Between the Goat's Arse and the Face of God: Deleuze and Guattari and Marx and the Bible

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, especially ‘587 B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Régimes of Signs’ and ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine’. These texts closely engage with biblical narratives concerning Moses and the scapegoat. This reading of Deleuze and Guattari has three lines: one is to trace how their argument that opposition is external must eventually face up to internal resistance as well. Another line is to connect the four régimes of signs—presignifying (the segmented tribe), signifying (the despotic state), counter-signifying (the numbered nomadic war-band) and post-signifying (the scapegoat wilderness-community)—with Marxist discussions of the Asiatic mode of production and tribal society. The third line relates these régimes to Marxist biblical scholarship and to the Bible itself, especially the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus 16 and Jethro's advice to Moses in Exodus 18. However, a closer look at the biblical material shows how the patterns of opposition are actually internal to one another. But then, to their credit, Deleuze and Guattari admit that these régimes are not only multiple, but also fluid and overlapping.