The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism by Boano Camillo;

Author:Boano, Camillo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Potentiality (as will be specifically discussed in Chapter 10) has a prominent role throughout Agamben’s oeuvre, because of the connections that link power [potere] and potentiality [potenza] which enter the Homo Sacer project through an analysis of the relationship between the ‘constituting power’ that founds a sovereign state, and the ‘constituted power’ that maintains it once it has been established. Agamben argues, “Every authentic understanding of the problem of sovereignty depends on how one conceives of the existence and autonomy of potentiality” (1998[1995]: 44). Although this relationship between potentiality and autonomy is left open, “the most authentic nature of potentiality, Aristotle actually bequeathed the paradigm of sovereignty to Western philosophy” (1998[1995]: 46), and “potentiality and actuality are simply the two faces of the sovereign self-grounding of Being” (1998[1995]: 47). Agamben states that “the strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty” is not to be found in any of these reactionary thinkers, but instead is contained in “Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener who, with his ‘I would prefer not to,’ resists every possibility of deciding between potentiality and the potentiality not to” (1998[1995]: 47). The problem of potentiality is not a problem among others in Homo Sacer; rather, it is the foundational kernel. It is the problem that gives its logic and its paradoxes to all others – and as the reference to Bartleby makes clear, it involves thinking about potentiality in a less operative and reactionary manner, but rather in a novel fashion.

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