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.

Rationalizing the following "word-image"

Here there is a list of the words used by Hobbes in the Fourth Part of Leviathan, ordered by frequency.
At the top of the list we encounter God

And maybe...the political body (as it was depicted on the cover of 1651) is the embodied threshold that marks the ontological way of indifference between God and Leviathan...

WORDS COUNTS
God 166
Men 127
Man 115
Power 96
Say 91
Place 73
Time 67
Body 66
Worship 62
Kingdom 59
Civil 59
Christ 56
Church 55
Life 53
Words 53
Make 51
Hath 50
Scripture 50
People 50
Doctrine 48
Nature 47
World 45
Law 44
Image 40
Death 40
Authority 37
Philosophy 36

A study on Leviathan

A text analysis - Leviathan - The Fourth Part - The King of Darkness

managed with wordle (a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide)

A question of Hubris

Gorboduc , or the Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, is a rinascimental representation of hubris, usurpations and abuses, the deepest violations of law's sanctity, whose secrets are safeguarded by the patriarches of the Inns.

For the influence of Gorboduc on King Lear see this reference

Reading

McCall Smith last novel, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built has conquered me!
Once again Precious Ramotswe's shrewdness is one of the best device to compete with every day life!

A recall to the past

Grasping the meaning of my intellectual origins....I find the following link very intriguing and exciting
Classical Greek sources