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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