Today's Mood. The 1st of November

As if the Sea should part
and show a further Sea -
And that - a further - and the Three
But a Presumption be -
Of Periods of Seas -
Unvisited of Shores - 
Themselves the Verge of Seas to be - 
Eternity - is Those - 

W.H. Auden's poetry

Progress?


      Sessile, unseeing,
the Plant is wholly content
      with the Adjacent.


      Mobilised, sighted,
the Beast can tell Here from There,
      and Now from Not-Yet.


      Talkative, anxious
Man can picture the Absent
      and non-Existent.

Existence

From Legal History Blog: David on Comparativism and Legal Reasoning in Jewish and Islamic Traditions

A very intriguing link!!


Legal History Blog: David on Comparativism and Legal Reasoning in Jewish and Islamic Traditions

Paul Auster's latest novel "Invisible"

Excerpt from Chapter 1, p. 4 "I was smoking a cigarette and looking out at the people, dozens upon dozens of young bodies cranmed into the confines of that spaces, listening to the mingled roar of words and laughter, wondering what on earth I was doing there, and thinking that perhaps it was time to leave"

Spectacular representation of the individual suspension on the threshold of a living emptiness.

Dispositif or Apparatus?

Reading Hardt and Negri's latest book, Commonwealth, I'm questioning about the clear terminology used to name the Foucaultian notion of dispositif.

In the preface of this book (p. X) we have to cope with Gilles Deleuze's understanding of dispositif and here we find the untranslated French word.

I think that this is the better (intellectual and scientific) choice instead of re-nominate Foucault's technical term as "apparatus". The heterogeneous nature of what Foucault intends to be "dispositif" seems to me inconsistent with the absorbing meaning of the English term "apparatus". A different perspective could be traced back to the latin roots of the two words insofar as dispositif derives from the Latin dis-ponere (taht is to arrange, put in order), while apparatus derives from the Latin ad-parare, ad-paratus (that is made ready for). On this ground 'apparatus' recalls much more the ultimative function (to response to an urgency), eclipsing both the concrete act of framing the resulting network and the multifarious elements which concurs to give substance to the created set.

For a very deep investigation on this issue, see the transcript of a talk by Jason Michael Adams on Giorgio Agamben's What is an apparatus. This is the link to the web page

Giorgio Agamben's book can be consulted here

Agreeing with Peter Ackroyd

The following statements captured my mind

" Linguistic change is the principal arbiter of imaginative transition"

"Antiquarianism, in England, has always been compounded by a vision of Englishness itself; it is not a question of nationalism, which is often mistakenly introduced as an explanation or an easy device, but rather of the sentiment that in the relics of the past there is some inkling of what England is really like"

In my view these are the very pillars on which the English legal tradition could be framed with the consistency of art.