APARG - Grupo de Estética, Política e Artes

The key to all processes of subjectivation and the «folding of the outside» is the body itself. Beyond conscious reflexivity we have come to discover bodily reflexivity. This reflexivity, though, does not remain the reserved and folded zone of the free man but it becomes the object of power and knowledge and the target par excellence of the «government machine». The roots of the plants are severed, the cagastrical element is too strong. Instead of a process of subjectivation a process of dejectivation becomes necessary. We are initiated in the art of phyturgy. Vegetative life becomes royal vegetation. Neophytes of the world, unite!

A presente dissertação pretende apresentar e desenvolver criticamente o conceito de dispositivo na sua relação com o conceito de subjectivação a partir da contribuição das obras de Gilles Deleuze e Giorgio Agamben. Ambos os conceitos serão pensados no âmbito da temporalidade e da historicidade características das sociedades de controlo, naquilo que constituirá uma contribuição para uma ontologia crítica do contemporâneo. Na sequência desta problematização, demarcaremos o plano específico do dispositivo, apoiando-nos no pensamento de Walter Benjamin e Paul Virilio e nas suas noções de valor de exposição e de teletopia, respectivamente. No contexto da análise de Agamben do estado de excepção como paradigma de governo, mostraremos de que modo o plano do dispositivo possibilita a captura da vida nua implicada nesse paradigma. Por fim, tentaremos apontar uma via de desactivação e superação do dispositivo através de um apelo já não à noção de sujeito mas a uma noção singular de pessoa.

The present dissertation will critically present and develop the concept of apparatus [dispositif] in its relation with the concept of subjectivation, with the contribution of Deleuze’s and Agamben’s work. Both concepts will be assessed within the framework of control societies and its characteristic mode of temporality and historicity, contributing to a critical ontology of the contemporary. We will demarcate the apparatus’ specific plane with the aid of Benjamin and his notion of exhibition value, and of Virilio, with his notion of teletopia. In the context of Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception as a paradigm of government, we will show how the apparatus’ plane makes possible the capture of bare life implied in this paradigm. Lastly, we will aim at an overcoming and deactivation of the apparatus through an appeal not to the notion of subject but to a singular notion of person.

Cultural science allows for the description of the organic post-lapsarian device which defines human beings and their cultural enterprises. According to Heiner Mühlmann, all culture is grounded in maximal stress foundational events, in which human lifeforms find themselves totally exposed to death. These events, if successful, give place to a relaxation phase and its concomitant process of global rule adjustment, which then converts the primary intensity of the event in a bodily memory. Cultural liturgies are engendered which preserve and reproduce the evental energy in material forms transmitted transgenerationally. This cultural scientific model was employed by Peter Sloterdijk in the context of his immunological theory of religion. In the horizon of philosophy as a «medicine of culture», we analyze the Maximal Stress Cooperation model and render explicit its deficit, when confronted with the phenomenon of the operation of the cardiac intellect and its organic effects.