TEHRAN -- Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben will be giving a lecture on Michel Foucault’s notion of “dispositif” at the Association of Wisdom and Philosophy in Tehran on September 25.

Used by French historian and philosopher Foucault (1926-1984), the French word dispositif has no single direct English equivalent. It can mean any or all of ‘socio-technical system’, ‘device’, ‘mechanism’, etc.

Agamben was born in 1942 and teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He also holds a professorship at the European Graduate School and teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy.

He became famous for his investigations on the concepts of "state of exception" and “Homo sacer”.

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to September 11, 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governance in contemporary politics.