Biblio Bat’s Reviews > What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays > Status Update

The present is nothing other than this unlived element in everything that is lived. That which impedes access to the present is precisely the mass of what for some reason(its traumatic character, its excessive nearness) we have not managed to live. The attention to this "unlived"is the life of the contemporary. And to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been.

Friends do not share something (birth, law, place,tastc): they are shared by the experience of friendship.Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes the political.

Friends do not share something (birth, law, place,tastc): they are shared by the experience of friendship.Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has been shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes political.

The friend is not an other I, but an otherness immanent to selfness, a becoming other of the self.

Within this sensation of existing, there is another sensation, specifically a human one, that takes form of a joint sensation, or a con-sent (synaisthanesthai) with the existence of the friend. Friendship is the instance of this "con-sentiment" of the existence of the friend within the sentiment of existence itself.

There is an equivalence between being and living,between sensing one's existence and sensing one's life.It is a decided anticipation of the Nietzschean thesis that states: "Being-we have no other way of imagining it apart from 'living."

He who sees senses that he is seeing, he who hears senses that he is hearing, he who walks senses thathe is walking, and thus for all the other activities there's something that senses that we are exerting the, in such a way that if we sense, we sensethat we are sensing, and if we think, we sense that we arethinking. This is the same thing as sensing existence: existing means in fact sensing and thinking.

Indeed, what is friendship other than a proximity that resists both representation and conceptualization?To recognize someone as a friend means not being able to recognize him as a "something." Calling someone"friend" is not the same as calling him "white," "Italian," or "hot," since friendship is neither a property nor a quality of a subject.

In the eyes of authority-and maybe rightly so-nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

It is only an apparent paradox that the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies, who readily does everything that he is asked to do, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday gestures and his health.amusements and occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses, is also considered by power-perhaps precisely because of this-as a potential terrorist.