Greg Bird

This paper uses the three main etymological sources of quarantine (the 14th-century Venetian practice of isolating ships, Moses’s Law Concerning Leprosy, and the Temptation of Christ) as heuristic devices to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the division of life between vital lives and biological labourers. I trace this phenomenon through the first two stages of this pandemic. The first stage took place roughly from early February to mid-March. The central figure during this stage was the cruise ship, including the division between passengers (vital lives) and seafarers (biological labourers). The second stage ran roughly from mid-March until the pro-tests against the division of life erupted in late May. I focus on the broader distinction between essential workers and remote professional workers. I use the biblical references to examine how each group experienced quarantine measures during this second stage

This paper explores the role played by the dispositif of the proper in the collapse of the economic, social, and political spheres that many are now calling the impolitical crisis of neoliberalism. By turning to this dispositif, I provide an alternative account of the processes that have given rise to the collapse of these spheres. I begin by examining how theorists working within the paradigm of political economy set the theoretical terrain for this confusion. In the second section, I discuss the main features and provide a brief genealogical account of this dispositif. Finally, I end with a discussion of how this dispositif is central to contemporary identity politics through the example of the debate about gender neutral pronouns.

This paper focuses on a specific strain of thought that has emerged in the post-68 critiques of economism, workerism, and productivity: the logic of the proper, property, and ownership. I outline in very broad strokes the genealogy and political operations of a distinctively modern dispositif that I call the "dispositif of the proper." The May 68 uprisings and the subsequent political movements and theories that have been formulated in their wake mark a significant turning point in the genealogy of this dispositif. Post-May 68, the dispositif of the proper has expanded at an accelerated rate to the point that today it is now a fully matured and comprehensive dispositif that has engulfed our world. Everything is modulated and articulated through its operations from material structures, institutions, relations, and individuals up to our ways of thinking, doing, and being. Even our politics, from left to right, are articulated in and through this dispositif. I provide an alternative perspective by showing how the role played by the dispositif of the proper in the collapsing of our traditional categories. In the first section, I provide a brief overview of the paradigm of political economy. In the second section, I describe some of the main operations of the dispositif of the proper. In the final section, I provide a brief example of how this dispositif operates in contemporary identity politics by looking at the debate about gender neutral pronouns. If we want to work through the impolitical nature of neoliberal politics – of the mixing of the political, economic, and social – it is imperative that we start to address the significance of the dispositif of the proper in our world.

In the following paper, we draw from Roberto Esposito's and Donna Haraway's theories of immunity to examine immigration apparatuses. The immunization perspective provides new ways of examining how immigration apparatuses function. In particular, we explore how they serve the purpose of biologically and culturally immunizing a nation from being contaminated by "dangerous" populations. We begin by briefly outlining Esposito's and Haraway's theories of immunity. Then for the remainder of the paper we provide a genealogical sketch of the demographics of immunization in Canadian immigration policies. In the Canadian case, there are two stages of immunization that roughly correspond to Esposito's historical account of the development of immunization apparatuses. First, we explore what we call the "crude immunization stage" (1867–1967), where various discriminatory criteria and measures were erected to safeguard the nation from being contaminated by populations designated as "dangerous." The second "sophisticated immunization stage" began when Canada adopted a more liberal notion of multiculturalism (1967–present). Despite making substantial changes to immigration policies in the late 1960s, which were supposed to drop all discriminatory criteria on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin, we demonstrate how the same categories were reasserted by streaming potential (im)migrants into two pools: valuable, high-skilled immigrant workers and disposable, low-skilled migrant laborers. In this second stage, Canada has increasingly relied upon "guest" workers over permanent immigrants to supply its labor market. This distinction between permanent immigrants and temporary migrants has become a new mechanism for discriminating on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin.

This introductory essay covers two general problems raised in the formative and seminal texts on dispositifs: the problem of dispositifs and the dispositif problem. In part one, I focus on the problem of defining dispositifs. I turn to the three definitive texts by Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben. For the remainder, I focus on the dispositif problem. That is, the tasks, questions, and propositions that dispositifs posit. The problem that emerges is the problem of engineering. It is clearly articulated at the start of the genealogy of dispositif thinking, which we trace back to Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” (Grundrisse). The genealogy begins with a series of authors concerned with mechanical, technological, and biological engineering. In more recent iterations of dipositifs, the same problem is articulated through human engineering, such as social, racist, colonial, gendered, and even sexed engineering projects. Whether texts are more focused on the productive nature of dispositifs as machines operating through mechanical subjects or as discursive devices shaping and moulding subjects, what emerges is the problem of engineering: human-machine, nature-culture, artifice-intelligence. A series of questions arises. Have dispositifs reduced humans to simple mechanics? If so, who are the engineers? Those popularized mechanical engineers of the foregone era, such as Henry Ford or the Commandant of Kafka’s Penal Colony? Are our contemporaries, such as Musk or Gates, any different? Trumpist populism represents its own mechanically engineered political project. Artificial intelligence has raised the stakes of addressing this problem. Our world is not only dominated by dispositifs, an obvious point to make today, but also by the problem of engineering itself that is animating dispositifs.

Dispositif is one of the most prevalent yet elusive terms in contemporary thought. This comprehensive anthology brings together formative, seminal, and contemporary texts and visual applications to illuminate how central dispositifs are to contemporary theory. Greg Bird and Giovanbattista Tusa’s selection and placement of critical texts invite readers to explore common themes and genealogies, different interpretations and readings, and their diverse deployments across multiple disciplines and genres by such figures as Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Tiqqun, Claire Fontaine, and many others. Dispositif: A Cartography is a true toolbox for the development of technological ecology thinking that accounts for situated knowledge. This collection provides coordinates for reorienting oneself in a permanently changing world, offering possible roadmaps for navigating these profoundly uncertain times. More than just a compilation of interventions on the dispositif, this volume acts as a guide for understanding the complex interaction between technology, philosophy, and the languages of the arts and media. Introduction: "Problematizing Dispositifs" (PDF)

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay simul outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the un-limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination.

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

In this paper, I seek to caution the increasing number of contemporary sociologists who are engaging with continental phenomenological sociology without looking at the Anglo-American tradition. I look at a particular debate that took place during the formative period in the Anglo-American tradition. My focus is on the way participants sought to negotiate the disciplinary division between philosophy and sociology. I outline various ways that these disciplinary exigencies, especially the institutional struggles with the sociological establishment, shaped how participants defined phenomenological sociology. I argue that despite the supposed theoretical, methodological, and substantial differences between these waves of phenomenological sociology, the contemporary wave could benefit from some of the lessons that were learned by their predecessors.

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory.

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory.

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights that Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory.

It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation. Wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, nor political and economic turmoil, none of these can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. This collected edition considers this crisis of the proper with a focus on Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito’s work on community, immunity, and biopolitics. This collection introduces Esposito’s work to a wider English-speaking audience and provides many important contributions to the burgeoning scholarship on his political theory. Important international scholars working in this area examine and analyze his theory from a variety of perspectives, including those of biopolitics, feminism, political theory, the history of philosophy, property, community, and gift economies. The collection also includes previously untranslated essays by Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy. This collection will be of interest to those just discovering Esposito and for those who are already familiar with his work. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.