"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays

Giorgio Agamben, David Kishik, Stefan Pedatella

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804762304, 9780804762298
• eBook ISBN: 9781503600041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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.

§ 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 manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.²

Let me briefly summarize three points:

a. It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements.

b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation.

c. As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.

2.

I would like now to try and trace a brief genealogy of this term, first in the work of Foucault, and then in a broader historical context.

At the end of the 1960s, more or less at the time when he was writing The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault does not yet use the term “apparatus” in order to define the object of his research. Instead, he uses the term positivité, “positivity,” an etymological neighbor of dispositif, again without offering us a definition.

I often asked myself where Foucault found this term, until the moment when, a few months ago, I reread a book by Jean Hyppolite entitled Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de Hegel. You probably know about the strong link that ties Foucault to Hyppolite, a person whom he referred to at times as “my master” (Hyppolite was in fact his teacher, first during the khâgne in the Lycée Henri-IV [the preparatory course for the Ecole normale supérieure] and then in the Ecole normale).

The third part of Hyppolite’s book bears the title “Raison et histoire: Les idées de positivité et de destin” (Reason and History: The Ideas of Positivity and Destiny). The focus here is on the analysis of two works that date from Hegel’s years in Bern and Frankfurt (1795–96): The first is “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Destiny,” and the second—where we find the term that interests us—“The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (Die Positivität der christliche Religion). According to Hyppolite, “destiny” and “positivity” are two key concepts in Hegel’s thought. In particular, the term “positivity” finds in Hegel its proper place in the opposition between “natural religion” and “positive religion.” While natural religion is concerned with the immediate and general relation of human reason with the divine, positive or historical religion encompasses the set of beliefs, rules, and rites that in a certain society and at a certain historical moment are externally imposed on individuals. “A positive religion,” Hegel writes in a passage cited by Hyppolite, “implies feelings that are more or less impressed through constraint on souls; these are actions that are the effect of command and the result of obedience and are accomplished without direct interest.”³

Hyppolite shows how the opposition between nature and positivity corresponds, in this sense, to the dialectics of freedom and obligation, as well as of reason and history. In a passage that could not have failed to provoke Foucault’s curiosity, because it in a way presages the notion of apparatus, Hyppolite writes:

We see here the knot of questions implicit in the concept of positivity, as well as Hegel’s successive attempts to bring together dialectically—a dialectics that is not yet conscious of itself—pure reason (theoretical and above all practical) and positivity, that is, the historical element. In a certain sense, Hegel considers positivity as an obstacle to the freedom of man, and as such it is condemned. To investigate the positive elements of a religion, and we might add, of a social state, means to discover in them that which is imposed through a constraint on man, that which obfuscates the purity of reason. But, in another sense—and this is the aspect that ends up having the upper hand in the course of Hegel’s development—positivity must be reconciled with reason, which then loses its abstract character and adapts to the concrete richness of life. We see then why the concept of positivity is at the center of Hegelian perspectives.⁴

If “positivity” is the name that, according to Hyppolite, the young Hegel gives to the historical element—loaded as it is with rules, rites, and institutions that are imposed on the individual by an external power, but that become, so to speak, internalized in the systems of beliefs and feelings—then Foucault, by borrowing this term (later to become “apparatus”), takes a position with respect to a decisive problem, which is actually also his own problem: the relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element. By “the historical element,” I mean the set of institutions, of processes of subjectification, and of rules in which power relations become concrete. Foucault’s ultimate aim is not, then, as in Hegel, the reconciliation of the two elements; it is not even to emphasize their conflict. For Foucault, what is at stake is rather the investigation of concrete modes in which the positivities (or the apparatuses) act within the relations, mechanisms, and “plays” of power.

3.

It should now be clear in what sense I have advanced the hypothesis that “apparatus” is an essential technical term in Foucault’s thought. What is at stake here is not a particular term that refers only to this or that technology of power. It is a general term that has the same breadth as the term “positivity” had, according to Hyppolite, for the young Hegel. Within Foucault’s strategy, it comes to occupy the place of one of those terms tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Frontispiece
• Contents
• Translators’ Note
• What Is an Apparatus?
• The Friend
• What Is the Contemporary?
• Notes
• Series List