"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays
"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) Giorgio Agamben, David Kishik (Translator), Stefan Pedatella (Translator)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804762295
DDC: 320
Edition: Hardcover; 2009-05-01
Summary:
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.
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