Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power

POTENTIALITY, ACTUALITY, CONSTITUENT POWER
Author(s): KEVIN ATTELL

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 39, No. 3, CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN THOUGHT (1) (fall 2009), pp. 35-53
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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POTENTIALITY, ACTUALITY,
CONSTITUENT POWER
KEVIN ATTELL
What is potential is that for which, if the act of which it is said to have the
potential comes about, there will be nothing impotential.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics 1047a 24-26
In theoretical debates of recent years, the issue with which Italian thought has been most
closely associated is that of "biopolitics," and it is probably not controversial to claim
that within this milieu there are no more influential figures than Giorgio Agamben and
Antonio Negri, two thinkers who have been in dialogue with each other long before the
largely Italian rediscovery of the question of biopolitics in Michel Foucault's work in the
mid-1990s.1 As compatriots and near-contemporaries, Agamben and Negri have devel
oped their ideas with an awareness of each other's work, and their conceptual itineraries
have often run a parallel course, though for much of the 1980s and 1990s in a rather
understated fashion.2 For all their evident similarity in vocabulary and set of concerns,
however, Agamben and Negri nevertheless represent increasingly incompatible—or at
least contesting—accounts of biopolitics.

Without a doubt, a significant question about contemporary biopolitical thought is
that of the legacy of Foucault's work and the ways in which the Italian biopolitical the
orists who to varying degrees acknowledge their debt to Foucault are developing this
line of inquiry. More crucial, however, than the legacy of Foucault's thought, at least
as regards the central difference between Agamben and Negri, is the way in which their
biopolitical positions emerge out of the divergent and indeed competing concepts of po
tentiality and constituent power that they respectively developed prior to their entry into
the biopolitical field. That Agamben has drawn heavily on Heidegger in his conceptual
ization of potentiality is well enough known (though the precise nature of that influence
is a matter for debate); far less well appreciated, however, is Agamben's relation to post
war Italian thought—dominated by (post-)Marxism, "workerism," autonomia—a context
in which Agamben is something of an outlier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is Negri who
most forcefully of all of his commentators situates Agamben at this nexus, identifying
his uniqueness as a thinker precisely in the way he negotiates between his Heideggerian
influence and the context of Italian Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s ["Discreet Taste"
109-14], Out of this latter milieu, of course, Negri himself went on to do the work that
would lead to the development of what can be called his own signal concept, constituent
Published translations quoted in the text have occasionally been modified. All unattributed transla
tions are my own.
1
On the history of biopolitics in the Italian milieu, see Timothy Campbell's Introduction to Roberto
Esposito's Bios xix-xxvi.

2 In to Agamben in Negri's
addition to the references Insurgencies [339n50, 364nl0], note that
Agamben published an excerpt o/The Coming Community in the first issue of Negri's journal Futur
Anterieur (as well as numerous pieces after that). In the Italian edition of Insurgencies Negri's ref
erence to The Coming Community \364nl0] is not to the book but to the article in Futur Anterieur.
See also Agamben's favorable reference to the "possibility of a wholly and immediately positive
metaphysics" to be discerned in Negri's work on Spinoza in Language and Death [xiii nl], as well
as Negri's reference to Agamben's Introduction to his translation of the poetry of St. John of the
Cross in The Savage Anomaly [246nl4],
diacritics Volume 39.3 (2009) 35-53 © 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press
power. Negri's account of Agamben's early influences and milieu thus helpfully points
to the fundamental question that will determine the development of his and Agamben's
very influential but divergent versions of biopolitics. As others have noted [Neilson, "Po
tenza NudaT 63-71 and Mills 74-76] and as the following pages will seek to illustrate
in greater detail, the dividing line between Negri's and Agamben's contesting versions of
biopolitics can be most fundamentally drawn between their earlier analyses of potential
ity and constituent power.

It is well known that a major point of divergence between Agamben's and Negri's
biopolitical thought is the "question of the productive dimensions of 'bios'" [Hardt and
Negri, Empire 421nll], and a survey of the texts shows that this question lies at the root
of virtually every criticism Negri has launched against Agamben over the last fifteen
years. Negri's references to Agamben's The Coming Community (1990) in Insurgencies
(1992), for example, are muted but sympathetic, but since the publication of Homo Sacer
(1995), he has offered a number of pointed critiques, the most openly polemical being
found in a 2001 piece titled "II mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza," in which Agam
ben's notion of "bare life" [nuda vita] is unfavorably characterized merely as a figure for
a human life—bios— stripped of its free and productive potentiality and pared down to a
minimum of inert and brutally dominated biological life, a figure that Negri finds highly
doubtful as a politically useful paradigm. Here Negri attacks what he feels is Agamben's
mystifying and quietist—in any case apolitical—concept:
When one stakes and!or flattens the human quality on nakedness [il nudo] one
make a sort of natural law claim of man's innocence, an innocence that is impo
tence [impotenza], the "Muselmann." ... No, life and death in the camps repre
sent nothing other than life and death in the camps. An episode of the twentieth
century's civil war. A horrible spectacle of the destiny of capitalism and of the
ideological umaskings of its will, of the machine of capital against the instance
offreedom. ["II mostro" 194]
That in the same breath Negri makes precisely the sort of abstraction that he accuses
Agamben of has not gone unnoticed.3 But more revealing than this odd lapsus is the
way Negri reads Agamben's term impotenza as mere blank passivity ("impotence" rather
than "impotentiality")—a reading that characterizes all of Negri's critiques of Agamben's

thought on the question, and one that, as we will see, has significant consequences for the
way in which one understands Agamben's project. For Negri, Agamben's insistence on
the figures of bare life and impotenza amounts to a sort of heroic defeatism and quietism,
a "utopian flight" [//potere costituente 9] that lends itself to politically suspect conclu
sions.4
By contrast, in their recent book, Commonwealth, Negri and Michael Hardt have
continued to insist on human bios as excessively and unstoppably productive, vital, and
creative, arguing that "biopolitical production is not constrained by the logic of scarcity.
3
See de la Durantaye 218. See also 268-72 for a discussion of other critical responses to Agam
ben's paradigmatic use of the figure of the "Muselmann."
4
This continues to be the case in Negri's most recent writings. See, for example, these comments
in Negri's review of Agamben's 2007book II regno e la gloria [The Kingdom and the Glory]: "And
so, where does he want to lead us? To a world in which singularity can in no case be defined as
work (let alone the refusal of work), nor as resistance (let alone struggle)? Even without being a
theologian, one can very well imagine that the effort to encompass production (creation) within
the theological ambit could also reinstate it not as impotence [impotenza] and sterility but as
resistance and activity. 'Liberation theology' has touched on this truth of atheism" [Negri, "Quel
divino ministero" 12].
36 diacritics / spring 2009
It has the unique characteristic that it does not destroy or diminish the raw materials from
which it produces wealth. Biopolitical production puts bios to work without consuming
it" [283; emphasis in orig.]. And in the earlier Multitude we read that "biopolitical pro
duction is on the one hand immeasurable, because it cannot be quantified in fixed units of
time, and, on the other hand, always excessive with respect to the value capital can extract
from it because capital can never capture all of life" [146; emphasis in orig.].
Drawing a key distinction between the vital force of biopolitical production and the
repressive constraint of biopower, which (in its various guises as capital, the State, sov
ereignty, constituted power, fundamentalisms) seeks to capture and dominate the free
and incessantly creative praxis of the multitude, Hardt and Negri propose an affirmative
concept of biopolitics directly derived from Negri's earlier work on constituent power—
which exactly like biopolitical production is "all-embracing" [Insurgencies 2], "originary
and liberatory," "creative and irresistible" [9], "all-powerful and expansive, unlimited
and unfinalized" [13], "productive" [28], "creative," "in a word, constituent" [33].5 And
as exemplified in Negri's negative comments on "bare life" noted above, his view of
biopolitical productivity is in turn itself frequently and explicitly articulated as a counter
concept to what he sees as the quietistic passivity that underlies Agamben's thought. As
Hardt and Negri write in Commonwealth, "Agamben transposes biopolitics in a theo

