#nomadicsubject

The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; It is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has rel inquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. The nomadic subject, however, is not altogether devoid of unity; his/her mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes. It is a cohesion engendered by repetitions, cyclical moves, rhythmical displacement. ln this respect, I shall take the nomad as the prototype of the "man or woman of ideas" ; as Deleuze put it, the point of being an intellectual nomad is about crossing boundaries, about the act of going, regardless of the destination. "The life of the nomad is the intermezzo ... He is a vector of deterritorial ization." The nomad enacts transitions without a teleological purpose; Deleuze also gives as an example of this nomadic mode the figuration the "rhizome." The rhizome is a root that grows underground, sideways; Deleuze plays it against the linear roots of trees. By extension, it is "as if" the rh izomatic mode expressed a nonphallogocentric way of thinking: secret, lateral, spreading, as opposed to the visible, vertical ramifications of Western trees of knowledge. By extension, the rhizome stands for a nomadic political ontology that, not unlike Donna Haraway's "cyborg" (see "Re-figuring the Subject"), provides movable foundations for a post-human ist view of subjectivity. Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity.