The War Machine (IX)

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News Analyst, New York

The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race. 

Rimbaud said it all on this point: only he or she can invoke race who says, "I have always been of an inferior race... I am of an inferior race for all eternity. . . There I am on the Breton shore ... I am a beast, a nigger . . . I am of a distant race: my ancestors were Norsemen." In the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered, the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitution of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the representation of a Whole. 

AXIOM. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect. 

PROPOSITION . Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.