logical-political key, claiming that the only possibility of rupture with biopower resides
in 'inoperative' activity [inoperosita], a blank refusal that recalls Heidegger's notion of
Gelassenheit, completely incapable of constructing an alternative" [58] ,6
The third and fourthsections of this essay will examine in some detail this debate be
tween Agamben and Negri concerning the "productive dimension of 'bios'" and will seek
to elucidate Agamben's response to some of the criticisms Negri has leveled, but .before
doing so it is necessary to clarify Agamben's sometimes cryptically presented doctrine
of potentiality. Among the reasons for spending some time with Agamben's account of
potentiality there are two in particular that inform the following pages: (1) Agamben's
argument concerning potentiality (and "impotentiality") is frequently misconstrued or
incompletely represented in the commentary on his work (Hardt and Negri's account is
an example of this); and (2) because of an odd publication history,a crucial and illuminat
ing portion of Agamben's key text on the subject, the essay "On Potentiality," has been
unavailable to English-speaking (and for a long time Italian-speaking) readers. It is, then,
to Agamben's doctrine of potentiality that this essay will now turn.
Dunamis and Energeia
While Agamben discusses the interplay between Aristotle's concepts of dunamis and en
ergeia, potentiality and act, as early as his first book The Man without Content,7 it is not
until the 1980s that potentiality assumes such an explicitly central role in his work, be
coming what can legitimately be called his signal concept. When Agamben introduces the
paired concepts of sovereign power and bare life in Homo Sacer, the elaboration of the
sovereign's biopolitical production of and dominion over the bare life of the homo sacer
5 as
On the distinction between biopower and biopolitics, see especially Commonwealth 56-63,
well as Maurizio Lazzarato, "From Biopower to Biopolitics."
6 as being on a self-defeating or quietistic
This critique ofAgamben's political thought based pas
sivity or "blank refusal" can be observed in a number of other recent commentaries as well. See
" "
for example, Brett Neilson, "Politics without Action and Nina Power, "Potentiality or Capacity?
7 7.
Originally published in 1970 as L'uomo senza contenuto. See chapter
Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 37
is articulated with his earlier analyses of potentiality and is indeed presented as a further
development of that earlier theory. Above all, in chapter 1.3 of Homo Sacer ("Potentiality
and Law"), Agamben's argument concerning the sovereign suspension of the legal order
in the state of exception is intimately entwined with his understanding of the ambiguous
interplay between dunamis and energeia and in particular the way the former passes over
into the latter.No less than the "paradigm of sovereignty [in] Western philosophy" [Homo
Sacer 46], Aristotle's doctrine of potentiality provides Agamben with the theoretical ar
chitecture of his biopolitical thesis.
Agamben's argument concerning potentiality certainly has a largely, if often im
plicitly, Heideggerian provenance, but it most explicitly rests on a rather idiosyncratic
reading of Aristotle's term dunamis, presented most concisely in his 1987 essay "On
Potentiality" and in chapter 1.3 of Homo Sacer (which repeats parts of the earlier essay
verbatim). Both of these texts—as well as the 1993 essay "Bartleby, or On Contingency,"
to which this essay will turn in closing—end up centering on one of the most interesting
and problematic evocations of the term dunamis in the Aristotelian corpus—namely, a
particularly baffling sentence that Agamben claims has been misunderstood by virtually
the entire Western philosophical tradition. That sentence is Metaphysics 1047a 24—26 in
book Theta: "esti de dunaton touto hoi ean huparxei he energeia hou legetai ekhein ten
dunamin, outhen estai adunaton," which Hugh Tredennick translates as, "A thing is ca
pable of doing something if there is nothing impossible in its having the actuality of that
of which it is said to have the potentiality" [439]. The following pages will focus on this
particular sentence not only because of its oddness and Agamben's idiosyncratic reading
of it, but also because it turns out to be the very point on which Agamben constructs the
most important aspect of his theory of potentiality—namely his account of the way po
tentiality passes (or does not pass) into act or energeia.
To begin, let us dwell for a moment on the insistently polemical way in which Agam
ben presents his own reading as a corrective to the way this crucial sentence has been
misinterpreted by virtually all previous translators and commentators. For Agamben, this
passage "constitutes, even in its drastic brevity, one of the most extraordinary testaments
of [Aristotle's] philosophical genius; and yet it has fallen on deaf ears [e rimasta senza
ascolto] in the philosophical tradition" [Potentialities 183; La potenza 283].8 He con
tinues: "Usually this sentence is interpreted as if Aristotle had wanted to say: 'What is
possible is that with respect to which nothing is impossible,"' [P 183; PP 284], or in

other words, "what is not impossible is possible" [Homo Sacer 46]. Taken as such, the
statement is rather clear and seems true enough; in fact, it seems to be more than true: a
truism, a tautology. And with regard to this canonical reading of the sentence, Agamben
further notes (with obvious approval) that, "Heidegger, in his course on Book Theta of
the Metaphysics, had spoken ironically about the 'empty cleverness' of the interpreters
who, with a certain 'poorly-disguised feeling of triumph' attribute such a tautology to

Aristotle" [PP 284].'9
Agamben, in fact, has good reason to claim that the "modern commentators" [P 183;
PP 285] tend to read Aristotle as having uttered what appears to be a tautology here, but
it is perhaps unfair to suggest that he and Heidegger are alone in finding the passage, con
strued in this tautological way, to be an uncharacteristically banal definition of dunamis
on Aristotle's part, or that all commentary on this sentence has the tone of having caught
"
For reasons that will be explained below, page references to this essay will be given to both the
American and Italian editions (Potentialities and La potenza del pensiero, hereafter P and PP re
spectively). Where reference is given only to the one edition it is because that passage is missing
from the other version.

9 See
Heidegger 189-90.
Aristotle out.10 Nevertheless, it is indeed the case that most scholars more or less do agree
on the "tautological" interpretation of the sentence and attempt to justify or explain its
meaning and argumentative force. Yet, though these readings may represent the most ca
nonical line of interpretation of this passage, they do not constitute the only, and perhaps
not even the most subtle, debate over its meaning and the way the sentence—and more to
the point, the key terms and adunaton — should be translated.
dunaton, dunamis,
Dunamis is an ambiguous term in Aristotle. Indeed, he devotes a good deal of discus
sion to the numerous meanings and uses attached to the term, and thematizes the several
types of ambiguity one must account for in any attempt to think clearly about potentiality.
For example, in language that closely parallels that of his discussion of the multiple senses
of the word "being" in book Gamma [1003a 32-34], early in book Theta he writes: "We
have made it plain elsewhere [i.e., Delta, section 12] that 'potentiality' and 'can' have
several senses [legetai pollakhos]. All senses which are merely equivocal [homonumos]
may be dismissed" [1046a 4-7].11 On the one hand, there is ambiguity due to accidental
homonymy, mere ambiguity or equivocation, which Aristotle quickly dismisses here as
a result of employing loose analogies; and on the other, there is a multiplicity of senses
that merit deeper inquiry: the legitimate ways in which dunamis is legetai pollakhos}2
For the purposes of the present discussion, we can limit the senses of the term du
namis to two: namely, possibility and capacity. The former indicates something like pure
logical possibility, what may possibly take place in the future, an event or state of affairs
that is not logically impossible. This is the primary sense in which Tredennick and the
"canonical" commentators interpret the terms dunaton, dunamis, and adunaton in the pas
sage at 1047a 24-26, giving us variations of the coherent but banal reading "what is not
logically impossible is possible." However, introducing the second sense of dunamis—
capacity or capability—into the equation allows a distinctly differentand perhaps more
interesting reading of the passage. For example, Terence Irwin argues that in this particu
lar passage only adunaton refers to logical impossibility while dunaton and dunamis refer
specifically to capacity. Irwin thus emphasizes the distinction between potentiality as a
capability of a thing (as either an agent or patient) and the possibility (or impossibility) of
a certain state of affairs. In fact, he takes the intention of 1047a 20-26 precisely to be "to
explain the relation of potentiality to possibility" and he translates it thus: "Something is
capable to which if there belongs the actuality of that of which it is said to have the poten
tiality,nothing impossible will be the case" [First Principles 563nl 1] ,13This is to say that
10 For several interpretations of this "tautological" passage see Aubenque 453nl, Ross 245, and
Reale 439—40. Aubenque's translation of the lines is: "On appelle possible ce a quoi, lorsque
aviendra I'acte dont il est dit avoir la puissance, n'appartiendra aucune impossibility." Ross's
translation is: "And a thing is capable of doing something if there is nothing impossible in its hav
ing the actuality of that of which it is said to have the capacity." Reale's translation is: "Una cosa
e in potenza, se il tradursi in atto di cid di cui essa e detta aver potenza non implica alcuna impos
sibilita." Reale also notes the comments of Hermann Bonitz and Franz Brentano on this "vicious
circle," which Heidegger might have had in mind.

