reorganizing the website. hopefully all old links should redirect appropriately
[176] “Generative” and “transformational” are Chomsky’s terms. For him, the transformational is precisely the best and most profound way of realizing the generative; we, however, are using the terms in a different sense.
[177] Michel Foucault has developed, in successive levels, a theory of statements addressing all of these problems. (1) In *The Archaeology of Knowledge,* trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault distinguishes two kinds of “multiplicities,” of content and of expression, which are not reducible to relations of correspondence or causality, but are in reciprocal presupposition. (2) In *Discipline and Punish,* trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), he looks for an agency capable of accounting for the two imbricated, heterogeneous forms, and finds it in assemblages of power, or micropowers. (3) But these collective assemblages (school, army, factory, hospital, prison, etc.) are only degrees or singularities in an abstract “diagram,” which for its part has only matter and function (the unspecified multiplicity of human beings to be controlled). (4) *The History of Sexuality. Vol.* *l.Anlntro-duction,* trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), takes yet another direction since assemblages are no longer related to and contrasted with a diagram, but rather to a “biopoli-tics of population” as an abstract machine. Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.
[178] Louis Hjelmslev proposed a very important conception of “matter” or “purport” *(sens)* as unformed, amorphous, or formless: *Prolegomena to a Theory of Language,* trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sec. 13, pp. 47–60, and *Essais linguistiques* (Paris: Minuit, 1971), pp. 58ff. (see also the preface by Francois Rastier, p. 9).
[179] The distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C. S. Peirce, *Collected Papers,* ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958). But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make the “diagram” a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorializa-tion relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol. On Peirce’s fundamental distinctions and the complex status of the diagram, one may refer to Jakobson’s analysis, “A la recherche de l’essence du langage,” in *Problemes du langage,* ed. Emile Benveniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
[180] [TRANS: Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God,” *Selected Writings,* ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 571.]
[181] [<sub>TRANS</sub>: Jules Cotard, *Etard sur les maladies cerebrates et mentales* (Paris: Brail-liere, 1891).]
[182] [TRANS: Dr. Schreber’s *Memoirs,* quoted by Sigmund Freud, *Notes on a Case ofPara-noia,* vol. 12, *Standard Edition,* trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 17.]
[183] William Burroughs, *Naked Lunch* (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 131.
[184] The opposition program-phantasy appears clearly in the work of Michel de M’uzan, in relation to a case of masochism. See M’uzan in *La sexualit’e perverse,* ed. Isle and Robert Barande et al. (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 36. Although he does not specifically discuss this opposition, M’uzan uses the notion of the program to question the themes of Oedipus, anxiety, and castration.
[185] See Kurt Lewin’s description of the flow of meat in the American family, “Psychological Ecology,” *Field Theory in Social Science,* ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), pp. 170–187.
/blog will now house just weekly recaps and unfocused ramblings
[186] Albert Dalcq, *L’oeufet son dynamisme organisateur* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), p. 95: “Forms are contingent upon kinematic dynamism. It is secondary whether or not an orifice forms in the germ. All that counts is the process of immigration itself; what yields an orifice fissure or primitive line is not invagination, but pure chronological and quantitative variations.”
[189] [TRANS: *Jouissance:* “pleasure, enjoyment, orgasm.” In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object of desire is irrevocably lost and the subject eternally split. *Jouissanceis* doubly impossible: life is a *manque-a-jouir,* read as “lack of enjoyment,” because the true object of desire is unattainable; and it is a *manque-a-jouir,* read as “a lack to be enjoyed,” because *jouissance* as the orgasmic plenitude of union with a substitute object means the annulment of the constitutionally split subject. One of the necessary terms, the subject or the object, is always missing.]
[190] Roger Dupouy, “Du masochisme,” *Annales m’edico-psychologiques,* series 12, vol. 2 (1929), p. 405.
[192] On courtly love, and its radical immanence rejecting both religious transcendence and hedonist exteriority, see Rene Nelli, *L’erotique des troubadours* (Paris: Union Generale d’Editions, 1974), in particular, vol. l,pp. 267, 316, 358, and 370, and vol. 2, pp. 47, 53, and 75. (Also vol. 1, p. 128: one of the major differences between chivalric love and courtly love is that for “knights the valor by which one merits love is always *external* to love,” whereas in the system of courtly love, the test is essentially *internal* to love; war valor is replaced by “sentimental heroism.” This is a mutation in the war machine.)
