Innocence, Evil, And Human Frailty Potentiality And The Child In The Writings Of Giorgio Agamben

Innocence, Evil, And Human Frailty: Potentiality And The Child In The Writings Of Giorgio Agamben In his essay ‘On Potentiality,’ Giorgio Agamben rules out interpreting potentiality in Aristotle’s metaphysic as like the child to actuality’s adult, on the basis that the child exists in a state of not yet in relation to their potential (as not yet having knowledge, as not yet being head of state) The child is not potentially an adult (or knower, or leader) in the relevant sense, according to Agamben Rather, the potentiality with which Aristotle is interested, he says, pertains to one who already possesses knowledge, and specifically, to the nature of such ‘possession’ (Potentialities 179) At the same time as the child is sequestered in the ‘not yet’ of their potentiality, however, Agamben also draws upon the figure of the child in order to imagine a future political community, in which we belong to one another, without reduction (of one to the other), exclusion, or exploitation The child then comes to represent the potentiality of community—its hidden power for political agency, change, and the emergence of difference—precisely as this ‘not yet.’ This essay explores the various nuances of Agamben’s treatment of the concept of potentiality, and how these relate to an ethics of community and the kinds of agency available to those who comprise it Although Agamben is best known for a critique of the liberal state that seems to leave little room for personal agency, I will argue here that the concept of potentiality is a dense kernel of his political and ethical philosophy, through which we can glimpse an account of agency grounded in inter-subjective (rather than sovereign v subject) relations By refocussing Agamben’s critique so that it speaks to the dynamics between classes of subject rather than between the citizen and the liberal state, I hope to demonstrate that the political agency of some is guaranteed by others’ marginalisation In other words, some individuals stand in for the potentiality—or agency —of others, by setting aside their own possibilities and thereby becoming a resource for the rest of the community Those who have come to represent the potentiality of others, I will argue, are increasingly those children whom contemporary affluent communities sentimentalise, and in whom they invest their hopes and fears for the future This equation of the child with society’s potentiality means that children have become privileged bearers of cultural value It also means, however, that adolescents, who inhabit a ‘zone of indistinction’ between childhood and adulthood, are charged with responsibility not only for society’s loss of innocence, but also for its vulnerability to ideas and events that threaten it In order to pose this line of questioning to Agamben, I have needed to adopt some ‘minor’ strategies of reading the political significance of potentiality in his work First, and most controversially, in order to draw out some of Agamben’s insights so that they speak to inter-subjective relations, I have brought psychoanalytic theory into a relation with potentiality Particularly, this will assist in elucidating Agamben’s notion of the appropriation of impotentiality, and what it means to ‘take flight’ from one’s impotentiality Second, I will read Agamben’s understanding of potentiality with his suggestions regarding ethics and the community, rather than in terms of how he situates it politically (in Homo Sacer) My reason for doing so is that the former context offers a more promising means to theorise a path away from the reification of all possibility—as well as vulnerability and danger—in the child It is also hoped that by taking our course of thought through his writings on ethics and community, we might recuperate some promising aspects of potentiality that, in his interpretation of Aristotle’s texts, Agamben chooses to underplay So, third, I will read Agamben’s understanding of potentiality across Aristotle and Heidegger on potentiality, in order to engage in dialogue these incrementally different, and sometimes even competing, concepts I Potentiality Potentiality is a rich word, comprising possibility and teleological principle, as well as potency or power To preserve its definitive opposition to ‘actuality,’ potentiality must be understood as a power that is not in force but which, rather, stands in reserve, supporting the expenditure of energy required for action Potentiality thus bears upon ideas relating to physics as well as political action Potentiality has been a pivotal ontological concept at least since Aristotle, pertaining not to kinds, but to modalities or ‘ways’ of being.1 The concept of potentiality appears frequently, and in varying contexts, throughout Agamben’s political writings Such references are often fleeting, gesturing towards an arcane tradition of knowledge that either resonates with, or is lost upon, the reader’s understanding Where Agamben takes time to elucidate the concept, his elaborations are repetitive, referring us to the same passages of Aristotle, and to his own, sometimes obscure, meditations upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby: the scribe who does not write Agamben’s most lucid reference to potentiality—and one to which he continually returns—cites a conversation between Aristotle and the Megarians, of which we have only Aristotle’s first-hand account In chapter three of Metaphysics