I. The war machine and the partisan

The modern figure of the partisan, Schmitt says, is an irregular soldier who fights in relation to states at war with other states while remaining outside the codes of regularized warfare which are meant to contain those conflicts and their enmity.Footnote ⁷ The partisan clashes with regular military forces asymmetrically and in ways that those codes must define as illegal, and yet ‘for the modern partisan today, the binaries of regular–irregular and legal–illegal often blur and cross over each other’ (Schmitt [1963] Reference Schmitt2004: 11). Despite superficial similarities, the partisan is neither a criminal, a mercenary, nor a privateer. This is because he operates on a firmly political terrain, often in defence of his home soil, even if he might eschew his own state’s politics. Hence the Spanish guerrilla fighters of 1808, Schmitt notes, fought Napoleon’s forces even though the Spanish monarch had not authorized it and even while the Spanish ruling classes sympathized with their foreign conqueror, preferring another State system to what the guerrilla resistance offered (4–6). Characterized by mobility and stealth, the partisan’s methods entail another conception of space, as he seeks not to hold territory but instead to cut off his opponent’s avenues of movement (48–49).Footnote ⁸ But these methods also entail a different friend/enemy division, one that denies the state final authority in identifying the real enemy, appealing instead to codes of justice above the state and its laws, and one that raises enmity to the level of the absolute enemy to be annihilated (57–68).

Schmitt suggests that this new enmity might be so extreme as to go beyond the opposition that makes the other an enemy (2004: 67), inviting the question of whether the partisan is really a figure on the margins of politics or altogether extra-political. Against this, Schmitt insists on the partisan’s political character, based on two fundamental demands: first, pace The Concept of the Political (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2007), that the political is defined solely through the constitution of the friend/enemy antagonism, all attempts to eliminate this foundational truth reflecting a naïve liberalism or utopianism; and, second, that the partisan ‘remains dependent on the sense and content of a concrete regular’ (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2004: 63), that the regular organization of either the partisan’s home state, a third party state invested in the conflict, or the centralized communist authority Schmitt associates with twentieth-century international revolutionary partisanship, is necessary in order to supply the partisan with weapons, equipment and direction. The association required by the second demand ties the partisan to the Schmittian political of the first demand; without it, the line separating the partisan from the ordinary criminal or lumpen rabble blurs (35). Furthermore, Schmitt contends, without connection to a regular and hierarchical association, the concept of the partisan dissolves to the point where ‘any loner or non-conformist can now be called a partisan, whether or not he ever even considers taking up arms’ (12–13). For Schmitt, such extra-political uses of the term are ‘permissible as a metaphor’ (13), based on the abstract generality that ‘to be human means nothing else than to fight’ (13). The concrete and literal concept of the partisan, however, must define him by ‘a heightened intensity of political commitment’ (13).

For Deleuze and Guattari, however, such expanded uses embody not an abstract and metaphorical concept of the partisan but the concrete if open-ended form of the war machine. Inasmuch as ‘an “ideological,” scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 422), the war machine need not invoke any notion of real violence. Where a war machine does emerge in opposition to the State, its antagonism can be as minimal as a refusal to conform: ‘each time there is an operation against the State—insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare or revolution as act—it can be said that a war machine has revived’ (386). Nevertheless, the war machine is not defined by its antagonism or disobedience towards the State, which arises, Deleuze and Guattari argue, only when the State tries to appropriate the war machine by incorporating it into the State’s war machinery—what would be, in Schmittian terms, either direct incorporation into a regular army or indirect incorporation into an irregular military force operating under the umbrella of a regular one.Footnote ⁹ Schmitt’s partisan, then, is a war machine, but one already appropriated to State ends. The State always risks losing control of the war machine, just as the enmity of Schmitt’s partisan risks spinning out of control. This condition ‘explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine’ (355).

