, there is no electronics without metallurgy. Thus Simondon pays homage to metallurgy: “Metallurgy does not entirely accommodate itself to an analysis using the hylomorphic schema. The fixing of the form is not accomplished visibly in a single stroke, but in several successive operations; the forging and quenching of steel are anterior and posterior, respectively, to the fixing of the form in the strict sense; forging and quenching are, nevertheless, operations that constitute objects” *(L’individu,* p. 59).
[531] Not only must myths be taken into account, but also positive history, for example, the role of “the brass” in the evolution of musical form; or again, the constitution of a “metallic synthesis” in electronic music (Richard Pinhas).
[532] Wilhelm Worringer defines Gothic art in terms of a geometrical line that is “primitive” but has taken on life. But this vitality is not organic, as it will be in the classical world: this line “embodies no organic expression... it is nevertheless of the utmost vitality....Since this line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced from organic life... The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalized geometry—a prelude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an effort unnatural to it.” *Form in Gothic* (London: Putnam’s and Sons, 1927), pp. 41–42.
[533] This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe’s argument in *The Prehistory of European Civilization* (London: Cassell, 1962): the metallurgist is the first specialized artisan, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The relation of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also with the food they take or receive. The Dogon myth, as analyzed in its variants by Griaule, can be seen as marking this relation, in which the smith receives or steals grains, and hides them in his mallet.
[534] Maurice Lombard, <em>Lesm’etauxdansI’ancien mondedu VeauXIesiecle</em> (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 75, 255.
[535] The social position of the smith has been the object of detailed studies; for Africa in particular see the classic study by W. B. Cline, “Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa,” *General Series in Anthropology,* no. 5 (1937); and Pierre Clement, “Le forgeron en Afrique noire,” *Revue de geographie humaine et d’ethnologie,* no. 2 (April-June 1948), pp. 35–58. But these studies are hardly conclusive; the better defined the principles invoked—“reaction of contempt,” “of approbation,” “of apprehension”—the hazier and more overlapping the results, as seen in Clement’s tables.
[536] See Jules Bloch, *Les Tziganes,* Que sais-je?, no. 580 (Paris: PUF, 1969). Bloch demonstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary in connection with cave dwelling.
[537] Elie Faure, *Medieval Art,* vol. 2 of *History of Art,* trans. Walter Pach (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12–14.
[538] On these peoples and their mysteries, see the analyses of V. Gordon Childe, *The Prehistory of European Society,* chapter 7 (“Missionaries, Traders and Warriors of Temperate Europe”), and *The Dawn of European Civilization* (New York: Knopf, 1958).
DEPRESSED DAD
[539] Maurice Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, *Le renard pale,* vol. 1 (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1965), p. 376.
[540] The book by Robert James Forbes, *Metallurgy in Antiquity* (Leiden: Brill, 1950), analyzes the different ages of metallurgy, as well as the types of metallurgists that existed in the “ore stage”: the “miner,” who did the prospecting and mining; the “smelter” [who produced the crude metal or alloy]; the “blacksmith” [who manufactured mass products from crude metals]; and the “metalworker” [who produced smaller objects; includes gold- and silver-smiths] (pp. 74–76). The specialization system becomes more complicated in the Iron Age, with attendant variations in the nomad-itinerant-sedentary distribution.
[541] The texts of T. E. Lawrence, *Seven Pillars of Wisdom* (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935) and “The Science of Guerrilla War,” in *Encyclopedia Britannica,* 14<sup>th</sup> ed. (1929), vol. 10, pp. 950–953, remain among the most significant works on guerrilla warfare; they present themselves as an “anti-Foch” theory and elaborate the notion of the nonbattle. But the nonbattle has a history that is not entirely dependent on guerrilla warfare: (1) the traditional distinction between the “battle” and the “maneuver” in war; see Raymon Aron, *Penser la guerre. Clausewitz* (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 122–131; (2) the way in which the war of movement places the role and importance of the battle in question (as early as Marshal de Saxe, and the controversial question of the battle during the Napoleonic Wars); (3) finally, more recently, the critique of the battle in the name of nuclear arms, which play a deterrent role, with conventional forces now having a role only in “testing” or “maneuver”; see the Gaullist conception of the nonbattle, and Guy Brossollet, *Essai sur la non-bataille* (Paris: Belin, 1975). The recent return to the notion of the battle cannot be explained simply by technological factors such as the development of tactical nuclear arms, but implies political considerations—it is upon these that the role assigned to the battle (or nonbattle) in war depends.
[542] On the fundamental differences between Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, see Rene Grousset, *The Empire of the Steppes,* trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 417–419.
[543] See *Armees etfiscalit’e dans le monde antique,* ed. A. Chastagnol, C. Nicolet, and H. van Effenterre (Paris: CNRS, 1977); this colloquium best covers the fiscal aspect but deals with the other two as well. The question of the distribution of land to soldiers and the families of soldiers comes up in every State and plays an essential role. In one particular form, it lay the foundation for fiefs and feudalism. But it already lay at the basis of “false fiefs” around the world, most notably of the *clews* and cleruchy in Greek civilization. Claire Preaux, *L’economie royale des Lagides* (Brussels: Ed. de la Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1939), pp. 463ff.
[544] Clausewitz, *On War,* especially book 8, and the commentary on these three theses by Raymond Aron, *Penser la guerre,* vol. 1 (particularly pp. 139 ff., “Pourquoi les guerres de la deuxieme espece?”).
[545] Erich Ludendorff, *Der totale Krieg* (Munich: Ludendorff Verlag, 1935), notes that the evolution has been toward attributing more and more importance to the “people” and “domestic policies” in war, whereas Clausewitz still puts the emphasis on armies and foreign policy. This criticism is true overall, despite certain texts of Clausewitz. The same criticism is also made by Lenin and the Marxists (although they obviously have a totally different conception of the people and domestic policy than Ludendorff). Certain authors have convincingly demonstrated that the proletariat is as much of military origin, naval in particular, as of industrial origin; see, for example, Virilio, *Speed and Politics,* pp. 38, 40–41, 134–35.
