Potentiality or Capacity--Agamben's Missing Subjects

Potentiality or Capacity?— Agamben's Missing SubjectsNina Power (bio)

Discussions of the link between practice and action in European thought in recent years have come to resemble something of a merry-go-round, circulating between optimistic ontologies and pessimistic diagnoses, celebrations of passivity and predictions of activity. Changes in the nature of work and attempts to keep up with, diagnose or explain various forms of social resistance have seen the re-emergence of a curious pantheon of outsider literary figures - Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, Melville's Bartleby, the Bible's Job.1 Work and its refusal are embodied in these troubled symbols of aesthetic excess (Josephine just wants to sing, not work like the other mice), obstinate potentiality (Bartleby's "I would prefer not to") and Job (the progressive withdrawal of all meaningful things and attachments). There is something minimal in all these figures, reduced to their ability to merely persist or to refuse in the last resort. We are reminded a little of Marx's early claims regarding "a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society… a total loss of humanity" which can only redeem itself through "the total redemption of humanity. "2 But there is a crucial difference between Marx's universal class and these isolated, broken figures: the collective dimension is absent. Has contemporary philosophy become so withdrawn from organized struggle that it can only conceive of transformations in the attitude to work by recourse to minimal individuals? The last line of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street may be "Ah, Bartleby! Ah humanity!" but this is more like a sigh of despair than a radical loss presaging redemption, political or otherwise. Is this all we can hope for? It is arguable that transformations in work and the composition of labor have made older, classically Marxist analysis seem outmoded, or at least in need of radical overhaul, but contemporary thought seems to have opted for two extreme responses: the radically pessimistic (or minimalist) or the baselessly optimistic. If Agamben falls into the former camp, then Hardt and Negri represent the latter with their concept of the multitude:

The contemporary cooperative productive capacities through which the anthropological characteristics of the multitude are continually transcribed and reformulated, cannot help revealing atelos , a material affirmation of liberation.3

Just as it is altogether too quick to see the "material affirmation of liberation" in the exploitation of basic human capacities in work, it is altogether too slow to see in the obstinacy of a Bartleby the only response to sovereign domination. Agamben plays a central role in this recent "minimizing" turn, turning to an older Aristotelian concept of "potentiality" to explore, albeit paradoxically, the primacy of inactivity. In his discussion of Bartleby, he notes: "Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity… Bartleby is capable only without wanting."4 Agamben shares Heidegger's distaste for 'activity' and "will," deeming such concepts insuperably metaphysical. He thus demeans, unintentionally perhaps, the real forces at work in labor; Hardt and Negri, on the other hand, see all too clearly the politically productive elements of labor but miss crucial steps and antagonisms in the relation between production and emancipation. In the case of Hardt and Negri, this is perhaps a consequence of their affirmative ontology which sees potential everywhere. Agamben's paradoxical treatments of potentiality, on the other hand, seem to leave room only for reduced or promissory subjects. "The messianic concept of the remnant" may well permit "more than one analogy to be made with the Marxian proletariat"5 but only as "the unredeemable that makes salvation possible,"6 the part "with all due respect to those who govern us" that "never allows us to be reduced to a majority or a minority."7 There are other, far less deferential ways of conceiving of political opposition - do we need to say that all activity is necessarily metaphysical? Agamben's Aristotelian conception of potentiality entails, in the highest instance, "that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be)," which suggests that even if potential is realized, it is realized only by its lack of activity. Agamben may see parallels between this lack of activity and the class that exhibits the "total loss of humanity," but the "redemption" that Marx and Agamben see must be understood quite differently. "Redemption" for the early Marx is the simultaneous supersession of private property coupled with the recovery of humanity; it is not the paradox of being saved "in being unsavable" as Agamben concludes his discussion of man and animal in The Open. 8

