The Public Square: Love Is Life - Variations on Sovereignty

David Bleeden 2010

ISSN: 1832-5203

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84, November 2010

ARTICLE

One Paradigm, Two Potentialities: Freedom, Sovereignty and Foucault in Agamben’s

Reading of Aristotle’s ‘δύναμις’ (dynamis)

David Bleeden, DePaul University

ABSTRACT: This piece considers especially the concept of potentiality in Agamben, and how

it is indebted to and present in Foucault’s thought. It draws on Aristotle to highlight impor-

tant aspects of potentiality and to consider Agamben’s interpretation of it. The paper thus in-

dicates some of the important ontological and methodological aspects of the relations between

Foucault and Agamben.

Keywords: Agamben, dynamis, potentiality, Aristotle, Foucault, genealogy

English readers of Giorgio Agamben have an unusual opportunity compared to readers in

other languages, including Agamben’s native Italian. This opportunity consists in the possi-

bility of reading the essay ‚On Potentiality‛ which to date has only been published in an Eng-

lish language collection of essays entitled Potentialities.1 ‚On Potentiality‛ was presented as a

public lecture, in Italian, at the University of Lisbon in 1986. The essay consists of a reading of

Aristotle’s conception of δύναμις (dynamis) or ‘potentiality’ and ultimately argues that this

concept provided Western thinking the ‚originary paradigm‛ of human freedom.

Despite the absence of ‚On Potentiality‛ in languages other than English, readers will

likely be familiar with the specifics of the essay’s argumentation. This is because nine years

after he first presented ‚On Potentiality,‛ Agamben employs the same argumentation in the

book Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life).2 But

the conclusion that Agamben draws from this argumentation is quite different from that ar-

rived at in ‚On Potentiality.‛ Rather than providing the paradigm for human freedom, he

concludes in Homo Sacer that δύναμις (dynamis) provides the paradigm for sovereignty. Sove-

reignty is what makes it possible for sovereign entities (nation-states for example) to lawfully

do anything to people, citizens or otherwise. δύναμις, then, has provided the paradigm by

which something like human freedom becomes extremely limited, if not impossible.

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1999).

Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1995). Translated by

Danile Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1998).

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

It is tempting to think that providing any substantive explanation for the extreme

difference between these conclusions would be largely speculative. Contrary to this tempta-

tion, I think that we have the means to provide a substantive, that is, non-speculative or at

least minimally speculative, explanation for this difference. Specifically, I think that this dif-

ference is the result of Agamben’s methodology, which he identifies as ‚archaeology.‛ In-

deed, he asserts, ‚To be sure, my investigations, like those of Foucault, have an archaeological

character.‛3 In what follows, then, I develop this explanation. To do this, I first detail the

reading of δύναμις made both in ‚On Potentiality‛ and Homo Sacer and the conclusions drawn

from this reading. I then turn my attention to Agamben’s understanding of both his own and

Foucault’s archaeological methodology and show that this methodology leads to the variance

in conclusion mentioned above.

Clearly, the argument that I am making requires a consideration of Agamben’s reading

of specific passages in Aristotle’s corpus. Although the trajectory of this essay is not to evalu-

ate Agamben’s reading of Aristotle per se, I have included footnotes containing both the

original Greek as well as the Loeb Classical Library translations, which are considered the ca-

nonical English translations. I have also included Joe Sach’s excellent literal translations for all

citations of Aristotle and have left Daniel Heller Roazen’s fine translations of Agamben’s

renderings of Aristotle’s Greek unchanged. This, I believe, provides readers interested in ma-

king such an evaluation the means to do so. Moreover, to prevent confusion, I cite and leave

unaltered published English translations of Agamben’s work.

‚On Potentiality‛

Agamben begins ‚On Potentiality‛ noting that ‛potentiality‛ has ‚at least since Aristotle‛

been located at the center of Western philosophical thought. One of Aristotle’s important con-

tributions, he argues, is to have introduced the distinction between ‘potentiality’ (δύναμις,

dynamis) and ‘actuality’ (ἐνέργεια, energeia) to the tradition.4 Agamben thus sets out to inves-

tigate this distinction. Animating his analysis is the contention ‚that the concept of poten-

tiality has never ceased to function in the life and history of humanity, most notably in that

part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency [potenza] to the point of imposing

its power over the whole planet.‛5 Potentiality, then, as passed down from Aristotle—and we

will investigate how Agamben understands this passing down to take place shortly—has had

an identifiable ‚function‛ since its introduction. Further, this function neither is nor has been

merely theoretical, but it is and has been ‘political’ as well; indeed, the two conclusions that

Agamben eventually draws from his argument differ precisely in what he thinks the juridical

and political effects of ‘potentiality’ are. Thus, Agamben sets two tasks for himself in ‚On

Potentiality.‛ He must develop an understanding of ‘potentiality’, and then identify what its

effects are and have been.

Agamben takes up these tasks by investigating the meaning of the verb ‚can‛ or

‚potere‛ which in its nominative form in Italian means ‚power.‛ Indeed, he wants to under-

Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is a Paradigm?‛ in The Signature of All Things: On Method, translated by Luca Di

Santo (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 31.

Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 177.

Ibid.

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

stand what we mean when we say, ‚I can‛ (posso) or ‚I cannot‛ (non posso). Agamben’s con-

tention is that all of us arrive at a ‚moment‛ when we must, ‚utter this ‘I can’ which does not

refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is nevertheless, absolutely demanding.‛6 This is

to say that we arrive at a point when we claim that we can do something that is ‚beyond all

faculties‛ that we believe ourselves to possess. Still, we press forward and state that we can do

this thing. Although this particular ‚I can‛ is meaningless with respect to that act that it pur-

ports to be able to undertake, Agamben argues that it ‚marks< the experience of potentiality‛

that each of us has. So, despite this meaninglessness, when we approach a limit of one of our

faculties or powers (potente) in this manner, what is proposed to us, or perhaps better what we

are confronted with, is the question: what exactly is this faculty or power by means of which I

can or I cannot? And thus, Agamben argues, we are confronted with the ‚originary problem

of potentiality‛ namely, ‚what does it mean ‘to have a faculty’? In what way can something

like a ‘faculty’ exist?‛7 The experience of potentiality, then, arrives at the moment when we

wonder what a faculty is and how we can have such a thing.

Agamben’s contention is not only that this question went unasked before Aristotle, but

also that the issue of a faculty was absent from Greek thought. Aristotle, then, brought the

problem of potentiality into Western thought and De Anima is one of the texts in which

Agamben locates the emergence of the question of potentiality. In De Anima, Aristotle won-

ders why the senses lack a sensation of themselves. Otherwise stated, he asks: why is it that

when no object is presented to the senses they provide nothing? Aristotle’s answer is that sen-

sibility is not actual but potential, meaning that sensibility is the potential that we posses to

have an actual sensation when a sensory object is presented to us. Although thinking of

sensibility as a faculty was alien to the Greeks, doing so is for us, Agamben argues, un-

problematic. Indeed, because the ‚vocabulary of potentiality‛ is so common to and so in-

grained in us, Agamben thinks that we fail to realize, ‚that what appears for the first time in

these lines is a fundamental problem that has only rarely come to light as such in the course of

Western thought.‛8 These lines, then, are the originary moment of the problem of potentiality

and as such they are a condition of the possibility for the thinking of a faculty.