"
There is considerable debate over whether pollakhos legomenon (multivocal) and homonumos
(homonymous) are equivalent or whether Aristotle is exploiting a difference between them. The log
ic of the two sentences cited here seems to require a difference, as is noted by Irwin ["Homonymy"
531], For an extensive discussion of homonymy in Aristotle, see Shields, who takes the position that
multivocity and homonymy are ultimately equivalents [22-28, 42}.

12 For it throughout
an account of this distinction, as well as complications in maintaining Aris
totle's text, see Hintikka 1-26. Frede suggests that a further complication may be that not only is
Aristotle attempting to describe dunamis itself but he is grappling with the insufficient vocabulary
at his disposal; that is to say, part of Aristotle's difficulty, and hence ours in reading this text, arises
out of the need to use a single term—dunamis—that is not adequate [775]. What we would have
here, then, is a treatise in part on the uses and meanings of the term dunamis.
13 For Irwin's close
philological justification of this reading, see First Principles 563-64.
something (or someone) is able to realize a potentiality or capability if external conditions
do not prevent the exercise of that potentiality, i.e., make its actualization impossible. Or,
in other words, I can exercise a capacity if nothing prevents me from doing so. If this is
right, then Aristotle's sentence turns out to be making a rather important point not about
possibility and impossibility, but about the nature of potentiality as such, for it means that
while external conditions of possibility may determine whether I can exercise certain ca
pacities, they do not determine the existence of these capacities. This, in turn,implies that
potentialities persist even in the absence of the conditions in which they may be realized,
or as Irwin writes: "If I am a builder, but I lose all my tools and cannot replace them for a
week, then for a week it is impossible for me to build; but since I do not change, I do not
lose my potentiality to build" [First Principles 229]. And as Irwin reminds us, the funda
mental point of this whole section of the Metaphysics is to show (against the Megarian
position) that potentialities persist even when they are not in act. Thus, on Irwin's read
ing the two distinct senses of dunamis in this passage are not only acknowledged but are
exploited to make the case for the autonomous existence of potentialities as such.
Although, as we will see in a moment, Agamben reads dunaton, dunamis, and adu
naton in this sentence as always referring to the potentiality or capability of a thing to
be or to do, and never to purely logical possibility and impossibility, his and Irwin's
interpretations share some important common ground. For like Irwin, Agamben argues
that Aristotle's point here is not to provide criteria for modal possibility but precisely
to establish the persistent existence of potentialities that are not—and may never be—
actualized. For Irwin, in splitting the two senses of dunamis, Aristotle is attempting to
show not only that possibility is not identical with potentiality, but also that it is neither
necessary nor sufficient for it [First Principles 229]. Contra the Megarian position, for
Aristotle potentialities exist, regardless of whether the conditions for their actualization
exist. Or as Agamben puts it: "There is a form, a presence of that which is not in act, and
this privative presence is potentiality" [PP 277], and more fully in Homo Sacer, "what
Aristotle undertakes to consider in Book Theta of the Metaphysics is .. . not potentiality
as a merely logical possibility but rather the effective modes of potentiality's existence"
[45].14 And this latter consideration—that is, of the effective modes of potentiality's ex
istence—goes right to the heart of Agamben's first-philosophical project: the affirmation
of an existence of potentiality as such, of potentiality as "the existence of non-Being, the
presence of an absence" [P 179].15
14
Though Aristotle says in 1046a 5 that dunamis has equivocal senses, if Harry Ide's analysis is
correct it appears he never (or at least in the texts under consideration here) actually uses the noun
dunamis to mean "possibility." While he uses adjectival derivatives (dunatos, etc.) to describe
states of affairs as possible, or as possibilities (dunata), dunamis is always reserved for potentiality
in its "first meaning," the "authoritative definition." See Ide 20-21.
15
In Ways of Being Charlotte Witt has made a very similar claim about the basic goal of book
Theta, in which, she argues, "being X potentially and being X actually distinguish two ways of
being rather than adding two new kinds of entities to Aristotle's ontological inventory" [44], She
has also argued that Aristotle subtly draws on the modal significance of dunamis or dunaton in
order to bolster his ontological analysis of dunamis as capacity or existing-yet-inactive potential
ity [30-37], As the title of her book suggests, Witt essentially reads book Theta as an ontological
treatise on the nature of potential being as opposed to actual being, and suggests that the burden
of the argument in Theta is to introduce a "new, ontological meaning of dunamis" [40], On this
basic point, for which she more or less implicitly draws on Heidegger's lectures on Theta, Agamben
would presumably agree, though Witt argues that in the end Aristotle shows certain "Megarian ten
dencies" [19] and proposes a "kind of Aristotelian actualism" [/5] in granting primacy to actuality
(see especially her chapter 4). This latter interpretation is, not without reason, widely accepted;
as will be noted below, however, Agamben claims that the position of primacy in Aristotle's text is
less easily decided.
In Homo Sacer Agamben asserts that there is a "constitutive ambiguity of the Ar
istotelian theory of dunamis/energeia," and "it is never clear, to a reader freed from the
prejudices of tradition, whether book Theta of the Metaphysics in fact gives primacy to
actuality or to potentiality" [47]. Whether or not this is indeed unclear in Aristotle, it
nevertheless is clear that Agamben wants not only to call this hierarchy into question but
also to tilt the balance distinctly toward potentiality. And indeed the aim of this remap
ping of the relation between dunamis and energeia seems to extend beyond a mere re
equilibration of the two or even an inversion of the hierarchy, but also toward a thinking
of potentiality wholly detached from actuality: a thinking of pure potentiality or potenti
ality as such. Actuality, Agamben suggests, must thus be reinscribed within the domain of
potentiality, which exists no less than entities and essences, and indeed must be thought
of as anterior and superordinate to realized beings and events. And in what is more or less
a programmatic description of his own project (which we might thus call a fundamental
"dunamology" or "potentiology"), Agamben here calls for "a new and coherent ontology
of potentiality ... [one that will replace] the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality
and its relation to potentiality" [44] and will enable us to truly follow Aristotle's affirma
tion of the "autonomous existence of potentiality" [45],
Dunamis and Adunamia
This attempt to level or re-equilibrate—and eventually dissociate—the paired terms duna

mis and energeia is, however, not the most audacious interpretive or philological move in
Agamben's reading. On a philological level, Agamben's most idiosyncratic interpretation
of Aristotle's text is, in truth,not that of dunamis at all, but of dunamis's other conjoined
twin: adunamia. What is adunamia (from which is derived the adjective adunatori)! The
majority of Aristotle's translators and commentators understand the alpha-privative as
indicating the negation or opposite of dunamis (whether as possibility or as capacity) and

thus read adunamia as meaning either impossibility or incapacity/impotence. Agamben,
however, offers a very differentreading: not impossibility or incapacity, but "potentiality
not to," "capacity not to," or in his distinctive usage, "impotentiality" [impotenza].
The potentiality not to (be or do) is, of course, absolutely essential to any potentiality.
Indeed, you cannot have the latter without the former, since without the potentiality not
to pass over into act, potentiality would always simply be or immediately lead to actual
ity; all potentialities would always be realized and the Megarians would be right. The
two form an indissoluble pair and cannot be conceived independently of one another, or
in Aristotle's words, "there is an impotentiality corresponding to each kind of potential
ity" [1019b 20], and "every potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to
the same" [1046a 32; qtd. in Homer Sacer 45]. To every potentiality there corresponds a
potentiality not to, a contrary possibility, which is to say that adunamia is the constitutive
counterpart to dunamis, otherwise dunamis would simply be energeia: in a very rigorous

sense, "all potentiality is impotentiality" [P 181; PP 280], This, for Agamben, is "the car
dinal point on which [Aristotle's] entire theory of dunamis turns" [Homo Sacer 45], and
when he notes this relation, for example, in The Coming Community (among a number
of other places) he emphatically tilts the scale on the side of impotentiality, writing that
"Of the two modes in which, according to Aristotle, every potentiality is articulated, the
decisive one is that which the philosopher calls 'the potentiality not to be' [dunamis me
einai] or also impotentiality [adunamia]" [35], It is crucial to note this intimacy of the
bond between potentiality and potentiality-not-to (as well as the "decisiveness" of the
latter) if we are to understand Agamben's reading of 1047a 24-26, in which he—and
perhaps he alone—interprets adunaton precisely as this "potentiality not to" rather than
"impossibility."
In his important introduction to Potentialities, Daniel Heller-Roazen succinctly
glosses Agamben's argument concerning this section of the Metaphysics, and in doing so
throws a helpful light on Agamben's reading of the passage. For Agamben what is at stake
in this sentence is neither a definition nor a criterion of dunamis, but a description of what
occurs in the passage from potentiality to act. As Heller-Roazen writes:
The potential not to be (or do), Agamben suggests, is not effaced in the passage
into actuality; on the contrary, actuality is itself nothing other than the full real
ization of the potential not to be (or do), the point at which, as Aristotle writes,
"there will be nothing impotential" [outhen estai adunaton]. Far from stating
that "what is potential is what is not impotential," Aristotle's definition of po
tentiality therefore concerns the precise condition in which potentiality realizes
itself. [17]16
But how exactly does Agamben interpret the sentence as a description of the passage
from potentiality to act?
What complicates the issue here is that in showing impotentiality to be an essential
and equal component of potentiality, Agamben has established that the passage to act
cannot be seen simply as the inevitable end result of potentiality's irresistible tendency to
realize itself. Being or doing is not founded on the inherent tension of potentiality toward
being or doing, but also on a modification or alteration of the equally forceful potentiality
not to be or do. In short, energeia is not the realization solely of potentiality-to, but a sort
of precipitation, the result of a process that happens in the autonomous realm of dunamis
and adunamia, which in itself is relatively indifferentto energeia. Since impotentiality

is an integral component of (or, better, since it is) potentiality, then conceiving of the
passage to act is not as simple as saying that energeia is a matter of potentiality realizing
itself by overcoming the obstacle of adunamia, for energeia is also, as Heller-Roazen
notes, "nothing other that the full realization of the potential not to be (or do)," which in
turn must also be an element that in some way persists in that realization.
That this is the point of Agamben's reading is suggested by the fact that the section
of "On Potentiality" in which the discussion of this passage is found is titled "The Act
of Impotentiality." In the Italian version of the essay, however, this section bears the title
"Nulla sara di impotente" [There will be nothing impotential], which indeed is the last
clause of 1047a 24—26 as Agamben translates it: "What is potential is that for which, if
the act of which it is said to have the potential comes about, there will be nothing impo
tential." [Epotente cidper il quale, se avviene I'atto di cui e detto avere la potenza, nulla
sara di impotente.] [P 183; PP 284]. Both of those titles—"The Act of Impotentiality"

and "Nulla sara di impotente"—are pertinent to this crucial argument, and we must now
focus on each, beginning with the second: "There will be nothing impotential." It would
not be an exaggeration to suggest that Agamben's entire argument hinges on his reading
of this last phrase of Aristotle's opaque sentence. Unfortunately, however, though much
of his argument can be pieced together from chapter 1.3 of Homo Sacer as well as the Bar
tleby essay and a few other texts, Agamben's precise reading of Aristotle's key sentence
is more or less illegible in the version of "On Potentiality" published in Potentialities.

"On Potentiality" was delivered as a lecture in Lisbon in 1987 and appeared in print
for the first time in Heller-Roazen's English translation for the landmark 1999 collection
Potentialities. It appeared more recently, however, in a substantially different form in
16
And see in general his discussion of potentiality 14-18.
the Italian analogue to Potentialities, titled La potenza delpensiero (where it in fact now
bears the same title as the collection). Among the changes to the Italian version is the
inclusion of a long passage that explains in considerable detail how we are to understand
the phrase concerning the adunaton, and in turn Agamben's entire doctrine of impoten
tiality.
On the question of what Aristotle means by the negated adunaton in the final clause
outhen estai adunaton, Agamben makes two central claims. The first, which we have al
ready discussed, is that adunaton does not mean "impossible" but rather "potential not to
(be or do)," and the second is that we must understand the negation of adunaton (outhen
estai) in a "privative mode" rather than as a "modal" negation.17 In a long passage not
included in the English edition he writes that, in contrast to the reading of adunaton as
"impossible,"
the impotentiality of which it is said that in the moment of the act will be nothing
cannot be anything but that adunamia which, according to Aristotle, belongs to
every dunamis: the potentiality not to (be or do). The correct translation would
thus be "What is potential is thatfor which, if the act of which it is said to have
the potential comes about, nothing will be of the potential not to (be or do)."
[E potente cio per il quale, se avviene l'atto di cui e detto avere la potenza, nulla
sara di potente non (essere o fare).] But how are we then to understand "nothing
will be of the potential not to (be or do)"? How can potentiality neutralize the
impotentiality that co-belongs with it?
A passage from De interpretatione provides us with some precious indications.
With regard to the negation of modal statements, Aristotle distinguishes and, at
the same time, puts in relation the problems of potentiality and modal enuncia
tion. While the negation of a modal statement must negate the mode and not the
dictum (thus the negation of "it is possible for it to be" is "it is not possible for
it to be" and the negation of "it is possible for it not to be" is "it is not possible
for it not to be"), on the plane of potentiality things are differentand negation
and affirmation do not exclude one another. "Since that which is potential is not
always in act," writes Aristotle, "even the negation belongs to it: indeed, one
who is capable of walking can also not walk, and one who can see can not see"
(21b 14-16). Thus, as we have seen, in book Theta and in De anima, the nega
tion of potentiality (or better, its privation) always has the form: "can not" (and
never "cannot"). "For this reason it seems that the expressions 'it is possible
for it to be' and 'it is possible for it not to be 'follow each other, since the same
thing can and can not be. Enunciations of this type are therefore not contradic
tory. However, 'it is possible for it to be' and 'it is not possible for it to be' never
go together" (21b 35-22a 2).
If we call the status of the negation of potentiality "privation," how should we