[546] As John Ulric Nef shows, it was during the great period of “limited war” (1640–1740) that the phenomena of concentration, accumulation, and investment emerged—the same phenomena that were later to determine “total war.” See *War and Human Progress* (New York: Norton, 1968). The Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought together the elements of total war: mobilization, transport, investment, information, etc.
[547] On this “transcending” of fascism, and of total war, and on the new point of inversion of Clausewitz’s formula, see Virilio’s entire analysis in *L’insecurit’e du terhtoire,* especially chapter 1.
[548] Guy Brossollet, *Essai sur la non-bataille,* pp. 15–16. The axiomatic notion of the “unspecified enemy” is already well developed in official and unofficial texts on national defense, on international law, and in the judicial or police spheres.
this dad does not belong. this dad chases things he cannot catch. this dad’s life did not turn out how he expected. this dad did not expect to reach 30. this dad wishes to walk into the ocean. just kidding… unless…?
[549] The principal book in this respect is *Mitra-Varuna* (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) (it also contains the analysis of the “One-Eyed” and the “One-Armed” gods).
[550] The theme of the Binder-God and the magic knot has been the object of general studies in mythology, notably Mircea Eliade, *Images and Symbols,* trans. Philip Mairet (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1961), chapter 3. But these studies are ambiguous because they use a syncretic and archetypal method. Dumezil’s method, on the other hand, is differential: the theme of capture or of the bond only groups various data together under a differential trait, which is constituted precisely by political sovereignty. On the opposition between these two methods, one can refer to Edmond Ortigues, *Le discours et le symbole* (Paris: Aubier, 1962).
[552] Ibid., p. 150: “There are many ways of being a god of war, and Tiwaz defines one that is very badly expressed by the labels warrior god, god of combat.... Tiwaz is something else: the jurist of war, and at the same time a kind of diplomat” (the same applies for Mars).
[554] Ernst Junger, *The Glass Bees,* trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), p. 112 [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].
[555] Marcel Detienne, *Les maitres de verite dans la Grece archaique* (Paris: Maspero, 1973), and “Le phalange, problemes et controverses,” in *Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne* (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, *The Origins of Greek Thought* (Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell University Press, 1982).
[556] Jacques Harmand cites an “enterprise using extensive manpower exceptionally directed by a functionary, Ouni, under the Pharaoh Pepi I toward 1400 B.C.”; *La guerre antique* (Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 28. Even the military democracy Morgan described does not explain, but presupposes, an archaic State of the imperial type (the work of Detienne and Vernant establishes this). This imperial State itself functions first with jailers and police, and not warriors: see Dumezil, *Mitra-Varuna,* pp. 200–204.
[557] The idea itself of an Asiatic despotic formation appeared in the eighteenth century, notably in Montesquieu, but was used to describe an evolved state of the empires and corresponded to absolute monarchy. Entirely different is the viewpoint of Marx, who recreates the notion in order to define the archaic empires. The principal texts in this regard are Marx, *Grundrisse,* trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 471–514; Karl Wittfogel, *Oriental Despotism* (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s preface to the first French edition, *Le despotisme oriental* (Paris: Minuit, 1964), which was surpressed in the second edition at Wittfogel’s request; Ferenc Tokei, *Essays on the Asiatic Mode of Production* (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979); and the studies in CERM, *Sur le mode de production asiatique* (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1969).
[558] Varron made a famous pun on *nexum* and *nee suumfit* (<verbatim>=</verbatim> the thing does not become the property of he who receives it). In effect, the *nexum* is a fundamental form of archaic Roman law, according to which it is not an accord between contracting parties that creates an obligation, but the borrower’s or donor’s word, in a magico-religious mode. This is not a contract *(mancipatio),* and it involves no buying-selling, even deferred, and no interest, although it seems to us that it may involve a kind of rent. See in particular Pierre Noailles, *Fas et Jus* (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948); and Dumezil, who stresses the connection between the *nexum* and the magic bond, *Mitra-Varuna,* pp. 118–124.
[559] See the excavations and studies of James Mellaart, *Earliest Civilizations in the Near East* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) and *Catal HuyukQievj* York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The urbanist Jane Jacobs has drawn on this work in proposing an imperial model she calls “New Obsidian” (after the name of the lava used to make tools), which may go back to the beginning of Neolithic times, or even much further into the past. She stresses the “urban” origin of agriculture and the role of hybridizations occurring in the urban grain stocks: It is agriculture that presupposes the stock, and not the reverse. In an as yet unpublished study, Jean Robert analyzes Mellaart’s theses and Jacobs’s hypothesis, applying them to new perspectives *(D’ecoloniser Vespace).*
[560] Clastres, *Society against the State,* trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977). We have seen that, according to Clastres, primitive war is one of the principal mechanisms warding off the State in that it maintains the opposition and dispersion of small segmentary groups. But also, from this viewpoint, primitive war remains subordinated to these preventive mechanisms and does not become autonomous as a machine, even when it comprises a specialized body.
also there’s an 11 year old girl who is routinely baited into terrible situations (surrounded by adult sex, alcohol and hookah, skeevy teenagers who say fuck, getting lost at night in a weird resort in turkey, michael) but nothing bad actually happens. this naturally transforms her into an intelligent lesbian for two brief chromeless future scenes.
[561] According to Griaznov, it was the sedentary farmers who went out on the steppe and became nomadic, during the Bronze Age: This is a case of a zigzag movement in evolution. See *The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia,* trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), pp. 97–98, 131–133.