Absent this appropriation, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 416). This does not mean that war machines lack strife or conflict, simply that these do not take the form of friend/enemy antagonisms. Deleuze and Guattari’s war machines are characterized by organizational forms different from and incompatible with the State’s formal and hierarchical structures, organizations with often fluid and dispersed structures of authority and subordination. Consider the organization of a clan, a street gang, or a street protest, each of which, Deleuze and Guattari contend, can become either a war machine ‘exterior’ to the State or be made to serve State interests.Footnote ¹⁰ These organizations entail not only a different kind of politics, but another kind of self, with a different morality or ethics. The alternatives Deleuze and Guattari suggest can be compared with Nietzsche’s idea of a warrior morality of good and bad that refuses to despise enemies and instead honours them (Nietzsche 1967: 1.10), or with Blanchot’s description of the May 1968 protests, which were marked, he says, by ‘the impossibility of recognizing an enemy, of taking into account a particular form of adversity’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot1988: 31), this absence of an enemy presenting a profound if fleeting form of ‘unavowable’ community.

There is no partisan in Hegel’s political philosophy, but there is nonetheless a similar dynamic of seeking to regularize disparate and irregular elements within his State, to the point that Hegel ultimately turns to the threat of war between states to secure the State’s internal political order. Elements not conducive to this Schmittian move of securing the political through antagonism are dismissed as apolitical forms of irrationality and even criminality, akin to Schmitt’s treatment of non-political notions of partisanship. Such moves perform acts of capture that constitute what is captured by conceiving it as appropriable to the State’s rational order or dismissible as irrational remnants. We will return to Hegel’s Schmittian moment later. First, however, we will turn directly to the relation between Hegel’s State and Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine by outlining how they are similarly conceived as configurations of drives at both individual and collective levels, and then how they are differentiated by the forms of desire and subjectivity which their respective configurations entail.

II. The State and the war machine as assemblages of drives

The German Trieb has been rendered by Freud’s translators as ‘instinct’, by Nietzsche’s translators as ‘instinct’ or ‘drive’, and in Knox’s translation of Hegel as ‘impulse’. The Introduction to the Philosophy of Right offers a substantial discussion of Trieb, directly following the text’s well-known derivation of the will’s freedom as the dialectical unity of indeterminacy and determination. Hegel argues that freedom understood as the absence of restraint remains abstract and empty indeterminacy, but any determination of the will seems to cancel its freedom; these contradictions are resolved by the more concrete synthetic concept of freedom as self-determination. Hegel immediately declares this to be the self-determination of a merely natural will, one whose substance comprises

The will does not stand above this multiplicity, but rather comes to exist by resolving its indeterminacy, determining itself in relation to one impulse directed towards one object (§12). Hegel’s natural will, then, accords with Hobbes’s idea of will as voluntary action proceeding from ‘the last appetite in deliberating’ (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1998: ch. 6).

Although natural will is free in the sense of being determined by its own drives, this autonomy, Hegel argues, amounts to mere arbitrariness (PR: §15), as each impulse is ‘simply a unidirectional urge and thus has no measuring-rod in itself’ (§17), leaving the self with no immanent principle able to weigh and decide among its conflicting impulses. Each resolution leads to another, so that the will, again akin to Hobbes, passes capriciously from impulse to impulse and object to object. Natural will is thus ‘infinite in form only’ (§14), as its haphazard movement ‘never enables it to get beyond its own finitude’ (§16). What is required, Hegel declares, is ‘the purification’ of the impulses’ immediacy and naturalness so that they can ‘become the rational system of the will’s volitions’ (§19). This is the goal of the system of Right (Recht), which, ordering the self’s impulses, introduces ‘the realm of freedom made actual, the world of Spirit [Geist] brought forth out of itself as a second nature’ (§4). Ethical Life’s institutions achieve rightfulness by habituating the will so that its own natural impulses drive it in accordance with Ethical Life’s rational form. Mediating and organizing the impulses, these institutions raise the will from arbitrary natural freedom to infinite rational freedom.

