Discussion
“[I]t is not an exhaustive approach to establish a simple opposition between two points of view, religion-nomadism,” they tell us. “For monotheistic religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiritual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe areas.” What might these consist of?
Well, I can think of a few, myself — various heresies or esoteric practices within the monotheisms, from Sufism to Kabbalah to the practice of kenosis.
But D&G are after something more specific: “religion as an element in a war machine, and the idea of holy war as the motor of that machine.”
They seem to anticipate — even then, in the days before various self-anointed mujahideen made “jihad” a familiar concept in the West — that the mind of the reader would leap straight to Islam at this point: “The *prophet* [emphasis in original], as opposed to the state personality of the king and the religious personality of the priest, traces the...
movement by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of such a machine.” And they invoke Georges Bataille’s pungent, if questionable, summary of early Islam: “‘a society reduced to the military enterprise.’”
Here comes the corrective, though: “Yet the Crusades were a properly Christian adventure of this type.” And there follows an astonishing, if all too brief, regrounding in the history of medieval Europe, and the papacy’s concerted attempts, over two centuries, to
wrest the southern Levant from Islam by military force, and claim it for Christendom.
It’s a good moment to spend some time contemplating the energies summoned by the Crusades, because in so many ways they are still conditioning our lives. Poor self-hating Pete Hegseth rather fancies himself a Crusader, with his Deus Vult tattoo; various contemporary far-right formations overtly take this warrior Christianity as a model (when they aren’t simply harboring suppressed jealousy for the Taliban).
And what D&G argue is that the lessons are not quite so clearcut as these latterday stans have made themselves believe. The whole sequence in which they do this has a melancholy music that — in its own way, to be sure — just about rises to a prophetic cadence itself, so I’m going to quote it in full:
“The prophets may very well condemn nomad life; the [here implicitly Crusader] war machine may very well favor the movement of migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very
“well compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the world — but despite all of that, when religion sets itself up as a war machine, it mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute deterritorialization, it doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad, or with the potential nomad the migrant
“is in the process of becoming, and finally, its turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form. And this turning against is no less a part of the ‘essence’ of religion than that dream.”
*Whew*. We don’t even need to imagine the specifics to grasp something of the truth of this, but let’s try to evoke some anyway. The doughty Norseman meeting his end in the siege of some Balearic hilltown, the Catalan uprooted from the tending of his fields and driven halfway around the world
in a bedraggled column of filthy, half-literate warrior-mendicants: what heresies did they encounter along the way? What sights, sounds, foods, smells entered them? (For that matter, *who* entered them, and under what circumstances?) Can we be at all sure they remained the slicing instrument of Godly terror at all times, or is it possible that entirely other affects traversed these pilgrim bodies, and made *them* something entirely other?
It’s an example from another time and place and context,
but I think of the three US Army medics who came back from the war in Vietnam filled not with loathing for the Viet Cong, but with admiration for the way they tended to the wellbeing of the people, and on the basis of these “barefoot doctor” practices founded the Free Clinic that remains operational in Berkeley to this day.
The faith contains the seeds of its own undoing, always. Not in every body that carries it, not maybe in most — but the harder it tries to clamp down a lid upon the world,
the more cracks it opens through which something else might seep through. The application of force creates the conditions of its own negation, and however local that negation may be, when it appears it is absolute.
Let’s leave things here for today, shall we?
Notes: Wikipedia’s not terrible on the Crusades, at least as a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades
- You shouldn’t doubt how potent or how appealing Crusader iconography has become over the past several years: https://blog.library.villanova.edu/2019/09/30/deus-vult/
- Annemarie Schimmel’s “Mystical Dimensions of Islam” was my first source on Sufism (outside the hugely problematic works of adult-child sex advocate “Hakim Bey,” aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), and while it’s somewhat dated, it’s still a useful overview. You can find that here: https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/137665622MysticalDimensionsOfIslamAnnemarieSchimmel/137665622-Mystical-Dimensions-of-Islam-Annemarie-Schimmel.pdf
- My own exposure to Kabbalah (& related ideas e.g. gematria) was via Thelema, but the *source* is Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.” Find that here: https://www.bard.edu/library/pdfs/archives/Scholem-Major_Trends_in_Jewish_Mysticism.pdf
And for the Abrahamic trifecta, here’s what is possibly the preëminent work of Christian mysticism, the fourteenth-century “Cloud of Unknowing.” https://ia902909.us.archive.org/32/items/cloudofunknowing0000unse_h8l5/cloudofunknowing0000unse_h8l5.pdf
See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
Oh, say: could you give me a quick show of hands if you’ve followed this read-through of #Nomadology, either in whole or in part? I’m trying to get a sense of who’s on the other side of the screen – needn’t be more than a “👋,” thanks.
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