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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 163-175 War is the Father and King of All:
1. Combat against war
What do we pit against the big against? How do we declare combat against war? First, we must differentiate between them, and stop thinking the former as the gruesome manifestation of the latter. Deleuze argues that there is a difference in kind between combat and war, a difference between an aggression that affirms and a domination that destroys, devastates, eradicates. Combat is opposed to more than war. It also militates against the judgment that justifies war. Combat is, for Deleuze, “the way to have done with God and with judgment” (134). “To Have Done With Judgment” is a teensy twilight text – ten pages in my copy of Essays Critical and Clinical – but it is one of my favourite pieces by my favourite guy. Deleuze rallies four writers to his side, Nietzsche, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, and Artaud, to do battle with judgment. The essay is a concise, precise, distillation of a noble and sparkling flow that traverses the whole Deleuzian plenum. More on that set of rushing rapids later. Let us first have done with my ringing endorsement of “To Have Done with Judgment.” This fierce little piece is appropriate for our awful au courant, untimely and all too-timely, what with the recently re-anointed rulers of the lone and lonely hyperpower being mongers and merchants of war, who judge and incite judgment in the name of the all-justifying judgment of God. [end page 163] Judgment, Deleuze argues, is not just pitted against combat. Judgment is a grander, greater foe, thwarting existence itself, insofar as it “prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence” (135). Judgment is part of the project and process Nietzsche mocked and reviled and defied: the interiorization and introjection of force. Judgment cannot tell us a thing about the work to come, or the people to come that are implied and implicated in that work. Judgment only iterates the same old infinite debt and exacts its immortal payola, as scores of temporal condemnations nestle under the flaming wings of the Last Judgment, killing time and life until God’s judgment unfurls fully, in glorious, world-wrecking Apocalypse. In another gem from Essays Critical and Clinical, on D.H. Lawrence’s reading of the Apocalypse, and its relation to Nietzsche’s reading of St. Paul, Deleuze notes that the Book of Revelation represents a horrible spiritual innovation: a wish to rigorously program unto and including the end of time, an organization that devastates, systematically, the world entire. Christ is soft and amorous. John of Patmos is hateful, savage, and speaks in the roar of the outraged, resentful collective, the great, swarming zombie mob of the tiny-souled. The edge of the Republican wedge, your fundamentalist types, seriously dig the notion that we are living in the end times, and that the Last Judgment is nigh. Check out the message board at Raptureready.com, bejewelled with smiley-face emoticons, where the faithful gleefully anticipate the cataclysm and debate fine points of theology like, “Will my kitties be in heaven with me?” The faithful are already making dates with each other, to meet in the next world, the true world, penning each other into eternal daytimers and angelic buddy lists. I am no theologian, but I doubt that even the most heroically cute kitty could purr its furry way into purgatory, let alone paradise. If our feline friends serve any deity it is Bast or Beezelbub. But I digress. The desire to be judge and be judged, which expresses itself so enthusiastically and explicitly on the Raptureready.com board, is an ancient one, but it blooms anew, in a horrid, florid, flourishing theo-techno-spectacular form. The mass media explosion has provided new stages for the tribunal, a theatre of judgment that beams and blares on screens all over the world. Moreover, as Deleuze notes, the judgment of God is “nothing other than the power to organize to infinity” (130), an objective dear to post-modern states and corporations. The two biggest computer systems in America are at the Pentagon and the head office of Wal-Mart, and each track, synthesize and master a practical infinity of information, virtually in real time, really in virtual time. This is not even to broach a field mapped by Deleuze and Guattari, that of AC-DC axiomatic of capital, and the way all that deterritorializing engenders the harshest reterritorializations, so the [end page 164] creative destruction of capitalism births new fascisms. It is clear that we are not yet done with judgment, as the re-animated version of it that currently lurches the earth seems all the more powerful for being neither dead nor alive, but undead. And it wants what all zombie legions want: to devour warm flesh and living brains. If we are not yet done with judgment, then we are not done with the critique of judgment, either. Deleuze names Spinoza as the first philosopher to produce a critique of judgment. Kant’s work of the same name ain’t; instead, it his most fantastic staging of the subjective tribunal of reason. This is one of many such allegations Deleuze levels against Kant, to whom he refers as “the