A brief and schematic presentation of two ethnographic events illustrates the dynamic engendered by the clash between the state as striated and organicity. This clash is the Deleuzian war machine. The ethnographic events are part of Israeli nationality: one shows a close combat training session within the Israeli Defense Forces and the other a recording of Holocaust survivors’ stories for educational purposes. Both are instances in which somaticity is channelled into the national through abduction. The body animates and cultivates the mixed dynamic of nationality, infusing its forces of striation and congealment with life. Although Deleuze and Guattari posit that the war machine is born from the nomad as it encounters the state, and that it is external to the state, the following analysis of the ways in which the war machine operates within the national clearly shows that the war machine can be both a requirement and a product of the state. The forces of striation are just as unstable as the forces of rhizome. They tend to crumble and fall apart when the impetus of stasis becomes too overwhelming. To remain socially tenable, the striated craves the organic nature of the nomad, and depends on the emergence of the war machine.
Allen L. ( 2008) Getting by the occupation: How violence became normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Cultural Anthropology23(3): 453-487.
2.
Alter JS ( 1992) The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
3.
Arendt H. ( 1992[1963]) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books .
4.
Artaud A. ( 1964) Le Théâtre et son double. Saint-AmandGallimard.
5.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2006) Kime in Japanese martial arts and the moving body. Body & Society (4): 73-93.
6.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2007) Timing in karate and the body in its own right in anthropology . Social Analysis51(3): 1-22.
7.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2009a) Kibadachi: Pain and crossing boundaries within the lived-in-body and within sociality. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute15: 610-629.
8.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2009b) Survival, an Israeli Ju Jutsu School of Martial Arts: Violence, body, practice and the national. Ethnography10: 154-184.
9.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2009c) Becoming body in Aikido: A Pacific martial art. Israeli Sociology11(1): 113-135. (in Hebrew).
10.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2009d) Opening and closing ritual in Japanese martial arts and the dismantling of violence. The Journal of Ritual Studies23(1): 29-44.
11.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2010) Globalization of war on violence: Israeli close-combat, Krav Maga, and sudden alterations in intensity. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale18(3): 267-288.
12.
Bar-On Cohen E. ( 2011) ‘Once we put our helmets on, there are no more friends’: The ‘fights’ session in the Israeli Army course for close-combat instructors. Armed Forces and Society37(3): 512-533.
13.
Bar-On Cohen E. (in press) Perfect praxis in Aikido: A reflexive body-self. In: Evens T, Handelman D and Roberts C (eds) Reflecting on Reflexivity [special issue of Social Analysis].
14.
Benjamin W. ( 1985) Critique of violence. In: One-Way Street and Other Writings. Norfolk: Verso , 132-154.
15.
Bogard W. ( 1998) Sense and segmentarity: Some markers of Deleuzian-Guattarian sociology. Sociological Theory16(1): 52-74.
16.
Bruun H. and Langlais R. ( 2003) On the embodied nature of action. Acta Sociologica46(1): 31-49.
17.
Buchanan I. ( 1997) The problem of the body in Deleuze and Guattari Or, what can a body do?, Body & Society3(3): 73-91.
18.
Carruthers A. ( 1998) Kung fu fighting: The cultural pedagogy of the body in the Voviam Overseas Vietnamese Martial Arts School. The Australian Journal of Anthropology9(1): 45-57.
19.
Colebrook C. ( 2004) Nomadicism. In: Parr A (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 180-183.
20.
DeLanda M. ( 2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
21.
Deleuze G. ( 1990) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
22.
Deleuze G. ( 2002) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
23.
Deleuze G. and Guattari F. ( 2005[1987]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
24.
Feldman J. ( 2007) Between Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl: Changing inscriptions of sacrifice on Jerusalem’s ‘Mountain of Memory’. Anthropological Quarterly80(4): 1147-1174.
25.
Foucault M. ( 1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . New York: Vintage.
26.
Handelman D. ( 2000) Telling a good Holocaust story: The narrative as a double subject in witnessing. In: Vesenkari M, Enges P and Siikala A-L (eds) Telling, Remembering, Interpreting, Guessing: A Festschrift for Anniki Kaivola-Bregenhoj. Joensuu: Suomen Kansantietouden Tutkijain Seura, 39-45.
27.
Handelman D. ( 2004) Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Event. Oxford: Berg.
28.
Handelman D. and Katz E. ( 1998) State ceremonies in Israel: Remembrance Day and Independence Day. In: Handelman D (ed.) Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Event. New York: Berghahn, 191-233.
29.
Handelman D. and Lindquist G. ( 2011) Introduction: Religion, politics and globalization: The long past foregrounding the short present, prologue and introduction. In: Lindquist G and Handelman D (eds) Religion, Politics, and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn.
30.
Holland E. ( 2004) Nomadism + Citizenship. In: Parr A (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 183-184.
31.
Hughes J. ( 2008) Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation. London/New York: Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy.
32.
Kapferer B. ( 1988) Legends of People, Myths of States: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
33.
Kapferer B. ( 1997) The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
34.
Kaplan D. ( 2009) The songs of the siren: Engineering national time on Israeli Radio. Cultural Anthropology24(2): 313-345.
35.
Katz J. ( 1999) How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
36.
Kidron CA ( 2009) Toward an ethnography of silence: The lived presence of the past in the everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology50(1): 5-27.
37.
Linke U. ( 1999) Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetic of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
38.
Lomsky-Feder E. ( 2004) The memorial ceremony in Israeli schools: Between the state and civil society. British Journal of Sociology of Education25(3): 291-305.
39.
McDonald DA ( 2009) Poetics and the performance of violence in Israel/Palestine . Ethnomusicology53(1): 58-85.
40.
Maman D, Ben-Ari E and Rosenhek Z (eds) ( 2001) Military, State and Society in Israel: Theoretical & Comparative Perspectives. New Brunswick: Transaction.
41.
Marcuse H. ( 2010) Holocaust memorials: The emergence of a genre. The American Historical Review115(1): 53-89.
42.
Marvin C. and Ingle DW ( 1999) Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
43.
Massumi B. ( 1995) The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique (Fall) 83-109.
44.
Massumi B. ( 2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation . Durham: Duke University Press .
45.
Norrick N. ( 1989) How paradox means. Poetics Today10(3): 551-562.
46.
Patton P. ( 1984) Conceptual politics and the war-machine in ‘Mille Plateaux’. SubStance13(3/4): 61-80.
47.
Pype K. ( 2007) Fighting boys, strong men and gorillas: Notes on the imagination of masculinities in Kinshasa. Africa77(2): 250-271.
48.
Rajchman J. ( 2000) The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
49.
Scarry E. ( 1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World . New York: Oxford University Press .
50.
Segev T. ( 1991) The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
51.
Sion L. ( 2011) When the Israeli state of exception meets the exception: The case of Tali Fahima. In: Bajc V and de Lint W (eds) Security and Everyday Life . New York: Routledge, 79-100.
52.
Throop CJ and Murphy KM ( 2002) Bourdieu and phenomenology. Anthropological Theory2(2): 185-201.
53.
Weizman E. ( 2006) Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Radical Philosophy136: 8-22.
54.
Wistrich RS ( 1997) Israel and the Holocaust trauma. Jewish History11(1): 13-20.
55.
Wyschogrod E. ( 1985) Spirit from Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death. New Haven: Yale University Press.
56.
Yuasa Y. ( 1987) The Body: Towards a Mind-Body Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press.
57.
Zarrilli PB ( 2000) When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
58.
Zayani M. ( 2000) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guttari and the total system . Philosophy & Social Criticism26(1): 93-114.
