Mark Twain’s Critique of Literacy through the War Machine of Joan of Arc
Abstract
Since the late twentieth century we have witnessed the rapid disintegration of existing concepts and boundaries. French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1980 , designate the disintegrating phenomena as “de-territorialization” and its generator as “the war machine.” Drawing our attention to the vital mutability of molecular dimension, they maintain that the war machine constantly undermines established boundaries. They name the vital core of the war machine “nomos” and contrast nomos with “logos.” Whereas the logos grounds the state constitutions, the nomos features the aimlessly wandering nomads who have been excluded from the written history. Deleuze and Guattari straightforwardly state, “The war machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two things simultaneously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the formation of imperial functionaries” 393 . The surfacing of the war machine challenges the logo-centrism, which has stabilized the power hierarchy of literacy-bound civilization.
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