understand in a privative mode the double negation contained in the phrase:
"nothing will be of the potential not to (be or do)"? Insofar as it is not con
tradictory with respect to the potentiality to be, the potentiality not to be must
not simply be annulled, but, turning itself on itself, it must assume the form of
a potentiality not to not be. The privative negation of "potential not to be" is
therefore "potential not to not be" (and not "notpotential not to be").
17
On modal negation see also "Bartleby" in Potentialities 261-65.
What Aristotle then says is ... If a potentiality not to be originally belongs to ev
ery potentiality, one is truly capable only if, at the moment of the passage to the
act, one neither simply annuls one's own potentiality not to, nor leaves it behind
with respect to the act, but lets it pass wholly into it as such, that is, is able not
to not pass to the act. [PP 284-85; emphasis in orig.]18
It thus is clear why Agamben titles this section of the essay "Nulla sara di impotente,"
the phrase on which everything hinges; for in this very unusual "privative" interpreta
tion of the negated impotentiality in that final clause of the sentence, Agamben sees an
account of what the passage to the act must entail when impotentiality is viewed as co
belonging to potentiality. Impotentiality is not simply annulled or left behind, but is itself
also fulfilled, actualized in the act, which means that the act itself is a sort of "privative"
self-suspension of the potentiality-not-to, the impotenza that in the act turns on itself and
suspends itself in the form of a potential not to not be. For Agamben this is the meaning
of the clause outhen estai adunaton, "there will be nothing impotential."
This is also why, as noted above, the title of this same section in the English version
of the essay, "The Act of Impotentiality," is also entirely appropriate. If impotentiality is
indeed the "decisive" sense of potentiality, then actuality or energeia must then decisively
be thought as the fulfillment(the act) of impotentiality. At stake in Agamben's "impoten
tial" reading of this passage is his broader critique of the primacy of actuality in the philo
sophical tradition, which we already saw an element of in his more or less Heideggerian
affirmation of potentiality over actuality. This analysis of the passage of impotentiality
into act, however, constitutes a second element of this reconceptualization and revalua
tion of actuality. As suggested at the end of this long passage, for Agamben, in energeia,
it is not only potentiality but also and above all impotentiality that as such passes wholly
over into the act, and if this is the case then actuality must be seen not as the cancellation
of impotentiality and the fulfillment of potentiality, but rather as the precipitate of the
self-suspension of impotentiality, which produces the act in the far more obscure, but for
Agamben absolutely fundamental, mode of privation or steresis. It produces the act not in
the fashion of a positive ground or even a negative ground, but in a paradoxical structure
of a privation that is not a negation.

The identification and description of this peculiar form of relation—which seems to
be precisely a form of unrelation—is of utmost importance for Agamben's thought, and
as we will see in the next section, in Homo Sacer this relation between a potentiality-not
to (be or do) and the reality or act that it privatively produces and includes will be given
the name "relation of ban" or "relation of exception," and its logic will be elaborated in
terms of the paradox of sovereignty, that is, the power that grounds the juridical order
by virtue of its ability to suspend the law. One of the fundamental discoveries of Homo
Sacer (via Schmitt) is that the structure of this potentiality-not-to that withholds itself
while privatively giving being—which is also the "essential structureof the metaphysical
tradition" [8] —is none other than the structure of sovereignty, "the originary structure in
which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending itself' [28], "the hidden
foundation on which the entire political system rest[s]" [9].19
18
This passage would roughly replace the last paragraph on page 183 of Potentialities.
19
As is well known, Agamben studied law at university, but turned to philosophy soon thereafter.
His legal training, however, served him well in his research for Homo Sacer, as he noted in a 2001
interview: "For a long time [after turning to philosophy], I thought it was a mistake to have studied
law. That is something, however, that I no longer think because without this familiarity I would
probably never have been able to write Homo Sacer" [de la Durantaye 203-04], It is, further, on
the basis of his having "caught sight" of the inclusive-exclusive ban structure that Agamben distin
guishes his thought from the political traditions to which it is probably closest, namely, anarchism
and Marxism [Homo Sacer 12].
3
Potentiality, Sovereignty, and Constituent Power
It is no exaggeration, then, to say that this concept of potenza forms the philosophical
foundation for the biopolitical thesis first developed in Homo Sacer. As noted earlier,
Agamben's central analysis of the relation between sovereign power and the bare life
over which it rules is explicitly presented as a coherent development of his earlier analy
sis of potentiality. It is also, moreover, articulated as a critique of precisely the notion
of constituent power that lies at the core of Negri's work. In chapter 1.3 of Homo Sacer
Agamben passes from the book's opening analysis of the logic of sovereignty to that
of potentiality via a discussion of the aporetic relation between constituent power and
constituted power, closing with some brief but crucial comments on Negri's discussion
of this relation in Insurgencies and the claim that "Negri cannot find any criterion, in his
wide analysis of the historical phenomenology of constituent power, by which to isolate
constituent power from sovereign power" [43].
Why does he say this, when Negri unequivocally states in that book that "everything,
in sum, sets constituent power and sovereignty in opposition" [Insurgencies 13]? The
argument here is driven by Agamben's specific response to Negri's argument concerning

the way sovereign power, which Negri conceives as the concentrated force of formalized
and normalized constituted power, becomes detached from constituent power and then
seeks to deny or contain in "a rigidified formal constitution" the "absolute process" of
constituent power, which is "all-powerful and expansive, unlimited and unfinalized" [13].
In truth, the question of sovereign power as distinct from constituted power is not greatly
developed in Insurgencies, where sovereignty is generally identified as a modality of con

stituted power. Though the historical account of sovereignty's guises and transformations
will, in the wake of Homo Sacer, be greatly augmented and refined in Empire, sover
eignty for Negri remains primarily a principle of absolutization and transcendentalization
of constituted power, which removes power from the revolutionary plane of immanence
to the absolute and transcendental—it is a "transcendental apparatus." (See Hardt and Ne
gri, Empire 69-90). Sovereign power is thus the absolutized counter-revolutionary force
driving each of the strategies of containment that Negri's historical analysis of constituent
power traces, and the quandaries of legal theory that he surveys all arise from the funda
mental assumption that constituent power must be understood "in a juridical apparatus"
while at the same time "maintain[ing] the irreducibility of the constituent fact, its effects,
and the values it expresses" [Insurgencies 3]. For Negri, this is an irresolvable aporia; the
"[solution of] the problem of constituent power from the point of view of public law" is
an "impossibility" [10] because in truththere is no real intimacy but rather a fundamental

"contradiction between constituent power and juridical arrangement" [3], with the latter
always seeking to neutralize and contain the former, a Thermidor that overtakes and de
fuses the forces of constituent power precisely by seeking to codify and compartmental
ize them in juridical norms. (See Insurgencies 2.)20
20
In his response to Homo Sacer in the 2002 reissue of II potere costituente, Negri does not con
test, and indeed seems to accept, this identification of sovereign and constituted power. For Negri,
Agamben's objection is not that sovereignty and constituted power are two different things, but
rather that it would be impossible to think of a constituent power that is free and autonomous from
constituted power: "According to Agamben," he writes, "constituent power is attracted to its op
posite and thus cannot be assumed as a radical expression of innovation of reality nor as a thematic
sign of revolutionary movement. In short, for Agamben constituent power is formally included in
constituted power, in sovereignty, in the political tradition of modernity" [8].
In asserting, however, that Negri cannot separate sovereign and constituent pow
er Agamben is placing these two terms within a fundamentally different problematic,
namely, the particular mode in which potentiality passes into act, which for him follows
nothing other than the logic of what he calls the sovereign ban-structure, in which a "con
stituent" (im)potentiality suspends itself in a sort of state of exception and gives rise to
"constituted" actuality. For Agamben, the reason Negri cannot separate constituent power
from sovereign power is not that the former is formally included in the latter but that he
does not ground his understanding of constituent power's "power" on the (Agambenian-)
Aristotelian model of dunamis-adunamia and does not conceive of the "productive" pas
sage from constitutive potentiality to constituted act through the self-suspending ban
structure of sovereignty. Negri's account of power, then, differs from Agamben's in at
least two critical ways. (1) Derived from Spinoza's concept of potentia, "the force that
actually produces [things]" [Savage Anomaly 191], constituent power tends irresistibly
toward actualization or constitution and is viewed fundamentally as generative, produc
tive potentiality without the correlate impotentiality.21Indeed, even though constituent
power may be "an articulation of the sense of the insufficiency of existence and a deeply
vigorous reaction to an unbearable absence of being" [Insurgencies 23], if there is a func
tional opposite to Spinozan potentia in the structural dynamic of actualization it is not

impotentia, but rather the counter-force of potestas, Spinoza's term for the "subordination
of the multiplicity, of the mind, of freedom, of potentia" [Savage Anomaly 190-91],22