As an immanent organization (‘Spirit brought forth out of itself…’) of natural drives into a socialized second nature, Hegel’s system of Right exemplifies what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘social machine’. That is, it is an organization or ‘assemblage’ (the French term that Deleuze and Guattari use is agencement) of disparate components operating at the level of rights, moral codes and institutions, which emerges from and reacts back upon the incongruent and forceful impulses that characterize the level of the will, or what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘desiring-machine’. Each level is ‘machinic’ because it is a ‘synthesis of heterogeneities as such’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 330) which, through its internal frictions, drives the self in determinate directions. Hegel’s natural will and system of Right similarly comprise two machinic levels: the former’s strife and conflict constitutes ‘a dialectic of impulses and inclinations’ in which ‘the satisfaction of one is unavoidably subordinated or sacrificed to the satisfaction of another’ (PR: §17); the latter’s various intertwined institutions, as will be seen later, never function smoothly or unambiguously, revealing multiple fracture points along the way. For Deleuze and Guattari, the levels of desiring-machine and social machine are reciprocally determining, with direct investments of drives into social forms giving these social forms their sense and direction even as the latter react back upon the former. Hegel expresses a similar idea when he holds that the social institutions that habituate natural drives unfold as they do because natural human impulses already express a compulsion towards this social and ethical structure: ‘human beings have by nature the impulse towards right, also the impulse to property and morality, also the impulse of love between the sexes, the impulse to sociability, and so on’ (§19). For Hegel, this unfolding allows individuals to identify with the rationality and rightfulness of society’s actual order so that their drives align with its institutions in a way that conforms to freedom’s self-determining character. This transforms the will into thinking will (§21), which identifies with duty. When duty becomes the object of the will’s desire, the self’s own compulsions drive it towards this ethical goal.

In principle, other social machines—that is, configurations of drives and desire that shape both the self and the social forms in which it is embedded—are possible. But for Hegel these cannot unite the two levels in the way that modern Ethical Life does. In short, Hegel holds that only his State links drives and social institutions by way of internal rational necessity. Other configurations must therefore be considered thoughtless, irrational and sunk into a chaos of unreflective, contingent nature. The capture of drives manifests itself in the way that Hegel’s declaration that there are natural impulses towards ethicality entails that other configurations of drives can be dismissed. But the precariousness of this capture becomes apparent in the way that contingent and disorganized elements persist within Hegel’s State. He consistently treats these elements as mere moments of irrationality that inevitably arise within but in no way compromise the State’s overall rational structure. But at one notable point Hegel declares it rational to acknowledge them as such, stating that ‘Reason itself requires us to recognize that contingency, contradiction, and semblance have a sphere and a right of their own, restricted though it be, and it is irrational to strive to resolve and rectify contradictions within that sphere’ (PR: §214). This admission comes when he is discussing Right as positive law, where the application of universal rules to particular cases cannot eliminate the inherent discretion in the procedure. Hegel holds this difficulty to demonstrate how, beyond the philosophical grounding of Right, which is decidedly unhistorical, it is necessary to study positive law’s historical development, which promises to show how these moments of discretion are part of a rational progress unfolding over time (§§211–14). But this example and the response that irrationalities are part of a progressive historical development cannot stand in the face of other instances that reveal how Right’s ethical structures engender contingencies that refuse mediation and progressive unification over time. Such contingencies elude capture inasmuch as they can be neither appropriated into the State’s rationality nor dismissed as primitive forms.

For Deleuze and Guattari, these moments signal the emergence of another kind of social machine: the war machine. Entailing another form of both the self and the social, it ‘bears witness to another kind of justice … another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus’, to ‘another movement, another space-time’, and ‘another dynamism’, all of which are related to a ‘form of exteriority of thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 352, 353, 366, 377). The war machine’s ‘exteriority’ to the State is neither geographical nor historical—it is neither outside the State the way a garden is outside a house nor, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s references to nomadic peoples living at the borders of historic empires, is it simply a pre-modern or pre-State social form.Footnote ¹¹ Rather, it is an exteriority that remains immanent to the State, emerging from it because the State machine, like all machines for Deleuze and Guattari, functions off its own frictions, and thus works only also by breaking down.Footnote ¹²

III. Desire in the State and war machine assemblages

If State and war machine are considered two competing social machines, how should their difference be understood? For Deleuze and Guattari, it is a matter of desire, along with the concepts of interiority, exteriority and becoming related to its possible forms. We can consider desire to be a configuration of the drives that tempers their vicissitudes by orienting them towards a specific object, so that when desiring something my will is driven towards it. For Deleuze and Guattari, this makes desire an assemblage, replete with its own frictions. On these terms, Hegelian desire orients the drives and the self in accordance with an ideal of self-conscious subjectivity that ‘purifies its object, content, and aim, and raises them to … universality’ (PR: §21). Unsurprisingly, to be self-conscious is what the Hegelian will desires.Footnote ¹³