master” of false critique. Nietzsche, not Kant, is the most thorough and coruscating critic of judgment, the one who strips judgment bare, denuding it of its sentimental moral frippery, and revealing it as nothing more than the infinite, immortal, unpaybackable debt. Kafka, Lawrence, and Artaud are also engaged in this sort of vital critique, and effect radical transvaluations in their works. These are Spinoza’s heirs, men who know the power of judgment, since each of them “personally, singularly suffered from judgment” (126). You know the verdicts – crazy, creepy, dirty, and scary, respectively. You know the sentences – bans, failure, shunning, castigation, for the lot of them. What is amazing, and Spinozian, about all four is their exuberant response to these strictures and condemnations, their ferocious and joyful struggle against the suffering judgment wishes to impose, engrain, and enshrine. These writers are combatants par excellence, and exult in struggle, but all despise the scourge of war. Deleuze writes: For Nietzsche and Lawrence, war is the lowest degree of will to power, its sickness. Artaud begins by invoking the relation of war between America and the USSR; Lawrence describes the imperialism of death, from the ancient Roman to the modern Fascists. They do so in order to show more clearly that this is not the way combat works. Combat, by contrast, is a powerful nonorganic vitality that supplements with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of. (133) Where combat marshals forces, and supplements force with force, war is a question of power. This desire for power is always the sign of a sick will, of forces that have been separated from what they can do, and turned back in on themselves, to gnash and fester and fulminate. Combat is primary and affirmative. War is derivative, force twisted and tortured into its own negation. [end page 165] “Combat against” is crucial, but this is not the only aspect of combat. Combat is also a combat between, a struggle between warring forces that occupy the field of the combatant himself. External combat against the contingencies imposed by fate – insomnia, priests, fathers, interminable engagements, headaches, shrinks, censorship, fever, electroshock, to name but a few of the indignities visited upon Deleuze’s fab four – depends on the combat between that constitutes the combatant. The combat between is how a “force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming” (132). This combat, this becoming, is a thought older and happier than the Apocalypse. This is the struggle Heraclitus consecrates in his fragments, the war that is the father and king of all that becomes. This is the fighting spirit of the most excellent gods and heroes of Homeric epic. This is what Nietzsche means when he argues that noble and beautiful things come from combat, that every great talent makes itself manifest through a fight, a contest. Judgment introjects and renders latent, which curdles the will, making it a will to nothing. Combat projects and hurls a living something at and against the will to nothing, the will to nothing that is precisely war. To engage in combat against war, we must combat the sickened and wizened will that wants to wage war, and make everything a nothing. Or to put it another way, in the crystalline form of a poem by a man subjected to the devastation of war, Paul Celan: The trace of a bite in Nowhere. It too you must combat, 2. No fighting in the war room
In “Homer’s Contest”[5] Nietzsche praises the Greek love of the contest, of a combat that forces combatants to excel, and unfold their particular talents in fighting. One of the wonders of the Greek world, Nietzsche argues, is that the Greeks celebrate strife, and the force which strife elicits and inspires. Art itself is a fight, a struggle, a pitched battle between creative powers. Nietzsche writes, “Whereas the modern man fears nothing in an artist more [end page 166] than emotion of any personal fight, the Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personal fight” (37). Artists want to kick other artists’ asses – check out the way Plato sics Socrates on his rivals, the sophists and orators and dramatists, arming his mentor and mouthpiece with all their weapons, and trying to outdo them with arguments, speeches, and myths of his own. Then he delivers the ultimate diss: you bunch of third order mirror-makers, traffickers in shadows! You are further from the truth than carpenters, you cave-dwellers... my art is the art. The Hellenic celebration of discord, strife, hatred, and the ardent desire to vanquish one’s foes extends all the way to their gods. Nietzsche marvels that a Greek can receive his envy as a blessing from the gods: “What a gulf of ethical judgment lies between us and him!” (35). Christianity condemns envy as one of the seven deadlies, and readers of Dante know that those afflicted with pernicious invidia can look forward to a long haul in the purg, slumped in sackcloth with their greedy green eyes wired shut. The Greek gods don’t just bestow the blessing of strife upon mortals. They also fight and squabble amongst themselves. The Olympians are forever engaged in fantastic contests with one another, and delight in mortal contests to the point where they charge into terrestrial