Giorgio Agamben: What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2006-) [IT, EN, PT]

“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.”

“What is an Apparatus?” was originally published in Italian as Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Nottetempo, 2006
“The Friend” was originally published in Italian as L’amico, Nottetempo, 2007
“What Is the Contemporary?” was originally published in Italian as Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, 2008

English edition
Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2009
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804762309, 9780804762304
56 pages

Commentary: Matteo Pasquinelli (Parrhesia, 2015).

Publisher (EN)

Che cos’è un dispositivo? (Italian, 2006)
L’amico (Italian, 2007)
Che cos’è il contemporaneo? e altri scritti (Italian, 2010)
What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (English, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 2009)
O que é o contemporâneo. e outros ensaios (Portuguese, trans. Vinícius Nicastro Honesko, 2009)

Gabriel Tarde: Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (1898-) [FR, EN, CZ, SR]

This early work, originally published in 1899, contains the leading ideas of one of the most authoritative and distinguished writers in sociology and social psychology at the turn of the last century. Gabriel Tarde here outlines his three principal works on general sociology and the internal bond that unites them. A fascinating read for any sociologist, amateur or professional alike.

English edition
Translated by Howard C. Warren
With a Preface by James Mark Baldwin
First published in New York, 1899
Publisher Batoche Books, Kitchener, 2000
98 pages

Les Lois sociales. Esquisse d’une sociologie (French, 1898, other formats)
Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (English, trans. Howard C. Warren, 1899/2000, other formats)
Zákony sociální: Nástin sociologie (Czech, trans. Břetislav Kalandra, 1901)
Socijalni zakoni: skica za jednu sociologiju (Serbian, trans. Vladimir Novosel, 2011, other formats)

Daniel Heller-Roazen: Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005)

Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Individuals can forget words, phrases, even entire languages, and over the course of time speaking communities, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages grow obsolescent and give way to others. In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen reflects on the many forms of linguistic forgetfulness. In twenty-one concise chapters, he moves among classical, medieval, and modern culture, exploring the interrelations of speech, writing, memory, and oblivion. Whether the subject is medieval literature or modern fiction, classical Arabic poetry or the birth of French language, structuralist linguistics or Freud’s writings on aphasia, Heller-Roazen considers with precision and insight the forms, effects, and ultimate consequences of the persistence and disappearance of language. In speech, he argues, destruction and construction often prove inseparable. Among speaking communities, the vanishing of one language can mark the emergence of another, and among individuals, the experience of the passing of speech can lie at the origin of literary, philosophical, and artistic creation.

From the infant’s prattle to the legacy of Babel, from the holy tongues of Judaism and Islam to the concept of the dead language and the political significance of exiled and endangered languages today, Echolalias traces an elegant, erudite, and original philosophical itinerary, inviting us to reflect in a new way on the nature of the speaking animal who forgets.

Publisher Zone Books, 2005
ISBN 1890951498, 9781890951498
287 pages

review (Michael Newton, London Review of Books)
review (Dorian Stuber, Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature)

publisher
google books

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