The arguments under consideration indicate to Agamben that ‚potentiality is not

simply non-being‛; put in terms of the term with which he started his analysis, it is neither

simply the absence of an ability to nor its negation.9 Instead, potentiality is ‚the existence of

non-Being‛ it is the ‚presence of an absence,‛ the presence of the can that we cannot.10 Thus,

Agamben understands a ‘faculty’ or ‘power’ as this existent non-being. Having a power, then,

is ‚to have a privation‛ and the problem that Aristotle is interested in, as Agamben under-

stands it, is ‚how can an absence be present,‛ or, in the actual terms Aristotle is concerned

with in this passage from De Anima, how is it possible for sensation (aisthesis) to exist in its

absence (anesthesia)?11

Ibid., 178.

Ibid.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

To address this problem, Aristotle first distinguishes between generic and existing

potentiality. ‚Generic potentiality‛ requires the subject to ‚suffer‛ an alteration for it to be ac-

tualized. Agamben employs Aristotle’s example of this, namely a child knowing. Although a

child has the potential to know, she must suffer the alteration ‚through‛ learning to become

knowledgeable. Generic potentiality, though, is not what Aristotle is concerned with. Instead,

his focus is on the potentiality of a subject who has a particular ability. A poet, for example,

has the potential to write and does not need to suffer the alteration so as to be able to write

because of this ‚existing potentiality.‛ Aristotle, on Agamben’s reading, is interested in this to

the extent that the potentiality is not simply a potentiality to, a ‘can’, but also a potentiality

not-to, a ‘cannot’. Thus, potentiality can be said to have two ‚modes‛: to do and not to do, to

be actual and ‚not to pass into actuality.‛12

‚Book Theta‛ of the Metaphysics, Agamben argues, possesses the passages in which

Aristotle labors most diligently to get a handle on what is at stake with the negative mode, the

not to do or not passing into actuality, or as it is sometimes called, the privation of potentiality.

Agamben highlights two passages that he believes to be critically important. The first (1046e

25-32) states:

Impotentiality is a privation contrary to potentiality. Thus all potentiality is impotentiality

of the same and with respect to the same.13

He understands this passage to articulate the relation that is the ‚essence of potentiality,‛

namely the relation between potentiality (δύναμις) and its privation. The relation is one of a

self-maintenance with respect to its ‚own non-Being.‛ Thus, in Agamben’s words, ‚To be po-

tential means: To be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity.‛14 So, for some-

thing to exist in the ‚mode of potentiality‛ is for it to be ‚capable of‛ its own impotentiality, to

be self-able (posso), to be impotential. The poet, for example, can only potentially write in

virtue of, or in relation to, her ability not to write—the impotentiality of her writing. Only if

something is impotential in this way, Agamben argues, can it become potential. Something

can be (posso essere) only in virtue of its relation to its inability to be (non posso essere) or non-

being. This relation Agamben believes is the ‚originary structure‛ of δύναμις.

Ibid., 179.

Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 182. Agamben cites the passage as 1046e 25-32, when in fact it takes place at

1046a 30. The Greek reads, ‚καὶ ἡ ἀδυναμία καὶ τὸ ἀδύνατον ἡ τῇ τοιαύτῃ δυνάμει ἐναντία στέρησίς

ἐστιν, ὥστε τοῦ αὐτοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ πᾶρα δύναμις ἀδυναμίᾳ" (all Greek citations of the Metaphysics

are from the Aristotle, Metaphysics, Edited by Hugh Trednnick (Cambridge, MA, London, UK: Harvard

University Press, 1989), 432). Hugh Tredennick, in the Loeb edition, translates this passage as, ‚‘Incapacity’

and ‘the incapable’ is the privation contrary to ‘capacity’ in this sense; so that every ‘capacity’ has a contrary

incapacity for producing the same result in respect of the same subject‛ (Cambridge, MA, London, UK:

Harvard University Press, 1989), 433. Joe Sachs translates it as, ‚And lack of capacity, or something

incapable, is a deprivation opposite to this sort of potency, so that every potency is contrary to an incapacity

in the same thing, for the same thing‛ (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2002), 168.

Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 182.

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

Agamben takes up the second passage because he believes it to explicitly exposit the

‚originary figure‛ of potentiality, namely ‚the potential not to be.‛ This passage (1050b 10)

reads:

What is potential is capable of not being in actuality. What is potential can both be and not

be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be.15

Something, then, is potential only if it can, that is, only if it has the capability to both be and

not be. Agamben thinks of this in terms of a ‛welcoming,‛ which means: ‚I welcome, receive,

admit.‛16 A potential thing admits non-being and this welcoming constitutes potentiality.

Such potentiality is ‚passive‛ in that welcoming its non-being it ‚suffers‛ it. So, every poten-

tiality is originarily impotentiality.

But this is rather odd: how can we think ‚the actuality of the potentiality to not-be?‛

Asking this question in terms of the poet example is to ask: if the actuality of the potentiality

of the poet to write is the composition of a poem, what is the actuality of the (originary)

potentiality not-to write? To answer this question Agamben turns to the Metaphysics (1047a

24-26) where Aristotle states that, ‚A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is

said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential.‛17 Aristotle, on Agamben’s

reading, is arguing that since a potentiality not-to-be ‚belongs‛ to potentiality, we can

conclude that something is only potential to the extent that the potentiality not-to-be is fully

welcomed into actuality or ‚passes fully into it as such.‛ Agamben thinks of this as poten-

tiality not-to-be preserving ‚itself as such in actuality.‛ Writing the poem, then, the potentia-

lity of the poet not-to write ‚passes fully‛ into the actuality of the writing of the poem and

thereby preserves itself. This is to think of actuality as the impotentiality of impotentiality

wherein impotentiality preserves itself as such, or as Agamben puts it, ‚What is truly potential

is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.‛18

To distinguish his conception of δύναμις from others, Agamben takes up a final

passage from De Anima (417 b 2-16), which states:

To suffer is not a simple term, but is in one sense a certain destruction thorough the opposite

principle and, in another sense, the preservation[sōtēria, salvation] of what is in potentiality

by what is in actuality and what is similar to it< For he who possesses science *in poten-

tiality] becomes someone who contemplates in actuality, and either this is not an altera-

Ibid., 183. The Greek reads ‚τὸ ἄρα δυνατὸν εἶναι ἐνδέχεται καὶ εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι· τὸ αὐτὸ ἄπα

δυνατὸν καὶ εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι.‛ (462) Treddenick translates that passage: ‚Therefore that which is capable

of being may both be and not be. Therefore the same thing is capable both of being and of not being.‛ (463)

Sachs renders it, ‚Therefore, what is capable of not being admits of not being, and so the same is capable of

being and not being.‛ (180)

Ibid.

