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The Presents Longer Shadow

Udaya Kumar

Agamben, Quest-ce quun dispositif?, tr. Martin Rueff (Paris: ditions Payot &Rivages, 2007), 64 pp. ISBN: 978-2-7436-1672-4. 5 euros.

Giorgio Agambens recent work has tried to extend Foucaults inquiry intomodern power by travelling further back in time to zones beyond thehistorical origins of western modernity. This attempt at a medieval, andespecially theological, genealogy of modernity, Agamben has reminded us, isvery much in the spirit of Foucaults own historical investigations which wereseen by their author as shadows cast on the past by a theoretical questioningof the present. This short volume consists of a single essay, and it performs itsinquiry in relation to a single term. Terminology is the poetic moment ofthought, Agamben tells us at the outset in a suggestive invocation of WalterBenjamin. As in poetry, not everything is explained when it comes tophilosophical terminology: did Plato not desist from defining the mostprivileged of his philosophical terms, the Idea? It is not surprising then thatFoucault too does not define the dispositif, a term of strategic importancein his own thought.

The dispositif is often translated into English as apparatus. The price we payfor the clarity of this choice is the etymological aura of the term, whichAgambens philological acumen makes rich use of. Although Foucault did notdefine the dispositif, he described it at some length in an interview in 1977,

identifying three crucial aspects: What I am trying to pick out with this termis, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses,institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrativemeasures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropicpropositions in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Secondly, what Iam trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of theconnection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thirdly, Iunderstand by the term apparatus a sort of shall we say formation whichhas as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to anurgent need. The interviewers went on to question Foucault on the links

between the dispositif and the episteme, a crucial phrase in some of his

earlier work. His response characterized the episteme as a dispositif whichmade possible a separation of the scientific and the unscientific in discourses.However, the division of entities into discursive and non-discursive isultimately of interest neither to Foucault nor to Agamben. When Agambenlooks for a predecessor of the dispositif in Foucaults earlier works, he turnsrather to a term that cuts across this distinction. The term in question ispositivity (which receives much attention in Archaeology of Knowledge), whichshares a curious etymological history with the dispositif.

The turn towards theology in Agambens essay begins here in his inquiry intothe sources of Foucaults use of positivity. He finds an antecedent in Jean

Hyppolites Introduction to Hegels Philosophy of History, which argues thatHegel, in his early essays on Christianity, made a distinction between

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natural and positive religion. While natural religion, for Hegel, referred to adirect and immediate relationship between human reason and the divine,positive religion indicated an ensemble of beliefs, rules and rites imposedfrom the outside on individuals at any given point in time. In this sense, thepositivity of positive religion comes to coincide with its historicality. Hegels

approach to positive religion implied an ambivalent estimation. On the onehand, positive religion, insofar as it suggests external constraints on theindividual subject, is a taint on the liberty of human reason; on the other,since positive religion is historical, it can be reconciled with reason, whichloses its abstract character in this concrete historical manifestation. The linkthat Agamben establishes between Foucault and Hyppolite concerns thishistorical dimension of a grid or set of constraints which also enable andshape distinctive forms of life. This can be seen in Foucaults use ofpositivity to refer to an ensemble of institutions, processes of subjectivationand rules within which power relations are concretized. Unlike Hyppolitewho aimed at a reconciliation of reason and history, Foucault is interested inexamining the specific modes by which positivities operate withinmechanisms of power.

Interestingly, Foucaults use of dispositif seems to mobilize all three sensesinvoked in the ordinary language use of the term discussed in dictionaries,which connected three separate meanings: juridical, technological andmilitary. While the juridical sense referred to that part of a legal judgementwhich spelt out a decision arrived at after a consideration of arguments, thetechnological use pointed to the manner in which parts are arranged in amachine or mechanism, and the military use denoted an ensemble of meansdeployed towards an end. For Agamben, these three senses are parts of anoriginal configuration of the dispositif; his attempt is to use this insight to

provoke a fresh look at the historical forms in which dispositifs are availableto us in contemporary times. This modern history of the dispositif philosophical and philological in parts concludes the first movement ofAgambens text. The second begins by plunging into an earlier, theologicalcontext and explores a fresh trajectory. At later point, we shall see these twintrajectories of philological investigation converge.

Agambens new starting point, this time from the medieval and classical past,is also a term economy. We are familiar with the Greek use of the term,which referred to the management of the household, oikos. The story thatAgamben tells us is less familiar, and concerns the Christian theological uses

of the term to refer to a divine economy. Agamben notes that this use becameprominent in discussions of the trinity: in responding to charges ofintroducing polytheism into Christianity, theologians elaborated a discourseon the relations between the three elements of the trinity. The father and theson were consubstantial or of the same substance. However, they weredifferent in the tasks that they perform. The father assigns certain tasks to theson. This arrangement of tasks and functions may be called a divine economy.In other words, economy was the device or dispositif by which Trinitariandogma and the doctrine of a providential government were introduced intoChristianity. This also produced a distinction between the domains of beingand action. The latter, which included politics and economy, came to have no

foundation in the order of being. Agamben would go so far as to say that oneof the major legacies that the doctrine of the economy has bequeathed to

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to highlight the importance of profanation. However, the contemporaryconfiguration of the dispositif makes it difficult to pose this problem and tothematize the ungovernable which, for Agamben, is both the point of originand the breaking point for all politics.

The challenge that Agambens recent work poses concerns our understandingof the history and the structure of the modern subject. The theological roots ofmodern power sketched by him propose a rethinking of the relations betweensovereignty, disciplinarity and governance. Agambens method, whichcombines philological, philosophical and historical moves, also posemethodological problems for determining the level at which a history offorms of power can be conceived. It becomes difficult to decide, for example,how to figure and understand an instance of discontinuity, as the philologicalnarrative seems to carry with it resonances of an original articulation.

In the essay on the dispositif we are directly confronted with this problem.The specificity of the dispositif in Foucaults work was linked to its strategiccharacter and its relation to situations of urgent need. Agamben retains thissense, but also expands the scope of the concept to include all technology.Thus the dispositif seems to invoke a situation of irreducible specificity and aconfiguration that defines the human at the same time. Agambens account ofmodern technological devices such as the cell phone or the television alsoshows a curious denial of new forms of subjectivity to their users,highlighting passivity and a sense of being controlled. In Remnants ofAuschwitz, Agamben gave a rich account of the relationship betweendesubjectivation and the production of subjects in the context of language. Doour times refuse such complexity, or does Agambens inclusive definition ofthe dispositif and his identifying it with the technological device foreclose a

closer encounter with the positivities that make our present?