Whilst Agamben's position could be easily criticized from the standpoint of a more orthodox Marxism that would stress the historically conditioned nature of human potential and the necessity to think through forms of organization from within shifts in the nature of work, this is not the primary route this paper will take. In order to stay closer to Agamben's Aristotelianism, it is more productive to compare him to a thinker for whom questions of linguistic capacity and politics are also central, and also stem from a certain complex relation to naturalism, namely Paolo Virno. The paper will, via a reading of Agamben's Aristotelian conception of praxis and potentiality alongside Virno's work on the relation between language and labour, indicate the constitutive reasons why Agamben's notion of the subject as potentiality can only gesture towards collectivity and organisation, and why Virno's more nuanced conception of "capacity", which draws upon both rationalist and naturalist theories of the subject might form a more relevant alternative. It is by identifying the exploitation of those universal features of mankind, "the collective, social character which belongs to intellectual activity" as Virno puts it,9 that we can identify the possibilities for struggle inherent, yet not obvious, in the common. The struggle is no longer that of sovereign and subject, but of a different "constitutional principle": "the multitude does not converge into a volonté génerale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect. "10 What Virno posits is a rethinking of human nature on the basis of "the history of capitalism."11 Agamben cannot fully perform this, despite gestures here and there towards an understanding of the historically specific nature of changes in exploitation of basic human capacities, because he cannot allow himself to admit any form of collective nature, however minimal, due to his Heideggarian suspicion of anything that looks like a philosophical anthropology, a humanism or a Marxism comprised of a theory of activity. Agamben's subjects are therefore 'missing' because he neither sees what it is in the human that is currently exploited, nor does he get beyond the Aristotelian-Heideggerian belief that inactivity is more important than action.

This paper will propose neither a return to classically Marxist analysis nor an overly optimistic (or pessimistic) picture of the composition and likelihood of mass resistance or social change. It takes Agamben's return to Aristotle seriously, whilst defending an alternative type of historicized (or problematic) naturalism in the light of Virno's work.

Agamben's Aristotelianism is a thread that runs throughout his work, particularly regarding the concept of potentiality. In Book IX of Aristotle's Metaphysica , Aristotle writes "'potency' and the word "can" have several senses."12 Again and again, Agamben chooses to focus on the 'can not', to stress the impotence of potentiality. As Mills puts it, Agamben "stresses the suspension of the passage of potentiality into actuality, such that actuality itself appears not simply as 'being' or 'doing' but, rather, as 'not not-being' or 'not not-doing'."13 Something is held back for Agamben, potentiality must always exceed its actualization. In this way, he is faithful to Aristotle for whom:

…the potency of acting and of being acted on is one (for a thing may be "capable" either because it can itself be acted on or because something else can be acted on by it), but in a sense the potencies are different. For the one is in the thing acted on … But the other potency is the agent … [i]n so far as a thing is an organic unity, it cannot be acted on by itself; for it is one and not two different things.14

Potentiality is thus always the constitutive ability not to be something. Capability is always understood then primarily as the capacity not to act: "The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence."15 To say "I can" is, in the last instance, "beyond all faculties," unrelated to real capacities of identifiable potentialities. But whilst Agamben may see in a return to Aristotelian conceptions of potentiality the only minimal resource left in a political system that biopolitically divides subjects from each other and themselves, it may be (perversely) that we need to give up on this minimal resource to recognize a greater exploitation of our "humanness" in the name of formulating a vision of politics more appropriate to the current situation. The following passage from Virno is crucial in that regard, as it highlights the beginning of a way of thinking through the "nature" of human being in a historically specific way:

We are therefore dealing with a historically determinate subversive movement, which has emerged in quite peculiar, or rather unrepeatable, circumstances, but which is intimately concerned with that which has remained unaltered from the Cro-Magnons onwards. Its distinguishing trait is the extremely tight entanglement between "always already" (human nature) and "just now" (the bio-linguistic capitalism which has followed Fordism and Taylorism).16

Virno posits that due to certain shifts in the nature of work, it is only now, when the differential traits of the species (i.e., that which separates us from other animals, namely verbal thought, the transindividual character of the mind, the lack of specialized instincts) are the "raw material" of capitalist organization, that we can return again to the question of a politics of human nature. Thus the problem of the "natural" emerges contingently , that is, at a certain historical moment, yet as if for the first time. Thus "the multitude exhibits, in its very mode of being, the peculiar historical situation in which all the distinctive traits of human nature have earned an immediate political relevance."17 Certainly Virno's analysis involves paying attention to transformations in work and the exploitation of human capacities in employment, rather than sticking to older political questions such as the ones that preoccupy Agamben, namely the role of the state and the nature of the sovereign.