Book Theta Aristotle had taken the Megarians to task for obscuring the vital difference between actuality, or activity (energeai) and potentiality (dunamis), such that potentiality as such is erased from the scene of being The aspect of being that Aristotle wished to preserve from the Megarians’ categorisations is the potential or capacity to perform a task, when it is not in use According to Aristotle, the Megarians not acknowledge such a mode of being For the Megarians, he writes, “there is a power only in the act and … there is no power apart from its operation” (Met θ 3, 1046b 30) The Megarians have no conceptual resources to think the being of a capacity at rest; un-actualised potential that is held in reserve for a later enactment The builder who does not build right at this moment cannot build, for the Megarian, because a capacity is only through its enactment As Heidegger points out in his analysis of this argument (Aristotle’s Metaphysics 155), what makes Aristotle an original thinker is that the Megarians’ viewpoint is entirely in keeping with the Greek manner of thinking, whereby being is understood purely as presence Because potentiality appears only in its actualisation, there is a difficulty in comprehending the notion of a latent capacity that is retained precisely within its inactivity The equation of being with that which presents itself misses the moments of being through which the appearance is given: those ‘unconscious’ or subterranean aspects of being Accordingly, as Aristotle argues, this viewpoint fails to take into account transition from one state to another For instance, if we were to accept the Megarians’ view, then how would the builder procure the ability to build the moment he commenced building? And equally, what is the process whereby this art is instantaneously lost once he ceases? (Met θ 3, 1046b 33-1047a 5) Because the Megarians cannot explain such gain and loss, and the passage between doing and not doing, Aristotle contends, they miss the essential quality of capacity: that it is something that does not have to be in use; which, moreover, one might possess, rather than exhaust or extinguish in the act Rather, for Aristotle potentiality is the origin of movement and change (kinesis), so that it is the moment of being that can be withheld in order that beings and actions may come into presence, as actuality/activity (energeia), in their own time Agamben rightly emphasises, in his own analysis of Met θ, the ability to withhold itself proper to potentiality Citing Aristotle’s phrase in chapter eight— “whatever is potentially in being may either be or not be” (8, 1050b 10)—Agamben brings out the character of potentiality as what negotiates non-being, writing that potentiality “welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, fundamental passivity” (Potentialities182) Without this relation between being and nonbeing, brokered by potentiality, there would be no room in the system for becoming—for beings of all kinds to pass in and out of being Agamben also draws our attention, however, to the special relation between human being and its own potentiality, and thus underscores the ethical and political significance of these ancient musings: If we recall that Aristotle always draws his examples of this potentiality of nonBeing from the domain of the arts and human knowledge, then we may say that human beings, insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other, exist in the mode of potentiality Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation (ibid.) If we look to Heidegger’s interpretation of Met θ, as Agamben undoubtedly would have done, then adumania here might refer to mastery, conceived as the very self-restraintfrom-doing that the Megarians deny exists Potentiality, then, insofar as it is not active, attests to one’s proficiency For, only one who truly knows their art can leave it [to] idle, thus holding it in readiness whilst refraining from its enactment If, for instance, I can only inhabit a relation to my capacity to write whilst I am writing, then this craft could never come to be well honed One would have to start over again each time if putting the pen down also meant losing the ability to write But as every writer knows, an almost unbearable process of not- writing—anxiety, reading, thinking, error, and erasure— supports the achievement of the written article Developing proficiency—whether in building, playing an instrument, or writing—necessitates a course of negotiating with what one cannot do, through practice, and thereby enlarging the scope of what one can Moreover, adunamia refers not simply to incapacity, but rather to a being-able that abstains from doing The athlete must rest, for instance, in order to recover her energy for the next run; and the musician must rest between sounding notes, so as not to produce a cacophony Any human endeavour of value requires a measured balance between exercise and restraint To exist in relation to this not-doing is then a means of accomplishment through overcoming; and once one has developed expertise, this non-being or -doing (adunamia) is outdone in order to produce a masterly act.2 Yet while human potentiality enables the development of proficiency, as Heidegger emphasises, it also signals a darker relation to non-being that orients us ethically through guilt, fear, and deception For this relation to non-being underlies and supports human abilities and arts, to be sure, but more than this, it also undermines them by indicating our