Ibn Khaldûn and Esprit de Corps in Deleuze and Guattari

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari pose the question, ‘What is a collective body?’ This leads them to differentiate between bodies and organisms, attributing esprit de corps to bodies and âme d’organisme to organisms. Deleuze and Guattari oppose esprit de corps to âme d’organisme as nomadic to sedentary, the war machine to the State apparatus, and the smooth to the striated. Their point of entry to the notion of esprit de corps is a discussion of Ibn Khaldûn’s fourteenth-century Muqaddimah and his concept of ‘asabiyya, which is often rendered as ‘esprit de corps’ or ‘group feeling’. They argue that Ibn Khaldûn associates ‘asabiyya with nomadism and contrasts it with the sedentary, but Ibn Khaldûn’s primary distinction is not between the nomadic and the sedentary but between rural life and urban life, and ‘asabiyya is an essential component of both forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari also claim that ‘asabiyya is secret rather than public; that it involves lineages that are pure and mobile, as opposed to impure and rigid; and that it is opposed to autocratic values. All of these claims are problematic. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari creatively appropriate Ibn Khaldûn for their own purposes, and though they distort his thought, they do illuminate it by isolating unresolved issues in Ibn Khaldûn’s understanding of the dynamics of leadership among nomads and the origins of state power.