“War machine” and “Divine Violence”: Is There God in “Nomadology”?

Abstract

Author treats some common traits between Benjamin’s critique of violence and conception of nomadic war machine as developed by Deleuze and Guattari in in Thousand Plateaus. The resemblance concerns the manner in which in both theories think the violence of state and law – as a violence “which presupposes itself”. Benjamin’s mythic violence and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of the state have circular and tautological structure. Such structure of violence in the light of Hegel’s logics of reflection forms utterly problematic attempts to think exteriority. The text tries to show how Benjamin’s divine violence which undermines the circle of mythic violence and grounds simultaneously the possibility of revolutionary violence as well as conception of war machine in “Nomadology” originate in the attempt to provide an answer to this problem. The aim of these concepts is not to find principles to legitimate violence, but asserting the irreducibility of the singularity of the event affirmed in the practice of social struggles.