Agamben is misguided in seeing contemporary work as the highest manifestation of themetaphysical world-view: "work, which used to occupy the lowest rank in the hierarchy of active life, climbs to the rank of central value and common denominator of every human activity."18 The omnipresence of work (or, rather, the simple fact of the majority of people having to sell their labor-power in order to survive) is taken by Agamben to be an indicator of the ubiquity of the metaphysical outlook, rather than a constitutive part of the capitalist order. In this he is following Heidegger for whom the metaphysical age:

… measure[s] deeds by the impressive and successful achievements of praxis. But the deed of thinking is neither theoretical nor practical, nor is it the conjunction of these two forms of behavior.19

The "measuring" component of technocratic metaphysics misses something crucial about changes to the type of work seen as paradigmatic by theorists of immaterial labor. Both Heidegger and Agamben oppose to modern life a more primordial understanding of thought (in Heidegger's case) or a more profound conception of production as Agamben hankers for in The Man Without Content :

According to current opinion, all of man's doing - that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician - is praxis , that is, manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect.20

To this definition of praxis, Agamben proposes instead, just as Heidegger does with "thought," a return to the Greeks. We need to rethink, he argues, the distinction between "three kinds of human doing - poiesis, praxis , and work."21 But there is something historically inopportune about Agamben's return to the Greeks on this point, as he admits, acknowledging that:

The Greeks were prevented from considering work thematically, as one of the fundamental modes of human activity besides poiesis and praxis, by the fact that the physical work necessary for life's needs was performed by slaves. However this does not mean that they were unaware of its existence or had not understood its nature.22

Apart from the profound bad faith of imagining that those who speculated about slaves working would be able to contribute to a useful understanding of contemporary labor, Agamben overlooks the fact that it is far less a metaphysical conception of "will" that lies at the heart of the blurring of the three terms poiesis, praxis and work than transformations in the kinds of work that characterize contemporary capitalism that have practically engendered this blurring. If they have indeed become indiscernible it is less because praxis has come to totalize our understanding of activity than that all of the main elements of activity - the aesthetic, the theoretical and the practical - have become fused in the exploitation of our basic capacities. The very ability to communicate, to speak, has burst the banks of the 9 to 5 job, consuming "free" time in the perpetual demand to be "on call," to be available, to answer emails and calls, to exchange information at all times. The excessive creativity and potential of the language faculty is precisely the thing that gets mined by contemporary capitalism. As Virno puts it:

Far from dreading it, the society of generalized communication tries to profit from the "semantic excess not reducible to determinate signifieds," thereby conferring the greatest relevance to the indeterminate language faculty.23

But how does Agamben's conception of potentiality involve an understanding of language? Here his later work is important. In Homo Sacer he claims that the Aristotelian statement "'In what way does the living being have language?' corresponds exactly to the question 'In what way does bare life dwell in the polis ?'"24 Here Agamben identifies the very basis of politics: "There is politics because

man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion."25 But is this really the way linguistic potentiality is divided? Why is the division of zoeand bios made in the name of a "zone of irreducible indistinction?" There is another way of formulating the relation between language, potential and politics which shifts the emphasis away from the state and towards an understanding of the capacity of the laboring subject in terms of his or her linguistic nature. As Brett Neilson puts it:

At stake in [Virno's] analysis is an implicit correlation he makes between the capacity for language (langage ) and abstract labor power—a parallel that becomes ever more important in the contemporary information/knowledge economy where all work tends toward communication and/or the symbolic manipulation of language. As Virno notes, Marx himself equates labor-power with potential: "The purchaser of labor-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the seller becomes actually, what before he was only potentially, labor-power in action, a laborer." But while labor-power is potential, it is also a commodity that is bought and sold on the marketplace. And here lies the specificity of capitalism as a mode of social organization - it gives the discrepancy potential/act an extraordinary pragmatic, empirical, and economic importance. Capitalism historicizes metahistory. 26