[193] Robert Van Gulik, *Sexual Life in Ancient China* (Leiden: Brill, 1961); and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s discussion of it, *Economie libidinale* (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 241 -251.
[194] Gregory Bateson, *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113.
[195] Artaud, *H’eliogabale,* in *Oeuvres Completes* (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 50–51. It is true that Artaud still presents the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity, one that reduces the multiple by gathering it into the One. He makes Heliogabalus a kind of Hegelian. But that is a manner of speaking, for from the beginning multiplicity surpasses all opposition and does away with dialectical movement.
[196] [TRANS: Artaud, “The Body Is the Body,” trans. Roger McKeon, *Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,* vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), p. 59.]
[197] Artaud, *The Peyote Dance* (translation of *Les Tarahumaras),* trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 38–39 [translation modified].
[198] [TRANS: Carlos Castaneda, *Tales of Power (New* York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 125.]
more purposeful posts have been moved to /essay
[202] Josef von Sternberg, *Funin a Chinese Laundry(Nev/* York: MacMillan, 1965), p. 324. [TRANS: The English version of this phrase reads “merciful darkness.”]
[203] [TRANS: “Blumfeld. An Elderly Gentleman.” *The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka,* ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 183–205.]
[204] On this ballet, see Jean Barraque’s *Debussy* (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which cites the text of the argument, pp. 166–171.
[205] See Otto Isakower, “Contribution a la psychopathologie des phenomenes associes a I’endormissement,” *Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse,* no. 5 (Spring 1972), pp. 197–210; Bertram D. Lewin, “Le sommeil, la bouche et l’ecran du reve,” ibid., pp. 211–224; and Rene Spitz, with the collaboration of W. Godfrey Cobliner, *The First Year of Life* (New York: International Publishers, 1965), pp. 75–82.
[206] Henry Miller, *Tropic of Capricorn* (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 121–123.
[207] Klaatsch, “L’evolution du genre humain,” in Kreomer, *L’Univers et I’humanit’e,* vol. 2: “In vain, we tried to find a trace of red edging around the lips of live, young chimpanzees, which resemble man so closely in all other respects.... How would the face of the most gracious young woman look if her mouth was a stripe between two white borders?... In addition, the pectoral region of the anthropoid possesses the two nipples of the mammary glands, but folds of fat comparable to the breasts never form.” And Emile Devaux’s formula in *Trois problemes: I’espece, I’instinct, rhomme(Paris:* Le Francois, 1933), p. 264: “The child made the woman’s breast, and the mother the child’s lips.”
[208] Face exercises play an essential role in the pedagogical principles of J.-B. de la Salle. Even Ignacio de Loyola integrated his teaching landscape exercises or “compositions of place” relative to the life of Christ, hell, the world, etc. As Barthes points out, this involves skeletal images subordinated to a language, but also active schemas to be completed, colored in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks *[Sade, Fourier, Loyola,* trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)—Trans.]
[209] Chretien de Troyes, *The Story of the Grail,* trans. Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 88–89. A similar scene, dominated by the “machinery” of the boat, is found in Malcolm Lowry’s novel *Ultramarine* (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), pp. 159–172: a pigeon drowns in waters infested by sharks, “as if a red leaf should fall on a white torrent” (p. 170), and this inevitably evokes the image of a bloody face. Lowry’s scene is imbedded in such different elements and is so particularly organized that there can be no question of influence by Chretien de Troyes’s scene, only confluence with it. This makes it an even better confirmation of the existence of a veritable black hole or red mark-white wall abstract machine (snow or water).
[210] [TRANS: Continued in 10, “1730: Becoming-Intense ...,” pp. 232–309]
[211] Sergei Eisenstein, *Film Form and Film Sense,* trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 195–199: “‘The kettle began it...’ Thus Dickens opens his *Cricket on the Hearth....* What could be further from films!... But, strange as it may seem, movies also were boiling in that kettle.... As soon as we recognize this kettle as a typical close-up, we exclaim:’... of course this is the purest Griffith.’... Certainly, this kettle is a typical Griffith-esque close-up. A close-up saturated, we now become aware, with typically Dickens-esque ‘atmosphere,’ with which Griffith, with equal mastery, can envelop the severe face of life in *Way Down East,* and the icy cold moral face of his characters, who push the guilty Anna onto the shifting surface of a swirling ice-break” (the white wall again).
