Ibn Khaldûn’s Nomadism Revisited In Deleuzo-guattarian Nomadolgy: A Deconstructionist Reading
Keywords:
Asabiyyah, Deconstruction, Deleuze and Guattari, Ibn Khaldûn, Nomadology, War MachineAbstract
The current study examines the divergence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discourse of nomadology from Ibn Khaldûn’s anthropological discussion of nomadism, exploring how such a shift reshaped postmodern thought and philosophy. In his magnum opus, The Muqaddimah (1377), Ibn Khaldûn provides a sociological study of the rise and fall of civilisations by referring to particular notions: Badawa (Bedouin), Hadara (civilisation) and Asabiyyah (group feeling), which are still discussed and developed in many fields to this day. In philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) is one of the works that revisited Ibn Khaldûn's anthropological framework of nomadism by concocting concepts, such as state, nomadology and the ‘war machine.’ The present paper examines how Deleuze and Guattari deconstruct and reinterpret Ibn Khaldûn’s theorisation of Badawa, Hadara and Asabiyyah to more experimental notions to fit the postmodern context. Delving into the conceptual triad of state apparatus, nomad and ‘war machine,’ the paper finds that the Deleuzo-Guattarian nomadology is not only an appropriation of Ibn Khaldûn’s treatise on nomadism but also deconstructionist. This tendency manifests itself in different fields of postmodern society, which champions ‘nomad thought’ as a discourse to challenge dogma and orthodoxy.
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