Giorgio Agamben - What Is a Dispositor?

Giorgio Agamben - What is a Dispositor? I have for my lecture a bilingual title. First the French title, 'Quel Est Dispositif?' Then, an attempt at an English translation, 'What is a Dispositor?' Let me start with some considerations on this title. Of course the term 'dispositif' comes from Michel Foucault, that is to say, when he begins to work on what he will call governmentality. For reasons that I hope will become clear in my lecture, I am not satisfied with the current English translation of the term dispositif as 'procedure' or 'apparatus' and I would prefer to keep nearer to the French original. This is why I have proposed what is probably a monstrous translation, as 'dispositor'. The term is in the English Oxford Dictionary, it is an astrological term that means the law of a sign in its relation to other planets. Thus a dispositor as the law of the astrological sign embodies all of the forces and influences that the planet exerts on individuals, inclining them, binding them and restraining them in all possible ways. The questions of terminology are important in philosophy. Even if we do not reduce philosophy to terminology like Friedrich Schlegel proposes to do, terminology is extremely important. As a philosopher whom I respect very much used to say, terminology is the poetic moment in philosophy. Of course philosophers do not need to define their technical terms. Thus Plato does not define his most important technical term 'idea', that is why they have spent 2,000 years discussing it. On the contrary, Spinoza prefers to define 'geometrical', 'substantive', 'casa sui', etc, and Leibniz also. Every part of the discourse can become a technical term, so that the hyphen in Heidegger's In-der-Welt- sein is the technical term. And an adverb, gleichwol in Kant is a technical term. And in the last text published by Deleuze, the dots are technical terms. So what I am suggesting here is that dipositif is a central technical term in Foucault's philosophy. He almost never really defines it, but in an interview from 1977 he comes near to a definition. The dispositif is a general and heterogeneous set. It includes virtually everything, linguistic and non-linguistic, discourses and institutions, architecture, laws, police measures, scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so on. But, as he points out, the dispositif is the network or the web established between those elements. Second it always has a strategic function, it's always inscribed in a power game, so it has a strong relationship to power. Third it is very general because it includes the epistemic, which defines, for Foucault, what allows in a certain society at a certain time, to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific statements, of what you can say and what you cannot say - so the dispositif is in a margin.Let me make a quick genealogy of this term, first in Foucault and then in a more general way. At the end of the Sixties, Foucault does not apply the term dispositif, but applies the term positivity when he tries to name the object of his investigation. I always wondered where Foucault could have found this curious term until the moment I read Jean Hyppolite's essay 'Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy'. You know the strong relationship that linked Foucault and Hyppolite, whom he sometimes refers to as 'mammoth'. In Chapter Three of this booklet, we have the title, 'Reason, History and the Ideas of Positivity and Destiny'. Analyzing Hegel's writings in the so-called Bern and Frankfurt period, that is to say 1795 and 1796, Hyppolite mentions and focuses on two books, the first of which is 'Positivity'. So, Hyppolite makes a strong statement about these two terms. He writes, "we have here two key concepts we must always remember, because the whole of Hegel's reflection focuses on them. I mean the concept of positivity and the concept of destiny". As for the first term, Hyppolite shows that this conflict in Hegel comes from the opposition between natural religion and positive or historical religion. While the natural religion is the general relationship of human reason to the Divine, a positive or historical religion includes all the stated beliefs, rites, rules, behaviors, which appear in a certain moment and in a certain place, and are imposed from outside as an historical title. Hyppolite quotes a passage from Hegel that must have awakened Foucault's attention, and seems to contain some intimations of the notion of dispositor. I quote, "a positive religion includes feelings and beliefs which are imposed by means of constriction to the souls of individuals. It demands acts that are the effect of a command and the result of a base". Hyppolite shows that this opposition in the young Hegel is a preformation of the big dialectic between pure reason and history. "Therefore", he writes, "to investigate the positive elements of a religion, but also more generally from a social state, means to discover what is imposed to man by constriction". Just to measure the importance of this concept, Hyppolite shows that all of Hegel's subsequent thought is precisely an attempt to reconcile these two elements - nature, reason and history, individual and state, so that the first one gets rid of its obstruction. Hyppolite writes that positivity must be reconciled with reason and in that way lose its abstract character and become concrete. And of course, Hegel is precisely an attempt to think the consolation of man and dispositif, of course in Foucault it is not at all the same attempt, but if positivity is the name the young Hegel gives to whole of history, including the juridical institution, the power institution, etc., then borrowing from Hyppolite, the term positivity, which then becomes dispositif, Foucault takes a position with respect to a crucial problem; the relationship between man and history. Man as human being and the history of all institutions. Of course, Foucault does not attempt at all to reconcile the two like Hegel. He does not want either to stress the conflict. He prefers to analyze the way in which the positivity or dispositif or dispositors, work in the relationship between living beings and history and power. So, now I think you will have understood why I suggest that dispositif is an important technical term in Foucault's strategy. And it does not refer only to this or that particular dispositor, but is more general - remember, the dispositor itself is the network that is established between all these. Let me now take my genealogy in a more general frame. The dictionary distinguishes three meanings. The first is a strictly juridical one. The dispositif is that part of a juridical judgment that contains the 'enacting' part. Second the term has a technical meaning; the manner in which the pieces of a machine and by extension the mechanism itself are disposed. Third, the whole set of the means of disposal according to a military plan. The dictionary always functions by dividing the meaning of a term. Of course this is correct in a way, but it is wrong. There is always one general meaning that articulates itself in different conflicts. So we can say that in the dictionary, the essential meaning refers to the disposal of the set of actions, means and discourses in order to cope with an emergency or to obtain an effect or a result. So it is in a way, an act of management, of governing a concrete situation. Now to go back in our genealogy, as a matter of fact, in the last three years I engaged myself in a long investigation in what I tentatively defined as a theological genealogy of economy. You may know, perhaps, that in the first centuries of the history of the Church, lets say between the second and the sixth centuries, the Greek term oikonomia played a decisive role in theology. As you know, in Greek, the word oikonomia means very simply, the administration of the house. In a more general way, it means the management of the house or of an enterprise. It is, according to Aristotle, a non-epistemic paradigm, meaning it is not a science but an activity that has to cope each time with a peculiar situation, a particular problem, and it has to be adequate to this. How did this term come to be introduced in theology? They used this term to answer a very fundamental question; the invention of trinity. When, in the second century, the fathers began to elaborate the paradigm of the trinity, to speak of three different figures in God, of course they met a strong resistance, from very reasonable persons who said, "are you crazy, you are going back to Paganism, you are saying that God is three". At that moment, the problem was not yet decided, it was a very delicate problem. Oikonomia was the term of the dispositif by means of which trinity was introduced in God. As for his being or substance, God is one. But as for his oikonomia, his economy, meaning the way he manages his house and his divine life, he is three - like a master of the house, he has a son. So in this way he says, we keep to the monarchy, we keep to the unity; substantially God is one, but as for the activity of governing his house, he is three. So you see the strategy. Then oikonomia became a crucial term, and it was eventually used to mean Christology, to mean Christos. So in the Gnostic writings, Christos is called the man of the economy.

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