[562] Jean Robert develops this notion of an “inversion of signs and messages”: “In a first phase, information circulates principally from the periphery toward the center, but at a certain critical point, the town begins to emit, in the direction of the rural world, increasingly imperative messages”; the town becomes an exporter *(D’ecoloniser I’espace).*
[563] On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle, see Etienne Balazs, *Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy,* trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 410: “The social structures in both India and China automatically rejected the town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because society was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization.”
[564] From all of these standpoints, Francois Chatelet questions the classical notion of the city-state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State: “La Grece classique, la Raison, I’Etat,” in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., *En marge. L’Occident et ses “autres”,* (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978). Islam was to confront analogous problems, as would Italy, Germany, and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century; in these cases, political power does not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns, which lacked functionaries, an army, and even legal status. The town is always inside a network of towns, but, precisely, “the network of towns” does not coincide with “mosaic of States.” On all of these points, see the analyses of Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, *Les equipements de pouvoir: ville, territoires et equipements collectifs* (Paris: 10/18, 1976), pp. 79–106.
[565] Claude Levi-Strauss, *Structural Anthropology,* trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 150–151.
[566] Louis Berthe analyzes a specific example of the need for a “third village” to prevent the directional circuit from closing: “Aines et cadets, l’alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj,” *L’Homme,* vol. 5, no. 3/4 (July-December 1965), pp. 214–215.
[567] Fernand Braudel, *Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800,* trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 60), pp. 398,405,411. Emphasis added. (On town-State relations in the West, see pp. 396–406.) And as Braudel notes, one of the reasons for the victory of the States over the towns from the beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war machine: by means of the territorial recruitment of men, material investment, the industrialization of war (it was more in the arms factories than in the pin factories that mass production and mechanical division appeared). The commercial towns, on the other hand, required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenaries, and were only able to encast the war machine.
[568] This theme is frequently developed by Samir Amin: “Since the theory of relations between different social formations cannot be an economistic one, international relations, which belong precisely to this context, cannot give rise to an economic theory.” *Unequal Development,* trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 146.
[569] See Jacques Lacarriere, *Les hommes ivres de Dieu* (Paris: Fayard, 1975).
[570] [TRANS: On capitalism repelling its limits, see Deleuze and Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus,* trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 230–232.]
film just ended without elaborating on which of these dads was the real dad. we do not get to learn the true dad no more than she did. but maybe, the true dad was the dad we made up in our heads along the way. cause i guess the real one is dead now? idk. good for him or sorry.
[571] Samir Amin analyzes this particularity of the “peripheral formations” of the Third World and distinguishes two principal types, the oriental and African, and the American: “The Americas, Asia and the Arab world, and Black Africa were not transformed in the same way because they were not integrated at the same stage of capitalist development at the center and therefore did not fulfill the same function in development.” *Unequal Development, p.* 295. See also *Accumulation on a Worldscale,* vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 390–394. We shall see, however, that under certain conditions the center and the periphery are determined in such a way as to exchange their characteristics.
[572] Gaetan Pirou, *Economie liberale et economie dirigee,* vol. 1 (Paris: Ed. Sedes, 1946–1947), p. 117: “The productivity of the marginal worker determines not only that worker’s wage but that of all the others, in the same way that, when it was a question of commodities, the utility of the last bucket of water or last sack of wheat governed the value not only of that bucket or that sack but of all the other buckets and all the other sacks.” (Marginalism seeks to quantify the assemblage, when in fact all kinds of qualitative factors are at work in the evaluation of the “last.”)
[573] On the importance of the theory of evaluation and feeling out for marginalism, see Jacques Fradin’s critical discussion, *Les fondements logiques de la th’eorie neoclassique de I’echange* (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976). For Marxists, there is also a groping evaluation, but one that can bear only on the quantity of socially necessary labor; Engels speaks of this precisely in the context of precapitalist societies. He invokes “a process of zig-zag approximation, often groping back and forth in the dark,” which is governed more or less by the “need for each person to have a rough idea of his costs” (one may wonder if this last part of the phrase does not reinstate a sort of marginalist criterion). Engels, “Supplement to Volume Three of Capital,” in Marx, *Capital,* vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 1036.
[574] [TRANS: “Ophelimity” (from the Greek for “useful,” “serviceable”) was introduced by Vilfredo Pareto in his *Cows d’economie politique* (1896), ed. G.-H. Bousquet and G. Busino (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), pp. 2–16. The first portion of this discussion is translated in Vilfredo Pareto, *Sociological Writings,* ed. and intro. S. E. Fine, trans. Derick Mirtin (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 97–102.]
[575] David Ricardo, *On the Principles of Political Economy,* in *The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo,* vol. 1, ed. Piero Sraffa (London: Cambridge University Press, 1962), chapter 2. See also Marx’s analysis of the two forms of “differential rent,” *Capital,* vol. 3, part 6.
[576] Of course, the least fertile land is also in theory the most recent or the last in a series (which allows many commentators to say that Ricardo prefigured marginalism in his theory of rent). But this is not even a rule, and Marx shows that an “increasing sequence” is just as possible as a “decreasing sequence” and that a better soil can “take the lowest place instead of that which was formerly the worst.” *Capital,* vol. 3, p. 798.
[578] Ricardo, *On the Principles of Political Economy,* p. 75: “If air, water, the elasticity of steam, and the pressure of the atmosphere, were of different qualities; if they could be appropriated, and each quality existed only in moderate abundance, they, as well as the land, would afford a rent, as the successive qualities were brought into use.”
