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"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays
"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays
"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays
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"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays

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The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time.

"Apparatus" (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them.

Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being.

Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 1, 2009
ISBN9781503600041
"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays

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    This starts a bit banal and jerkofferian, but then rephrases some old ideas about just how grim things (human things, civilization things) are getting in a clear, cold, compelling way: Agamben describes the apparatus (dispositif) and notes how it is a general terme clé in Foucault, then gives a rundown of Hegel’s distinction between natural and positive religion (the former, multiple, agentive, relative, rooted in practice; the latter absolute, unified, ideological, rooted in the operations of impersonal spiritual forces); these are simple and familiar to many, I think. It seems rote.But then Agamben departs and makes the discussion brilliantly his own, in a few stages. First, the obvious criticism of Foucault’s apparatus in light of his rejection of universals: it is all well to say that networks of individual practices control and are subverted by us in complex ways, and that it is nonsense to talk about the State, Ideology, Religion, etc., without acknowledging these multiple specific and contingent natures; but if “the apparatus” unexamined and unteasened becomes the new universal, then where’s the advance? This is a relief to have said clearly without fuckery. And then he goes on to give true facts about real things, which Agamben, as our generation’s Foucault, always does in a more trustworthy-seeming way than the original F. The early Christian dispute between the scholars developing an ever-more articulated theory of the Trinity and the regular Christians who hadn’t just discovered this One God only to let pagan multiplicity in again by the back door. “Monarchians,” they were called, meaning supporters of the Kingdom, as against the scholarly idea of God as a network, an economy, which is where that tortured and torturing term oikonomia enters history as meaning something more than the Greek “household management.” The idea of the earth as the realm of the Son and the positive yield of his activity within it elides easily into the revelation of the Church’s world-historical mission conceived in terms of a kind of divine management theory.And then this idea, despite its pointy-headed origins, as against a theology. It’s the tension between faith and works in a way—praxis and ontology—either can be positivistic or—in Agamben-language, Open (here, “Open”-ended). And then either positivism or open-endedness can be constructive or lead to horrors.Though that’s a bit boring, and Agamben goes better places with it than I just did: oikonomia is also Latin dispositio, French dispositif, English “apparatus.” Exigency and management. Here we leave Foucault behind—Agamben invokes Feuerbach’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit the “beginning of something’s capacity to be developed,” from a hermeneutic standpoint—“I have reached the point where I must leave my master behind and strike out on my own”—which I find charming. His own contribution, here, is the idea of the subject as between the ontology of creatures and the apparatuses that manage them—the “I” emerging from the application of perceptual apparatuses (“apps,” ha) to mere beings. Of course, not just Foucauldian discipline-and-punish type apparatuses like prison and CCTV and body-loathing but also updating your blog, liking a drink at the end of the day, folktales, language, florid psychosis, the tango, the dream of a real counterculture again. Late capitalism as the massive overaccumulation of these apps (sorry, but not really sorry): “For example, I live in Italy. a country where the gestures and behaviors of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the cellular telephone (which the Italians dub the telefonino). I have developed an implacable hatred for this apparatus, which has made the relationship between people all the more abstract. Although I found myself more than once wondering how to destroy or deactivate those telefonini, as well as how to eliminate or at least to punish and imprison those who do not stop using them, I do not believe that this is the right solution to the problem.” The app embodies the human desire for happiness—our scaffolding toward the angels, we feel—but only breaking through it leads us to the Open, and also boredom and despair. Apparatuses are the stories we tell ourselves to manage ourselves on behalf of apparatuses.So how to combat them? Agamben falters here a bit, though I guess it’s not fair to expect a handbook or martial arts manual. He talks about profanation, the restoration of the sacred to the free use (AND BUT MANAGEMENT) of humans, and religion as its opposite (and sacrifice as the everpresent marker of sacralization—suddenly I think of George Bush, profaning people’s ideological or theological rage after the September 11th attacks by subverting their desire to sacrifice, telling them to go shopping. It was a management move for the ages, and the USA PATRIOT act is still with us). He notes that modern apparatuses no longer produce subjectification but rather desubjectification; the Christian apparatus, say, makes a kind of citizen, but the cell phone–social network apparatus reduces us to numbers and nodes, at best, avatars of a deferred being. The more I exist on and via Facebook or what have you the more the real me is a mere truth-claim that what we have agreed to call a person is under there. There is no longer a right way to be ideologically, merely a participatory praxis where we hand our days, our health “choices,” the utter worthlessness of what we paste up on the internet to take the sting out of our humanities degree debt, our household oiconomies, over to be managed. The bloody viciousness of ideology is banished. Agamben tries to imagine something ungovernable and cannot. There is no hell like a managed hell.

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"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays - Giorgio Agamben

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation and Translators’ Note © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

"What Is an Apparatus?" was originally published in Italian in 2006 under the title Che cos’è un dispositivo? © 2006, Nottetempo. The Friend was originally published in Italian in 2007 under the title L’amico © 2007, Nottetempo. What Is the Contemporary? was originally published in Italian in 2008 under the title Che cos’è il contemporaneo? © 2008, Nottetempo.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Frontispiece image: Detail of Giovanni Serodine, The Apostles Peter and Paul on the Road to Martyrdom (1624–45), oil on cloth. Rome, Palazzo Barberini.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942–

[Essays. English. Selections]

What is an apparatus? and other essays / Giorgio Agamben ; translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella.

p.   cm.—(Meridian, crossing aesthetics)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6229-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-6230-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Power (Philosophy)   2. Knowledge, Theory of.   3. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984.   4. Friendship.   5. Contemporary, The.   I. Title.   II. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

B3611.A42E5   2009

195—dc22

2008043113

ISBN 978-1-5036-0004-1 (electronic)

WHAT IS AN APPARATUS?

and Other Essays

Giorgio Agamben

Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA   2009

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher

Editor

Contents

Translators’ Note

§ What Is an Apparatus?

§ The Friend

§ What Is the Contemporary?

Notes

Translators’ Note

English translations of secondary sources have been amended in order to take into account the author’s sometimes distinctive Italian translations. Mandelstam’s poem on pages 42–43 was translated from the Russian by Jane Mikkelson. We would like to thank Giorgio Agamben for his generous assistance, which has improved the grace and accuracy of our translation.

§   What Is an Apparatus?

1.

Terminological questions are important in philosophy. As a philosopher for whom I have the greatest respect once said, terminology is the poetic moment of thought. This is not to say that philosophers must always necessarily define their technical terms. Plato never defined idea, his most important term. Others, like Spinoza and Leibniz, preferred instead to define their terminology more geometrico.

The hypothesis that I wish to propose is that the word dispositif, or apparatus in English, is a decisive technical term in the strategy of Foucault’s thought.¹ He uses it quite often, especially from the mid 1970s, when he begins to concern himself with what he calls governmentality or the government of men. Though he never offers a complete definition, he comes close to something like it in an interview from 1977:

What I’m trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements . . .

. . . by the term apparatus I mean a kind of a formation, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The apparatus therefore has a dominant strategic function . . .

. . . I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain

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