2 - On Aristotle, Actuality and Potentiality

Summary

ARISTOTLE AND THE PROBLEM OF ‘POTENCY’

As noted in the previous chapter through Agamben's genealogical exploits, the various efforts to manufacture substance through the necessary fiction of sovereignty are exposed for what they are through the history of the Christian liturgy and its focus on how (divine) mystery brought substantiality and effectiveness to be identified together (OD 40/OHS 683). This creates a situation which allows effectiveness itself to become, in the terms that Agamben utilises in his genealogical study of the liturgy, Opus Dei, a ‘new ontological dimension’, as well as the only representation of being today that we have (OD 41/OHS 684). The conditions of such an established ontology are based on a distinction made by Aristotle between energeia (‘work’ or actuality) and dynamis (‘ability’ or potentiality) (OD 43/OHS 685). Referenced frequently by Agamben, this Aristotelean distinction sought directly to actualise potential and thereby establish effectiveness as a primary category of Western political and philosophical thought. This split between potentiality and actuality became the fundamental metaphysical distinction in the West, and that which allowed the logic of presupposition to capture being and render it subject to the operations (operativity) of the apparatuses that subsequently came to govern over it. In this way, Agamben discerns, the ‘dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself’ (OD 44/OHS 687). Here, as he makes clear, the dualism potentia-actualitas in Latin becomes a rendering of the Greek pair dynamis-energia, which the Latin Fathers also translated as possibilitas-efficacia (OD 46/ OHS 688). By embracing the mystery that unites these polarities, and which is part of the presupposition or capturing of being, these pairs enter into a space of undecidability that is the apparatus of the liturgy, offering another byway from which to view the political and philosophical through the lens of the theological (OD 47/OHS 689).

Despite the reality that medieval theologians were often searching for a ‘third thing’ between form and material, or potential and act (a lineage that Agamben here traces only to develop in wholly new directions), these dualisms proceeded to gain traction within theological circles for the pronounced political currency they often displayed.