/minfeub is self explanatory
[212] Jacques Lizot, *Le cercle desfeux* (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 34ff.
[213] On the stranger grasped as Other, see Andre Haudricourt, “Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l’igname: l’origine des clones et des clans,” *L’Homme* vol. 4, no. 1 (January-April 1964), pp. 98–102. And Robert Jaulin, *Gens de soi, gens de I’autre* (Paris: Union Generate d’Editions, 1973), preface, p. 20.
[214] Maurice Ronai demonstrates that the landscape, the reality as well as the notion, is tied to a very particular semiotic system and very particular apparatuses of power: this is one of the sources of geography, as well as a principle behind its political subordination (the landscape as “the face of the fatherland or nation”). See “Paysages,” in *H’erodote,* no. 1 (January-March 1976), pp. 125–159.
[215] See Jacques Mercier, *Ethiopian Magic Scrolls,* trans. Richard Pevear (New York: Braziller, 1979). And “Les peintures des rouleaux protecteurs ethiopiens,” *Journal of Ethiopian Studies,* vol. 14, fasc. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 89–106 (“The eye stands for the face which stands for the body.... The pupils are drawn in the inner spaces.... That is why we must speak of directions of magic meaning based on eyes and faces, with the use of traditional decorative motifs such as cross-hatching, check patterns, four-pointed stars, etc.”). The power of Negus, with his ancestry going back to Solomon and his court of magicians, was based on his ember-eyes, operating like a black hole, angelic or demonic. Mercier’s analyses in their entirety constitute an essential contribution to the analysis of facial functions.
[216] For Eisenstein’s own distinction between his conception of the close-up and Griffith’s, see *Film Form and Film Sense.*
[217] This is a recurring theme in horror novels and science fiction: the eyes are in the black hole, not the opposite (“I see a luminous disk emerging from the black hole, resembling eyes”). Comic books, *Circus* No. 2, for example, depict black holes populated by faces and eyes, and the traversing of that black hole. On the relation of eyes to holes and walls, see the texts and drawing of Jean-Luc Parant, in particular, *Lesyeux MMDVI* (Paris: Bourgois, 1976).
[218] See Jean Paris’s analyses, *L’espace et le regard* (Paris: Seuil, 1965), vol. 1, chapter 1 (also, the evolution of the Virgin and the variation in the relations between her face and that of the infant Jesus: vol. 2, chapter 2).
[219] D. H. Lawrence, “Melville’s ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo,’” *Studies in Classic American Literature* (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 197. Lawrence’s essay begins with a lovely distinction between terrestrial and maritime eyes.
[223] Wilhelm Reich’s *Character-Analysis,* trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), considers the face and faciality traits to be among the first pieces of character “armor” and the first ego resistances (the “occular ring,” followed by the “oral ring”). The organization of these rings occurs on planes perpendicular to the “orgonotic streaming” and oppose the free movement of this streaming throughout the body. Hence the importance of eliminating the armor and “dissolving the rings.” See pp. 370ff.
[225] D. H. Lawrence, *Kangaroo* (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 339.
artistic, design, software projects are things at /thing (perhaps project or work would be more appropriate but i like ’thing')
[226] See Jules Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly, *The Diaboliques,* trans. Ernest Boyd (New York: Knopf, 1925). Of course, the work of Maupassant is not limited to tales; he also wrote novellas, or novels containing elements of the novellas. For example, the episode of Lison in chapter 4 of *Une vie:* “It was at the time of Aunt Lison’s sudden impulse.... It was never spoken of again, and remained as though enveloped in fog. One evening, Lise, then twenty, threw herself into the water without anyone having an inkling why. Nothing in her life or manners, could have allowed one to predict this act of madness.”
[227] Vladimir Propp, *Morphology of the Folktale,* 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).