Hegelian desire is, also unsurprisingly, dialectical in structure. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel defines self-consciousness as ‘Desire in general’ (PhG: §167) because desire’s negative movement encompasses the separation from and unification with another that constitutes both self-consciousness and free will.Footnote ¹⁴ As such, however, it requires a negative relation that preserves the otherness of desire’s object, and so requires an object that neither passively allows itself to be consumed nor presents itself as a mere impediment, but rather actively challenges and refuses self-consciousness’s desire (Pippin Reference Pippin2011: 20). In this form, the object becomes another self-consciousness and desire becomes the desire for recognition, which is satisfied only via a relationship of reciprocal recognition with this other subject. This reciprocity defines the ethical community that is the shared aim of the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right.Footnote ¹⁵

Insofar as recognition aims to secure subjectivity, it is also inseparable, for Deleuze and Guattari, from a notion of subjective interiority. This does not necessarily involve a metaphysical claim about the self’s depth—indeed, this is precluded insofar as what is associated with this interiority reflects and is a product of the subject’s relations to others—but it does embody a commitment to a certain ‘self-construal’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2011: 88) for which the possibility of objective validation is offered. My recognizing the interiority of another self-consciousness means attributing to that other—no matter how different or alien he or she might seem to me to be—capacities along the lines of being able to carry on a conversation with oneself, to feel the depths of one’s emotions, to reflect on one’s existence in the world, and to be able to determine action normatively, that is, ‘on the basis of claims, commitments, entitlements, justifications, warrants’ (67). This is not an attribution of a neutral, second-order self-awareness, as interiority is inseparable from ‘something like a projecting … of oneself into the world and the future’ (65) which defines self-consciousness as ‘a dynamic process, a doing in a way and a thinking in a way’ (55). Granting this recognition, in turn, gives the other’s recognition of me superior value, making it meaningful in a way that the recognition seemingly given to me by my cat or dog, to whom I do not attribute interiority, cannot be. This allows it to serve as validation of my human subjectivity and interiority: I can be certain of my self-conscious interiority because another whom I recognize as self-conscious confirms that what I desire to see myself as being is also what I am. Self-consciousness is thereby secured through a movement that takes the self outside itself so as to find self-consciousness in another, and then returns it to itself by the way this other reflects self-consciousness back. Hegel contrasts self-conscious interiority with the ‘pure externality’ (PR: §42) of material things, which change and go beyond themselves but lack self-consciousness’s dialectical return-to-self. A material thing ‘lacks subjectivity, [because] it is external not merely to the subject but to itself’ (§42A). It thus may rightfully be possessed by a subjective will with infinite actual freedom (§42, 44).

Eschewing such interiority, the war machine might appear simply to be a deficient and less rational form of the self-conscious self. Deleuze and Guattari note that the man of war’s character appears ‘from the standpoint of the State … in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 353–54), and that he seems to be ‘outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself’ (355). Hegel expresses this same attitude when he dismisses heroes of the past as anachronisms (PR: §93) whose self-consciousness ‘had not advanced out of its primitive simplicity either to reflection on the distinction between deed and action, between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to the subdivision of consequences’ (§118). However, while Hegel dismisses the warrior as an unreflective type, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that he expresses a becoming that exceeds and dissolves the interiority of Hegelian self-consciousness without being reducible to the pure externality of Hegelian thinghood. While the war machine’s ‘form of exteriority … is always external to itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 356), this is not in the same way that a thing is external both to subjectivity and to itself—so that, in saying a thing is ‘external’ to me, I am saying both that it is not ‘internal’ to me the way my consciousness is and that it has no inner reality itself. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari contend, ‘it is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking’ (354). The war machine is exterior not because it is external but because it contests interiority’s internal/external division.

