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<ul><li><p>PARRHESIA NUMBER22201579-89</p><p>The habitus is the logical place where something like a theory of subjectivity could have been born. Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei1 </p><p>The abnormal, while logically second, is existentially first. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological2 </p><p>AGAMBENS DISPOSITIVE RELIGIONIn his essay What is an Apparatus? Agamben relates the genealogy of the Foucauldian dispositif of biopower directly to the notion of positivity in Christian theology as highlighted by Hyppolite in a passage from his In-troduction to Hegels Philosophy of History. Agamben believes that this passage [] could not have failed to provoke Foucaults curiosity, because it in a way presages the notion of apparatus.3 Agamben then sets up a lengthy genealogy: he first relates the notion of biopolitical dispositif to Hegels notion of positive religion and then moves from there to the theological term dispositio. According to Agamben, the Latin dispositio trans-lates the Greek word oikonomia, which in the early centuries of theology designated the administration and government of human history by Christ.4 Agamben thus proposes to take the form in which Christianity was propagated and governed as the archetype of Foucaults modern dispositif of biopower. </p><p>The passage from Hegel as quoted by Hyppolite is the following: </p><p>A positive religion implies feelings that are more or less impressed through constraint on souls; these are actions that are the effect of command and the result of obedience and are accomplished without direct interest.5 </p><p>WHAT AN APPARATUS IS NOT: ON THE ARCHEOLOGY OF THE NORM IN FOUCAULT, CANGUILHEM, AND GOLDSTEINMatteo Pasquinelli</p></li><li><p>WHAT AN APPARATUS IS NOT MATTEO PASQUINELLI</p><p>THE NORMALIZING APPARATUS OF FOUCAULTWhat exactly did Foucault say during the course Abnormal at the Collge de France, in his lecture on January the 15th 1975 when he used the term dispositif for the first time? On that day, Foucault was introducing his research project on the normalization of sexuality in modern France:</p><p>The eighteenth century, or the Classical Age, also set up a State apparatus [appareil] that extended into and was supported by different institutions. And thenand it is on this that I would like to focus, or which I would like to serve as background to my analysis of the normalization of sexualityit re-fined a general technique of the exercise of power that can be transferred to many different institutions and apparatuses [appareils]. This technique constitutes the other side of the juridical and political structures of representation and is the condition of their functioning and effectiveness. This general technique of the government of men comprises a typical apparatus [dispositif], which is the disciplin-ary organization I spoke to you about last year. To what end is this apparatus [dispositif] directed? It is, I think, something that we can call normalization. This year, then, instead of considering the mechanics of the disciplinary apparatus, I will be looking at their effects of normalization, at what they are directed toward, the effects they can achieve and that can be grouped under the rubric of normalization.11</p><p>To what does Foucault relate the idea of dispositif in this passage from 1975? What is the purpose of the dis-positif that Foucault himself is suggesting and in what ways does it diverge from the merely mechanical reading of the disciplinary apparatuses? The answer to both those questions is: Normalization. </p><p>The concept of normalization is pivotal in Foucaults thought and he would use it again in Discipline and Punish, which was published that same year. Both in his course and in his book, Foucault explains normaliza-tion by following his teacher Canguilhems interpretation of the norm in The Normal and the Pathological. Canguilhem defines the norm as something that operates differently from the law, as Foucault recalls: The norms function is not to exclude and reject. Rather, it is always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project.12 The dispositif of normalization in Foucaults Abnormal thus emerges as a further and more complex evolution compared to the notion of positivity in The Archeology of Knowledge, as in this case the dispositif is not just a positive heterogeneous agent (law) but becomes, rather, a normative autonomous agent.