[229] [TRANS: “In the Cage,” *The Novels and Tales of Henry James* (Fairfield, N. J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1979), vol. 11, p. 469.]
[230] Nathalie Sarraute, in “Conversation and Sub-conversation,” *The Age of Suspicion,* trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust analyzes the smallest movements, glances, or intonations. However, he apprehends them through memory, he assigns them a “position,” he thinks of them as a sequence of causes and effects; “he rarely... tried to relive them and make them relive for the reader in the present, while they were forming and developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has its adventures, its mystery and its unforeseeable ending” (p.92).
[231] [TRANS: The French translation consulted by the authors reversed the meaning of this passage. The original reads: “She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out.” *In the Cage, The Novels and Tales of Henry James,* vol. 11, p. 472.]
[232] S0ren Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling,* trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 46ff.
[233] [<sub>TRANS</sub>: Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in *The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected* *Pieces,* ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), p.69.]
[235] Pierrette Fleutiaux, *Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette et autres nouvelles* (Paris: Jul-liard, 1976), pp. 9–50.
[236] In another novella in the same collection, “Le dernier angle de transparence” (The last angle of transparency). Fleutiaux distinguishes three lines of perception, but without applying a preestablished schema. The hero has *molar perception,* which takes in overall aggregates and clear-cut elements, well-distributed areas of fullness and emptiness (this perception is coded, inherited, and overcoded by the walls: Don’t miss you chair, etc.). But he is also caught up in a *molecular perception* composed of fine and shifting segmentations and autonomous traits, where holes appear in what is full and microforms in emptiness, between two things, where everything “teems and stirs” with a thousand cracks. The hero’s problem is that he cannot make up his mind between the two lines and constantly jumps from one to the other. Will he be saved by a third line of perception, the *perception of escape,* a “hypothetical direction barely hinted at” by the angle of the two others, the “angle of transparency” opening a new space?
[237] Fernand Deligny, *Cahiers de I’immuable,* vol. 1, *Voix et voir, Recherches,* no. 8 (April 1975).
and /other has other things. i mostly felt like there should be another topic. it might not see use
[238] Henri Laborit wrote a book “in praise of flight,” *Eloge de lafuite* (Paris: Laffont, 1976). In it, he demonstrates the biological importance of lines of flight among animals, but his approach is too formalistic; among human beings, he thinks flight is associated with values of the imaginary functioning to increase one’s “information” about the world.
[240] Leon Shestov, *Chekhov and Other Essays* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 8–9 [translation modified to agree with the French edition cited by the authors—Trans].
[241] Jacques Lizot, *Le cercle des Feux* (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 118
[242] Claude Levi-Strauss, *Structural Anthropology,* trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963): “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” pp. 132–163.
[243] See two exemplary studies in *African Political Systems,* ed. Meyer Frotes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): Fortes, “The Political System of the Tellensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast,” pp. 239–271, and Evans-Pritchard, “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan,” pp. 272–296.
[244] Georges Balandier analyzes the ways in which ethnologists and sociologists define this opposition: *Political Anthropology,* trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 137–143.
[245] On the initiation of a shaman and the role of the tree among the Yanomami Indians, see Jacques Lizot, *Le cercle des feux,* pp. 127–135: “Between his legs a hole is hastily dug in which they place the base of the pole they erect there. Turaewe draws imaginary lines on the ground radiating in all directions. He says, ‘These are the roots.’ ”
[246] The State, therefore, is not defined solely by the type of public powers it has, but also as a resonance chamber for private as well as public powers. It is for this reason that Althusser says: “The distinction between public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the subordinate domains where bourgeois law exercises its powers. The domain of the State eludes it because it is beyond Law.... It is on the contrary the foundation for any distinction between the public and the private.” “Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d’Etat,” *LaPensee,* no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 29–35.
[247] Jean-Pierre Vernant, *Mythe etpens’ee chez les Grecs* (Paris: Maspero, 1971–1974), vol. 1, part 3 (“When it becomes communal, when it is erected in the public and open space of the agora and no longer inside private residences... the hearth *[foyer:* also, focus, focal point— Trans.] expresses the center as common denominator of all of the houses constituting the *polis”;* p. 210).
