Abstract

« Esprit de corps » is a now globally uttered phrase, which designates the strong inner cohesion of — and attachment to — a human organized group. Since the Encyclopaedists up until Bourdieu, the term is usually critical and pejorative in French thought, used to fustigate the groupthink of privileged social casts. But in their famous chapter on war machines, Deleuze and Guattari proposed a much less well-known yet promising U-turn in the way esprit de corps was theorized. Far from the now common paranoid idea of discipline, often defended by Foucauldian exegetes, this overseen aspect of nomadology, inspired by Bergson’s ideas on esprit de corps, but also by medieval guilds and oriental martial art communities, reopens the path to what could be called a politics of hieropoiesis, a communal and secular production of the sacred.