[579] The two forms of *differential rent* are based on comparison. But Marx maintains the existence of another form, unknown to the theorists (Ricardo), but with which the practitioners, he says, are quite familiar: *absolute rent,* based on the special character of landed property as monopoly. In effect, land is not a commodity like the others because it is not reproducible at the level of a determinable aggregate. There is therefore monopoly, which is not the same as “monopoly price” (monopoly price, and the eventual corresponding rent, are totally different questions). In the simplest terms, differential rent and absolute rent can be distinguished in the following manner: since the price of the product is calculated on the basis of the worst soil, the entrepreneur with the best soil would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into differential rent accruing to the landowner; but on the other hand, since agricultural surplus value is proportionally greater than industrial surplus value (?), the agricultural entrepreneur in general would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into absolute rent accruing to the landowner. Rent is thus a necessary element in the equalization and adjustment of profit: whether it be the equalization of the agricultural profit rate (differential rent), or the equalization of this rate and the rate of industrial profit (absolute rent). Certain Marxist economists have proposed an entirely different schema of absolute rent, but one that maintains Marx’s necessary distinction, [TRANS: On absolute rent, see Marx, *Capital,* vol. 3, part 6, chapter 45, pp. 895–899.]
[580] Bernard Schmitt, *Monnaie, salaires et profit* (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 289–290, distinguishes between two forms of capture or “harnessing,” which correspond moreover to the two principal figures of the hunt, *waiting* and *pursuit.* Rent would be a residual or waiting kind of capture because it depends on external forces and operates by transfer; profit would be a capture of pursuit or conquest because it derives from a specific action and requires a force of its own or a “creation.” This holds true, however, only in relation to differential rent; as Marx noted, absolute rent represents the “creative” aspect of landed property *(Capital,* vol. 3, p. 889).
[581] Edouard Will, *Korinthiaka* (Paris: Ed. De Boccard, 1955), pp. 470ff, analyzes a late, but exemplary, case, that of the tyrant Cypselos’s reform in Corinth: (1) a portion of the land belonging to the hereditary aristocracy was confiscated and distributed to the poor peasants; (2) but at the same time a metallic stock was constituted, through seizure of the property of proscribed persons; (3) this money itself was distributed to the poor, but in order for them to give it to the old owners as an indemnity; (4) the old owners from then on paid their taxes in money, so as to ensure a circulation or turnover of the currency, and an equivalence between money, goods, and services. We already find analogous figures directly inscribed in the archaic empires, independently of the problems of private property. For example, land is distributed to the functionaries in their capacity as functionaries, and they exploit or lease it. But if the functionary thereby receives a rent in labor or in kind from it, he owes the emperor a tax payable in money. Hence the necessity of “banks,” which, under complex conditions, ensure the equivalence, conversion, and circulation of goods-money throughout the economy; see Guillaume Cardascia, “Armee et fiscalite dans la Babylone achemenide,” in *Armees et fiscalit’e dans le monde antique* (Paris: CNRS, 1977).
rating: an alliance of various holiday dads
[582] [TRANS: On these three forms of rent, see Marx, *Capital,* vol. 3, part 6, chapter 47, pp. 925–938.]
[583] Authors like Will and Gabriel Ardant have demonstrated that the commercial function does not account for the origin of money, tied to ideas of “payment,” “settlement,” “taxation.” Will proves this in particular for the Greek and Western worlds; but even in the oriental empires, we think that the monopoly over monetarized trade assumes monetary taxation. See Edouard Will, “Reflexions et hypotheses sur les origines du monnayage,” *Revue numismatique,* vol. 17 (1955), pp. 3–24; Gabriel Ardant, *Histoire financiere de I’antiquite a nos jours* (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 28ff.: “The milieus that gave rise to taxation also gave rise to money.”
[584] On this aspect of indirect taxation, see Arghiri Emmanuel, *Unequal Exchange,* trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 1–2, 228–236 (in relation to foreign trade). Concerning the relations taxation-trade, a particularly interesting case is that of mercantilism, analyzed by Eric Alliez *(Capital et pouvoir,* unpublished manuscript).
[585] [TRANS: Marx presents his trinity formula (capital-profit, land-ground rent, labor-wages) in *Capital,* vol. 3, chapter 48.]
[587] Marx often emphasizes the following points, particularly in his analysis of primitive accumulation: (1) Primitive accumulation precedes the mode of production and makes it possible. (2) It therefore implies specific action by the State and the law, which are not opposed to violence but, on the contrary, promote it (“These methods depend in part on brute force.... But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society.” *Capital,* vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], chapter 31, p. 915). (3) This lawful violence appears first in its raw form but ceases to be conscious to the degree that the mode of production becomes established; it seems to be a fact of nature pure and simple (“direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases”; ibid., p. 899). (4) A movement such as this is explained by the particular character of this violence, which is in no case reducible to theft, crime, or illegality (see *Notes surAdolph Wagner* in *Oeu-vres de Karl Marx,* “Pleiade” edition, vol. 2, ed. Maximilien Rubel [Paris: Gallimard, 1968]): what is taken away from the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist “does not limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production of a surplus value, *in other words,* he first contributes to the creation of that from which he takes away.... A part of the value created without the labor of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by the capitalist, in other words, without violating the corresponding right to the exchange of commodities.”
[588] Jean Robert thoroughly demonstrates, in this context, that primitive accumulation implies the violent construction of a homogenized, “colonized” space (“Decoloniser l’espace,” unpublished manuscript).
[589] Ferenc Tokei, “Les conditions de la propriete fonciere dans la Chine de l’epoque Tcheou,” *Acta Antiqua,* vol. 6 (1958), pp. 245–300. Marx and Engels already noted that the Roman plebs (partially composed of freedmen) alone had the right to the “transfer of property out of the *ager publicus”* (Marx, *Grundrisse,* p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were “excluded from all public rights” (Engels, *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the* *State* [New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).
[590] See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, *The Most Ancient East* (London: K. Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928)and especially *The Prehistory of European Civilization* (London: Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the Orient *(The Prehistory of European Civilization,* pp. 106–110).
