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Abstract
This article seeks to deepen Giorgio Agamben’s brief investigation of the Foucauldian technical term dispositif, by locating it (and the triple structure which articulates it) in the larger context of his own contribution to the genealogy of “governmentality.” Following Agamben’s reconstruction of the Christian paradigm for the divine government of the world, it explores the singular relation between governmental dispositifs and concurrent modes of subjectivation. It argues that the contingency of human action must first be secured for the governmental machine to be able to operate.
Notes
I would like to acknowledge the precious feedback and encouragement provided by Justin Clemens, Yoni Molad, Connal Parsley and, especially, Emmett Stinson and Jessica Whyte in the drafting of this essay.
1. In a recent book, Samuel Weber has astutely drawn attention to the particular stylistic tendency, which traverses Walter Benjamin's writings from beginning to end, to formulate many of his key concepts in nominalised verbs which employ the suffix -ability (in German, -barkeit): communicability (Mitteilbarkeit), translatability (Übersetzbarkeit) and reproducibility (Reproduzierbarkeit), to cite some of the better-known examples. See Weber, Benjamin's -abilities. An analogous observation could be extended to Agamben's work, which consciously takes up this terminological legacy – albeit in a direction entirely different to that which Weber envisages for Benjamin (which, in the final analysis, makes him a privileged, if unacknowledged, precursor to Derrida's deconstruction). Such a study, which remains to be written – but with respect to which the present essay, as should become clear, would constitute a first, preliminary contribution – would need to account for the particular relationship that joins this set of terms to a further, certainly rarer, set, which includes a negative prefix in addition to the potentiating suffix.
2. See Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 19.
3. Agamben, Signatura rerum 8 (my translation).
4. Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? Although, as Agamben observes, Foucault himself never furnished a precise definition of this term, the singular importance it would assume in his thought was already duly recorded in an interview published in Ornicar? in 1978 – which is to say, almost immediately upon its assumption in his lexicon. See Foucault, “Le Jeu de Michel Foucault” 298–301. More tellingly still, Gilles Deleuze would take the occasion of an international colloquium held in Paris in 1988 in honour of Foucault's life and work to pose the same question pursued by Agamben twenty years later. See Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?”
5. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 76 (translation modified); original in Sécurité, territoire, population 77–78.
6. For a probing account of the methodological differences which separate Foucault's and Agamben's respective approaches to the theme of governmentality, see Bruno Karsenti. The author errs, however, when, toward the end of his essay, he demands a justification for the theoretical privilege that Agamben grants to theology; a justification from which Foucault is exempted on account of the “atopical character” (370) of his investigations. To the extent that the theological elaboration of what Agamben terms the “governmental machine” assumes paradigmatic status in his presentation, the exposition as it were justifies itself. For Agamben's discussion of the paradigm, see Agamben, Signatura rerum 11–34.
7. Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 21 (all translations from this text are my own).
8. Ibid. 21–22.
9. Ibid. 25–26.
10. As opposed to what Paul Patton, to cite just one particular example, has argued for his deployment of the concept of biopolitics. See Patton 218.
11. See Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 15, but also Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 31–34, which further highlights the extent to which, in Aristotle, this term denotes a practical activity and not a science in the epistemological sense.
12. On this latter distinction in Agamben, see Il Regno e la Gloria 34–35.
13. Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 22.
14. See Deleuze, Foucault 108.
15. Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 22–23.
16. See Agamben, The Open 13.
17. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 159 (all translations from this text are my own).
18. Deleuze, Foucault 77.
19. Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 221.
20. Ibid.
21. See the lecture of 8 March 1978 in Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 227–53. According to Foucault's analysis, in the course of the sixteenth century, what he terms the “great theologico-cosmological continuum” – that vital, guiding force which extends, by analogy, from God to the King and which authorises the manner in which the King, in and through the exercise of his sovereignty, can and must govern – is definitively broken. Henceforth, as the world is purged of the prodigies, marvels and signs which attested to the enduring presence of this “great continuum,” so a specific art de gouverner will ultimately be separated from the exercise of a sovereignty so total as to have been reflected in nature itself. Significantly, for Foucault, this great continuum finds its classic elaboration in St Thomas's tractate on royal power, De regno.