warfare in aid of their favourite men. Jesus is positively Swiss compared to partisans and patrons like Hera or Aphrodite. The Greeks even pit war-gods against war-gods. In a magnificent scene from book 21 of the Iliad, Ares lunges at Athena. He bellows at her for stirring up discord among the gods, calling her a dogfly and cursing her “bold and stormy ways” and “violent heart.” Ares is determined to make Athena pay for her insolence and his injury. In a previous battle, Athena, wielding the spear of Diomedes, gashed Ares’ divine flesh. The “blood-encrusted” (21.470) Ares strikes her shield with a mighty blow, and Athena, recoiling, seizes a massive boulder. She clocks the brute– smack! – square in the throat, laying him out flat, choking and gagging. She laughs at him, mocking the very idea that he could ever beat her, the goddess of strategy, wisdom, and tricks. “Stand up to me?/ Lie there: you might fulfill your mother’s curse/ baleful as she is, incensed at you/ because you switched to Trojans from Akhaians” (21.481-4). Speaking of mom and dad, what are the King and Queen of the gods doing, anyway, as their son and daughter engage in thunderous, earth-shaking sibling rivalry? Do they disapprove of this smackdown? Hell, no! Zeus is totally giddy: he “laughed in his heart for joy, seeing the gods about to meet in strife.” Zeus can’t wait to see the fight. Hera certainly doesn’t try to get the kids to make nice either. When Aphrodite goes to Ares’ aid, trying to help the broken brute limp away, Hera tells Athena to go pound on her sister, too. Athena is delighted to oblige: [end page 167] Athena followed, in a flash, with joy, What is startling about these passages is the redoubling of joy, from god to god in strife. While Troy comes tumbling down, and men gut and cut and butcher one another, Zeus enjoys surveying the action, Athena revels in her victory, and Hera goads her on to wilder deeds still. Athena and Ares are both gods of war, but they differ like combat and war differ. Ares represents the ruin of war, the power of destruction, and the frenzy of the slaughterbench. Ares’ posse is loathsome: his malicious sister Eris, the personification of evil strife, instigator of the Trojan war; his wretched sons, Deimos and Phobos, fear and terror; the furious old goddess of bloodshed, Enyo; and the attendant miseries of warfare simply known as Pain, Panic, Famine and Oblivion. Ares does not care who wins – Greeks, Trojans, whatever – so long as warfare prevails. This is why nobody likes him, save for the equally indiscriminate Aphrodite. The first time Athena wounds Ares, it is at Zeus’s behest, in book 5 of the Iliad. When Ares goes running to Zeus to tattle, bawl, and get healed, Zeus is far from sympathetic to his complaints. He says, frowning, “Do not come whining here, you two-faced brute,/ most hateful to me of all the Olympians.” Conversely, Athena is arguably Zeus’ most darling dandling, his special favourite, the child he himself bore in pangs of excruciating head labor. His response to Ares echoes the marching orders the grey-eyed goddess gives Diomedes. She urges, “Whip your team/ toward Ares, hit him, hand to hand, defer/ not longer to this maniacal god/ by nature evil, two-faced everywhere” (135). Nietzsche notes that this disdain for Ares, and veneration of Athena, is a preference that extends throughout Greek culture, a taste lost to the Romans, who worship Mars far more ardently than they adore Minerva. Look at a similar scene in the Aeneid. As Troy burns and Aeneas girds his loins for futile and dutiful combat, his mother, Venus, pulls back the veil of mortal vision and lets Aeneas sneak a peek at what’s really going on: the gods themselves are sacking his beloved city. It too is a staggering scene, but it is not nearly as intimate, as close to the gods as the perspective of the Iliad. The gods are already starting to recede into inexorable Fate, into the fixed abstraction of empire without end. Rome is John of Patmos’s arch-nemesis, and this empire without end is what he seizes from his enemy and twists into a triumphant horror show. Why stop at empire without end? Why not rage all the way to the empire of the End, the kingdom of total death, the war that wipes out the world? [end page 168] Just as Athens is the cradle of the contest, so too is Athena the goddess of a fighting, a combat, that militates against the brutish devastation of warfare. Ares arms himself anytime he hears the rumble and clang of clashing arms. Athena represents only defensive warfare: the good fight, the brilliant plan, the beautiful risk. She is the friend of the ingenious contestant who works by craft and guile, who creates artful illusions. She and Odysseus are kith and kin, despite the gulf of mortality and power that separates them, because both are masters of the highest power of the false, the power of making appear. Athena will destroy you if she must, but she would really rather trick you, fool you into vanquishing yourself, as she does when she assumes the form of Deiphobos to lure Hektor into battle with Achilles. Moreover, great works of art are born like Athena is, from the forehead in throes of skull-cracking agony, fully fucking armed and ready to rumble. Nietzsche’s longing for the contest is also a critique