The war machine’s pure form of exteriority entails a notion of space that is intensive rather than extensive, and therefore a becoming that does not necessarily involve a change of position. Against the suggestion that the war machine’s nomadism implies its ambulatory nature, Deleuze and Guattari align it with ‘spiritual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one place: these are part of nomadism’ (1987: 381). Nomadic becoming exceeds what Deleuze and Guattari call the State’s ‘striation’ of space and movement, its stratification of these in terms of measurable units and fixed places. As such, it involves special forms of number and affect. Against the number that counts units and measures magnitudes, Deleuze and Guattari propose ‘numbering number’, where ‘number becomes a subject’ (389)—that is, a seat of agency. It does not measure distances but instead expresses vectors, directions of force: ‘it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one’ (390). Numbering number invokes ‘a geometry of the trait’ (389), where traits ‘are “generated” as “forces of thrust”’ (364). It thus expresses a quantum of drive or compulsion—what Nietzsche calls will to power—that makes both intensive becoming and extensive change possible. It thereby embeds agency in the desiring impulses that Hegel seeks to organize dialectically.

The war machine’s affects, in turn, relate to weapons rather than the tools of work associated with the State form. For Hegel, work ‘is desire held in check’ (PhG: §195) and is crucial to Hegel’s bondsman attaining self-consciousness as, by disciplining his world and himself, the bondsman ‘acquires a mind of his own’ (§196). Work’s tools, Deleuze and Guattari hold, correlate with self-consciousness’s ‘form of interiority’ (1987: 395) as they are ‘inseparable from an organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the formation of the subject’ (399–400). Nevertheless, although work checks desire, desire is not absent from it, as the State’s work assemblage, like the war machine, is an assemblage of desire. But the structures of work and war machine ‘fundamentally mobilize passions of different orders’ (399). While work mobilizes the passions of self-restraint and interiority that Nietzsche associates with the slavish man of ressentiment, the war machine mobilizes those associated with Nietzsche’s noble: ‘the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack’, whose effect is ‘to undo things, and to undo oneself … the “not-doing” of the warrior, the undoing of the subject’ (400). The war machine and the man of war thereby imply an order of Nietzschean affirmation, a desire to overcome: ‘it is not the same justice or the same cruelty, the same pity, etc.’ (399).

The State can secure itself only by inverting the force of these affects. It must capture and appropriate them by imposing an ‘imperial spatium’ and a ‘modern extensio’ that ‘links the number to metric magnitudes’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 389), and must convert the war machine into a disciplined army (402). If the impulses towards Ethical Life invoked by Hegel make this imposition possible, then a multitude of counter-tendencies at the level of drives also undermines it, counter-tendencies that make it possible for a war machine always to appear. Given these resisting forces, it is unsurprising that Hegel’s State is, on Foucauldian terms, decidedly disciplinary, its purportedly rational necessity remaining inadequate to the configuration of impulses it seeks to achieve, leaving it struggling against the impulses released by the war machine.Footnote ¹⁶

IV. Right and its semblances

Throughout the Philosophy of Right, key transitional moments in the development of concrete freedom present a specific kind of negation to be negated: that of show or semblance (Schein). Semblance differs from appearance (Erscheinung), which presents the outward face of an essential if still abstract reality. The moments of the will’s indeterminacy and determination outlined in Hegel’s Introduction, for example, are one-sided but nevertheless real moments of freedom understood concretely as self-determination. Conversely, ‘a semblance is a determinate existence inadequate to the essence, the empty detachment and posited-ness [Gesetztsein] of the essence’ (PR: §82A). As such, it lacks standing even to be a partial portrayal of reality. Abstract appearance may entail aspects of semblance, but its place in the dialectic is fundamentally different. Appearance’s negation maintains it within a more comprehensive whole—the moments of indeterminacy and determination thus persist in the synthesis that incorporates them. The negation of semblance, in contrast, amounts to its annulment, as it had no standing in reality in the first place.