Virno's attempt at a solution to the ability of capitalism to "historicize metahistory" is to historicize natural history - to argue that it is only now, when capitalism has worked out a way of exploiting our most fundamental human capacities, that we can "see" human nature properly, not as that which gets inclusively excluded in the State, but as that which is exploited in its most fundamental form (it should be noted here that most of the arguments for immaterial labor stress the paradigmatic rather than the quantitative nature of their arguments - it is not that most people in the world don't still literally produce goods, simply that communication has overtaken manufacture as the central factor in understanding contemporary work. No longer the factory as the main image of work but the call-centre). The baleful influence of metaphysics and the omnipresence of State are unhelpful terms in thinking about contemporary politics, presenting an image of an all-powerful sovereign and a weak and minimal subject. As Neilson notes: "Agamben finds it is difficult to think of a constitution of potentiality that is freed from the principle of sovereignty or of a constituent power that exists in separation from constituted power."27 However, it should be noted that at odd moments Agamben poses the question of communication, noting inThe Coming Community , as well as in Means Without End , that

... a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name that one wants to give the process that today dominates world history) was directed not only towards the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans... The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle.28

But investigation of this linguistic expropriation is not historically specific for Agamben - it reminds him instead of an episode in the Talmud which in turn manifests itself in the age of the spectacle. In Means Without End , the Common is linked back to Heraclitus' notion of Logos.There is no recognition of the specificity of post-Fordist forms of work. But why is Virno so sure that now is the right time to turn to human nature? Much of twentieth-century thought was a criticism of essentialism and an attempt to displace the centrality of the human, after all. Agamben too worries about essentialism. His turn to potentiality is in many ways an attempt to escape this logic of capture: "There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality. "29 But one can talk about human capacities without essentializing the way those capacities are understood. Turning to a idea addressed in Capital , Marx explains that "by labor-power, or labor-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind."30 What is at stake here is the actual, material application of the "aggregate of mental and physical capacities," not what is left behind. If Virno is right, then almost nothing, or perhaps nothing at all is left behind. And yet a different way of understanding human nature (beyond biopolitics?) has emerged:

The content of the global movement which ever since the Seattle revolt has occupied (and redefined) the public sphere is nothing less than human nature. The latter constitutes both the arena of struggle and its stake. The arena of struggle: the movement is rooted in the epoch in which the capitalist organization of

work takes on as its raw material the differential traits of the species (verbal thought, the transindividual character of the mind, neoteny, the lack of specialized instincts, etc.). That is, it is rooted in the epoch in which human praxis is applied in the most direct and systematic way to the ensemble of requirements that make praxis human. The stake: those who struggle against the mantraps placed on the paths of migrants or against copyright on scientific research raise the question of the different socio-political expression that could be given, here and now, to certain biological prerogatives of Homo sapiens. 31

These "differential traits" of the species tells us nothing essential about the being of being human (if by essential we mean ahistorical), as they are only apparent in their rawness at a particularly historical moment, namely now. Humanity is only comprehensible as a historical and political being because of the mismatch between itself and its environment. For Virno, Homo sapiens is, if anything, constituted entirely negatively: "the animal whose life is characterised by negation, by the modality of the possible, by regression to the infinite."32 Against the phenomenological idea of the world as a kind of background and source for all our other possibilities, Virno understands the world as a space of natural conflict, a source of perpetual confusion and a constitutive disorientation. If we are to return to a kind of natural political theory, Virno would want us to understand that this is, above all, an unhappy naturalism. This "unhappy naturalism" is something Agamben cannot see in general, nor can he allow for the emergence of naturalism within a particular historical context. The "privation" that Agamben identifies is never a question of environment or changes to the workings of the world, but remains solely on the side of the individual: "To have a faculty means to have a privation."33 The notion of potentiality that Agamben takes from Aristotle is not the generic one, "a child has the potential to know" but the one belonging to "someone" to be, or, more importantly, not to be (an architect, a musician, etc.). In Agamben's discussion of Marx in The Man Without Content , it is clear that the framework of potentiality means that it is impossible for him to see in Marx anything other than a generic "metaphysics of will," and man for Marx, as Agamben sees it, is simply as a kind of natural, living being:

In our time, the philosophy of man's "doing" continues to be a philosophy of life. Even when Marx inverts the traditional hierarchy of theory and praxis, the Aristotelian determination of praxis as will remains unchanged, because for Marx work is, in its essence, "capacity for work" (Arbeitskraft ), and its foundation is inherent in the very natural character of man as "active natural being," that is, as endowed with vital instincts and appetites.34

Thus Marx remains, for Agamben, trapped in an essentialist mode of thinking: "Marx does not think the essence of production beyond the horizon of modern metaphysics."35According to Agamben, Marx's definition of work and of human kind (Gattung ) is primarily a biological one:

For while poiesis constructs the space where man finds his certitude and where he ensures the freedom and duration of his action, the presupposition of work is, on the contrary, bare biological existence, the cyclical processes of the human body, whose metabolism and whose energy depend on the basic products of labor.36

For Agamben, it is "will" that characterizes Marx's conception of praxis: "it is will, determined naturalistically as drive and passion, that remains as the sole original characteristic of praxis."37Man is not simply an animal, but is a generic natural being (a Gattugswesen ):

Marx thinks of man's being as production. Production means praxis, "sensuous human activity." What is the character of this activity? While the animal, writes Marx, is immediately at one with its vital activity, is its vital activity, man does not confuse himself with it; he turns his vital activity into a means for his existence. He produces not unilaterally but universally.38

But this generic universality, the experience of the species in production, is not enough to break with the generalities of metaphysics: the collective practice of work does not do enough to separate out man from the beasts, it merely places him in another natural category. But Gattungshouldn't be understood merely naturally; Virno's historically specific claim about the point at which we can identify the major features of human nature and our troubled interaction with the environment is a claim about our generic being, but it is also a material and a historical claim about the situation we find ourselves in now. We should remember, too, that the original reception of the idea of Gattungswesen by the Young Hegelians sought to reconcile the alienated individual with the universal in the social, in light of the fact that the universality promised by the Hegelian system appeared nowhere in reality. This absence is the reason why the young Marx could write of the proletariat that it "can lay claim to

no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not aparticular wrong but wrong in general. "39 But Agamben equates the living being with its political, linguistic and natural capture by the state so completely that there seems to be no room for any kind of historically anomalous or collectively unprecedented subject, the proletariat or anything else, one that would break with history or disrupt everyday order.

For Agamben, Marx moves too quickly to conceive of man as a natural being, neglecting the role of art, in particular. The real break in history as Agamben sees it is not recent transformations in the nature of work (from Fordism to post-Fordism, for instance), but the advent of nihilism. The historical event that a rethinking of praxis, poiesis and work must encounter is thus a cultural-metaphysical break, and not an economic one. The importance of nihilism for Agamben explains to some extent his continued emphasis on the State (for example, in terms of the commonalities he discerns between Nazism and modern democracies), and the West's biopolitical mode of governance. If class has gone, if what we are left with is a "single planetary petty bourgeoisie" as the form in which "humanity has survived nihilism,"40 it is because, for Agamben, we exist still under the "sign" of Nazism. But does it make sense to speak of the camp, and of homo sacer as the primary images of contemporary politics? Certainly we cannot ignore the fact that illegal detention centers exist, that immigrants are simultaneously social scapegoats and exploited workers, but Agamben runs the risk of totalizing these images into seemingly insurmountable conditions of contemporary life. There is something exceedingly ominous about the following two statements, made in Means Without End, the first with reference to Tiananmen: " the tanks will appear again"41 and the second more general claim that "[t]he camp ... is the new biopoliticalnomos of the planet."42

What escape can there be from these totalizing images? It is no surprise that Agamben privileges Nietzsche's conception of art as poiesis over Marx's notion of work as praxis. For Agamben, reclaiming those things that have been diminished by the supposedly omnipresent petty bourgeoisie - style, gesture and, most importantly, ethics - are suggestions concerning aesthetic modes of life. In the end, potentiality is not simply about not doing, but about not doing well. Just as it was for Aristotle:

It is obvious also that they potency of merely doing a thing or having it done to one is implied in that of doing it or having it done well, but the latter is not always implied in the former: for he who does a thing well must also do it, but he who does it merely need not also so it well.43

