Giorgio Agamben Destituent Potentiality and the Critique of Realization
The South Atlantic Quarterly 122:1, January 2023 doi 10.1215/00382876-10242602 © 2023 Duke University Press
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ne concept that we find ourselves speaking and hearing spoken of ever more frequently, though almost always without rigor or clarity, is the concept of destituent potentiality (potentiality [potenza], not power [potere]).1 When I began some years ago to reflect on this concept, I was sure of one thing: that it required a willingness radically to put into question the ways we think the grounds and strategies of politics. That is, what was needed was not just another variation on the paradigms of conflict and struggle that we have inherited from the tradition of the so-called revolutionary movements. Even if these paradigms could have still been tactically valid, it is certain that the strategy of destitution required other paths and other grounds. However, I intend to deal not with strategy but, rather, with the concept of destituent potentiality itself, for it is certain that only by bringing the concept to its greatest possible clarity will we be able also to understand the strategies that it entails. Now, what I have come to think in recent months is that we can understand what a destituent potentiality is only if it is subjected to a decisive critique and if we free ourselves from a concept that has dominated and continues surreptitiously to dominate Western thought and politics: the