22. Summa theologiae 1. Q103, A1, resp.; English in The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas 4–5.
23. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 148.
24. Summa theologiae 1. Q103, A1, repl. 2; 5.
25. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 148.
26. Summa theologiae 1. Q103, A1, repl. 3; 5.
27. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 148.
28. See Schmitt, Constitutional Theory 264–67.
29. See Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 149.
30. Summa theologiae 1. Q105, A5, resp.; 39.
31. Ibid.
32. Summa theologiae 1. Q105, A6, resp.; 42.
33. Ibid.
34. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 149, 150.
35. Ibid. 150.
36. See ibid. 159–60, and, in particular, its two appendices, devoted precisely to “L’economia dei moderni”: “La legge e il miracolo” 287–304, and “La mano invisibile” 305–14. It is important once again to note that it is not in itself significant for Agamben that the modern theory of government has theological origins. Rather, it is a question of being able to seize and to comprehend, in its determining features, the precise structure of the paradigm which the modern theory inherits from theology but which has nonetheless receded from view. In this, and in this alone, lies the significance of its theological “signature.”
37. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 235.
38. See Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 127.
39. De Consolatione Philosophiae 4, 6: 27–42; English in Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy 359 (translation slightly modified).
40. Courcelle 203 (my translation).
41. See De Consolatione Philosophiae 4, 6: 48–51; 359–61.
42. Courcelle 203 (my translation).
43. See De Consolatione Philosophiae 4, 6: 51–60; 361.
44. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 143. Both Agamben and Pierre Courcelle have underscored the debt that Boethius owes, for the elaboration of this distinction, to Neoplatonic sources (in particular, to the three opuscules on providence attributed to Proclus). But whereas for Courcelle this serves to minimise the distinctly Christian dimension of Boethius's discussion, for Agamben instead something genuinely unprecedented does indeed happen here: “Providence and fate, transcendence and immanence, which, already in Plutarch and Proclus, formed a two-sided system,” he writes, “are now clearly articulated with one another in order to constitute a perfect machine for the government of the world” (143).
45. Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A2, resp.; 171 (translation slightly modified).
46. See Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A2, repl. 1; 171–72.
47. See Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 152.
48. Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A2, repl. 3; 172.
49. See Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” 263–64. For a general overview of this theme across the three monotheistic religions, see Rudavsky.
50. De Consolatione Philosophiae 5, 3: 4–16; 395.
51. De Consolatione Philosophiae 5, 3: 69; 399.
52. De Consolatione Philosophiae, 5, 6: 100–04; 429. For the principle, see 5, 6: 2–5; 423.
53. See Heller-Roazen 102.
54. See ibid. 106–11.
55. Ibid. 111.
56. See Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A3, obj. 3; 172.
57. Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A3, resp.; 172–73.
58. Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A3, resp.; 173.
59. Aristotle, De interpretatione 19a, 22–34; see Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” 264.
60. Summa theologiae 1. Q116, A3, resp.; 173.
61. See Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 130.
62. Ibid. 130.
63. See Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 29.
64. See Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” 259–65, and, in particular, Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 145–48.
65. As he writes:
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Contingency is not one modality among others, alongside the possible, the impossible and the necessary: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the manner in which a potentiality exists as such [è il darsi effettivo di una possibilità, il modo in cui una potenza esiste come tale]. It is an event (contingit) considered from the point of view of potentiality, as the giving of a caesura between a being able to be and a being able not to be. (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz 146 (translation modified); original in Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz 136)
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Boethius binds the notion of the event to that of possibility, such that, in his text, what is capable can no longer be separated from what takes place. After Boethius the contingentia, in short, will concern contingere as such; contingency will constitute a mode of “happening,” a way of taking place.
66. For a remarkable account of the “topology” of the exception in Agamben, see Coccia 420–25.
67. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge 143.
68. Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk 17, but also Agamben's decisive commentary on this text in Agamben, Homo Sacer 172–74, and, especially, the “Introduzione” to Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso 19–24.
69. Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo? 35.
70. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria 274.