Foucault - Enlightenment 2 (continued) "potentially not to"

Continuation of the above article.

"If the notion of ‚contingency‛ in this passage appears to be tied to what Foucault 

elsewhere in the essay calls the present, one’s historical mode of being, Foucault appears to 

want to push it here toward Duns Scotus’ understanding of it as ‚something whose opposite 

could have happened in the very moment in which it happened.‛  Such would be an en- 

lightened critique of contingency, the transformation of contingency into the possibility of 

transgression. Foucault calls such a practice the ‚undefined work of freedom.‛28  

From the closing paragraphs of Foucault’s essay, one gathers that it is not entirely 

certain that such a transformation entails keeping one’s faith in the Enlightenment.  Rather, to 

‚enlighten‛ the Enlightenment, to push it towards the ‚potentiality not to‛ that is central to 

Agamben’s intellectual project, means to question any actualization of the Enlightenment 

itself, so as to return it instead to the question that both Kant and Foucault choose as their title. 

Any enlightened conception of the Enlightenment would thus refrain from presenting the 

Enlightenment as an answer; instead, the Enlightenment is crucially a question, is defined as a 

‚potentiality not to‛ that permanently resists actualization.  Thus, Enlightenment doctrine— 

the Law—is pushed back into the poetic regions of its own saying, into those liminal spaces 

that Agamben is so interested in, where the Enlightenment is always also otherwise."

Elena: 

Any enlightened conception of the Enlightenment would thus refrain from presenting the 

Enlightenment as an answer; instead, the Enlightenment is crucially a question, is defined as a 

‚potentiality not to‛ that permanently resists actualization. 

One could say that these are just word games to try to understand the possibilities at stake. Is it not clear that these men are using a different language to convey the idea of "not being identified?"

They put it beautifully and differently: "the pontentiality not to, that permanently resists actualization is one way of saying it", another way could be: the potentiality to permanently actualize one's self

In the act of not identifying the I resists actualization or identification but in so doing it finds another dimension of itself in which to exist, a layer both within itself and the outside world that keeps it from falling in the "historical" present and remaining in the "eternal human". 

This is to me a beautiful presentation of what religion is about, religion or psychology much more than philosophy unless by philosophy we were to understand the psychology of religion! My difficulty with the words is just a theoretical one for in my times the word philosophy is something we learn and study about while psychology deals with our "problems" while religion is for the "conservatives"! They all seem to depict our own confusion on knowledge and being but what is being dealt with in these texts that I've presented by Foucault is Being in its  deepest expression and he masterfully depicts it not only in the individual but in society. It's no wonder that so many people are "following" him.