But what is identified as semblance at these key transitional moments: Right itself or what appears to be its negation? Knox’s Explanatory Notes, revised extensively by Houlgate but not on this specific point, suggest the latter. But the evidence and reasoning seem faulty. The context of the particular note at issue is the opening to Hegel’s discussion of Wrong, a stage reached when the initial understanding of freedom as Abstract Right progresses from property as the fundamental abstract right that grounds personhood to contract as an agreement between individual wills to respect one another’s property. Because contract is a contingent agreement between particular self-interested wills, it engenders Wrong as its negation. Hegel writes: ‘This appearance [Erscheinung] of right, in which right and its essential existence, the particular will, correspond immediately, i.e., fortuitously, proceeds in wrong to become a semblance [Schein]’ (PR: §82). Knox, and by implication Houlgate, interpret this passage to mean that Wrong, in the form of crime, ‘is a mere “semblance”, [sic] no genuine existence; what it denies is its own essential basis, right, on which the very being of crime depends’ (Explanatory Note 93, 340). Aside from this reading leaving unexplained how crime, as semblance with no reality in itself, could pose a threat to Right, the passage that it interprets, even as translated, does not state that Wrong becomes a semblance, but rather what appears at this stage to be Right—namely, the form of contract affirmed in the immediacy of particular contracting wills.Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, Hegel is really identifying Abstract Right as semblance. Knox’s conflation of Wrong and crime adds further confusions, as crime is only one subdivision of Wrong. The latter culminates in the punishment meant to negate Wrong, but punishment becomes revenge in the hands of the self-interested wills enforcing it. With punishment becoming revenge, the mechanism meant to secure Right becomes on Hegel’s own terms a charade, inadequate to its essence: while its content may be retributive, in its form as revenge, punishment ‘becomes a new transgression’ (§102). Once the use of Schein is understood in this way, the reason for invoking it becomes clear. The situation of Abstract Right’s self-negation into show certainly can only be overcome with the annulment of Wrong, as Hegel promises when he states that ‘right reasserts itself by negating this negation of itself’ (§82). But as Wrong is not just Abstract Right’s negation but also its endpoint, the negation of this negation must raise the will and its freedom out of the order of Abstract Right and to a higher one. The negation of Wrong thus transitions the dialectic from Abstract Right to Morality, where particular wills secure rightfulness by willing the universal.Footnote ¹⁸ The challenge posed by Abstract Right becoming a semblance of rightfulness entails this move.

Semblance functions similarly in subsequent stages of Hegel’s account and, even where the term is not employed, his descriptions lend themselves to its meaning. Morality’s problem is that it remains an ‘ought’ that the subject may or may not will, so that its vehicle remains inadequate to the task of realizing it. The result is that Morality’s objective content is reduced ‘to a form and a semblance’ (§137). On the subjective side too, the subject’s moral character becomes a façade, as various attempts to ground morality entail hypocrisy, evil will, dubious theories of probabilism, the assertion of subjective opinion in which ‘any semblance of ethical objectivity has totally disappeared’, and finally ironic detachment, which reduces the moral law to empty subjectivism (§140). Morality too thereby reaches its ultimate form in a condition where it becomes a semblance of itself. Once again, the required negation must move the will to another level. Morality thus transitions to Ethical Life, whose institutions seek to impart morality to the will as a second nature. Yet each of Ethical Life’s institutions contain negative moments that threaten to reveal their promised unity and that of Ethical Life as no more adequate to reality than Abstract Right and Morality were in their domains. The contingency of love makes the Family’s unifying bonds precarious, as subjective wills can become estranged, and ‘there is no merely legal or positive bond which can hold the parties together once their dispositions and actions have become hostile and contrary’ (PR: §176). Although Hegel does not use these terms, such a condition is clearly one in which marriage becomes a sham. Civil Society’s promise to satisfy diverse and arbitrary subjective wills through its Invisible Hand becomes ‘a show of rationality’ (§189)Footnote ¹⁹ as the order it discerns derives from extracting abstract principles from the individual decisions of a mass of arbitrary wills. And the free market’s dynamics, as Hegel explains, produce an impoverished underclass that falls outside the influence of Ethical Life, with Civil Society never having sufficient wealth ‘to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble’ (§245). The State aims to turn the particularity released by Civil Society back to the universal, building on the unifying powers of patriotic sentiment and the church (§§268, 270) and demonstrating the rationality of its own structure. Through institutions such as a figurehead monarch embodying the State’s individuality and personhood, a publicly debating bicameral legislature mediating between the crown and the people, and a civil service selected by objective standards and discharging its duties dispassionately (§§291–97), the State purports to unite concretely an objective good and the subjective agents who deliver it. But Hegel acknowledges all this to be mere show, concluding his account of the State’s constitutional structure with the admission that this unification ‘has not up to this point attained its right or its existence’ (§320).