(2) Once constituted, constituted power is (or becomes) an alien power with respect to
constituent power, which it then seeks to contain in the form of the state, constitutional
norms, or sovereignty (which will all vary according to historical specificities but ulti
mately amount to the same thing). As he writes, "When constituent power sets in motion
the constituent process, every determination is free and remains free. On the contrary,
sovereignty presents itself as a fixing of constituent power, and therefore as its termina
tion, as the exhaustion of the freedom that constituent power carries" [Insurgencies 22],
That is to say that since for Negri the constituent power (or its near synonyms: desire,
living labor, love of community) of the multitude in a free praxis is ceaseless and gapless,
halted only by the obstacle of sovereign and constituted power, it is in short conceived
as a sort of ceaselessly productive dunamis without adunamia, making Negri's argument
something of a Megarian one, acknowledging and valuing only the dunamis that carries
over into act or is prevented from freely doing so by external obstacles and counter
powers such as the state or imperial sovereignty. For Agamben, however, the paradoxi
cal ban-structure of the process of potentiality's actualization suggests that sovereignty's
claims are much more than a ruse or a strategy for containing an insurgent constituent
power within the boundaries of the juridical order. The relation is far more intimate and
2/
Negri does in fact note this aspect of potentiality [Insurgencies 20, 23] and does cite Agamben in
"
a discussion of "absence," "possibilities," and "the presence of negative possibilities [Insurgen
cies 13, 339n50], but this does not prove to be particularly determinate for his account of constitu
ent power, nor, as will be discussed below, does it prevent him from misreading or mischaracter
izing Agamben's term impotenza.

22
Though the question cannot be pursued here, Negri's interpretation of Spinoza is surely as id
iosyncratic as Agamben's reading of Aristotle. For example, as Hardt notes in his Translator's
Foreword to The Savage Anomaly, the sharp distinction that Negri draws between potentia and po
testas is anything but a settled matter in Spinoza scholarship, and it would be hard to overestimate
the importance of this distinction to the development Negri's concept of constituent power [jciV].
"
Agamben's own discussion of Spinoza in "Absolute Immanence (1996) can be read as an implicit
counter-reading to Negri's. In terms that map consistently onto the present discussion, Agamben
here argues that Spinoza's idea of beatitude entails "acquiescentia in se ipso, 'being at rest in one
self'" [Potentialities 237], See also The Kingdom and the Glory 249-51.
complex, and we cannot simply appeal to a constituent power freed from the oppressive
containment of sovereignty.23 Contra Negri, Agamben argues that "The relation between
constituent power and constituted power is just as complicated as the relation Aristotle
established between potentiality and act, dunamis and energeia', and, in the last analysis,
the relation between constituent and constituted power (perhaps like every authentic un
derstanding of the problem of sovereignty) depends on how one thinks the existence and
autonomy of potentiality" [Homo Sacer 44]. Indeed, for Agamben, "only if it is possible
to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently—and even to think be
yond this relation—will it be possible to think a constituent power wholly released from
the sovereign ban" [44].
From Negri's perspective, on the other hand, Agamben's continuous efforts to de
flate the imperative of potentiality to produce and realize itself in work, and his correlate
valorization of "impotentiality" and "inoperativity" appear as a sort of quietism, a private
ontological ecstasy rather than a productive and constructive collective activity. As Brett
Neilson has rightly noted, "Negri's disagreement with Agamben stems from an equation
of constituent power with living labour and a refusal to ground ontology in the condition
of bare life" ["Potenza Nuda?" 68], a condition which Negri characterizes as pure sub
jection and passivity in the face of an absolutized sovereign power. But as Neilson also
notes, Negri does not engage Agamben's reading of Aristotelian potentiality so much as
insist on his Spinozan productivist alternative [68-69]. Because he does not allow for or
engage Agamben's account of dunamis-adunamia, Negri consistently reads impotenza
not as potentiality-not-to, but as powerlessness, passivity, impotence and this of course
stands in stark contrast to the ceaseless productivity of constituent power in the body of
the multitude.
If correct, however, Agamben's analysis of how potentiality realizes (but also does
not realize) itself compromises the notion—so insistently valorized by Negri—of con
stituent power's creativity, of the multitude's "work," its "living labor," its energeia and
ergon. While largely implicit in Homo Sacer, such a critique of Negri can be found in an
essay from 2004, "The Work of Man," where Agamben returns to the dunamis-energeia
pair, but with a tightened focus on the latter.24 Here he writes,"Ergon in Greek means 'la
bor,' 'work' [opera]. Yet... the meaning of the term is complicated because of the close
relation that links it to one of the fundamental concepts of Aristotle's thought: energeia
(lit. 'being at work'). The term was, in all probability, created by Aristotle, who uses it in
functional opposition to dunamis" ["Work of Man" 1]. In the passage from the Nicoma
chean Ethics that Agamben is discussing here (1097b 22ff), Aristotle names several types
of artisans (the carpenter, the shoemaker) whose "work," whose product, is clearly identi
fiable (a table, a pair of shoes) and then asks the vexing question of whether it is possible
that there is "a certain work and an activity for the carpenter and the shoemaker, and for
man there is none, that he is born with no work (argos)T' ["Work of Man" 1 ]. A carpenter,
who has the potentiality of building, is essentially defined by the determinate ergon in
which his dunamis realizes itself. But unlike artisans or practitioners of whatever skill,
man as such cannot be said to have a determinate ergon and so any and every specific en
ergeia or ergon that a given human might realize proves entirely useless in arriving at the
definition or identification of human essence. This leaves us with a quandary, for if there
is no "work of man," the dunamis of man cannot be derived or described on the basis of
it, and we are left to doubt the "very possibility of identifying the energeia, the being
at-work of man as man" [2]. Is it possible, then, that there is fundamentally no work of
23
For a slightly different critique ofHardt and Negri 'v division of constituent and constituted pow
er, one that focuses on the difficulties of consistently separating the immanent from the transcendent
in their logical and historical analyses, see Fitzpatrick, "The Immanence o/Empire."
24 without End 141-42.
This argument is also briefly sketched in Means
man, or better, that man is characterized by, in Agamben's words, "an essential inactivity
[inoperosita] . . . with respect to his concrete occupations and functions [operazioni]"
[2]? Is it possible that human essence lies in what withholds itself from the realization of
all concrete human ergal

