Archeology of Violence

Clastres''s final, posthumous book on the affirmative role of violence in “primitive societies.” The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war.—from the Archeology of Violence Anthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari''s Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication in French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres''s final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he had begun before his death in 1977 at the age of 43. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as