Nomadic Thinking

This present­a­tion is a few notes on a ques­tion. The ques­tion being: What does it mean to say: the free space of think­ing? As my title sug­gests, I would like to relate the free space of think­ing to what one might simply call nomadic think­ing. To this end, I will draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomad­o­logy and, in addi­tion, the work of Jean-​Luc Nancy in order to effect a kind of cross-​fertilisation. What I will try to present is the fol­low­ing: first, an impossibly brief con­spectus of Nancy’s ideas on free­dom, space, and what it means to think; second, a brief remark on the rel­ev­ance of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad war machine; and finally, an all too hasty con­clu­sion that will affirm the neces­sity to think cri­tique in terms of a crit­ical agency or, what amounts to the same thing, a war­ring subjectivity.

To begin, what does Nancy mean by free­dom? In his sem­inal book The Exper­i­ence of Free­dom (Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity Press 1994), Nancy does not con­struct a the­ory of free­dom. Instead, he decon­structs free­dom, points to aporias that plague its very con­cep­tion, while always, in the end, abandon­ing it, let­ting it go, releas­ing it from the bonds of sig­ni­fic­a­tion as far as he can, given the con­straints of writ­ing. Nancy focuses on how free­dom always evades being pigeon-​holed, how it always slips bey­ond the clasp of any con­cep­tu­al­isa­tion, which is why free­dom is pre­cisely free in and for itself. If we were to push Nancy to give us his con­cep­tion of free­dom, his answer would be to say, without a hint of irony, that free­dom is, quite simply, not conceived.

Now both think­ing and space enter into the pic­ture as a rela­tion to free­dom. When speak­ing of space, this is not under­stood in terms of a cartesian res extensa—a geo­met­rical, meas­ur­able thing — but what Nancy calls ‘spa­ci­os­ity’ or simply a spa­cing. Such a spa­cing comes before any notion of space itself, and is described by Nancy as the gift of spatio-​temporality. This does not mean that space is offered to free­dom, but that free­dom offers itself space as a gift thereby giv­ing space to itself, a space that is the immesur­able spa­cing out of sin­gu­lar­it­ies in the world and as world. The exper­i­ence of free­dom, of being free, means being exposed to this open space that free­dom gives itself, it is an open space that allows exist­ence as such to take place. Out of the abyss of free­dom, exist­ence self-​initiates, and it is in this sense that free­dom is the ground of onto­logy, in other words, free­dom is the being of being.

To say that free­dom is the being of being also means that free­dom is the leap into exist­ence in which exist­ence is dis­covered as such, and this dis­cov­ery is what Nancy fur­ther calls think­ing. Free­dom comes before think­ing, because it is free­dom that gives think­ing. This giv­ing — which again takes the form of a gift, that is to say, an abso­lute prod­ig­al­ity that gives without count­ing — gives to think­ing, quite simply, some­thing to think about. Tying things together, one could say that this some­thing that free­dom gives to think­ing is noth­ing but itself, that is to say, the gift of a space for thinking.

When, in every­day lan­guage, one says “I need space to think” or “give me some space to think”, this usu­ally means: I need dis­tance from the situ­ation or place I am in pre­cisely in order to think. Now, on an onto­lo­gical level, the free space of think­ing means that think­ing is already dis­tanced from itself, a dis­tan­cing that does not mark out a ter­rain or ter­rit­ory of think­ing in which a spe­cific paradigm or school of thought can lay its found­a­tions and build its temples, but rather, to adopt now the idio­mat­ics of Deleuze and Guat­tari, this dis­tan­cing amounts to the deter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion of the space of think­ing. Deleuze and Guattari’s nomads do not pass­ively inhabit the smooth space of the open steppe or desert, they make their hab­itat, which expands out in all dir­ec­tions. The nomads freely add steppe to steppe and desert to desert, mak­ing space for them­selves, allow­ing their open space to grow along vec­tors of deter­rit­ori­al­isa­tion, vec­tors that trace the mobile lim­its of deter­rit­ori­al­ised space. Like­wise, the free space of think­ing can be seen as the realm of the nomadic thinker, giv­ing him or her­self space to think at the limit of this very space dis­pensed by free­dom. Nomadic think­ing is there­fore think­ing at or on the limit of free­dom, which by defin­i­tion has no lim­its, and which, to use another expres­sion of Deleuze and Guat­tari, turns the nomadic thinker into a “war machine” on a dir­ect col­li­sion course with the static, ossi­fied, and insti­tu­tion­al­ised thought that one could asso­ci­ate with the state appartus.

For Deleuze and Guat­tari, the state appar­atus is a prin­ciple of organ­iz­a­tion that dis­trib­utes ter­rit­ory to indi­vidu­als, mark­ing out bor­ders, erect­ing bound­ar­ies, and cre­at­ing spaces of inter­i­or­ity. It is a prin­ciple of sov­er­eignty and con­trol. In con­trast, the nomad war machine is a prin­ciple of move­ment and becom­ing, a prin­ciple of exter­i­or­ity indif­fer­ent to the bound­ar­ies laid down by the state appar­atus. From the per­spect­ive of the state, the war machine is viol­ent and destruct­ive, but on its own terms it is simply in a pro­cess of con­tinual move­ment. For this reason, the nomad war machine does not make war its aim. It is essen­tially in a state of war because it col­lides with the con­sti­tuted state appar­atus; or as Deleuze and Guat­tari write in their Nomad­o­logy, “[w]ar is neither the con­di­tion nor the object of the war machine, but neces­sar­ily accom­pan­ies it or com­pletes it.”

It is essen­tial to bear in mind that Deleuze and Guat­tari also recog­nise the import­ance of not lim­it­ing this idea simply to the nomad. It can also apply, they say, to ideas in gen­eral, sci­ence, art, any­thing that takes up a line of cre­ativ­ity. Nomadic think­ing can thus be seen as the free space of cre­at­ive think­ing, a mode of cre­ativ­ity that is equally a mode of struggle and resistance.

What is the rel­ev­ance to law? Well, as a mode of res­ist­ance, nomadic think­ing comes up against the state appar­atus con­sti­tuted by law. The city or state does not need to be sur­roun­ded by a brick wall to delin­eate inside from out­side because the law (con­sti­tu­tional law, pub­lic inter­na­tional law, etc) per­forms this task to great effect. To think nomad­ic­ally implies an inev­it­able col­li­sion with or into law, like a river col­lides into, and even­tu­ally erodes or under­mines, its banks. I am there­fore temp­ted to risk say­ing that nomadic think­ing is noth­ing less than the onto­lo­gical pre-​condition for rad­ical forms of legal critique.

To con­clude: the nomadic thinker is one who traces the con­tours of the free space of think­ing and whose sub­jectiv­ity is, for neces­sary struc­tural reas­ons, in a state of war-​like struggle. This struggle is not a purely intel­lec­tual exer­cise where one engages in cri­tique with noth­ing more at stake than, say, a purely formal vis­ion of the greater good. Instead, one could say, in a man­ner faintly remin­is­cent of Carl Schmitt, that what is at stake is the nomadic thinker’s very life, that is to say, the ethos, integ­rity and cre­ativ­ity of the free space of thinking.

This is an abridged ver­sion of a paper delivered at the 2010 Crit­ical Legal Conference.

Tags: Deleuze & Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nomad

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