"If he were to lack an ergon of his own," Agamben writes, "man would not even
have an energeia, a being in act that could define his essence: he would be, that is, a
being of pure potentiality, which no identity and no work could exhaust" [2]. Though
Aristotle puts forward such a possibility, Agamben notes the way he quickly rejects it
and instead seeks to identify the work of man in the sphere of life by means of a dubious
analogy drawn between human erga (shoemaking, lyre playing, etc.) and the functions
[erga] of the individual parts of the human body (eye, hand, foot, etc.). As the carpenter
builds and the cobbler makes shoes, so the eye sees and the hand grasps, but what then is
the function of the whole living body, and might we find in it something like the work of
man? This moment of slippery logic in Aristotle's argumentation has monumental con
sequences according to Agamben's reading, for not only does it transfer the political—or
at least the practical—considerations about to ergon tou anthropou into the sphere of
the physical human body, but it then leads Aristotle to enact a "series of caesurae in the
continuum of life" [4], dividing it into nutritive,sensitive, and practical-rational life. This
fateful displacement of the question of the work of man onto the life of man (which is
precisely motivated by Aristotle's actualist rejection of the possibility that there is no
work of man) necessitates or produces, in the argumentation of the Nicomachean Ethics,
the fundamental biopolitical division between differenttypes of "life" (most coherently,
though not exclusively, schematized by the terminological and conceptual division be
tween bios and z,oe). For in attempting to define the work of man, now identified with
the life of man, Aristotle must strategically separate out and exclude the life that is also
shared by plants and animals (nutritive, sensitive) from the life—"a certain kind of life
[zoe tis]" [5]—that is distinctively and exclusively human (the practical-rational). And it
is this latter that must be lived, must be-at-work, in a certain way—namely, "living well"
[eu zen], or "in accordance with excellence" [5],
Though the issue merits a fuller examination, for the purposes of the present discus
sion it will suffice to note that this fundamentally biopolitical gesture is motivated here
by an actualist bias on Aristotle's part, a blindness to a possibility that his own doctrine of
potentiality opens for thought. Instead of seeking to resolve the enigma of the "work of
man" precisely in the lack of a work proper to man (that is, in man's impotenza and man's
inoperosita), Aristotle shifts the problematic onto the human body and there attempts to
discover the energeia of human life by enacting a biopolitical separation of man's ani
mal life from his human life. In contrast to this actualist view, however, Agamben reads
against the grain of Aristotle's text and (drawing on Dante and Averroes) identifies and
valorizes a human dunamis that does not lead, or does not necessarily lead, to energeia
or act or work [opera]. This brings him to a definition of the human and of human (onto-)
politics that is, among other things, founded on a paradoxical idleness or resistance with
respect to act and work, "a politics that corresponds to the inactivity [inoperosita] of man,
one which is determined, that is, not simply and absolutely beginning from the being
at-work of human rationality, but from a working that exposes and contains in itself the
possibility of its own not existing, of its own inactivity" ["Work of Man" 10].
"The Work of Man" concludes with the suggestion that in order to discover whether
there is "a politics possible today that is equal to the absence of a work of man, and will
not simply fall back into the assumption of a biopolitical task ... it will be necessary to
put aside the emphasis on labor and production and to attempt to think of the multitude as
a figure, if not of inaction, at least of a working that in every act realizes its own shabbat
and in every work is capable of exposing its own inactivity and its own potentiality" [10].
Though Negri is not mentioned by name in the essay, it is clear to whom this statement is
directed. Agamben's seemingly odd call to jettison all appeals to labor and work becomes
clear (and clearly not a call to blank passivity) once we see that it is based on the "cardinal
point" that potentiality is "not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to
not-do, potential not to pass into actuality" [P 179-80], Contrary to what we might call
the Negrian-Megarian position, dunamis is not always "at work" and not always tending
toward production, and in this capacity for not passing over into act lies the true nucleus
of human potentiality. Or to put the terms of the debate at hand in the form of a question:
can Negri's constituent power interruptitself? Is living labor free not to work? Can living
labor rest or pause? And, if and when it does, in that interval between working and not
working, what is the status of the being who equally can and can not? This intervallic be
ing is the protagonist of Agamben's drama and this interval the stage.
Never Work
Agamben has given us a handful of figures who dwell in this half-space between being
at-work and argia, certainly the most striking of whom is to be found in his magisterial
reading of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Bartleby, of course, has proven to be
something of a Rorschach test in contemporary philosophy, having been taken up by
Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Zizek, and others. Negri, too, has invoked the scrivener;
however, the Bartleby whom Negri has in mind is in fact not a self-projection, but quite
specifically Agamben's Bartleby. For example, in "The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic,"
after reiterating his claim that Agamben has "flattened the reality of the biopolitical field
onto the fabric of indefinite negative ontology," and "excluded production from the bio
political context," Negri polemically writes that "the height of resistance is interpreted
by Agamben as passivity rather than as rebellion, represented by Bartleby rather than
Malcolm X, by homo sacer rather than the slave or the proletariat" [123],
In his passive refusal of work, Bartleby may be, Negri grants, a figure for resistance
to the forces of sovereign and constituted power, but he is still merely a "beautiful soul"
who does not yet know how to turn his resistance into productive and collective action;
he does not know how to exercise his constituent power and thus remains passive and
inert. "[Bartleby's] refusal," he and Hardt write in Empire, "certainly is the beginning
of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning. . . . Beyond the simple refusal, or as
part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new
community. This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward
homo homo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the
community" [204]. As Stefano Franchi has noted, this reading of Agamben's Bartleby
frames the argument squarely within a workerist paradigm and aligns Bartleby's disrup
tive passivity with a Trontian strategy of refusal [38-39] ,25 And the failure of such a tacti
cal passivity—which would seek to remove the productive power of living labor from the
organizing and exploitative power of capital—is, in Agamben's purely negative version,
its inability to direct itself to a new constitutive activity (rebellion). It is, in short, inertia
for inertia's sake. Though Bartleby's may be a heroic refusal, it is, for Negri, an ultimately
melancholic and quietist one; there is no joy to be found in Bartleby's story, no hope for
ultimate liberation:
25
See also de la Durantaye's comments on inoperativeness and the workerist strategy of refusal,
18.
His refusal is so absolute that Bartleby appears completely blank, a man without
qualities or, as Renaissance philosophers would say, homo tantum, mere man
and nothing more. Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particu
lars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing
more. And in the course of the story he strips down so much—approximating
ever more closely naked humanity, naked life, naked being—that eventually he
withers away, evaporates in the bowels of the infamous Manhattan prison, the
Tombs. [Empire 203]
But as the foregoing discussion has sought to show, Agamben has done anything but
"exclude production" from his thought (biopolitical or otherwise). With the same hereti
cal sensibility that leads him to read the end of Kafka's "Before the Law" in a happy light,
Agamben finds Bartleby and his finale in the Tombs to be a figure for creation and for a
sort of joy.26 Indeed, it is rather fortuitous that Negri characterizes Agamben's Bartleby
in these starkly passive and negative terms since they are so clearly at odds with the
argument Agamben actually advances. Though Bartleby is certainly a figure—perhaps
Agamben's supreme figure—of impotentiality, "nothing is fartherfrom him than the he

roic pathos of negation" [Potentialities 256]. And this is because what is being thought
in the concept of impotentiality is not at all blank passivity but precisely the structure of
production—or in the term the essay foregrounds, creation.
In the first section of the Bartleby essay Agamben restates the Aristotelian argument
detailed above, but this time he also articulates it with certain debates in medieval Jewish
and Islamic theology. Of particular interest, in this essay about the reluctant scrivener, is
the philosophical tradition in which "divine creation is conceived as an act of writing"

and "the creative word of God ... is likened to a scribe moving his pen" [Potentialities
246]. Descended, Agamben argues, from Aristotle's comparison of nous, thought, with
a writing tablet on which nothing is actually written [De anima 430a 1], this figural
tradition reaches a sort of apex in Avicenna's Liber VI naturalium in which the image
of writing is used to illustrate the varying degrees of potentiality, arriving ultimately at