</p><p>CANGUILHEMS NORMATIVE BOURGEOISIEIn the chapter From the Social to the Vital in The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem aims to retrace the history of the words normal and normalization in the French language. As he explains, before entering common speech, the term normal was used only in educational and medical institutions to indicate a prototype of learning and health as required by the modernizing reforms following the French Revolution. The process of normalization of French society began silently with the normalization of language, but in order to pursue a more ambitious political plan: in the years in which the bourgeoisie was taking over the means of production, it expropriated, for the same reason, the grammar of the French language. According to Canguilhem, the bour-geoisie thus appeared as the new normative class. Compared to the previous regimes, the bourgeoisie started to exercise power not through the old laws (that were functioning on the basis of repression), but above all through new norms (that were structural):</p><p>Between 1759, when the word normal appeared, and 1834, when the word normalized appeared, a normative class had won the power to identifya beautiful example of ideological illusionthe function of social norms, whose content it determined, with the use that that class made of them.13 </p><p>In other words, positive religions introduce a form of power or management of the soul, one that is both indirect and automatic, as Agamben explains: </p><p>While natural religion is concerned with the immediate and general relation of human reason with the divine, positive or historical religion encompasses the set of beliefs, rules, and rites that in a certain society and at a certain historical moment are externally imposed on individuals.6 </p><p>Agamben intuits here the embryo of the future paradigm of biopolitics: originally, the definition of biopolitics would have emerged from a kind of spiritual manipulation, one that operates without direct interest, as Hegel said, and in a way that is similar to the automatic and impersonal movements of a mechanism.</p><p>According to Agamben, Foucault in his The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) often uses the term positivity of power in this sense (yet, as Agamben notes, without ever defining or referencing it), only to replace it with the term dispositif in his research on power from 1975 onwards.7 Agamben points out that the term dispositif has three main definitions in Foucault and in the French language more generally: a juridical one, a technological one, and a military one. He immediately emphasizes, however, that [t]his fragmentation [of meaning] gener-ally corresponds to the historical development and articulation of a unique original meaning that we should not lose sight of.8 After opening his essay with a long quote by Foucault9 on the diverse meanings of dispositif, it seems odd (at least to this reader) that Agamben would then promptly inaugurate a quest towards the notions unique original meaning. </p><p>Specifically, Agamben retraces Foucaults dispositif to an etymology that goes back to the first centuries of Christian theology and the disputes against the Monarchians, a heresy denying Trinity in favor of God as a single person. Agamben does not provide any philological reference for this theological liaison within the Foucauldian corpus: he underlines only that theologians such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Irenaeus translated the Greek word oikonomia (the divine government of the worldly things) with the Latin word dispositio, that is cognate to the French dispositif. </p><p>Yet Agamben nonetheless appears quite confident that his etymology can be tied back to Foucault:</p><p>The Latin term dispositio, from which the French term dispositif derives, comes therefore to take on the complex semantic sphere of the theological oikonomia. The dispositifs about which Foucault speaks are somehow linked to this theological legacy. They can be in some way traced back to the fracture that divides and, at the same time, articulates in God being and praxis, the nature or essence, on the one hand, and the operation through which He administers and governs the created world, on the other. The term dispositif designates that in which, and through which, one realizes a pure activ-ity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why dispositifs must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, they must produce their subject.10 </p><p>Evoking remote and alien forces, Agamben thus works very hard to resolve a question that can actually be resolvedthis is, indeed, what I propose to showmuch more easily, while staying closer to the sources of the Foucauldian corpus itself. </p><p>The task of the historian of ideas should be to use a complex reading (lectio difficilior) when a text does not provide a context, but here the context seems clear enough. It may indeed be wiser to look at the sources that Foucault himself quotes when he employed the term dispositif of biopower for the first time. The history of the idea of dispositif in Foucault is, of course, plural and complex, but it can be explained without the detour through the remote Christian oikonomia: by simply visiting the German Naturphilosophie that Foucault him-self knew very well. </p></li><li><p>WHAT AN APPARATUS IS NOT MATTEO PASQUINELLI</p><p>Perception (1945).