When Hegel subsequently turns to the State’s external relations to consolidate it internally, however, the status of Schein changes fundamentally. Here, Hegel holds that the threat of war makes manifest the State’s absolute priority over all particularities, thereby reconstituting unity by compelling different constituencies to will the good of the whole over their particular interests (PR: §§323–25). Against the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace, it must be remembered that ‘the state is an individual, and individuality essentially implies negation. Hence even if a number of states make themselves into a family, this group as an individual must engender an opposite and create an enemy’ (§324A). This Schmittian move to secure the political by way of a friend/enemy antagonism seems to leave Ethical Life at the mercy of the contingencies of international anarchy. But Hegel responds—in a way notably different from previous transitions where the elaborations of abstract right, morality and ethicality ultimately revealed them to be mere shows—by holding the anarchy that would negate Ethical Life to be the semblance. He proclaims: ‘the point of view from which things seem pure contingencies vanishes if we look at them in the light of the concept and philosophy, because philosophy knows contingency to be semblance and sees in it its essence, necessity’ (§324). Through what is now declared to be only the semblance of international anarchy, Hegel closes the text by tracing the rational State’s progress in World History, which culminates in the final form that secures Ethical Life (§§348–60). It is not simply that this change in the status of semblance is suspicious: the resulting turn to history in the closing pages undermines the entire project of the Philosophy of Right, as Hegel stated at the start of the work that the philosophical foundation of Right could make no such appeal: ‘When those who try to justify things on historical grounds confound an origin in external circumstances with one in the concept, they unconsciously achieve the very opposite of what they intend’ (§3). The turn to history would not present a problem if, as Hegel initially frames it (§33), the account of World History followed a completed philosophical justification of the State and simply showed its unfolding in time. But because he must use history to surmount the final semblance arising in the State’s external relations, the historical account cannot be treated as extraneous to the philosophical justification in this way.

All this leaves the problem of semblance unresolved, and the consequences for Hegel’s project are extreme. On the one hand, absent a philosophical justification showing international anarchy to be a façade concealing true rightfulness, Ethical Life cannot rise above being a semblance of rational unity, entailing further that the universal character of Morality and the rightful character of Abstract Right are also charades. Hegelian Right now reveals itself to be inadequate to reality, whereas unresolvable strife and conflict inside and outside the State embody it. On the other hand, if the failure to ground the State philosophically leaves the State’s unity reliant on nothing more than the antagonism of war, then the appeal to World History does not resolve this antagonism but only magnifies it, seemingly without end. Such an appeal, and its consequences, is indeed a gambit played regularly by real states and political leaders throughout our all too familiar bloody history.Footnote ²⁰ But this, in turn, reveals a very different foundation of the State: namely, in the appropriation of social forces for the project of waging war, this project in turn being the ground on which the State declares its absolute necessity. And this means that the State, which purports to contain all its essential moments within it, is really founded on the appropriation of the war machine, both into a military institution and into history itself. As Deleuze and Guattari declare, ‘One of the biggest questions from the point of view of universal history is: How will the State appropriate the war machine’ (1987: 418). State Right is grounded neither in philosophical necessity (as Hegel attempts to show) nor in historical circumstances (as both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari reject), but in the capture and stratification that make State politics and history possible. This capture turns history into a history of war between states, and politics into the politics of friend/enemy antagonisms.