Ibid. The Greek is: ‚ἔστι δὲ δυνατὸν τοῦτο ᾧ ἐὰν ὐπάρξῃ ἡ ἐνέργεια οὗ λέγεται ἔχειν τὴν δύναμιν,

οὐθὲν ἔσται ἀδύνατον.‛ (438) Treddenick’s translation reads, ‚A thing is capable 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) Sachs translates the passage as, ‚What is capable is that which would be in no way incapable if it so

happened that the being-at-work *ἐνέργεια+ of which it is said to have potency were present.‛ (170)

Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 183.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

tion—since here there is the gift of the self to itself and to actuality[epidosis eis auto]—or this

alteration is of a different kind.19

This passage argues, on Agamben’s reading, not, as is commonly held, that δύναμις is

‚annulled‛ in ἐνέργεια, rather that in actuality it ‚conserves‛ and ‚saves‛ itself. Potentiality

‚survives actuality‛ thus it ‚gives itself to itself.‛20 Aristotle is interested in ‛existent po-

tentiality‛ and Agamben points out that all of Aristotle’s examples of this involve ‚the arts

and human knowledge‛ which he regards as crucial insofar as it indicates that ‚human

beings, insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other, exist in

the mode of potentiality.‛21 Thus, he argues that every human power or faculty is an impoten-

tiality and in this Agamben sees the political aspect of Aristotle’s concept of potentiality men-

tioned at the outset of this essay. Indeed, his contention is that this relation of every human

potentiality to its impotentiality is the, ‚origin of human power, which is so violent and

limitless with respect to other living beings.‛22 A claim, we will see shortly, that is congruent

with the claims he makes in Homo Sacer.

Agamben, though, pushes his claim further, arguing that the ‚root of freedom‛ is

found in potentiality. ‚To be free,‛ he argues, ‚is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of

one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. This is why freedom is free-

dom for both good and evil.‛23 Each of us, then, as human is free in the sense that we have the

Ibid., 184. The Greek of this passage reads, ‚οὐκ ἔστι δ’ ἁπλοῦν οὐδὲ τὸ πάσχειν, ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν φθορά τις

ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐναντίου, τὸ δὲ σωτηρία μᾶλλον ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐντελεχείᾳ ὄντος τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος καὶ ὁμοίου οὕτως

ὡς δύναμις ἔχει πρὸς ἐντελέχειαν· θεωροῦν γὰρ γίνεται τὸ ἔχον τὴν ἐπιστήμην, ὅπερ ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν

ἀλλοιοῦσθαι (εἰς αὑτὸ γὰρ ἡ ἐπίδοσις καὶ εἰς ἐντελέχειαν) ἢ ἕτερον γένος ἀλλοιώσεως. διὸ οὐ καλῶς

ἔχει λέγειν τὸ φρονοῦν, ὅταν φρονῇ, ἀλλοιοῦσθαι, ὥσπερ οὐδὲ τὸν οἰκοδόμον ὅταν οἰκοδομῇ. τὸ μὲν

οὖν εἰς ἐντελέχειαν ἄγειν ἐκ δυνάμει ὄντος κατὰ τὸ νοοῦν καὶ φρονοῦν οὐ διδασκαλίαν ἀλλ’ ἑτέραν

ἐπωνυμίαν ἔχειν δίκαιον· τὸ δ’ ἐκ δυνάμει ὄντος μανθάνον καὶ λαμβάνον ἐπιστήμην ὑπὸ τοῦ

ἐντελεχείᾳ ὄντος καὶ διδασκαλικοῦ ἤτοι οὐδὲ πάσχειν φατέον, ὥσπερ εἴρηται, ἢ δύο τρόπους εἶναι

ἀλλοιώσεως, τήν τε ἐπὶ τὰς στερητικὰς διαθέσεις μεταβολὴν καὶ τὴν ἐπὶ τὰς ἕξεις καὶ τὴν φύσιν‛

(Aristotle, Περὶ Ψυχῆς, edited by W.S. Hett (Cambridge, Ma, London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1964),

98). Hett, in the volume from which the Greek is cited above renders the passage: ‚Even the term being

acted upon’ is not used in a single sense, but sometimes it means a form of destruction of something by its

contrary, and sometimes rather a preservation of that which is potential by something actual which is like it,

in accordance with the relation of potentiality to actuality; for that which merely possesses knowledge comes

to exercise it by a process which either is not alteration at all (for the development is into its real self or

actuality), or else it is a unique kind of alteration.‛ (Ibid., 99) Joe Sachs translates the passage as: ‚But ‘being

acted upon’ is not unambiguous either; in one sense it is a partial destruction of a thing by its contrary, but in

another it is instead the preservation, by something that is at-work-staying-itself, of something that is in

potency and is like it in the way that a potency is like its corresponding state of being-at-work-staying-itself.

For the one who has knowledge comes to be contemplating, and this is either not a process of being altered

(since it is a passing over into being oneself, namely into being-at-work-staying-oneself), or is a different

class of alteration.‛ (On the Soul (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2001), 98)

Ibid.

Ibid., 183.

Ibid.

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

potentiality, and hence the impotentiality, to act in certain ways. We can choose and not

choose to do certain things. Human actions can thus be measured by inaction taking the form

of not doing what we can, which Agamben expresses with the abstruse statement, ‚The

greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.‛24

So, implicit in free human action is an ethical metric enabling the evaluation of all of

our actions. Agamben seems to be arguing that this is true on both the individual (to be free is

‚to be capable of one’s own impotentiality‛) as well as collective level (we can measure collec-

tive ‚human potentiality‛ via ‚human impotentiality‛). Although Agamben does not ostensi-

bly engage political institutions in this essay, his argument suggests that we can evaluate our

political institutions by means of the above stated measure. It seems to me that this further

suggests that this freedom could be a kind of ground for ‚political‛ institutions, by which I

mean that his argument implies that we could conjoin our individual freedoms to the end of

insuring that they collectively are directed towards ‚good‛ actions. That is to say that his ar-

gument seems to gesture towards a kind of liberalism. But there are serious tensions between

this and key conclusions that he draws from the exact same line of argumentation in Homo

Sacer. Hence, it is to this argumentation that we must turn our attention.

Homo Sacer

The discussion of potentiality in Homo Sacer begins with Agamben stating that Aristotle is not

interested merely in potentiality as ‚logical possibility‛ but in its ‚effective modes‛ by which I

understand him to mean ‚effective potentiality.‛ He then states that if we are to understand

potentiality as not that which simply disappears into actuality, then we are necessarily ad-

mitting ‚that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be) [la potenza di non

(fare o essere)+, or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also impotentiality.‛25 Agamben sup-

ports this contention with two citations from the Metaphysics discussed in ‚On Potentiality.‛

The first (1046a 32) is, ‚Every potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the

same;‛26 the second (1050b 10), ‚What is potential can both be and not be. For the same is

potential as much with respect to being as to not being.‛27 Thus far, Agamben has concisely

re-stated a portion of the argument made in ‚On Potentiality.‛

Agamben’s next move introduces language which though not present in ‚On Poten-

tiality‛ does not change the argument per se, but enables him to alter its trajectory. Spe-

cifically, he argues that potentiality that ‚exists‛ is that which is capable of not passing over

into actuality. The relation of this potentiality to actuality is, like in ‚On Potentiality,‛ a kind

of maintenance of impotentiality with respect to actuality. He characterizes this maintenance

as taking ‚the form of its suspension.‛ So, potentiality as impotentiality maintains itself by

suspending itself in actuality. Agamben argues that—and this is important—‚it *potentiality]

is sovereignly capable of its own impotentiality *my emphasis+.‛28 Potentiality is characterized

not simply as an ‚I can‛ (posso) but as a sovereign capability. Agamben shifts the trajectory of

Ibid.

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 32.