incapacities, our frailties, the possibility of evil, and the inevitability of death With the above quoted passage, then, Agamben subtly locates a specifically human impasse that inaugurates our agency, and not only expertise, in potentiality Humanity’s grounding in potentiality enables distinctively human conducts such as planning, speculation, imagination, and speech—each of which involves a particular comportment to non-being; to that which does not (yet) exist in actuality That we are the beings who think abstractly connects us to a great depth of potentiality in language, which is not in use all the time, but rather for the most part remains silent: the two faces of language being the enunciation and a vast muteness that supports it Humanity, as a being that dwells in language, is then in a privileged position to comprehend potentiality as the potential to be and not-be; and to extend our power by virtue of this understanding This double nature of language reiterates the double nature of potentiality that situates human freedom For, every potentiality as such is the potentiality both to be and to not-be—such that potentiality maintains itself in the tension between positive possibility and a withdrawal from being and doing Agamben articulates this duplicity by introducing a new term to the discussion, or at least a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s adunamia Traditionally translated as incapacity, or even impossibility, Agamben renders adunamia as impotentiality, in an attempt to keep it coupled to potentiality as part of the machinery of agency This double ‘face’ of potentiality has ethical implications not only because the choice between doing and not doing is the most minimal condition of a freedom of will.3 But furthermore, human being must countenance the negative face of potentiality in order to be capable of ethical thought and action As Agamben writes: The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potential is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness … To be capable of good and evil is not simply to be capable of doing this or that good or bad action (every good or bad action is, in this sense, banal) Radical evil is not this or that bad deed but the potentiality for darkness And yet this potentiality is also the potentiality for light (Potentialities 181) In this respect, impotentiality does not only unravel the illusion of mastery implicit in Heidegger’s account of potentiality (as proficiency) Rather, it also places humanity within the fertile, yet fragile ground in which an ethics (rather than a morality) can take root Such a ground in impotentiality might better be described as groundlessness, however For ethics is only possible in view of the irreconcilable uncertainty of human action: “if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done” (Coming Community 43) This uncertainty from which ethics emerges is exactly the interval moderated by potentiality, given its intrinsic relation to non-being Humanity is faced always with its own possibility of not being—as well as the impotentiality of existence in general—and manages the anxiety that connects it to this non-being by producing and thinking The ability to choose, create, and extend oneself is, in turn, made available precisely because “every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation” (Potentialities 182) Yet in this capacity to not-be that is impotentiality, we also find the source of guilt from which morality—understood as a technology of social hierarchy—takes its cue The notion of original sin that organises Christian subjectivity indicates, according to Agamben, morality’s foundational relation to non-being (Coming Community 44) JudeoChristian humanity and morality is engendered through God’s abandonment of Adam and Even after the fall, and the idea that henceforth human being has no essence or vocation Sin, as what separates us from divinity (traditionally conceived as absolute actuality), designates the lack that persists at the nucleus of human being as impotentiality: the possibility of not doing and not being By the same token, what we call evil is also characterised by this non-being, and “the devil is nothing other than divine impotence or the power of not-being in God” (ibid 31) If evil is conventionally rendered metaphorically as a darkness—representing the non-being of goodness and light—we find Agamben also discussing impotentiality with regard to perception, as the darkness and shadow that brings forth light and visibility Agamben thus lends to ethics an aesthetic dimension, as values are rendered according to the principles of painterly chiaroscuro Light and darkness, good and evil, are situated in the same plane, but they offset one another to give place to a more complex, three-dimensional sense of life Indeed, by Agamben’s lights, the dichotomous thinking about good and evil found in morality is akin to the error of the Megarians, who failed to recognise the intrinsic dependence of presence upon absence, light upon darkness, truth upon error, and good upon evil For Agamben, conversely, Ethics begins only when the good is revealed to consist in nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the proper have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper (ibid 13) 10 We could add here, for the Megarians’ benefit, that activity consists in a grasping of our own impotentiality This non-Being that we must continually traverse—whether figured as passivity, uncertainty, mortality, or