</p><p>In Goldstein the normative power is first and foremost an attribute of the living and not necessarily a faculty of institutional apparatuses such as scientific knowledge and medicine. Goldstein always reframes the definition of pathology from the point of view of the patient: the sick man is not abnormal because of the absence of a norm but because of his incapacity to be normative, as Canguilhem informs us in a passage praising Gold-stein.20 For Goldstein, in general, the normative power is the ability of each organism (and specifically of the human brain) to invent, modify and destroy its own norms, internal and external habits, rules and behaviors, in order to adapt better to its own Umwelt (or surrounding environment), particularly in cases of illness and traumatic incidents and in those conditions that challenge the survival and unity of the organism.21 In Gold-stein, the normative proceeds from the constant antagonism of the organism against its environment.22 Yet Goldsteins originality lies not in the recognition of this antagonism alone, but rather in conceiving sickness and all that is usually considered psychopathological and socially abnormal as a manifestation of a positive normative process itself. Thus, the organism is always in-becoming. Truly sick is instead the organism that is incapable of invention and experimentation of new norms: the organism that is, paradoxically, not capable of making mistakes.</p><p>Canguilhem closely studied the holistic neurology of Goldstein, including his sophisticated idea of biological knowledge23 and transformed it into a veritable epistemology of medical sciences, thus approaching and inter-rogating the broader field of social sciences. In particular, he took Goldsteins intuition of the normative power expressed by the subject and applied it to the whole social field. In this way he began to analyze the normative power of the institutions in charge of producing and normalising the subject itself. At this point, Foucault ex-panded and transformed Canguilhems epistemology of the living into an epistemology of power. </p><p>It is rarely recalled that Foucault himself had studied Goldstein. Indeed, Foucault opens his first book Maladie mentale et personnalit (1954) with a strong critique of Goldsteins definitions of mental illness and organic medicine (based on the notions of: abstraction, abnormality, and environment), surely as part of an implicit dia-logue with his teacher Canguilhem.24 As a bizarre and circular coincidence, it is worth noting on this count that the last public and authorized text by Foucault is the new introduction to the English edition of Le Normal et le pathologique. Following again Goldsteins track, Foucault famously writes there: life is what is capable of error.25 In this way Foucault seems to conclude in the last days of his research that life is itself the ab-normal, the life that does not imitate itself, the life exceeding the norm. In such an encounter of the geophilosophical faults of the old Continent, the austere monism of German thought and Goldsteins holistic philosophy are turned upside down in Foucaults ostensibly pagan polytheism and analytics of power. </p><p>Gilles Deleuze describes very well this pluralistic blooming of French post-structuralism, exploding further Foucaults dispositif into a cosmic diagram. What is a dispositif? asks one of his essays, written a decade before Agambens essay with the same title:</p><p>In the first instance it is a tangle, a multilinear ensemble. It is composed of lines, each having a different nature. [..] Each line is broken and subject to change in direction, bifurcating and forked, and subject to drifting. [..] Great thinkers are somewhat seismic.26 </p><p>Here Deleuzes operation is to explode German organicism to the limit of the cosmos, challenging the very organic and teleological unity of the living that was inaugurated by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us in A Thousand Plateaus: The enemy is the organism. The Body-without-Organs is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism.2</p><p>In his course Abnormal, Foucault himself underlines those passages where Canguilhem describes such a nor-mative period of French modernity that transformed the whole society by inventing new educational, medical and industrial norms. It is clear that Canguilhem anticipates several research fields that Foucault would take up and provides him with a conceptual toolbox for the analysis of the power of normalization and the tech-niques of normalization. </p><p>In Discipline and Punish Foucault refers very clearly to Canguilhem:</p><p>The power of the Norm appears through the disciplines. Is this the new law of modern society? Let us say rather that, since the eighteenth century, it has joined other powers - the Law, the Word and the Text, Traditionimposing new delimitations upon them. The Normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education and the establishment of the coles normales; it is established in the effort to organize a national medical profession and a hospital system capable of operating general norms of health; it is established in the standardization of indus-trial processes..</p></li></ul>