Ibid.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

the analysis away from freedom, and I would argue a liberal conception thereof, towards

sovereignty. He further clarifies this move in the paragraphs that follow.

In these paragraphs, Agamben inserts ‛sovereignty‛ and ‛suspension‛ into the

arguments made in ‚On Potentiality‛ regarding Metaphysics 1047a 24-26 and De Anima 417b 2-

16. With these insertions in mind, he makes the following reading of those passages:

In thus describing the most authentic nature of potentiality, Aristotle actually bequeathed

the paradigm of sovereignty to Western philosophy< Potentiality (in its double appearance

as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself

sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non

recognoscens) other than its own ability to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself

by simply taking away its own potentiality to not be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.29

This conclusion shifts those made about human ability and freedom to the plane of ontology.

Being is, on this account, sovereign in that it is self-founding and it would thus seem, as Daniel

Heller-Roazen observes, that Agamben may have achieved Heidegger’s project of establishing

die stille Kraft des Möglichen (the quiet power of the possible).30 His argument though, is not

limited to ontology, insofar as ontology provides a ‚paradigm.‛ The final portion of this essay

considers what a paradigm is and how it operates on Agamben’s reading, for political sove-

reignty. Concisely, Agamben contends ‚that a principle of potentiality is inherent in every

definition of sovereignty,‛31 meaning that the ultimate trajectory of Aristotle’s thinking about

potentiality is simultaneously ontological and political. A consideration of Agamben’s con-

ception of sovereignty thus brings into focus what he thinks the long-term import of Aris-

totle’s conception of potentiality is. Moreover, it elucidates the differences in the conclusions

that he draws from essentially the same line of argumentation in ‚On Potentiality‛ and Homo

Sacer.

Agamben borrows his concept of ‘the sovereign’ from Carl Schmitt. The sovereign is,

according to Schmitt’s definition, ‚(s)he who decides on the state of exception.‛32 Because the

defining quality of the sovereign is that she makes exceptions to the law, she places herself

both inside of and outside of the juridical order. This is to say that the sovereign’s implicit abi-

lity to suspend all or part of the juridical order from within, indeed from the very heart of it,

simultaneously places it outside of the juridical order because what it means to be part of the

juridical order is that one cannot violate the dictates, laws, thereof. So, Schmitt’s definition is

inherently paradoxical and Agamben offers two formulations of the paradox. The first is ‚the

law is outside of itself‛ and the second is that the sovereign can state that ‚I, the sovereign,

who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law.‛33 These formulae

exhibit a key facet of the paradox: while the first characterizes an exclusion: the law being

Ibid.

Daniel Heller Roazen, ‚Editor’s Introduction,‛ in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, edited and translated by

Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 18.

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 33.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, edited by Tracy Strong, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2006), 5.

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17.

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

outside of itself is excluded from itself, the second characterizes an inclusion: the law includes

everything, so nothing is exterior to it. Agamben calls this simultaneous inclusion and exclu-

sion the ‚topology‛ of sovereignty.34 Key for us is that this topology exhibits the ‚principle of

potentiality‛ functioning within it insofar as what is potential can both be and not be and in a

parallel fashion what is sovereign is both included and excluded. The paradox of sovereignty,

then, brings Agamben’s argument that potentiality is the originary paradigm of sovereignty

into relief.

What results from this decision about exception, as Schmitt’s definition suggests, is the

‚state of exception,‛ or the juridical situation resulting from this decision. From one perspec-

tive, the state of exception can be characterized by the suspension of a law, laws, or the entire

juridical order. One function of the state of exception is to capture within the juridical order

that which is outside of it—one point of his argument is to give meaning to the idiom ‚there is

nothing outside of the law.‛ This is to say that if the scope of the law is limited such that it

cannot be applied to certain activities or people, the choice on exception offers the juridical

order the means by which these people or activities can be brought into its purview.

Given the above, one might conclude that the sovereign exception primarily functions

to reign in that which is beyond the juridical order. But, Agamben, following Schmitt, is clear

that the exception is not deducted from the rule, but is, rather, constitutive of it. Indeed his

claim is that the rule, or law, cannot exist without the exception, nor can the exception without

the rule. This is to say that in its suspension the rule gives rise to the exception while simul-

taneously maintaining itself in relation thereto, thus marking its first constitution as a rule. So,

the key element in making a law a law is that it is potential precisely in the sense that Agamben

understands Aristotle. Law’s unique ‚force,‛ he thus argues, is precisely that it potently main-

tains itself in relation to something outside of itself, e.g., the exception. The exception, then,

more than simply reigning in that which is beyond the juridical order, constitutes the possi-

bility of the juridical order itself.

Agamben, though, understands the exception as doing more than just this. Indeed, it

also operates to the end of ‚the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-

politico order can have validity.‛35 While what he means by this ‚space‛ will become clearer

in a moment when we consider human life in relation to the exception, at this point we can say

that Agamben understands the state of exception as the ‚threshold‛ at which opposites, we

could say ‚potentialites,‛ such as inside and outside, fact and law, normal situation and chaos,

are related to each other in such a manner that the juridical order can actually be valid. In the

state of exception, these opposite terms function according to the topology of sovereignty, thus

their meanings are indeterminate: they are included in their exclusion, actualized in the

suspension of the other and vice versa. The sovereign choice on exception is the ‚localization‛

of this threshold insofar as the choice on exception fixes these meanings within a certain

sovereign space; it determines which of these terms will be brought to actuality and where this

will take place. Thus, Agamben argues that what is at stake with the sovereign exception is

not just social, juridical and territorial ordering, but the validity of the juridical order itself, as

Ibid.

Ibid., 18-19.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

without a sovereign decision the relation between these potentialities could not be

determined, their meanings, which are employed to order society, could not be fixed and the

law, which on one level operates via the determination of these meanings, could not be actua-

lized.

But the actualization of law is more complicated than simply suspending its potentia-

lity. In fact, Agamben’s argument is that it requires a two-step process. This is because law’s

‚application,‛ on Agamben’s understanding, is not contained in the concept of the rule, law or

norm, nor is it possible to derive it therefrom. Law, and thus sovereignty, must therefore both

presuppose and determine the field of objects to which it can be applied and this is also done

by means of the sovereign exception. So, the determination of the space in which sovereignty

operates can only occur once this first step, the determination of the field of objects to which

law can be applied, is complete.

Agamben’s accounts for this first step by claiming that by deciding on the exception the

sovereign also decides upon, ‚the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law or, in

the words of Schmitt, ‘the normal structuring of life relations,’ which law needs.‛36 The term

that Agamben uses for ‘social order’ is ‚structuring of life relations,‛ a choice of terms which

gestures towards his important contention that the object to which law is applied is human

life. But, because human life is in no way implicitly included in law, he argues that the means

by which life can be brought into the juridical order is the sovereign decision on exception,

which functions to include it in its exclusion. So, sovereignty’s ‚capture‛ of the object of its

application, human life, occurs by means of its topology, and therefore follows the principal of

potentiality.

Agamben identifies the paradigmatic form of this life caught in the sovereign exception

as an arcane figure of the Roman social order: homo sacer. In De verborum significatione, Pom-

peius Festus identifies homo sacer37 as a person whom having been found guilty of a crime can

Ibid, 22. It seems to me that Agamben’s employment of the term ‚normal‛ here may suggest that there is a

kind of normailzation that takes place by means of the choice on exception. This observation introduces a

set of complicated issues revolving around the question of what Agamben means by the term ‘biopolitics’.

In the ‚Introduction‛ to Homo Sacer, Agamben argues that Foucault’s thesis about biopolitics must be ‚cor-

rected‛ in light of his claim that biopolitics emerged considerably earlier than Foucault hypothesized,

specifically in ancient Rome. As suggested above, this argument raises a whole set of questions, not the least

of which being: what then is biopolitics? Answering this question would involve tangling with whether or

not this ‚normalization‛ has the same or similar characteristics as that Foucault argued emerged with the

development of the concept of ‘population’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This entire issue,

though closely related to the topics taken up in this essay, is beyond its limited scope—which is to say that

the sovereign excludes the actuality of this essay being sixty or seventy pages. Two essays that contend with

this issue and that I strongly recommend looking at if these issues interest you are Mika Ojakangas’

‚Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,‛ Foucault Studies, 2, May, 2005 and Paul

Patton’s ‚Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics‛ in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, edi-

ted by Matthew Calcarco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

James Muir, in his Historical Introduction to the Private Law of Rome (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,

1886), 18, asserts that, ‚The homo sacer was in every sense of the word an outcast—one with whom it was

pollution to associate, who dared to take no part in any of the institutions of the state, civil or religious,

whose life the gods would not accept as a sacrifice, but whom, nevertheless, any one might put to death with

impunity as no longer god-protected.‛

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

be killed, with the killer not being guilty of murder despite a law prohibiting it, but not made

sacred in a ritual sacrifice.38 Thus, this sacratio—Agamben employs the Latin—has two defi-

ning characteristics: the unpunishability of its killing, despite a law forbidding homicide, and

its exclusion from sacrifice or the victim being made sacred. Denying the sacralization of homo

sacer excludes it from the realm of divine law, while the ability to be killed with impunity

excludes it from the juridical order, the realm of civil law, as well. Agamben understands this

double exception as definitive of homo sacer,39 as it bears the ‚relation of exception‛ insofar as it

is included in the juridical order by being excluded. With this established, Agamben argues

that, ‚just as the law, in the sovereign exception, applies to the exceptional case in no longer

applying and in withdrawing from it, so homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacri-

ficeability and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed. Life that

cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life.‛40 This ‚sacred life,‛ Agamben argues, is

the first content of sovereign power and producing this life is the object of sovereign activity.41

Following Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Agamben calls this sacred life ‚nuda

vita‛ which is his translation into Italian of ‚bloβe Leben‛ which is now commonly translated

into English as ‚bare life.‛ Because the definitive characteristic of sovereignty is its capacity to

suspend all or part of the juridical order, including any legal protections of human life, bare

life is life susceptible to all forms of violence; it is an object with respect to which sovereignty

can fully suspend its potentiality and actualize its mortal force. Thus, rather than securing the

rights and freedom of subjects, Agamben argues that sovereignty, even ‚popular sovereign-

ty,‛ produces them as bare life such that law can be applied to them. All human life, accor-

ding to Agamben, is thus to some degree bare life.

Sovereignty produces the ‚space‛ in which law can be valid. This is actually the se-

cond step in the process of law’s actualization, as law first must have an object to which it can

be applied and then the space in which this application can take place will be determined.

Given this, the juridical space opened by sovereignty is the space in which the juridical order

can be applicable to human life. Because this life is captured by means of the topology of

sovereignty it is bare life, life to which the sovereign can do anything. Thus, Agamben cha-

racterizes this space as one in which with respect to human life ‚anything is possible.‛ This

possibility, though, is not one paradigmatic of the expansion of human faculties, as we might

Ibid., 71. Plutarch attributes a law forbidding homicide to Numa Pompilius. Numa was the second king

of Rome, the successor of Romulus. According to Plutarch he died while on the throne in 673 BCE, having

ascended it at forty years of age (see Plutarch, Parallel Lives, I, Theseus and Romulus. Lycurgus and Numa. Solon

and Publicola, Translated by Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Assuming

the accuracy of the year of his death, we can surmise that his law forbidding homicide dates from between

713-673 BCE and predates the Twelve Tables, dating from 450 BCE, the eleventh of which states, ‚Putting to

death of any man, whosoever he might be, unconvicted is forbidden‛ (regarding the Twelve Tables see

George Long, ‚Lex Duodeim Tabularum,‛ in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, edited by William

Smith (London: John Murray, 1875).

The Latin term ‚sacer‛ means both ‚sacred‛ and ‚damned.‛

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 52.

Ibid., 82, 83.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

surmise from his arguments in ‚On Potentiality,‛ but one in which anything can be done to

living human bodies despite copious laws ostensibly enacted for their protection.

This space in which anything is possible has, Agamben argues, a contemporary

‚paradigm‛: the Nazi Lager or concentration camp. The Lager was indeed a space in which

anything was possible with respect to the inhabitants, a space in which millions of lives were

killed but not made sacred.42 The actualization of this killing, and the Lager itself, Agamben

argues, required remarkable juridical machinations such as, to cite the obvious, the suspension

by sovereign decree of the Weimar Constitution and the denationalization of the Jews.43 But

the Lager, Agamben argues, has not been relegated to the past. Instead, it has become the

paradigm for the poli-juridical spaces inhabited since its inception—indeed, it is Agamben’s

claim that the paradigm for the poli-juridical spaces we inhabit is the Lager.

Although Agamben’s argument in Homo Sacer is that potentiality has resulted in our

contemporary situation being one in which anything is possible, this possibility is not the

ground of human freedom enabling each of us to act and/or not act as we please and, more-

over, ethically evaluate both our own actions and those of others from the same very same

ground, which is his argument in ‚On Potenitality.‛ Instead, potentiality, as understood in

Homo Sacer, has provided the paradigm for the ‚hidden‛ principal of a juridical order which,

despite liberal claims about the universal rights of each person qua person and so on, can only

function by producing and situating each person such that anything can legitimately be done

to them. And, while the claim made in ‚On Potentiality‛ that potentiality is the ‚origin of

human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings‛ is certainly

congruent with some key claims made in Homo Sacer, the ‚power‛ described in ‚On Poten-

tiality,‛ while ‚political,‛ can be subjected to ethical scrutiny and seems limited thereby.

Sovereign power as described in Homo Sacer, on the other hand, while certainly sus-

ceptible to ethical criticism—indeed we might even argue that Agamben’s Homo Sacer project

is subjecting sovereignty to ethical scrutiny—cannot be thereby limited insofar as the very

principal of its application is its limitlessness with respect to human beings. To banally clarify

my latter observation consider Agamben’s remarkably insightful claim that ‚democracy *the

power (kratos) of the people (demos)+ and totalitarianism are two sides of the same coin,‛ which

I understand to mean that because both are forms of sovereignty they can only function by as-

serting absolute power with respect to their citizen-subjects. Therefore, claims about the mo-

ral superiority of democracy over totalitarianism based upon, for example, its respect for fun-

damental human rights, merely mask the fact that democracy, no matter what is meant by this

term, operates according to the same principal as totalitarianism, namely sovereignty, insofar

as it produces social order juridically.

I understand this contention as the foundation for Agamben’s famous claim that we should not refer to the

mass killings that took place in the Lager as a ‚Holocaust‛ since they were not a sacrifice but murder. For the

details of this argument see Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).

Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and Archive (New York: Zone

Books, 1999).

For a more developed discussion of Agamben’s understanding of these machinations than those found in

Homo Sacer, see his Stato di eccezione (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003). Translated by Kevin Attell as State of

Exception (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

All of this is simply to say that despite the fact that there are ways in which the two

conclusions Agamben draws from the same argument are congruous, I think that they are

more substantively not so. It seems to me that the ‘politic’ that one would likely develop from

the conclusion drawn in ‚On Potentiality‛ is one in which this freedom of faculty that each of

us has would ground a kind of political order which, while having the capability and perhaps

even the propensity to violence, ethically limits that violence. I would go as far as saying, as I

did above, that it would likely be some kind of liberalism in which freedom itself becomes a

shared ground from which a polity could be formed to the end of quelling this capacity for

violence. The conclusion drawn in Homo Sacer offers no possibility of such a ‘politic.’ All so-

cial order is produced by sovereignty and all sovereignty has as its object the production of

bare life and politics is simply the management thereof: politics is violence.

It is no revelation to state that people—even philosophers—change their minds re-

gularly. So, we might think that Agamben’s change of position, though odd given that he

employs the same argumentation to two very different ends, is ultimately not that interesting.

It is, I believe quite interesting if explained in terms of his research methodology, specifically

how he understands himself to be employing Foucault’s research methodology. And this ex-

planation, in turn, involves him tangling with the question ‚what is a paradigm?‛ which will

further clarify many of the claims that we have been considering.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elena: This is an amazing approach from Agamben, not the conclusions of the author of the article but may my gratitude fulfill you for telling me in sucha concise way what it is about. I read a lot but if I had to read the whole book, which I would like to one day, I would not have enough eyes to do so. The headache would make it impossible to accomplish in a short time. It’s my poor excuse, but it’s true.

The text is amazing! I’ve been looking for this to be able to write my own understanding of We are One. I marvel at the fact that it is all already there, that we have to invent nothing, write nothing, that people everywhere already know what it is all about and yet, even with this joy, it is simply an added pleasure to be able to participate but without one’s participation someone else would do the job and it is wonderful to know that… for We are One, all equally capable.

The language being used is initially difficult for me for I am not familiarized with it but should I be on the right track there are some points here that I’d like to translate into the “work language” of Gurdjieff’s System.

The first part of this article is actually about being and the possibility of not being while being. Action in inaction or inaction as action. That is accomplished through non identification but the moment the individual becomes identified, s/he “falls”…..

(FALLS, the great fall….mmmmm, keep an eye on that.) into the world filled with laws and becomes the exception or the rule depending on the perspective from which it is looked from.

If I am adding anything to the article in relation to that, it is how it actually happens in an individual.

Agmaben: In thus describing the most authentic nature of potentiality, Aristotle actually bequeathed

the paradigm of sovereignty to Western philosophy< Potentiality (in its double appearance

as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself

sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non

recognoscens) other than its own ability to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself

by simply taking away its own potentiality to not be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.

This is a beautiful passage although they don’t talk about the beauty of these things in these texts! Why? It is beautiful every time we actualize the sovereignty of being. If people actually thought about it, “common people” that is, people who have not been to hell and back with their mind but have been protected from “thought” and still hold more of themselves than a concept, actually establish a relationship to the “sovereignty of being” in God. For the philosopher THAT God is being spoken as “sovereignty” and they are both equally valid in their own scale. Every human being understands this concept in his and her own way for every human being “IS” an aspect of that dimension. But I’m moving away from the text although it’s such fun to do so.

From a different perspective and adding perhaps a new idea, is that as Agamben is trying to put it, what he’s actually implying by sovereignty in the System would imply the whole different dimension of “being”. Being that in the end is not subject to the dimension of the physical even if the physical is killed. This we can understand in both spheres in which he is talking, as true for the individual (in the “inner” process above mentioned) as for the homo sacer. When “killed”, the homo sacer’s death is insignificant to the living for he is already an “outlaw” and what makes him “sacred” is that as an outlaw in the political world submitted to the laws he “returns” to the realm of the sacred: “free of laws”.

They do not speak about another “dimension” “explicitly”, these philosophers, but they are already obvious: the dimension of the law and the dimension “beyond” the law where the sovereign “recides” in potentiality of being and not being, acting and not acting, but in fact being and being even more fully when not identified with him or herself and acting and “not acting” more fully when not identified with him or herself in such a way that what makes the sovereign sovereign is that he or she is beyond the phenomenical world or the dimension under the law.

It’s even more beautiful when Agamben offers the idea that the structure of the Nazi state is exactly the same structure of Democracy.

“Agamben’s remarkably insightful claim that ‚democracy *the

power (kratos) of the people (demos)+ and totalitarianism are two sides of the same coin,‛ which

I understand to mean that because both are forms of sovereignty they can only function by as-

serting absolute power with respect to their citizen-subjects. Therefore, claims about the mo-

ral superiority of democracy over totalitarianism based upon, for example, its respect for fun-

damental human rights, merely mask the fact that democracy, no matter what is meant by this

term, operates according to the same principal as totalitarianism, namely sovereignty, insofar

as it produces social order juridically.”

Elena:

If I understand Bleeden correctly, he totally misses the point but that’s besides the point.

What is magnificent about realizing that the structure of the Nazi regime is exactly the same as that of Democracy or for that matter exactly the same as that of the individual human being when he or she is being controlled by the ego in the extreme “lowlessness” of her or his involution or by his or her real I in the extreme height of her or his evolution, is that it beautifully understands that the structure of all cosmoses is the same.

What is not mentioned here, but perhaps Agamben deals with it in other texts that I haven’t read, is that while in the dictatorial regime one individual poses his or herself as the sovereign and imposes the law on the people, in the ideal democratic state that we are still far from achieving, the “sovereign” within each individual IS the LAW. “LIFE” then is not left to chance in a descending octave but turned downside up and forward in an ascending octave. What the individual human being is conscious of in a true democracy is that “We are not animals” “That we are human beings” “That we are spiritual seeds in an ascending process of evolution, not “lunar” seeds in a descending process of involution”. With that “shift” in our consciousness, our social reality can only shift proportionately and our sense of egoness cannot determine our “life relations” as Schmitt, so beautifully puts it. The Fascist reality, which is not only a German, Italian or Japanese reality but the reality of every human being tied to the ego and with the ego, aiming to “own” the world, is the lowest expression of human consciousness. It is characterized particularly by the fact that under those “spells” we are chained to time and space. We are psychological “animals” trying to own as much as we can possibly have in as little a time as we can possibly achieve and then “guard” that property from others wishing to take it away. We are like “monkeys” unable to take our spirit out of the fixation, opening our hands to free ourselves from being caught by the hunters.

What Agamben realizes probably much more fully in his own text, is that the law of sovereignty is the same for the individual and society, the law and its application. In physics, we would better understand THAT with the hurricane and its eye: In the center there is stillness.

