Kibadachi is a rather simple karate exercise performed during a several‐day‐long special training, in which the participants squat in a crouching position for an hour and a half without moving. Despite its simplicity, and because its main feature is the immediate and excruciating pain it induces, kibadachi stimulates a kind of permeability between the participants, and also causes changes in the relations between physical and mental parts of their lived body. Following Deleuze and Guattari, kibadachi, and its capacity to dissolve boundaries, is analysed here as a way of becoming a Body without Organs. The participants of kibadachi enter social and somatic dynamics which operate potentiality hidden in their lived bodies, alter boundaries, and reinforce connectedness. Résumé Le kibadachi est un exercice de karaté relativement simple, exécuté au cours d'un entraînement spécial de plusieurs jours, lors duquel les participants se tiennent accroupis pendant une heure et demie sans bouger. En dépit de sa simplicité, et parce que sa principale caractéristique est la douleur immédiate et cuisante qu'il provoque, le kibadachi suscite une sorte de perméabilité entre les participants et provoque aussi des changements dans les relations entre les parties physique et mentale de leur corps vécu. Dans l'esprit de Deleuze et Guattari, le kibadachi et sa capacité d'abolir les frontières sont analysés ici comme un moyen de devenir un Corps sans Organes. Les participants au kibadachi s'engagent dans des dynamiques sociales et somatiques qui opèrent sur les potentialités cachées dans leurs corps vécus, modifient les frontières, et renforcent les liens aux autres.

This article concerns kime, a somatic code used in the ‘empty hand’ Japanese martial art of karate. Kime is a tactile-kinesthetic entity born out of practice, coming into being in a social setting through the specific organization of the body-self, fusing body and self into one stance and movement. Kime is entirely embodied, yet can only be operated and recognized inter-subjectively. It plays a crucial role in combat and at the same time also indicates a spiritual possibility that depends on eradication of emotion and volition. An analysis of kime shows how cultural understandings can emerge without necessarily using symbolic representations or verbal discourse in their construction. These somatic non-dual understandings can come to form an entire world-of-meaning directly through the moving body. The moving body shapes itself within itself even as it interacts with and contributes to shape its immediate environment. This is a world-of-meaning that includes complex inter-subjectivity founded on the speed and ambiguity of the interface between the innerness and the outerness of the body.

■ Nationalism is the untenable union of the impersonal, mechanistic, bureaucratic logic of the state and the intimate, emotional, organic logic of the nation. While practicing martial arts, the participants at the Israeli Survival School of Ju Jutsu create a utopian Israeliness, using bits of state-national understandings to form a family-like organicity. At the North Indian school of wrestling described by Joseph Alter, too, an organic utopian nationalism is practiced into existence through meticulous care for the body itself. A comparison between those modes of embodying the national, set in very different cultural and national realities, reveals not only different understandings of the national and of its organic nature, but also different uses of semiotic mechanisms. Whereas the Israeli world of the Survival School is based on representation, the Indian one is constructed from the body and the environment, set in dense connectedness forming this world in and of itself.

A brief and schematic presentation of two ethnographic events illustrates the dynamic engendered by the clash between the state as striated and organicity. This clash is the Deleuzian war machine. The ethnographic events are part of Israeli nationality: one shows a close combat training session within the Israeli Defense Forces and the other a recording of Holocaust survivors' stories for educational purposes. Both are instances in which somaticity is channelled into the national through abduction. The body animates and cultivates the mixed dynamic of nationality, infusing its forces of striation and congealment with life. Although Deleuze and Guattari posit that the war machine is born from the nomad as it encounters the state, and that it is external to the state, the following analysis of the ways in which the war machine operates within the national clearly shows that the war machine can be both a requirement and a product of the state. The forces of striation are just as unstable as the forces of rhizome. They tend to crumble and fall apart when the impetus of stasis becomes too overwhelming. To remain socially tenable, the striated craves the organic nature of the nomad, and depends on the emergence of the war machine.

Participants from all around the world come to train in Israeli Krav Maga (close combat) with the ‘Tour and Train’ programme. They perform exercises that aim to control close‐range violence and are devised within a certain logic, and this logic is subsequently disseminated to become part of the globalised view of the war on terror. Whereas the understanding of globalised terror and its counteraction is often drawn from political statements and their interpretation, in Tour and Train ‘universal’ understandings of terror and the war on terror are constructed through practice in its own right. Krav Maga cosmology views violence as sudden, unexpected alterations in intensity. This view eliminates any specificities and replaces content with intensity, sheer somatic sensation, with relentless fighting activity within an active–passive frame that presumes that there is always a course of action to be taken, while the fighter is also a passive passenger of the flow of violence. According to this view, the ideologies behind and reasons for belligerent situations, as well as the intentions of attacker and defender, are null and void, and terror itself is the result of fortuity.