[591] On the differences between “generalized slavery” in the archaic empire, and private slavery, feudal corvee, etc., see Charles Parain, “Protohistoire mediterraneenne et mode de production asiatique,” in CERM, *Sur le mode de production asiatique,* pp. 170–173.
[592] Gerard Boulvert, *Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haut-empire romain* (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of “subjective law” in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a “law without concepts” that proceeds by “topics,” and in this sense differs from the modern, “axiomatic” conception of the law. See Veyne, *Le pain et le cirque* (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744.
[593] See Francois Hincker, “La monarchic absolue francaise,” in CERM, *Sur lefeodalisme* (Paris: Ed. Sociaies, 1971).
[594] Edgar Quinet, *La genie des religions,* vol. 1 of *Oeuvres Completes* (Paris: Hachette, ca. 1899).
[595] Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” in *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,* trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298 [translation modified].
[596] On the historical independence of the two series, and their “encounter,” see Etienne Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, *Lirele Capital,* vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286–289.
[597] Arghiri Emmanuel, *Unequal Exchange,* pp. 13–14, and the following passage he cites from Paul Sweezy, *The Theory of Capitalist Development* (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942), p. 338: “‘Capital’ is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of value” (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of capital, Maurice Dobb *(Studies in the Development of Capitalism,* rev. ed. [New York: International Publishers, 1964], pp. 177–186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumulation bears not on the means of production but on “rights or titles to wealth” (p. 177; modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circumstances, are convertible into means of production.
[598] See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, “topical,” law, and modern, “axiomatic,” law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation, admonishment, etc.); (2) the code’s pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, *Essai sur la structure logique du code civil francais* (Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[599] [<sub>TRANS</sub>: Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,* ed. and intro. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.]
[600] See Jean Saint-Geours, *Pouvoir et finance* (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of “private-public” mixes in the modern economy.
[601] On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin and Kostas Vergopoulos, *La questionpaysanne et le capitalisme* (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974). Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; *The Law of Value and Historical Materialism,* trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6.
[602] Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of problems. For example, Robert Blanche’s fine book, *L’axiomatique* (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged and translated by G. B. *Keene as Axiomatics (New York:* Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the system is saturated, or “strongly complete” (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of “models of realization,” their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axiomatic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once again, there is the question of the “undecidable propositions” an axiomatic confronts (sec. 20). Finally, there is the question of “power,” by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed the axiomatic (sec. 26 and “the power of the continuum”). The comparison of politics to an axiomatic is based on all of these aspects.
-this one was by grombo
[603] Lewis Mumford, “The First Megamachine,” Diogenes, no. 55 (July-September 1966), p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].
[604] Ergonomics distinguishes between “human-machine” systems (or work posts) and “humans-machines” systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is not a generalization of the first: “The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect,” and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, *Les systemes hommes-machines* (Paris: PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A deaf-mute can be an essential part of a “humans-machines” communicational system.
[605] One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement combines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualitative leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the house, but as forming the walls of the house.
[606] See Lewis Mumford, *The Pentagon ojPower,* vol. 2 of<em>The Myth ojthe Machine</em>(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236–360 (a comparison of the “old megama-chine” and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered from difficulties in “communication”).
[608] Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: “undecidable” propositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets, which by nature elude axiomatic treatment (“the continuum, for example, cannot be conceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it will rely on a denumerable model”). See Blanche, *L’axiomatique,* p. 80.
[609] The “intuitionist” school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great importance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of *problems,* and of a *calculus of problems* that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle).
[610] In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye’s *Langages totalitaires* (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 664–676. Faye shows that Nazism is indeed a totalitarianism, precisely because of its minimal State, its refusal of any statification of the economy, its reduction of wages, its hostility toward large-scale public works. But at the same time, he shows that Nazism carries out the creation of domestic capital, strategic construction, and the building of an arms industry, which makes it rival or sometimes even meld with an economy of socialist leaning (“something that seems *to* resemble the Swedish loans praised by Myrdal with a view to large-scale projects, but which is in fact and immediately its opposite, the writing of an arms economy and a war economy,” and the corresponding difference between “the public works entrepreneur” and the “army supplier”; pp. 668, 674).
[611] See the critical list of the axioms of the periphery presented by Samir Amin, *Accumulation on a Worldscale,* pp. 390–394.
[612] Paul Virilio, *L’ins’ecurite du territoire* (Paris: Stock, 1975); *Speed and Politics,* trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986); *Defense populaire et luttes ecologiques* (Paris: Galilee, 1978), forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e) as *Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles:* it is precisely beyond fascism and total war that the war machine finds its complete object, in the menacing peace of nuclear deterrence. It is there that the reversal of Clausewitz’s formula takes on a concrete meaning, at the same time as State politics tends to wither and the war machine takes over a maximum of civil functions (“place the whole of civil society under the regime of military security,” “disqualify the whole of the planet’s habitat by stripping the peoples of their quality of inhabitant,” “erase the distinction between wartime and peacetime”; see the role of the media in this respect). Certain European police forces could be taken as an example, when they claim the right to “shoot on sight”: they cease to be a cogwheel in the State apparatus and become pieces in a war machine.
[613] Braudel shows how this center of gravity formed in northern Europe, but at the outcome of movements that, starting in the ninth and tenth centuries, put the European spaces of the North and the South in competition or rivalry with one another (this problem is not to be confused with that of the town-form and State-form, but does intersect with it). See “Naissance d’une economie-monde,” *Urbi,* no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3–20.
i liked film but it wasn’t all there. very technically well made. reminds me of the long goodbye since i saw that lately, lots of reflections and glare by the sea. memories…
[614] A movement in Marxist research formed on the basis of the work of Mario Tronti *(Operai e capitate* [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1971]; French translation, *Ouvriers et capital* [Paris: Bourgois, 1977]), then that of Italian autonomy and Antonio Negri, whose aim was to analyze the new forms of work and the struggle against work. It was a question of showing simultaneously: (1) that the struggle against work is not an accidental or “marginal” phenomenon in capitalism, but one essential to the composition of capital (the growth in the proportion of constant capital), and, (2) that this phenomenon engenders a new type of worldwide struggle—workers’ struggles, popular struggles, ethnic struggles—in every domain. See Antonio Negri, especially *Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse,* ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizion Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, *Die “andere” Arbeiterbewegung* (Munich: Trikont, 1974); and the current work in France of Yann Moulier, Alain and Daniele Guillerm, Benjamin Coriat, etc. [TRANS: The best sources on the autonomy movement in English are *Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e),* vol. 3, no. 3 (1980) and *Autonomy and the Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Praxis of a Class Movement: 1964–1979* (London: Red Notes and CSE Books, 1979). *Marx Beyond Marx* includes a lengthy epilogue by Michael Ryan summarizing Negri’s major works and a bibliography of writings on the Italian movement available in English.]
[615] This is one of the essential theses of Tronti, who defined the new conceptions of the “mass-worker” and of the relation to work: “To struggle against capital, the working class must fight against itself insofar as it is capital; this is the maximal stage of contradiction, not forthe workers, but for the capitalists __ The plan of capital begins to run backward, not as a *social* *development,* but as a *revolutionary process.”* See *Ouvriers et capital,* p. 322; this is what Negri has called the “crisis of the planning state” *(Crisi dello Stato-plano* [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974]).
[616] This is another aspect of the present-day situation: in addition to the new struggles tied to work and the evolution in work, there is the entire domain of what are called “alternative practices” and the construction of such practices (pirate radio stations would be the simplest example; other examples are urban community networks, the alternative to psychiatry, etc.). On all these points, and the link between the two aspects, see Franco Berardi Bifo, *Finalemente il cielo e caduto sulla terra* (Milan: Squilibri, 1978); and *Les Untorelli, Re-cherches,* no. 30 (1977) (special issue on autonomia).
[617] Andre Leroi-Gourhan, *L’homme el la matiere* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), pp. 244ff. (and the opposition between fabric and felt).
[618] William Faulkner, *Sartoris* (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 151.
[619] On the history of the quilt and patchwork in American immigration, see Jonathan Holstein, *American Pieced Quilts* (New York: Viking, 1973) (with reproductions and bibliography). Holstein does not claim that the quilt is the principal source of American art, but he does note the extent to which the “white on white” of plain quilts and patchwork compositions inspired or gave impetus to certain tendencies in American painting: “We can see in many [quilts] such phenomena as ‘op’ effects, serial images, use of ‘color fields,’ deep understanding of negative space, mannerisms of formal abstraction and the like,” (p. 13).
[620] Pierre Boulez, *Boulez on Music Today,* trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83ff. We provide a summary of Boulez’s analysis in the following paragraph.
[621] [TRANS: Boulez, *Boulez on Music Today,* p. 87. Translation modified.]
[622] On this indexing of the inside and the outside among the nomads of the desert, see Annie Milovanoff, “La seconde peau du nomade,” *Nouvelles litteraires,* no. 2646 (July 27, 1978), p. 18. And on the relations between the igloo and the outside among the nomads of the ice, see Edmund Carpenter, *Eskimo* (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964).
[623] See the two convergent descriptions of the space of ice and the space of sand: Edmund Carpenter, *Eskimo,* and Wilfred Thesiger, *Arabian Sands* (London: Longmans, Green, 1959). (In both cases, there is an indifference to astronomy.)
my favorite shot was at the very beginning where you can just barely see sophie’s reflection in the tv screen, but i also really liked when she interviewed her dad. amazing camerawork. really great stuff
[624] See Pierre Chaunu’s study, *L’expansion europeenne du XHIe au XVe siecle* (Paris: PUF, 1969), pp. 288–305.
[625] See in particular Paul Adam, “Navigation primitive et navigation astronomique,” in *Les aspects internalionaux de la decouverte oceanique aux XVe et XVIe siecles. Ve Colloque international d’histoire maritime,* ed. Michel Mollat and Paul Adam (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960), pp. 91–112. (See the operative geometry of the pole star.)
[626] Guy Beaujouan, “Science livresque et nautique au XVe siecle,” *Les aspects interna-tionaux de la decouverte oceanique,* pp. 61–90.
[627] See Paul Virilio, *L’ins’ecurite du territoire* (Paris: Stock, 1975), on how the sea reconstitutes a smooth space with the “fleet in being,” etc.; and how a vertical smooth space of aerial and stratospheric domination springs up (especially chapter 4, “Le littoral vertical,” pp. 93–109).
[628] Emmanuel Laroche, *Histoire de la racine “Nem “ en grec ancien* (Paris: Klincksieck, 1949), clearly notes the difference between the ideas of distribution and allocation, between the two linguistic groups concerned, between the two kinds of space, between the “province” pole and the “city” pole.
[629] This expression is found in Rene Thorn, who applies it to a continuous variation in which the variable reacts upon its antecedents: *Modeles math’ematiques de la morphogenese* (Paris: 10/18, 1974), pp. 218–219.
[630] On Riemann’s and Helmholtz’s presentations of multiplicity, see Jules Vuillemin, *Philosophie de I’algebre* (Paris: PUF, 1962), pp. 409ff.
[631] See Bertrand Russell, *The Principles ofMathematics* (New York: Norton, 1964), chapter 31. The following discussion does not conform to Russell’s theory. An excellent analysis of the notions of distance and magnitude according to Meinong and Russell may be found in Albert Spaier, *La pensee et la quantite* (Paris: Alcan, 1927).