What can change the social order is not the physical order which is equally subject to laws in no matter what system, what changes the way people relate to each other is their change of being, the change of consciousness, the actualization of our humaneness and our “equality”: The dissolution of the imaginary obstacles that separate us into races, nationalities, classes, careers, educations…

“Republicans” everywhere in the world, cannot understand THAT in their fixedness to material gains in their individualistic race but democracy pours out from within the human soul in the revolution in Egypt and the middle East even if that is but one momentary surfacing of an ideal that is then put to the test of our being today and drowned again for some time, for our history, like our lives, moves in the balance of extremes and one impulse is confronted by its opposite. But the taste of freedom is not forgotten and the impulse is subsequently renewed.

But lets get on with the text.

Agamben puts it beautifully! He sounds like a full human being when he speaks about:

“the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law or, in

the words of Schmitt, ‘the normal structuring of life relations,’ which law needs.‛36 The term

that Agamben uses for ‘social order’ is ‚structuring of life relations,‛ a choice of terms which

gestures towards his important contention that the object to which law is applied is human

life. But, because human life is in no way implicitly included in law, he argues that the means

by which life can be brought into the juridical order is the sovereign decision on exception,

which functions to include it in its exclusion.”

Elena: It is not that it is not included in human life, it is that we can talk about the law in different dimensions and in the philosophical understanding of the law, we are thinking about its ontological qualities while in the practical applications of laws, we are talking about their political qualities. We are dealing with different dimensions.

There is one more aspect I’d like to mention related to the concentration camp, the homo sacer or the ego in a state of crime. We would much better understand Agamben’s approach to all this if we included in it, the understanding of “processes” in the System. The process of crime is structurally exactly the same as the process of healing but diametrically opposite to each other. Here we see the same laws as above. We must be able to understand that laws are the same in the different cosmoses but different in relation to the “cosmos” they are “acting” out. Each complete octave is a cosmos onto itself. ________

Cont. text:

What is a Paradigm?‛: Foucault’s Influence on Agamben’s Methodology

We have seen that in both ‚On Potentiality‛ and Homo Sacer Agamben liberally employs the

concept of a ‛paradigm.‛ Despite this, neither piece contains passages actually explaining

what he understands a paradigm to be or how he understands it to function. Indeed, at the

outset of a more recent essay, he states that,

In the course of my research, I have written on certain figures such as Homo sacer... the state

of exception, and the concentration camp. While these are actual historical phenomena, I

nonetheless treated them as paradigms whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a

broader historical-problematic context... this approach has generated a few misunder-

standings.44

Given this, he then devotes the balance of the essay, aptly titled ‚What is a Paradigm?,‛ to

discussing his understanding of the paradigm and how paradigms are used in both philo-

sophy and ‚the human sciences,‛ as well as detailing how he understands himself to be car-

rying out an archaeological project methodologically based upon Foucault’s. Exploring this

dimension shows that the conclusions Agamben drew from his reading of δύναμις changed so

dramatically as a direct result of the research method that he understands himself to employ,

namely archaeology.

Agamben begins ‚reflecting‛ upon the paradigm by noting that, ‚Foucault frequently

used the term ‘paradigm’ in his writings, even though he never defined it precisely.‛45

Despite this absence, Agamben wonders whether the paradigm that he finds in Foucault’s

Agamben, ‛What is a Paradigm?‛ in The Signature of All Things, 9.

Ibid.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

archaeology is not closely related to what Thomas Kuhn understands a paradigm to be,

namely ‚that which... marks the emergence of scientific revolutions?‛ This question arises be-

cause Agamben regards both Foucault and Kuhn as conscientiously questioning and moving

away from understandings based on the rule. In Kuhn’s case, this means that rather than

viewing changes in the governance of accepted scientific truth as a result of the discovery of

new physical laws, they are understood as a ‚shift in paradigm.‛ Agamben aptly characte-

rizes Kuhn’s definition of the paradigm as, ‛an example, a single case that by its repeatability

acquires the capacity to model tacitly the behaviour and research practices of scientists.‛46 So,

on Kuhn’s account the paradigm determines the rules by which science functions and thus

changes in the conception scientific truth. What he calls ‚scientific revolutions,‛ result not

from the discovery of a new law, but from the replacement of one paradigm by a novel one

which is partially or entirely incompatible with the previous.

Similarly, Foucault laboured to question rule-based understandings not only of science,

but of the operation of ‚power‛ as well. Rather than employing models based on universal

categories of law, state or sovereignty, Foucault was interested in ‚the concrete mechanisms

through which power penetrates the very bodies of subjects and thereby governs their forms

of life.‛47 This is to say that Foucault interrogated the singular practice to see what it could tell

us about the general character of a specific regime of truth, discipline and so on. And it is in

this assignment of primacy to the singular, as opposed to the general or universal, that Agam-

ben locates an ‚analogy‛ between Foucault’s work and Kuhn’s paradigms. Kuhn, on the one

hand, moved away from looking at a rule-governed, ‚normal‛ science and instead considered

the behaviour of scientists as determined by paradigms. Foucault, on the other hand, focused

away from juridical models of power and investigated the ways in which disciplines and ‚po-

litical techniques‛ produced individual subjects such that they could be the objects of gover-

nance. Agamben interprets this analogy between Kuhn’s paradigm and Foucault’s work as

indicative of the fact that, despite Foucault’s silence on the paradigm, the paradigm is actually

at the heart of his archaeological project.

Despite Agamben’s assertion of the paradigm’s centrality in Foucault’s project, he con-

tends that Foucault’s conception of the paradigm differs significantly from Kuhn’s. Indeed, he

argues that though Foucault never named Kuhn, he labored to differentiate his work from

Kuhn’s in several places. The key difference, on Agamben’s reading, that Foucault articulates

between Kuhn’s paradigm and what he was interested in—what Agamben will ultimately call

Foucault’s notion of the ‚paradigm‛—is that while Kuhn’s paradigm operates at the level of

the ‚form‛ of epistemological statements, Foucault at the epistemological level was concerned

with ‚the effects of power peculiar to the play of statements.‛48 Foucault was interested in

how power ‚circulated‛ within a group of scientific statements, what he called their ‚internal

regime of power,‛ and did so such that these statements govern one another and in so doing

periodically become subject to radical change. Thus while Kuhn was interested in what we

might call political changes in scientific fields, Foucault was interested in developing the

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 12.

Ibid., 14.

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

methodological tools appropriate to the study of political power. A crucial dividing line be-

tween them, emphasized by Agamben, is Foucault’s genealogical inquiry.

Recall that Agamben argues ‛that a principle of potentiality is inherent in every

definition of sovereignty.‛49 This principal of potentiality seems to be operative at every level

of sovereign figuration. This is to say that the principal of sovereignty is also at work in every

sovereign effect and thus in every effect of the juridical order including law, bare life, the

sovereign space (the Lager) and so on. Although freedom surely is one of these effects, it can

only be meaningful in relation to the sovereign decision on exception. We can think of this

meaning from several perspectives. Two, though, seem to be germane. First, freedom only

functions by its impotentiality suspending itself. Thus, freedom and unfreedom are simply

two sides of the same coin. Therefore, second, freedom is an effect of the decision on excep-

tion and not power or faculty of human beings which Aristotle’s concept of ‛potentiality‛

made it possible to think. The second point makes it clear that the conclusion Agamben draws

from his interpretation of δύναμις in Homo Sacer is incompatible with that drawn in ‚On

Potentiality.‛ While indeed the argumentation in the former supports the claim that the ‚ori-

gin of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings‛50 is

potentiality, it does not support the claim that being free is to be capable of one’s, by which I

understand ‘an individual’s’, own impotentiality. This is to say that the argumentation in

Homo Sacer does not support a liberal conception of freedom. Instead, that which is fully ca-

pable of its own impotentiality is the sovereignty to which all of us are subject. This sove-

reignty indeed is the origin of human freedom, but that freedom is a kind of sovereign

bestowal and not that described by Locke, Rousseau, Berlin, Schlegel, Antonio Negri, Hegel or

in ‚On Potentiality.‛

We cannot therefore say that Agamben understands the effect of Aristotle’s genius to

be nefarious. Bestowing the principal of potentiality to Western thought, Aristotle provided

the means to think and understand sovereignty. We most prominently see sovereignty when

it entirely suspends its potentiality not to be, such as in the body of Jean Charles de Menezes.51

Only on the basis of potentiality is this even thinkable within a liberal polity.