of the will to annihilate that makes itself manifest in warfare. Another important feature of the contest is that it is indefinite, endless, as each contestant supplants another. The worst thing that can happen to a Greek combatant is the end of the contest, the decisive victory that declares one man unbeatably better than his fellows. This man must be cast out, ostracized, to keep the competition going. Or he must become the enemy of his only betters, the gods themselves, and compete with them in a dazzling, self-immolating feat of hubris that everyone can enjoy. Arachne had no rivals left, having resoundingly outwoven every earthly artisan. What could be more boring than being the best? It is, as Randy Newman crooned, lonely at the top. Arachne challenges Athena because she is a fighter with nobody left to fight, an artist without an ass to kick, and she would rather be trounced by the gods than rest on her laurels, attended by approving nymphs. Athena discourages the girl’s foolhardy attempt, but Arachne insists, because she needs to weave, and pitting herself against the goddess spurs her on to heights of beauty and defiance. Though Athena finds Arachne’s work, which depicts Zeus’s serial infidelities, insulting and impious, she still compliments the excellence of her mortal rival’s craft. Humans cannot beat the gods, but the gods are generous and game enough to let them try, time and again. Furthermore, Arachne is not annihilated as punishment for her presumption. While Athena does destroy her work, and makes the proud girl burn with shame for challenging the gods, Arachne hangs herself. Athena, saddened by this sorry sight, transforms the girl’s corpse, changing her into a symbolic spider and a cautionary myth, the artist becoming arachnid, living forever in and by her art. This indefinite time of the contest is opposed to the bad infinity of judgment, the infinite that comprehends and programs its own end. The time [end page 169] of the contest extends past death, as the long-gone Homer inspires the envy and activity of living Greek poets, and poets to come. In the infinite eyes of judgment, we are already the living dead, and war is the violent vehicle that metes out and manifests the just demise we have been waiting for all along. Just how great is the gulf of ethical judgment between modern warfare and the Greek contest? For your consideration: a few vignettes from a more recent depiction of war, the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, “Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.” Kubrick spent many months researching the Cold War, reading heaps of books about the thermonuclear bomb, when he came to the realization that he could not make a serious film about a subject so very absurd, so deeply disgusting. Holy shit... this is a comedy! And so he piles absurdity upon absurdity, accident upon accident, Peter Sellers upon Peter Sellers, and produces a panic of bumbling leaders enmeshed and entangled in their own bureaucracy (irrevocable orders) and their own technology (unstoppable apparati). The paranoiac General Ripper, muttering about the communist corruption of our precious bodily fluids, unleashes Plan R, sending war planes to Russia. He rallies his troops at Burpelson Air Force Base with a rousing call to eradicate the enemy, a hymn to suspicion and annihilation: Your commie has no regard for human life, not even his own. And for this reason, men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. The enemy may come individually, or he may come in strength. He may even come in the uniform of our own troops. But however he comes we must stop him. We must not allow him to gain entrance to this base. Now, I am going to give you three simple rules. First, trust no one, whatever his uniform or rank, unless he is known to you personally. Second, anyone or anything that approaches within 200 yards of the perimeter is to be fired upon. Third, if in doubt, shoot first, and ask questions afterwards.[6] Of course, it is the enemy who hates life, which justifies our ending his life, no matter the cost. And the enemy is everywhere, and could be anyone. As events escalate, and the Americans try to avert their own rogue attack, they learn that the Russians possess a doomsday machine, a device that will destroy every living thing and render the planet uninhabitable for a century. If the Yankee bombs fall, which they are about to, the doomsday machine will kick into gear. Can you turn it off? No. Attempting to unlock the doomsday machine triggers the doomsday machine. President Merkin Muffley wonders why anyone would ever create such a thing. Dr. Strangelove explains: [end page 170] That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It’s simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing. Strangelove’s words are instructive with regard to the doomsday machine that is the thought of judgment. It too is irrevocable and inhuman – but it is simple to understand. And when an indignant President Muffley admonishes General Turgidson and the Russian ambassador for skirmishing – “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” – the joke points to the difference between about war and combat, annihilation and a contest. There is no fighting in the War Room. War no longer resembles