Page 119 - Amechanon_vol1_2016-18

Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

«Political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the
jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and
Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly,

these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the
violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated,
the «bond» and the «pact», etc. But their opposition is only relative; they function
as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or

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constituted in themselves a sovereign unity» .

Further, they assert:

«The two together exhaust the field of the function. They are the principal elements

of a State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions,
and forms a milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State
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apparatus into a stratum» .

The State apparatus, so, works as a machine in a more literal sense (assuming that the

«machine» present in the concept of war-machine is not referring to a mechanism, but to
an agency, to a combination of forces or elements), being itself a structure and generating

thus structured space and time. It is important to observe that stating structures must have
these two forces that Dumézil points: the strength and the rules, the force that keep the

order and the logic that organizes the power. Deleuze and Guattari use chess as an
example for a stated structure (in opposition to the game Go): every piece in chess have

its function, its proper way of moving; they move over a striated table where all
movements (although there are many possibilities) are predictable, where you can

understand, control, foresee the moves.

«Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess

pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which
their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a
knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of
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the statement endowed with a relative power» .

159 Ibid., p. 12.

160 Ibid., p. 12.

161 Ibid., p. 13.

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