Similarly, when Agamben describes human existence as "not an essence nor properly a thing" but as "the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality,"44 he does so in the name of an ethics: "precisely because of this ethics becomes effective." Potentiality permits an ethical relation to others and the world, beyond the constraints of biopolitical life; similarly, re-conceiving activity as poiesis allows for a different understanding of the aesthetic. Again, this is close to Aristotle for whom all arts, i.e. all productive forms of knowledge, were potencies, that is to say, sources of change in another thing or in the artist himself. This artistic understanding of producing inaugurates a different temporality. For Agamben, "[t]o look at a work of art… means to be hurled out into a more original time."45 But is the ethical or aesthetic really exempt from the exploitation already suffered by our linguistic capacities in general? After all, the creativity of language is a well-documented dimension of our being - with finite means (the implicit structures of language) we are able to generate infinitely new sentences. The exploitation of our fundamental capacities is already the appropriation of this creative dimension of our being; just as the demand to present oneself well, to constantly be selling oneself, to smile and be friendly, a "team-player," is also the appropriation of our ethical being. It is hard to see how aesthetics and ethics can escape the logic of post-Fordist labor either by attempting to flee its structure or its time. Besides, one must also note the creative dimension of capitalism itself, its ability to generate new desires and new capacities at the same time as it reduces mankind to its raw capacities.

This question of time is also relevant to the discussion of potentiality. Granting that it is central to both Aristotle and Agamben that if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not immediately disappear into actuality, it is necessary that that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), then what is thetime of this not-doing, this potentiality in reserve? It may be that we want to hold something back, to preserve a

modicum of dignity and resources for a future to come, but to fetishize inactivity as some kind of minimal excess that preserves the individual from his or her total immersion in activity is a nostalgic dream; far better to begin, as if for the first time, with the raw material of human life and the vampiric way in which it gets periodically drained. By carefully laying out the ways in which our capacities get mined, both as individuals but also as a species, we can begin to rethink human capacity for positive change anew.

Nina Power Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. Her short book on feminism, One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books) was published in 2009. She is the author of several articles on European Philosophy and politics and is currently working on a monograph on Ludwig Feuerbach.

Notes

1. See Maurizio Lazzarato, "Art. Work and Politics in Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Security," Radical Philosophy, 149 , May/June (2008): 26-32, trans. by Alberto Toscano; Giorgio Agamben, 'Bartleby, or On Contingency', Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1999); Antonio Negri, The Labour of Job , trans. by Matteo Mandarini (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

2. Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction," Early Writings , trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Penguin, 1975), 256.

3. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 395.

4. Agamben, Potentialities , 254.

5. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 57.

6. Agamben, The Time that Remains , 57.

7. Agamben, The Time that Remains , 57.

8. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal , trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 92.

9. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude , trans. by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 38.

10. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude , 42.

11. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude , 43.

12. Aristotle, "Metaphysica," trans. by W. D. Ross, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 820.

13. Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 3.

14. Aristotle, "Metaphysica," 821.

15. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community , trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35.

16. Paolo Virno, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: The new "Global Movement" and the Biological Invariant', Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy , vol. 5, no. 1, 2009.

17. Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation , trans. by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 64.

18. The Man Without Content , trans by Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, orig 1970), 70.

19. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," Basic Writings , trans. by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977), 263.

20. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content , 68.



23. Virno, "Natural-Historical Diagrams," 91.

24. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.

25. Agamben, Homo Sacer , 8.

26. Brett Neilson, "Potenza Nuda ? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism," Contretemps 5, December (2004): 75-76.

27. Neilson, "Potenza Nuda ?", 4.

28. Agamben, The Coming Community , 80. See also, the same passage in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End , trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 82.

29. Agamben, The Coming Community , 43.

30. Karl Marx, Capital volume 1 , trans. Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left review, 1981, orig 1867) chapter 6.

31. Virno, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams', 83-84.

32. Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation , 18.

33. Agamben, Potentialities , 179.

34. Agamben, The Man Without Content , 71.





39. Marx, Early Writings , 256.


41. Agamben, Means Without End , 89.

42. Agamben, Means Without End , 45.

43. Aristotle, 'Metaphysica', 822.



Copyright © 2010 Nina Power and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Potentiality or Capacity--Agamben's Missing Subjects