The Struggle for Incapacity…

2009
Published in Framework: The Finnish Art Review (Issue 11)

[Excerpt Only]
The verb can (potere) is crucial to the understanding of the experience of potentiality, as was so poignantly written in Giorgio Agamben’s essay On Potentiality. Agamben describes the verb ‘can’, not as referring to a directed course of action but as a verb which marks out something vastly more arduous: “For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this ‘I can,’ which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this ‘I can’ does not mean anything – yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.”⁴ Agamben proceeds to qualify the originary problem of potentiality in Western thought, as pertaining to that of the question faculty. What does it mean to have the faculty of speech, of vision – which only implies that something “is or is not “in one’s power”⁵, thereby locating it within the “domain of potentiality”. This ‘is or is not’ essence of potentiality points to the complex nature of its existence, namely that it is “…not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence; and this is what we call a faculty or power.”⁶ Potentiality, or what Agamben calls the existence of potentiality (the present non-Being), becomes just as much about the potential to act (to pass into actuality) as about the potential not to act (not to pass into actuality). It is in the relation of potential to impotential where the existence of potentiality is constituted, where one is capable of one’s own incapacity.

4. Agamben, Giorgio (1999). “On Potentiality” in Potentialities, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel, Stanford University Press. P.177-184
5. IBID
6. IBID