a supreme type, whose contours will surely at this point come as no surprise. There is
"generic" potentiality (which Avicenna calls "material"), which "resembles the condi
tion of a child who may certainly one day learn to write but does not yet know anything
about writing"; there is "existing" potentiality (which Avicenna calls "possible"), which
"belongs to the child who has begun to write with pen and ink and knows how to form
the first letters"; and finally there is "a complete or perfect potentiality that belongs to the
scribe who is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he does not
write .... The scribe who does not write (of whom Bartleby is the last, exhausted figure)
is perfect potentiality" [Potentialities 246-47]. What is perfect about this last form of
potentiality is precisely its withholding itself from the passage into act of which it is fully
capable, its remaining in the mode of a pure hexis, or having, in which what is seized
and held is not any ergon or energeia, but the potentiality to be or not be, the capacity
to pass or not pass into the act, which for Agamben lies in a dimension "beyond Being
and Nothing" [Potentialities 259] and, contra Negri, is the true "a priori of every act of
production" [Empire 366].
As the "prince of the falasifa" [Potentialities 246]—the Islamic theologians who
"remained faithful to Aristotle's legacy" [249]—Avicenna crystallizes the image of pure
26
Agamben's reading of Kafka's parable is found in Homo Sacer chapter 1.4, which concludes
with this passage concerning the desoeuvrement or inoperativeness that the man from the country
patiently works on the law: "The only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it
as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted (like individual action or collective action
understood as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de potentia ad actum" [62],
potentiality as the seizing of this capacity to pass or not pass into act, and with this
thought opens a passage toward what Agamben calls "the construction of an experience
of the possible as such" [249], an experience not of writing, but of the white sheet on
which nothing is yet, and may ever be, written. This blank white sheet is the paper that
lies before Bartleby as he refuses to copy, but in the metaphorics of Agamben's reading,
this is not simply a refusal of work or labor (either as a resistance to exploitation or as
simple passivity). Rather it is the result of the experiment Bartleby obscurely conducts
behind his green screen, having passed through all the degrees of potentiality up to the
supreme form, which consists not in the virtuosic exercise of a capacity (for example,
to write, which Bartleby can indeed perform with virtuosity), but in the grasping of the
virtuosic capacity itself in a suspended, privative mode.27 To have a faculty, Agamben
argues, "means to have a privation. And potentiality is . . . the mode of existence of this
privation" [P 179],
This is the force of Agamben's claim that Bartleby, in the moment of not exercising
his capacity, "writes nothing but [his] potentiality to not-write" [Coming Community 37],
and it is why Bartleby's work in the Dead Letter Office proved so decisive for him. In
keeping with his perversely joyous reading of the tale's finale, Agamben writes that the
"undelivered letters are the ciphers of joyous events that could have been, but never took
place" [Potentialities 269], Essentially linked to Bartleby's formula and (non-)refusal,

these letters are indeed erga inscribed upon the white sheet and thus mark the "passage
from potentiality to actuality," but they therefore equally mark the "nonoccurrence of
something" [269] as well; that is to say, in the vision of the undelivered letter, the let
ter that never arrives, Bartleby sees not only the ergon of a realized dunamis, but also
the possibility that was never realized in any work. And the experience of that point of
contingency—the suspended moment of potentiality as such—is what the scrivener who
does not write retrieves in his obscure refusal.
First behind his green screen in the law office, then balanced on the banister in the
stairwell, and finally in the Tombs, Bartleby situates himself ever more securely on this
point of contingency, an intervallic space that reveals itself, under Agamben's lens, to be
anything but melancholy: "in the end, the walled courtyard is not a sad place. There is sky
and there is grass. And the creature knows perfectly well 'where it is'" [271], Negri of
course, is right to characterize Agamben's Bartleby as a sort of self-projection, for what
Agamben discerns in Bartleby's story is undoubtedly an allegory for his own potentiolo
27
Agamben's argument concerning the virtuosicperformance o/impotenza (virtuosicperformance
as the performance o/impotenza) must be distinguished from the idea of virtuosity developed by
Paolo Virno in A Grammar of the Multitude. There, Virno uses the term "virtuosity" to mean "the
special capabilities of a performing artist" [52], which realize themselves not in a produced mate
rial object but in the public performance itself. In an implicit response to Agamben (who is not
named in the text), Virno presents Glenn Gould as a negative example of virtuosity, or a retreat
" "
from virtuosity, insofar as he renounces performance (the "political dimension and "active life
of his profession) in favor of making recordings, which leave behind "extrinsic products" [55], i.e.,
LPs. (Agamben presents Gould as an avatar ofBartleby in the "Bartleby" chapter of The Coming
Community [35-37].) The lack of explicit engagement with Agamben in these pages is especially
pronounced when Virno writes: "One would need to reread the passages from the Nicomachean
Ethics on the essential difference between poiesis (production) and praxis (politics) with very close
connection to the notion o/parole in Saussure and, above all, to the analyses ofEmile Benveniste on
the subject of utterance (where 'utterance' is not understood to mean the content of what is uttered,
that 'which is said,' but the interjection of a word as such, the very fact of speaking)" [55-5(5]. As
Virno certainly knows, Agamben is engaged in precisely such a rereading, examples of which can
be found, among other places, in The Man without Content 68-93; Stanzas 135-58; Infancy and
History 3-10,44-61; Language and Death 19-26, 84-98; The Coming Community 79-83; Poten
tialities 27-61,177-84; Remnants of Auschwitz 137-46; and State of Exception 32-40.
gy. "Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike," Agamben writes of Bartleby's
experiment, "potentiality thus creates its own ontology" [259]. In the figure of the scribe
who does not exercise his capacity to write (or who exercises his capacity not to write)
and thus achieves the "restitutio in integrum of possibility" [267], Agamben presents an
image of the firstprinciple of his own politico-philosophical project.
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POTENTIALITY, ACTUALITY, CONSTITUENT POWER

Author(s): KEVIN ATTELL

however, Agamben and Negri nevertheless represent increasingly incompatible—or at

least contesting—accounts of biopolitics.

Esposito's Bios xix-xxvi.

ity and constituent power.

than "impotentiality")—a reading that characterizes all of Negri's critiques of Agamben's

36 diacritics / spring 2009

Hardt and Negri write in Commonwealth, "Agamben transposes biopolitics in a theo

Dunamis and Energeia

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 37

possible is that with respect to which nothing is impossible,"' [P 183; PP 284], or in

who, with a certain 'poorly-disguised feeling of triumph' attribute such a tautology to

from the other version.

38 diacritics / spring 2009

circle," which Heidegger might have had in mind.

multivocity and homonymy are ultimately equivalents [22-28, 42}.

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 39

presence of an absence" [P 179].15

40 diacritics / spring 2009

Dunamis and Adunamia

This attempt to level or re-equilibrate—and eventually dissociate—the paired terms duna

indicating the negation or opposite of dunamis (whether as possibility or as capacity) and

counterpart to dunamis, otherwise dunamis would simply be energeia: in a very rigorous

latter) if we are to understand Agamben's reading of 1047a 24-26, in which he—and

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 41

tentiality therefore concerns the precise condition in which potentiality realizes

and adunamia, which in itself is relatively indifferentto energeia. Since impotentiality

sara di impotente.] [P 183; PP 284]. Both of those titles—"The Act of Impotentiality"

is more or less illegible in the version of "On Potentiality" published in Potentialities.

Potentialities. It appeared more recently, however, in a substantially different form in

42 diacritics / spring 2009

A passage from De interpretatione provides us with some precious indications.

With regard to the negation of modal statements, Aristotle distinguishes and, at

go together" (21b 35-22a 2).

If we call the status of the negation of potentiality "privation," how should we

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 43

of a privation that is not a negation.

be precisely a form of unrelation—is of utmost importance for Agamben's thought, and

44 diacritics / spring 2009

Potentiality, Sovereignty, and Constituent Power

argument here is driven by Agamben's specific response to Negri's argument concerning

developed in Insurgencies, where sovereignty is generally identified as a modality of con

to the absolute and transcendental—it is a "transcendental apparatus." (See Hardt and Ne

an "impossibility" [10] because in truththere is no real intimacy but rather a fundamental

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 45

tional opposite to Spinozan potentia in the structural dynamic of actualization it is not

of the multiplicity, of the mind, of freedom, of potentia" [Savage Anomaly 190-91],22

cal ban-structure of the process of potentiality's actualization suggests that sovereignty's

izing Agamben's term impotenza.

46 diacritics / spring 2009

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 47

all concrete human ergal

48 diacritics / spring 2009

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 49

Tombs. [Empire 203]

Agamben's supreme figure—of impotentiality, "nothing is fartherfrom him than the he

the philosophical tradition in which "divine creation is conceived as an act of writing"

of writing is used to illustrate the varying degrees of potentiality, arriving ultimately at

50 diacritics / spring 2009

place" [Potentialities 269], Essentially linked to Bartleby's formula and (non-)refusal,

contingency—the suspended moment of potentiality as such—is what the scrivener who

does not write retrieves in his obscure refusal.

Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power /Kevin Attell 51