[632] Beginning in chapter 2 of *Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,* trans.F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Bergson repeatedly uses the noun “multiplicity,” under conditions that should attract the attention of commentators; that there is an implicit reference to Riemann seems beyond doubt. Later, in *Matter and Memory,* trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), he explains that Achilles’ stride can be divided perfectly into “submultiples” that differ in nature, however, from that which they divide; the same goes for the tortoise’s stride; and the submultiples, “in both cases,” themselves differ in nature.
[633] See Bergson, *Time and Free Will,* p. 82: if a multiplicity “implies the possibility of treating any number whatever as a provisional unit which can be added to itself, inversely the units in their turn are true numbers which are as big as we like, but are regarded as provisionally indivisible for the purpose of compounding them with one another.”
recently i tried to get a friend to not play video game “pathologic” because it’s not exactly a game as a direct to video essay experience. sometimes holidays can feel that way except it’s direct to camera roll or whatever. maybe this movie is direct to letterboxd review about life being direct to memory or whatever, idk. who knows…
[634] Albert Lautman, *Les schemas de structure* (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23, 34–35.
[635] On this properly Euclidean conjunction (which is very different from the process of accumulation), see Lautman, ibid., pp. 45–48.
[636] Benoit Mandelbrot, *Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension* (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977).
[637] On these two kinds of space, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, *Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs,* vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), pp. 174–175.
[638] Michel Serres, *La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbulences* (Paris: Minuit, 1977): “Physics is based much more on a vectorial space than on a metric space” (p. 79). On the hydraulic problem, see pp. 104–107.
[640] Anne Querrien has clearly demonstrated the importance of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) in this elaboration of the concept of work. For example, Navier, an engineer and professor of mechanics, wrote in 1819: “We must establish a mechanical currency with which to estimate the quantities of work used to accomplish every kind of fabrication.”
[641] It is a commonplace of missionaries’ narratives that there is nothing corresponding to the category of work, even in transhumant agriculture, with its laborious ground-clearing activities. Marshall Sahlins is not content to remark the briefness of the time devoted to the labor necessary for maintenance and reproduction, but goes on to stress qualitative factors: the continuous variation that regulates activity, and the mobility or freeness of movement, which excludes stockpiling and is measured in terms of the “convenience of transporting the object.” “La premiere societe d’abondance,” *Les temps modernes,* no. 268 (October 1968), pp. 654–656, 662–663, 672–673.
[642] The principal texts are Alois Riegl, *Die Sp’dtromische Kunstindustrie* (Vienna: Staatdruckerei, 1927); Wilhelm Worringer, *Abstraction and Empathy; A Contribution to the Psychology of Style,* trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1963); Henri Maldiney, *Regard, parole, espace* (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1973), especially “L’art et le pouvoir du fond,” and Maldiney’s discussion of Cezanne.
[643] All of these points already relate to Riemannian space, with its essential relation to “monads” (as opposed to the unitary Subject of Euclidean space): see Gilles Chatelet, “Sur une petite phrase de Riemann,” *Analytiques,* no. 3 (May 1979). Although the “monads” are no longer thought to be closed upon themselves, and are postulated to entertain direct, step-by-step local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and should be superseded by a “nomadology” (the ideality of striated space versus the realism of smooth space).
[644] See Edmund Carpenter’s description in *Eskimo* of ice space, and of the igloo: “There is no middle distance, no perpecti ve, no outline, nothing the eye can cling to except thousands of smokey plumes of snow... a land without bottom or edge ... a labyrinth alive with the movements of crowded people. No flat static walls arrest the ear or eye ... and the eye can glance through here, past there” (no pagination).
-rachel
[645] These two aspects, the Encompassing Element and the Center, figure in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s analysis of space in Anaximander; *Mythe et penseee chez les Grecs* (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), vol. 1, part 3. From another perspective, the entire history of the desert concerns the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected by the center, as though in an inversion of movement. In a phenomenology of religion like that of Van der Leeuw, the *nomos* itself does indeed appear as the encompassing-limit or ground, and also as that which is repelled, excluded, in a centrifugal movement.
[646] Whatever interactions there may be, the “art of the steppes” had a specificity that was communicated to the migrating Germans; in spite of his many reservations about nomad culture, Rene Grousset makes this point in *The Empire of the Steppes,* trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). pp. 11 -25. He notes the irreducibility of Scythian art to Assyrian art, Sarmatian art to Persian art, and Hunnic art to Chinese art. He even points out that the art of the steppes influenced more than it borrowed (see in particular the question of Ordos art and its relations to China).
[647] On this question of light and color, in particular in Byzantine art, see Henri Maldiney, *Regard, parole, espace,* pp. 203ff., 239ff.
[648] The correlation, “haptic-close-abstract,” was already suggested by Riegl. But it was Worringer who developed the theme of the abstract line. Although he conceives of it essentially in its Egyptian form, he describes a second form in which the abstract assumes an intense life and an expressionist value, all the while remaining inorganic: *Abstraction and Empathy,* chapter 5, and especially *Form in Gothic* (London: Putnam’s and Sons, 1927), pp. 38–55.
[649] Andre Leroi-Gourhan, *Legesteet la parole* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–1965), vol. 1, *Technique et langage,* pp. 263ff.; vol. 2, *La m’emoire et les rythmes,* pp. 219ff. (“Rhythmic marks are anterior to explicit figures.”) Worringer’s position is very ambiguous; thinking that prehistoric art is fundamentally figurative, he excludes it from Art, on the same grounds as he excludes the “scribblings of a child” *(Abstraction and Empathy,* pp. 51–55). Then he advances the hypothesis that the cave dwellers were the “ultimate result” of a series he says began with the abstract (p. 130). But would not such a hypothesis force Worringer to revise his conception of the abstract, and to cease identifying it with Egyptian geometricism?