[248] Paul Virilio, *L’insecurite du territoire* (Paris: Stock, 1975), pp. 120, 174–175. On “castrametation”: “Geometry is the necessary foundation for a calculated expansion of State power in space and time; conversely, this supplies the State with an ideal, sufficient figure, provided that the figure is ideally geometrical.... But Fenelon, voicing his opposition to the State policies of Louis XIV, exclaimed: ‘Beware the bewitchments and diabolical attributes of geometry!”’
i may or may not go through to tag some or all the old posts. it would be nice except it’s very painful to look at anything i’ve made
[249] Meyer Fortes analyzes the difference among the Tellensi between “guardians of the earth” and chiefs. This distinction between powers is fairly widespread among primitive societies; but the important thing is that it is organized in such a way as to prevent the powers from resonating. For example, according to Louis Berthe’s analysis of the Baduj of Java, the power of the guardian of the earth, on the one hand, is considered to be passive and feminine but, on the other hand, is assigned to the eldest son: this is not an “intrusion of kinship into the political order” but on the contrary “a requirement of a political order translated in kinship terms” in order to prevent the establishment of a resonance leading to private property. See Berthe, “Aines et cadets, l’alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj,” *L’Homme,* vol. 5, nos. 3/4 (July-December 65), pp. 189–223.
[250] Franz Kafka, *The Castle,* trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976), especially chapter 15 (Barnabas’s statements [the phrase quoted is on p. 228—Trans]). The parable of the two offices—molar and molecular—does not just have a physical interpretation, as in Eddington, but a properly bureaucratic one as well.
[251] The strength of Jean-Pierre Faye’s book, *Langages totalitaires* (Paris: Hermann, 1972), is that it illustrates the multiplicity of these focuses, both practical and semiotic, on the basis of which Nazism was constituted. That is why Faye is the first both to do a rigorous analysis of the concept of the totalitarian State (in its Italian and German origins) and to refuse to define Italian fascism and German Nazism by that concept (which operates on a different plane than the “subjacent process”). Faye goes into all of these points in *La critique du langage et son economie* (Paris: Galilee, 1973).
[252] On the complementarity between the “macropolitics of security” and the “micropoli-tics,” see Virilio, *L’insecurite du territoire,* pp. 96, 130, 228–235. The microorganization of permanent stress in large modern cities has frequently been noted.
[253] Valery Giscard d’Estaing, speech of June 1, 1976, before the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Defense Nationale (complete text in *Le Monde,* June 4, 1976).
[254] On the “flow with mutant power” and the distinction between the two kinds of money, see Bernard Schmitt, *Monnaie, salaires et profits* (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 236, 275–277.
[255] Michel Lelart, *Le dollar. Monnaie Internationale* (Paris: Albatros, 1975), p. 57.
[256] Take Foucault’s analysis, in *Discipline and Punish,* trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), of what he calls the “microphysics of power.” First, it is indeed a question of miniaturized mechanisms, or molecular focuses operating in detail or in the infinitely small and forming any number of “disciplines” in the school, army, factory, prison, etc. (see pp. 138ff.). But second, these segments themselves, and the focuses operating within them at the molecular level, present themselves as the singularities of an “abstract” diagram coextensive with the entire social field, or as quanta deducted from a flow of a nonspecific nature— the nonspecific flow being defined by “a multiplicity of individuals” to be controlled (see pp. 205ff. [translation modified]).
[257] On “quantitative sinfulness,” quanta, and the qualitative leap, one may refer to the microtheology constructed by Sdren Kierkegaard in *The Concept of Dread,* trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).
[258] According to Tarde, psychology is quantitative, but only insofar as it studies the desire and belief components of sensation. And logic is quantitative when it does not restrict itself to forms of representation, but extends to degrees of belief and desire, and their combinations; see *La logique sociale* (Paris: Alcan, 1893).
-rachel
[259] On all of these points, see especially Maurice Dobb, *Studies in the Development of* *Capitalism,* rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), and Georges Duby, *The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to Twelfth Century,* trans. Howard E. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).