Conversely, if the war machine appears wherever forces contest the State, then it can be glimpsed at each transition point in Right’s purported development. It appears, that is, where the abstract right, morality and ethicality meant to embody freedom devolve into semblances, and there is every reason not to take them seriously. Why affirm rights when revenge shows that might makes right? Why be moral when justifications of moral action reveal themselves to be charades? Why idealize the market as the path to prosperity through personal effort when it really generates undeserved poverty? Why feel loyalty to the ‘rational state’ when its mass bureaucracies treat people as numbers? These are the moments when the impulse to pursue other politics and forms of selfhood emerge. Capture and appropriation, however, take place at these same moments, as the State seeks to turn revenge towards moral conscience, the impoverished and unruly rabble towards patriotic loyalty, etc. It is thus in the State’s struggle with the war machine—at bottom a struggle over how drives and desires are assembled and given direction—that its politics and institutions both emerge and are compromised. From the State’s perspective, the discordant impulses turning away from it must appear irrational, unethical, antisocial, and even sinful. But against this, Deleuze and Guattari hold that the war machine’s forces can struggle against the State ‘only on condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social relations’ (1987: 423). The war machine’s struggle thus speaks to another justice, another morality, another way of being.

V. Conclusion: A politics of strategic and logistical relations between the State and the war machine

I will close this paper by examining what possible politics might follow from the State being inextricably bound up in struggle with the war machine. The nature of these possibilities turns on whether this relation of struggle is conceived as dialectical, antagonistic or of some other kind. When discussing how the State and war machine relate, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the figure of the metallurgist. Whereas Schmitt insists that the partisan requires some regular association to secure weapons and technology, Deleuze and Guattari hold that the metallurgist who secures these provisions for the war machine is not an agent of the State. The metallurgist thereby ensures that the relation between the State and war machine is not necessarily one of appropriation and regularization, but instead involves a completely different kind of politics in which appropriation is only one possible outcome.

The metallurgist resides in the nexus between the State and war machine, connecting to each while they remain irreducible to each other. Metallurgists depend at once on imperial agriculture, which they need for subsistence, on relations to forest dwellers, since they must keep their workshops near the necessary charcoal, and on relations to the nomads, as the mines are far from empire-controlled farmlands (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 412–13). Yet they also remain outside both State and war machine—they ‘are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among sedentaries’ (414). While metallurgy communicates with both the State’s striated space and the nomad’s intensive space of becoming, ‘the two communications are not symmetrical…it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it always conjugates with sedentary space’ (415). In relating to the war machine, metallurgy enhances and intensifies its becomings and overcomings, while in relating to the State, it advances the powers of capture and appropriation. But as a middle term disjoining State and war machine, the metallurgist also ensures a composition and resonance wherein each side swings back towards the other (422), communicating through their irreducible difference without a possibility of final mediation.

Were there no war machine, politics would be as Hegel’s State outwardly presents itself: an organization that unfolds in relation to a rational and ethical ideal. With the war machine’s inclusion, however, politics becomes fundamentally a matter of strategy and logistics, plans of action and complex organization, for both the capturing State and the resisting war machine. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect’ (1987: 391). Strategies and logistics also appear in Schmitt’s conception of the political, but in limited forms associated with identifying the real enemy and establishing the corresponding antagonism. This antagonistic politics, however, depends on the prior appropriation of the always irregular war machine. In relation to this task of appropriation, but also more generally, strategy cannot be merely oppositional but instead must be creative: opposition is the posture to which the strategist wants to manipulate his adversary so as to make the adversary predictable. The relation of State to war machine is strategic inasmuch as each side seeks capture or escape by way of creative unpredictability, but this nevertheless comes about by way of borrowings, which are ensured by the reciprocal communication between State and war machine forces. In this respect, the war machine, even while emerging from contingencies within the very State form seeking to appropriate it, cannot come into being as a spontaneous or accidental response or counter-attack, but depends on a strategic context and the possible resources it can borrow, as well as the logistics that can enable it to develop. Its emergence, in Foucauldian terms, is ‘intentional but nonsubjective’, and it is intelligible not because it results from a free choice or subjective decision—a war machine does not come into being simply because people choose to make one—but because it is ‘imbued, through and through, with calculation’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1990: 94, 95). In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, the war machine comes about not by way of the interiority of a subject, but by way of desire—that is, a configuration of drives—assembled in exteriority. Desire is a machinic assemblage of heterogeneous impulses, and for this reason its emergence is always already strategic and logistical.