Giorgio Agamben

I'm Preston.

And this week we're reading Giorgio Agamben's famous essay, What is an Apparatus? What is an apparatus? Well, so you know when you go to the shoe store and you try to find the shoe that fits and you say, I'd like a 6.5 and they say, I only have a 7? And then you go, okay, well, how long would it take to order in a size 7? And they say, well, it's going to take about a week and a half as the crow flies.

And then you eventually get it and you pay for it.

Isn't that a measure of distance? That's probably not going to be considered an apparatus.

So actually, Ferragombin...

Hold on, I think we're on to something that might be at least better...

Sometimes it's hard with Agamemnon to find a better.

There's obviously always a worse.

In the German version of my book, which you mentioned, Post-Foundational Political Thought, the German version is called The Political Difference.

I also discuss Rancière and Agamben as examples.

Of course, Rancière, again, would protest against being labeled a Heideggerian.

But in that sense, it serves me well, because what is... key in the heideggerian uh idea of the ontological difference is that the ontological and the ontic that is the realm of being as such and particular ontic beings you know this glass of water and whatever it is you know there is a difference and heidegger says we forgot to ask the being question the question about what is being right And this being question is silently asked all the time.

Now, that's just, that's just how it is.

You remember Agamben? Agamben when, when the, the COVID lockdown happened.

The state of exception stuff? Yeah.

Yeah, he's like, "Okay, this is it.

So, you know.

Yeah.

But Agamben was really useful when we were trying to read Israeli propaganda about Palestinians.

So-

Yeah, so quickly, I'll make two points.

One is the book is also a critique, especially in the preface of Agamben, who is a major philosopher and political theorist.

So during the COVID, he said that the scaling of the state of exception, which is a key term for him.

So he said that actually the COVID or the viral threat has replaced terrorism as a ground for intensifying the state of exception.

And my point is that, no, it has not replaced, okay? Because terrorism, by the way, itself is also sometimes described as a virus, right? So unlike Agamben, who talks about replacement of terrorism as a ground for a state of exception by the viral threat, I say that no, they coexist.

Okay, that is one point.

The second point about conclusion, let me say this, that actually the book has a conclusion which is titled anti-conclusion.

Yeah, I mean, there is an aspect of Byung-Chul Han that's sort of almost tragic.

By the way, some of his early work, we will at some point read some of his early critiques on late Foucault and Agamben.

on biopower are actually really cool.

This is sadly something I've felt that he's struggled with as he writes.

Well, there's an Italian philosopher.

He's actually a contemporary philosopher who goes, his name is Giorgio Agamben.

Thank you for listening to the Content Minded Podcast.

This concludes the free public version of the episode.

It touches on the ethics and the state became this powerful, godlike, omnipresent, completely this entity that was reaching beyond their rights.

And so I think it was, it's Giorgio Agamben.

It's an Italian philosopher.

He talks about the state of emergency.

To create settlements, to create civilization, modernity needed to create the fugitive, right? The plantation had fugitives.

Cities have vagabonds, right? Every boundary-making work is already a creation of a bare zone, bare land or bare state, to use the words of Giorgio Agamben.

So there is always the work of creating the monstrous in order to legitimize the internal, right? But sometimes the rituals with which we stabilize settlement, the rituals with which we say hello and goodbye and practice the economies between us, those rituals start to become tautological, right? And they don't produce anything else because they're stuck like ants in a death spiral.

They keep going around in this sensorial trap and nothing else can be done except all the things that we already know how to do.