[260] Rosa Luxemburg, in “Social Reform or Revolution,” and “Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions,” in *Selected Political Writings,* ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), formulated the problem of the differences and relations between masses and classes, but from a still-subjective point of view: masses as the “instinctual basis of class consciousness” (see Nicolas Boulte and Jacques Moiroux, “Masse et Parti,” *Partisans,* no. 45, *Rose Luxemburg vivante* [December-January 1969], pp. 29–38. Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are “invariants” that oppose the State-form in general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the concrete State, and, in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; *De I’ideologie* [Paris: Maspero, 1976]). But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the “peasant-plebeian” mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses—or even monetary masses.
[261] Jules Michelet, *Histoire de France au seizieme siecle* in *Oeuvres Completes,* vol. 7, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-).
[262] Henri Pirenne, *Mohammed and Charlemagne,* trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Norton, 1939), p. 22.
[263] See Emile Felix Gautier, *Genseric, roi des Vandales* (Paris: Payot, 1932). (“Precisely because they were the weakest, eternally being pushed from behind, they were forced to go the farthest.”)
[264] Totalitarianism is not defined by the size of the public sector because in many cases there is still a liberal economy. What defines it is the artificial constitution of “closed vessels,” particularly monetary and industrial. It is primarily in this sense that Italian fascism and German Nazism were totalitarian States, as demonstrated by Daniel Guerin in *Fascism and Big Business,* trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), chapter 9.
[265] Foucault, *Discipline and Punish,* p. 27: “These relations go right down into the depths of society, they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce... the general form of the law or government....They define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggle, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relation.”
[267] On these aspects of banking power, see Suzanne de Brunhoff, *L ‘offre de monnaie. Critique d’un concept* (Paris: Maspero, 1971), especially pp. 102–131.
[268] Carlos Castaneda, *The Teachings of Don Juan* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 57–60.
[269] Maurice Blanchot, *L’amiti’e*(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 232.
[270] F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in *The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces,* ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), pp. 77–78, 81.
[271] [TRANS: See 12, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” Proposition IX, pp. 416–423.]
[272] Klaus Mann, *Mephisto,* trans. Robin Smith (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 202–204. This kind of declaration abounds, at the very moment when the Nazis were succeeding. See Goebbels’s famous formulations: “In the world of absolute fatality in which Hitler moves, nothing has meaning any longer, neither good nor bad, time nor space, *and what other people call success cannot be used as a criterion....* Hitler will probably end in catastrophe”; *Hitler parle a ses generaux* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). This catastrophism can be reconciled with considerable satisfaction, good conscience and comfortable tranquillity. There is a whole bureaucracy of catastrophe. On Italian fascism, one may consult, in particular, the analysis of Maria-Antonietta Macciochi, “Sexualite feminine dans I’ideologie fasciste,” *Tel Quel,* no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26–42: the women’s death squad, the public display of widows and mothers in mourning, the slogan *(mots d’ordre)* “Coffins and Cradles.”
[273] Paul Virilio, *L’insecurity du territoire,* chapter 1. Although Hannah Arendt identifies Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: “Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion”; *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 326; even the war, and the danger of losing the war, acted as accelerators (pp. 325–326, 394ff, 41 Off., 462ff).
; 10.1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
[274] On the complementarity between series and structure, and how it differs from evolutionism, see Henri Daudin, *Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoologiques et Tid’ee de serie animale,* vol. 2 *of Etudes d’histoire des sciences naturelles* (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Michel Foucault, *The Order of ‘Things* (NewYork: Vintage, 1970).
[275] See Carl Jung, *Symbols of Transformation,* trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harper, 1962), and Gaston Bachelard, *Lautr’eamont* (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1939).
[276] Claude Levi-Strauss, *Totemism,* trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 78.
[277] Jean-Pierre Vernant in *Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes,* no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 15–16.
[278] On the opposition between sacrificial series and totemic structure, see Levi-Strauss, *The Savage Mind (Chicago:* University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 223–228. Despite all of his severity toward the series, Levi-Strauss recognizes the compromise between the two themes: structure itself implies a very concrete feeling for affinities (pp. 37–38) and is based on two series between which it organizes homologies of relations. In particular, “becoming-historical” can bring complications or degradations that replace these homologies with resemblances and identifications between terms (see pp. 115ff., and what Levi-Strauss calls the “flipside of totemism”).