What is a Dispositive?

The distinct French and Italian concepts of appareil/apparato and dispositif/dispositivo have frequently been rendered the same way as "apparatus" in English. This presents a double problem since it collapses distinct conceptual lineages from the home languages and produces a false identity in English. While there are good reasons for which translators have chosen to use "apparatus" for dispositif, there is growing cause for evaluating the theoretical and empirical specificity of each concept, and either to rethink the rendering as "apparatus" or to keep in mind the specific philosophical trajectories of each one. In particular, the ongoing release of Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lecture courses (in which the term is frequently used), and the essays by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben bearing directly on the dispositif and the dispositivo present a strong case for reevaluating the usage and rendering of these concepts. This paper presents a number of minute considerations on the productive distinction between them

Thinking relationality in Agamben and Levinas

Giorgio Agamben’s development of a messianic politics-to-come seeks to counter the law which is in force without significance, a law which creates bare life. Embodying this messianic politics, and a call for the law’s fulfilment, is the figure of whatever-being, a form-of-life. This article contends that there is an important conceptual problem in respect of Agamben’s construction of such a form-of-life, namely the issue of relationality. The problem of relationality in Agamben is explored here through the comparative lens of relationality in Levinas’s thought. It is contended that Agamben’s messianic subject, his form-of-life, has a negative relation to its other, in contrast to Levinas’s positive, subject forming view of relationality