[650] Worringer establishes an opposition between the power of repetition, which is mechanical, multiplying, and without fixed orientation, and the force of symmetry, which is organic, additive, oriented, and centered. He sees this as the fundamental difference between Gothic ornamentation and Greek or classical ornamentation: *Form in Gothic,* pp. 53–55 (“The Ceaseless Melody of the Northern Line”). In a fine book, *Esthetiques d’Orient et d’Occident* (Paris: E. Leroux, 1937), Laura Morgenstern develops a particular example, distinguishing the “symmetrical antithetism” of Sassanid Persian art from the “disjointed antithetism” of the art of the prdto-Iranian nomads (Sarmatians). Many authors, however, have stressed the centered and symmetrical motifs in barbarian or nomad art. Worringer anticipated this objection: “Instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel, the turbine or the so-called sun wheel, all designs which express violent movement. Moreover, the movement is peripheral and not radial” *(Form in Gothic,* p. 54). The history of technology confirms the importance of the turbine in the life of the nomads. In another, bio-aesthetic, context, Gabriel Tarde opposes repetition as indefinite potential *(puissance)* to symmetry as limitation. With symmetry, life constituted an organism for itself, taking a star-shaped or reflected, infolded form (the radiata and mollusks). It is true that in doing so it unleashed another type of repetition, external reproduction; see *L ‘opposition universale* (Paris: Alcan, 1897).
[653] On all of these points, see Georges Charriere’s very intuitive book, *Scythian Art* (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), which includes a great number of reproductions. It is doubtless Rene Grousset who has most effectively emphasized “slowness” as a dramatic pole of nomad art: *The Empire of the Steppes,* pp. 13–14.
[654] Dora Vallier, in her preface to the French translation of *Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraction et Einfuhlung* [Paris: Klincksieck, 1978]), is right to note Worringer and Kandinsky’s independence from one another, and the differences between the problems they were addressing. However, she maintains that there is still convergence and resonance between them. In a sense, all art is abstract, with the figurative springing from certain types of abstraction. But in another sense, since there are very different types of lines (Egyptian-geometrical, Greek-organic, Gothic-vital, etc.), the question then becomes one of determining which line remains abstract, or realizes abstraction as such. It is doubtful that it is the geometrical line, since it still draws a figure, even though an abstract and nonrepresentative one. Rather, the abstract line is that defined by Michael Fried in relation to certain works by Pollock: multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points, filling a smooth space, stirring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that “both invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all,” *(Three American Painters* [Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], p. 14). In Kandinsky himself, abstraction is realized not so much by geometrical structures as by lines of march or transit that seem to recall Mongolian nomadic motifs.
P before an entry indicates a preface, postface, introduction, or afterword.
*Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.* Preface by Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977; rpt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Translation of *VAnti-Oedipe.*
*Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.* Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Translation of *Kafka: Pour une litt’erature mineure.*
*Nomadology: The War Machine.* Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. Translation of Chapter 12 of *Mille Plateaux.*
*On the Line.* Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Translation of “Rhizome” (the final version published in *Mille plateaux)* and “Politics” (Chapter 6 *of Dialogues).*
*A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.* Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Translation of *Mille Plateaux.*
“Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring-Machines.” Trans. Robert Hurley. *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 5 (1977), pp. 117–135. Translation of “Bilan-programme pour machines desirantes.”
“Becoming-Woman.” Trans. Brian Massumi. *Subjects/Objects,* no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 24–32. Extracts from Chapter 10 of *Mille Plateaux.*
**“A Bloated Oedipus.”** Trans. Rachel McComas. *Semiotext(e), Polysexuality,* vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 97–101. Abridged translation of Chapter 2 of *Kafka: Pour une litt’erature* *mineure.* “City-State.” Trans. Brian Massumi. *Zone,* no. 1 /2 (1985), pp. 195–199. Extract from Chapter 13 *of Mille Plateaux.* “Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines.” Trans. Charles Stivale. *Sub/Stance,* vol. 13, nos. 3/4 (1984), pp. 7–19. Translation of Chapter 15 of *Mille Plateaux.* “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs.” Trans. Suzanne Guerlac. *Semiotext(e),* *Polysexuality,* vol. 4, no. 1(1981), pp. 265–270. Abridged translation of “Comment se faire un corps sans organes,” first version. “The Interpretation of Utterances.” With Claire Parnet and A. Scala. Trans, and ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. In *Language, Sexuality and Subversion.* Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 141–157. Papers delivered at the Milan conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973); published in Deleuze and Guattari, *Politique et psychanalyse.* “One or Several Wolves?” Trans. Mark Seem. *Semiotext(e),* *Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 137–147. Translation of “Un seul ou plusieurs loups?”, first version. “Nomad Art.” Trans. Brian Massumi. *Art and Text,* no. 19 (Oct.-Dec. 1985), pp. 16–24. Extracts from Chapter 14 of *Mille Plateaux.* “Rhizome.” Trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton. In *Ideology and Consciousness,* no. 8 (Spring 1981), pp. 49–71. Translation of *Rhizome* (the first version, published as a separate book). “What Is a Minor Literature?” Trans. Robert Brinkley. *Mississippi Review,* vol. 2, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 13–33. Translation of Chapter 3 of *Kafka.*
*I’Anti-Oedipe.* Vol. 1 of *Capitalisme et schizophrenic.* Paris: Minuit, 1972; 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., 1973, with added appendix, “Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes.” *Kafka: Pour une litt’erature mineure.* Paris: Minuit, 1975.
*Mille Plateaux.* Vol. 2 of *Capitalisme et schizophrenie.* Paris: Minuit, 1980.
*Politique et psychanalyse.* Alencon: Bibliotheque des Mots Perdues, 1977. Texts from the Milan conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973). Contains: “La place du signifiant dans l’institution,” Guattari (revised version reprinted in *La revolution moleculaire,* and included in the English edition); “Psychanalyse et politique,” Guattari; “Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse,” Deleuze; and “L’interpretation des enonces,” Deleuze, Guattari, Claire Parnet, and Andre Scala.