Deleuze: Appareils d'Etat et machines de guerre, séance 1

Summary

The lecturer begins by outlining the seminar’s plans, then recaps contrasts developed in the previous year. These contrasts frame the course’s central question: What is the state apparatus, how did it emerge, and how does it relate to the war machine? He treats the contrasts as analytical hypotheses, not as claims that the two formations never mix in practice.

1. The war machine and the state apparatus are different formations

The lecturer distinguishes the nomadic war machine from the state apparatus, which he also calls an apparatus of capture. In his account, nomadic organization developed the war machine, initially as a counter to state formations. States later appropriated war machines, but that historical relationship does not mean the state apparatus originated in the war machine.

The distinction is not simply between peaceful and violent activity. Both formations can involve violence, but the lecturer argues that their forms and functions of violence differ.

2. The recap’s main contrasts

The lecture reviews several contrasts that organize the analysis:

• Space: smooth and striated

  • The war machine is associated with smooth space, such as deserts, steppes, and seas.
  • The state apparatus is associated with striating space: measuring, dividing, organizing, and regulating territory.
  • These are tendencies rather than absolute categories. For instance, navigation can organize and “stri­ate” the sea in different ways.

• Composition: numerical organization and territorial organization

  • The nomadic war machine is characterized by an arithmetic or numerical composition of people, illustrated through the organization of the Israelites in the Book of Numbers.
  • The state apparatus is characterized primarily by a territorial composition: it organizes people by making land an object of administration, production, circulation, and borders.
  • The lecturer stresses that the state’s territorial organization also transforms people’s relationship to land.

• Activity: free action and work

  • The state apparatus is closely linked to work. The lecturer proposes that surplus labor turns activity into work by subjecting it to a particular regime.
  • He argues that work cannot be defined simply by the tools used. Rather, an object functions as a tool when activity is organized as work.
  • He links the concept of work to the linear displacement of force and to the organization of striated space.
  • The war machine, by contrast, is associated with free action in a physical rather than political sense, and with whirlwind-like movement that occupies many points in space.

• Expression: tools and signs versus weapons and ornament

  • The state apparatus is linked to tools and signs, especially writing, records, accounting, and bureaucracy. These help organize and command work.
  • The war machine is associated with weapons and jewelry or ornament. The distinction does not depend on the object itself: the same object could be a tool or a weapon depending on the activity in which it is used.
  • The lecturer presents ornament and metalwork as a system of abstraction distinct from writing, and as especially significant within nomadic war machines.

• Emotion: feelings and affects

  • The lecturer contrasts feelings, associated with development, social organization, work, and signs, with affects, associated with the war machine.
  • He connects this distinction to different kinds of justice and pity, drawing on Georges Dumézil’s discussion of the warrior and the statesman.
  • He also distinguishes state violence, described through the idea of structural violence that is continually present and normalized, from the war machine’s violence, which continually arrives as an event. The two should not be treated as identical.

3. Shared “movement matter” and the itinerant element

Although state apparatuses and war machines differ, the lecturer says they connect to a shared movement matter, which can be inanimate, animal, or human. He proposes the term phylum for a material process that traverses both formations without belonging exclusively to either.

He associates this itinerant dimension with metallurgy: metals, underground veins, and the traveling blacksmith. Mining creates a “holey” or perforated space that cuts across both smooth and striated spaces. The lecture also raises oil and maritime extraction as possible topics for extending this line of inquiry.

4. The state cannot be explained as an offshoot of the war machine

The lecturer’s main conclusion from the recap is that the state apparatus cannot, in his framework, be derived from a pre-existing war machine. He argues that the war machine’s characteristic organization and aims are, in important respects, opposed to those of the state. The state may later incorporate a war machine, but such incorporation presupposes that a state apparatus already exists.

He notes that some accounts of early states describe bureaucracies, police, and prisons without a developed army. This raises the question of how an early state could have formed without first relying on a war machine.

5. How states appropriate war machines

The lecturer identifies two broad ways states incorporate war machines:

• Employ or embed mercenaries within the state apparatus.
• Build a territorial or state army, eventually including forms of conscription.

In either case, troops must be integrated into the state’s economic and territorial system. The lecturer highlights land grants, colonies, taxation, and service obligations as ways of doing this. Such arrangements are unstable: a war machine may turn against the state that has incorporated it.

He connects this problem to the historical competition between states and cities during the development of capitalism. Trading cities needed military force but often preferred wars that were quick and inexpensive. States, by contrast, could make much larger investments in military organization and matériel. The lecturer uses the contrast between Carthage and Rome, and Hannibal’s lack of reinforcements, to illustrate the issue.

6. The central research question: How did the state apparatus originate?

The lecture turns to theories of the state’s origins and argues that proposed explanations often presuppose the state they are meant to explain.

• War-based or “exogenous” explanations: War may help expand or transform states, but the lecturer argues that it cannot explain the state’s initial emergence if the war machine is already operating against a pre-existing state.
• Private-property explanations: He questions the idea that private property simply emerged from communal or tribal property and then produced the state. He suggests that archaeological evidence points instead to private property developing within the framework of earlier imperial public property.
• Money- and market-based explanations: He doubts that a market economy or monetary exchange can explain the state’s origin, since money may itself depend on state institutions, taxation, and controlled foreign trade.
• Public-function explanations: Drawing on Engels, he discusses the theory that administrative roles—such as managing irrigation, organizing public works, and collecting taxes—gradually produced the state. He objects that these functions may already imply a state apparatus.

7. The archaic state as an apparatus of capture

As an alternative focus, the lecturer describes the archaic imperial state as an apparatus of capture. He identifies three interlocking forms of capture:

• Land rent
• Profit from enterprise or major public works
• Taxes and control of foreign trade

These correspond to three prominent administrative roles: the official representing the emperor as landowner, the organizer or contractor of major works, and the banker.

The banker is particularly important in this account. Rather than acting only as an intermediary, the bank is described as an institution that creates money and helps convert payments in kind—such as agricultural goods owed as taxes—into monetary payments owed to the emperor. The lecturer suggests that taxation, rather than commerce alone, may be central to the origin of money.

The broader point is that landholding, public works, taxation, foreign trade, and monetary operations form a connected system. Rather than explaining the state through any one of these elements in isolation, the lecture asks how they operate together as an apparatus of capture.

8. Seminar plans and method

The lecturer proposes that the course continue examining state apparatuses and their contemporary relevance, while also inviting students to suggest topics and authors. He ends by proposing further work on political economy and possibly forming a research group to investigate what mathematicians call axiomatics, in connection with the relationship between philosophy and mathematics.

Speakers and sources

• Speaker: Gilles Deleuze, the lecturer. No other identifiable speaker is featured in the subtitles.
• Sources and figures cited or discussed: Georges Dumézil; Tony Negri (Antonio Negri); Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; the Bible, especially the Book of Numbers; Homer; Democritus; Archimedes; and examples involving Odin, Týr, Carthage, Rome, and Hannibal.
• The lecture also refers more generally to archaeologists, historians, physicists, engineers, and theories of structural violence. One mention of a German novelist and a novel is too garbled in the subtitles to identify confidently.