anything as benign as a fight, or joyful as a struggle, and instead represents the wholesale devastation of the world. Kubrick’s amplification of the lunatic thanatic urge into antic hilarity reminds me of the way Nietzsche seizes upon the horrors of his time, blowing them up, and boiling them down, into pointed aphorisms that are cosmic jokes. Deleuze describes the way Nietzsche approaches the things that disgust him: “It often happens that Nietzsche comes face to face with something sickening, ignoble, disgusting. Well, Nietzsche thinks it’s funny, and he would add fuel to the fire if he could. He says: keep going, it’s still not disgusting enough” (Deleuze, Desert Islands, 258)[7]. No fighting in the war room is one of those jokes, like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, that seem like they are only getting truer, sadder, and funnier with each swerve of world history. We may no longer dwell under the looming shadow of the Cold War, but to paraphrase the late, great comedian Bill Hicks[8], that didn’t make things better, dumbass. Now plenty of countries have nukes. Ha ha! Things just got way, way worse! The enemy is everywhere and could be anyone! The language of deterrence is still very much with us, in the form of propaganda, pre-emptive warfare, and plans to militarize space, arming the very stars, converting the cosmos into another site for the slaughterbench. Given that Bush’s inner circle is as clenched and concealed as a sphincter, and that he is a man proud of his unilateral and impervious resolve, it is safe to say that there really is no fighting in the war room. [end page 171] 3. Pent-up agon
The insistence that there is a difference between combat and war echoes an earlier work by Deleuze, with Guattari, their “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine” (A Thousand Plateaus, 351-423). Here Deleuze and Guattari take great pains to distinguish between the nomad war machine and the State military institution, which is a war machine captured and transfigured by the State apparatus. The nomad war machine, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is pure exteriority. Its primary object is not even war, but the occupation of a smooth space, like the desert or the steppe. The nomad war machine only resorts to war to ward off the State apparatus, and, as Deleuze and Guattari write, nomads “can only make war on the condition that they simultaneously create something else” (423). Conversely, the military institution, the war machine that has been seized, trained, and reproduced by the State apparatus, takes war as its raison d’être, its analytic object: In order to grasp this paradoxical undertaking, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. 1. The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and the city form with which it collides. 2. When the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or [end page 172] impose its aims upon it. 3. It is precisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its “analytic” object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object), In short, it is at one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims of the State. (418) While Deleuze and Guattari stress the fact that the process of capture and appropriation varies throughout history, and that the military institution itself assumes multiple concrete forms, the State war machine is a result of a mutation, a warping, of the esprit de corps that animates the nomadic war machine. The State can never fully integrate its war machine into its own apparatus. The State is sovereignty, and sovereignty only “reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally” (360). So long as a war machine retains its exteriority, it seems as though it is working against the process of interiorization and organization that constitutes the State. The State is a stratum that becomes a stratum through a double articulation. Sovereignty is a two-headed beast, Deleuze and Guattari argue, drawing on Georges Dumézil’s study of Indo-European mythology, Mitra-Varuna.[11] The two heads of power are the jurist/priest and the magician/king, or the legislator and the despot, the organizer and the binder, the Cheney and the Bush. Though they seem like opposing figures, “they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity” (351). Mitra and Varuna need each other. The god of war, Indra, is another force altogether, one those who rule and those who reign cannot trust, for the man of war is a stranger to their forms, the pact and the bond. He is a man of the pack, the gang, a man that the State finds uncivilized, stupid, mad, beastly. Consequently, when the State appropriates the war machine, it institutes juridical processes, strict discipline, and bureaucratic organization. It territorializes the wandering warrior, planting him in a fort, on a base, at a front. States then turn the power of their war machines against other States, to advance their political aims. Deleuze and Guattari contend that Clausewitz’s dictum, that war is the continuation of politics by other means, no longer adequately depicts our situation. While they like his image of war as a flow that States try to channel, with varying degrees of success as conductors, the intricacies of European