evil—is also what enables the richness of human life: if there were no impotentiality we would be little more than acorns waiting for the sun to shine It is only because we are faced continually with our own privation, or impotentiality—with the possibility of failure, of projects unfulfilled, of death and evil— that we are human beings, whose existence constitutes an ethical puzzle For Agamben, the solution to this puzzle would be to ‘appropriate’ one’s own impotentiality to oneself He goes some way to explicating what this means with reference to a passage he considers the most significant (and misunderstood) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: 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 (Met θ 1047a 24-6; in Agamben, Potentialities 183)5 Agamben notes that the ordinary interpretation of this passage renders it scarcely worth saying: as the translation of ‘impotential’ as ‘impossible’ presents the phrase to be tautological.6 Conversely, Agamben interprets ‘impotentiality’ as of a piece with potentiality, and therefore as a mode of existence rather than a predicate In so doing, he reveals in Aristotle’s obscure phrase the process that brings the act into being: the mechanism of agency, as it were Challenging the reader to approach Aristotle’s text “in all its difficulty,” Agamben suggests the following interpretation of the passage: 29 At the point when one reaches one’s final state and fulfils one’s own destiny, one finds oneself for that very reason in the place of the neighbor What is most proper to every creature is thus its substitutability, its being in any case in the place of the other (Potentialities 23) This doctrine could be interpreted to underscore the dynamic of exploitation issuing from the flight from impotentiality, whereby one’s own ‘sins’ are heaped upon the backs of others Less perniciously, but in a similarly evasive spirit, it could be taken for a settling of accounts: “A loss is compensated for by an election, a fall by an ascent, according to an economy of compensation that is hardly edifying” (ibid 24) The alternative interpretation for which Agamben opts involves an empathetic identification with the other, which enables the “destruction of the wall dividing Eden from Gehenna” (ibid.) Substitutability, in this instance, would not involve burdening the neighbour with one’s detritus and uncertainty, but rather making a place to receive the other in their specificity (‘whatever’ being), which has nothing to with ‘identity,’ or with their belonging to this or that class, age, culture, gender, or ideology This community of whatever individuals, who belong to one another in their substitutability, could support a mode of inter-subjective agency addressed by Aristotle’s account of potentiality, but not explicitly attended to by Agamben For Aristotle identifies dunamis first and foremost as what pertains to “the source of change in another thing or in another aspect of the same thing” (Met θ 1046a 11) This is for Aristotle the primary sense of potentiality: the sense that is contained in all other of its uses This definition 30 speaks to the relations between bodies: the capacity to affect and to be affected, and the change wrought by such interactions With this economical passage, Aristotle articulates the bare bones of human agency: a power that emerges within, and is supported by, the relations between individuals in a community In order to understand one’s own potentialities, and exercise them, one needs to possess an adequate sense for the relations with others that give rise to this agency By withholding information from children, so as not to compromise their ‘innocence,’ we therefore decrease their agency by cutting them out of the network of relations that enables action.17 This excision of children from the network of social relations places them in a situation of vulnerability that obliges a fantastical relation whereby they represent to the community its own fragility Notwithstanding his neglect of the above definition, this nuance of potentiality speaks to the reinterpretation of the relation of potentiality to activity suggested by Agamben By reserving a place within ourselves for the other we approach our own impotentiality, and thus create an ease—or adjacent space (Coming Community 25)—for the expression of human frailty This inter-subjective account of potentiality also speaks to a reinterpretation of the relation between children and adults, to the extent that were such ethics in play, children would be unburdened of their role as communal reservoir for impotentiality Aristotle’s emphasis upon relations of change between bodies, coupled with Agamben’s affirmation of abandonment (his ‘Limbo ethics,’ as it were), encourage an acceptance of those aspects of experience from which we usually take flight—guilt, ambiguity, uncertainty, loss—in short, impotentiality Children and adolescents need to manage their own impotentiality, without also having to minister to adults’ anxieties What is needed, then, is to develop an orientation towards the change that one’s actions 31 and thoughts (fantasies and projections) bring to bear upon others The secret of agency would be found in these relations of change through which we ‘belong’ to one another not through conditions of belonging, but simply because we are co-implicated in the world that we make together The dynamic of social interaction, and the dynamic between being and non-being navigated through potentiality, are both part and parcel