One surely wonders whether understanding Aristotle in this way is productive. I think

that it certainly can be, if we follow Foucault and suppose that universals do not exist. This is

to say that there are not a set of trans-historical phenomena from which practices and the

thinking emerge. How does it become possible for a practice, or practices, to be actualized at a

given time and place? Moreover, how does it become possible to think or understand a given

practice? What are the conditions of possibility of thinking such an act? Retrospectively con-

structing these conditions is what I consider genealogy. Genealogy is never neutral; it is al-

ways involved in agonistic relations with other genealogies, even the concept of History itself.

Nor is genealogy concerned with causes; rather, it concerns conditions which make, or made, a

given practice possible. But practices only become possible to the extent that they are in-

Ibid., 47.

Agamben, ‚On Potentiality,‛ 182.

Menezes was summarily shot in the head by the London Metropolitan police after being mistaken for one

of the tube/bus bomber plotters in summer 2005.

Bleeden: One Paradigm, Two Potentialities

volved in what Foucault calls ‚a regime of truth‛ under which, ‛the articulation of a particular

type of discourse and set of practices, a discourse that, on the one hand, constitutes these

practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand,

legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false.‛52 Genealogy thus pro-

vides us a means of understanding how a particular practice came to be accepted and how it

was related to others in respect to its truthfulness or rightness.

Thus, projects like Agamben’s and Foucault’s provide us a means of understanding

that ideas, even very old ones, operate in a variety ways and are still involved in legislating

truth and falsity, even if they mutate over time—something akin to Foucault’s ongoing

interest in veridiction. On this basis, one would not say that Aristotle’s ideas in the Physics

were simply wrong. Instead, we ask how they conditioned a series of other ideas that were

(are) involved in various regimes of truth. From this perspective, thinking and Philosophy are

not simply something done in windowless classrooms and dusty offices, they are active and

engaged.

Considering an example of Foucault’s research in this respect reveals the genealogical

method and way of proceeding in his work. The noteworthy analysis he devoted to neo-

liberalism, as an epiphenomenon or related development of biopolitics, shows the technique

and the contours of his method. Foucault entitled his 1979 Colleège de France lecture course

‚The Birth of Biopolitics.‛ His initial goal for the course was to consider the ‚conditions of the

pos-sibility‛ leading to a significant shift in governmental technique which he had identified

in his lecture courses of the previous two years and in the last chapter of his book The History

of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction.53 This shift, Foucault argued, is characterized by a

change in the primary focus or object of government from the protection of geographic terri-

tory and the production of docile bodies, to the maintenance of the health of the ‛population‛

inhabiting the bounded territory of the nation-state. It was, Foucault argued, a shift from the

primacy of sovereign power, to what he called ‚biopower.‛

In the previous two courses, entitled Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory,

Population, Foucault detailed the novel practices, technologies, concepts and characteristics of

biopower. The Birth of Biopolitics was thus intended to develop and explain the conditions

under which these became possible. To accomplish this, Foucault decided that he needed to

further consider the development of the statistical concept ‛population.‛ Doing this, it turned

out, required him to analyze the way that this concept emerged from and morphed in eco-

nomic thought. As a result of this focus, The Birth of Biopolitics became a remarkably detailed

and uncannily prescient reading of the emergence of European and North American neolibe-

ralisms.

Throughout the analysis undertaken in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault reminds us that

his goal is to get to and explain the conditions of possibility for the emergence of biopower

and thereby further our understanding of biopolitics. This, though, never happens. Instead,

Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979 (Paris: Éditions de Seuil,

2004), 41.

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York:

Penguin, 1978).

Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 68-84.

he ends the course apologizing for not having arrived where he had hoped and stating that

even thinking that he could have gotten there without working through neoliberalism was im-

possible. The following year Foucault drops his analysis of biopower and focuses his attention

on what he eventually calls ‚technologies of the self.‛ This serves as a significant instantiation

of the premise that genealogy is not concerned with the search for origins, and that it cannot

be predicted or laid out in advance in a linear fashion.

Thus, the question remains open: what is the connection between neoliberalism and

biopower? This brief consideration provides an answer to this question. Specifically, that

Foucault’s analysis implies that the emergence of the concept of ‛population‛ out of develop-

ments in statistics made possible increasingly scientific techniques of management, particu-

larly the management of commercial interests. Foucault argues that the intensification of such

techniques, in turn, made possible the emergence of a scientific conception of ‛the market‛

differing from that of classical economists, such as Smith and Riccardo, which relied on non-

scientific metaphor for explanation, ‚the invisible hand‛ for example. Neoliberalism, from the

perspective of the argumentation provided in The Birth of Biopolitics, can be conceived as the

mapping of these scientific techniques of commercial management onto government, the latter

understood as—and this differs depending upon which neoliberalism is considered—being in

the service of, enhancing, protecting and/or producing this market. Given this, Foucault’s ar-

gument in the 1979 lecture course implies that biopolitics dramatically intensifies with the

emergence of neoliberalism. This is to say that as sovereignty wanes (or modifies) and bio-

power waxes, so too classical economics and neoliberalism. Thus, advanced neoliberal go-

vernmentality, to use Foucault’s now famous neologism, requires biopower and such power

cannot intensify, at least in the manner that Foucault thinks that it has and likely will, without

neoliberalism.

David Bleeden

Department of Philosophy

DePaul University

1 E. Jackson

Chicago, IL 60604

USA

Elena:

If there were to be a new paradigm in these times that we are talking in, it would be the paradigm of the Whole, Oneness. As a paradigm, it would have to include everything that’s been before us and everything that can possibly come. Consciousness should be able to see before and after because what matters to the human being is not conditioned by time.

One of the advantages of such a paradigm is that everything everyone has done or is doing, has been or is, matters. We are each looking through our own crystal and represent and act out a part of the whole that is worth being expressed. Those of us who happen to connect in the short period of our lives are no accident. Each in his and her own realm connect with those who are required. This is in our practical, daily lives. In our inner realm, we are all connected. I wonder if there is a greater experience of “reality”. Rich and complex as the phenomenical world is, it is the passing actualization of the non phenomenical. In that “passing” everything we can be, becomes, everything we are, IS, and yet "We", remain “untouched”. We are “too much” for any one of us to change THAT. The “juice” of our individual lives is for the glory of the “sovereign” within. We each “dissolve” into that “reality”. When we knock into each other, we “knock” into each other’s sovereignty, when we slip into each other, we slip into each other’s self, when we share, we actualize our selves. Love is Life.

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