Realpolitik seem quaint compared to the nefarious totality of the worldwide war machine. Perhaps the Siamese-twinned sovereign is correct to suspect the war machine, as the appropriation of a war machine leads to the State’s reciprocal capture by its [end page 173] own war machine, and a military-industrial Frankenstein monster, the worldwide war machine the States create. Where politics once determined war, “the appropriation has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute, an immense war machine of which they are no longer anything more than the opposable or opposed parts” (421). States may declare war to achieve a particular aim, but war itself has transcended the aims of states, becoming its own aim, unlimited and total. Total war develops in two stages. First, in the fascist stage, the State wages an unlimited war for the sake of war, a war that takes war as its aim, a war that seeks to eradicate a people, a nation, a world. But this is just the “rough sketch, and the second post-fascist figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival” (421). The peace of Terror or Survival generates its own smooth space, a perverse smooth space of surveillance and occupation that covers the entire globe. The army can be anywhere, or anyone. And then, the war machine, expanding like a creature from some science fiction flick, sets “its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer a State, or even another regime, but the ‘unspecified enemy’” (422). All too timely! The major war objects of the last few Republican regimes, like Reagan’s communists, guerrillas, and drug dealers, or Bush’s terrorists, sound an awful lot like Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the “unspecified enemy.” The “unspecified enemy,” anywhere and anyone, justifies total war, the line of devastation that germinates in a State, but extends itself beyond the ends – and to the end – of the earth. The State’s insistence that we arrest ourselves to save the cops the trouble, like good little autonomous Kantian self-legislators, reaches a ghastly terminus in our auto-terrorizing ecstasy of fear, our preaccomplished zombification. There is nothing more obscene than the gleam and the sheen of modern war, worldwide war, total war. I realize this is a bold claim, given the long, proud line of world-historical despots that have surfed to power on tsunamis of blood, on swells of cruelty, bathed in the froth of atrocity. But the horrors of the past and present century, the age of fascist and post-fascist total war, defy the destructive imaginations of even the most prolifically murderous ancient warlord, with all their techno-spectacular bureaucratic splendour and efficiency. Who are the killmasters? We are the killmasters, dealing death in the millions. The vile and shining fruits of our arsenals burn hotter, harder, meaner than the sun. We have outdone, with all our lethal ingenuity, that ancient and generous star, conjuring its perverse twin, a pure, total, and absolute death, present to hand at the press of a button or turn of a key. Look long and hard at the grey men, quaking with righteous zeal, who stand behind the consoles of the many franchises of this hideous End-o-Matic Apparatus that rules the world, the switch-flickers that populate the war machine which is the father and king of all. Every day, they shove [end page 174] our beautiful and hilarious world into a fetid sack of fear and death, and they preach the gospel, not of Christ, but of Deimos and Phobos. Bush ever-repeatingly declares his allegiance to “the culture of life,” but the culture of eternal life he really represents has always been the arch-nemesis of living life, the immortal enemy of the apparent and only world. If there is any thing worth fighting, it is the end of all fighting, the death of the contest and consecration of annihilation, the inversion of joyous combat into baleful, dolorous devastation. With all the force of our contempt, our laughter, and our joy, we must declare combat against war.
[1]. Deleuze, Gilles, “To Have Done With the Judgment of God.” In Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. [2]. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Homer’s Contest.” In The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufman. New York: Penguin, 1953. [3]. Celan, Paul, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. and ed. John Felstiner. New York: Norton, 2001: 187. [4]. Homer, The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Toronto: Random, 1974. [5]. Ibid., 2. [6]. Transcript of the film is available at http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0055.html. [7]. Deleuze, Gilles, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Ed. David Lapoujade, Trans. Michel Taormina. New York: Semiotexte, 2004. [8]. Bill Hicks, Revelations, is now available on DVD. Go watch it – he is the Nietzsche of stand-up comedy, and all too-timely on the topic of warfare, cultural and military. [9]. Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking? Trans. J. Glenn Gray. Toronto: Harper, 1968. [10]. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. [11]. Dumézil, Georges. Mitra-Varuna. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
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