The Potency of Thought

Abstract

This publication is the first translation into Russian of a text that is key to understanding Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical project. First presented in the form of a paper at a conference in Lisbon in 1987, this text is known to the general reader under the title “On Potentiality”, published in the English-language collection Potentialities (1999). The translation is based on an expanded and refined version of the text, which was first published in Italian in 2005. The article is a detailed commentary on two key concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy — potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia) — clarifying the relationship between them, which plays a key role in Agamben’s works. Wondering about the ontological status of the statement “I can,” Agamben shows that one of the most important forms of potency (potenza) is the experience of deprivation. Clarifying the mode of existence of this kind of experience leads Agamben to the fundamental aporia of the Aristotelian theory of potency, according to which every capacity/potency is at the same time its own incapacity/impotency. The proposed archaeology of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy aims to highlight not only the ontological but also the ethical and political problems of the Western tradition of thought rooted in this aporia. Agamben links the proposed solution to the posed problem with the development of a mode (modality) of being that prevents every capacity/potency from being fully exhausted in action (actualization). By reading the Aristotelian doctrine of potency as an archaeology of subjectivity, Agamben lays the foundations for his own concept of form-of-life, which is central to his Homo Sacer project.