of everyday political agency By identifying our own impotentiality with children—and thus consigning them to a sphere of protective concern and oversight—citizens exploit and disempower a whole section of the community But they also alienate themselves from an essential element of their own agency because, as Agamben demonstrates, impotentiality and fragility are integral to potentiality and ethics In order, therefore, to reappropriate our impotentiality, it is first necessary to release children from their fantasmatic function as purveyors of impotentiality Recognition of the fantasies through which the material future is negotiated reveals the relation of presence and absence through which life’s possibilities are afforded: that fundamental passivity comprehended by intellection In keeping with Agamben’s own insights, we might also rethink the kinds of places that are deemed ‘appropriate’ for children, in both practice and theory What the more or less constant disputes over public space and children’s place within it tell us is that children not desire merely to be corralled into playgrounds or other ‘authorised’ spaces, but want instead to share common spaces in their own manner, and without being branded menaces to the community.18 Agamben’s own relegation of children within his theorising to ‘Playland’—and other hypothetical spaces that symbolize a coming politics —represents a similar excision of them from everyday political concerns Instead they 32 have come to represent precisely the ‘not-yet’ potentiality that elsewhere Agamben dismisses as teleological: a possibility that will unfold into the future, but which is abstract, at best, to the present living context I will conclude this paper by suggesting a place for children that is consistent with Agamben’s critique of potentiality, but which is drawn instead from the reflections of the Australian photographic artist Bill Henson Henson, who famously works with children and adolescents,19 stated in an interview about his work: The reason I like working with teenagers is because they represent a kind of breach between the dimensions that people cross through The classical root of the word “adolescence” means to grow towards something I am fascinated with that interval, that sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period where you have an exponential growth of experience and knowledge, but also a kind of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult life (Sidhu) Henson gestures toward precisely the duplicity of potentiality, and the invidious position of children and adolescents—who inhabit an ambiguous interval, but are not thereby bereft of agency On the contrary, one gathers from this statement that it is precisely this in-between state that produces the child’s agency, bringing them in close proximity to the uncertainty and receptivity that characterises impotentiality Henson’s own depiction of children’s preferred spaces evokes, again, intervals and interstices within the normal fabric of the community’s spatiality, rather than a place of seclusion and protection: “the no man’s land between one thing and another thing … like the vacant lot between the 33 shopping mall and the petrol station.”20 Thus, children appropriate disused spaces, imbuing them with their own significance, through play This topography, together with the chiaroscurist play of light and shadow that his photography affects, is reminiscent of Limbo: the place of abandonment, in which the wall dividing Eden from Gehenna is finally dismantled When adults learn to make a place alongside for their child and adolescent neighbours—to share public space, without building into it obstacles to participation such as Mosquito devices, skateboard studs, and graffiti resistant surfaces— perhaps then they will be in a position to confront their impotentiality Notes For a comprehensive treatment of the ontological significance of potentiality in Aristotle’s work, see Charlotte Witt, Ways of Being Discussing a runner poised in the starting position—in her potentiality to run—Heidegger writes: what we call ‘kneeling’ here is not kneeling in the sense of having set oneself down [like the old peasant woman who kneels before a crucifix]; on the contrary, this pose is much more that of being already ‘off and running.’ The particularly relaxed positioning of the hands, with fingertips touching the ground, is almost already the thrust and the leaving behind of the place still held Face and glance not fall dreamily to the ground, nor they wander from one thing to another; rather, they are tensely focused on the track ahead, so that it looks as though the entire stance is stretched taut toward what lies before it No, it not only looks this way, it is so, and we see this immediately; it is decisive that this be attended to as well What limps along afterwards and is attempted inadequately, or perhaps without seriousness, is the suitable clarification of the essence of the actuality of this being which is actual in this way (Aristotle’s Metaphysics 187) Thus Heidegger signals the temporality of force, wherein potentiality and actuality co-determine one another Dumania anticipates and enables the act, energeia, just as the actual then corrects or clarifies that nature of potentiality, because, Heidegger notes, capability is always capability for something Heidegger thus remains faithful to Aristotle’s hierarchy of ways of being, which awards actuality priority over potentiality, even while salvaging potentiality from the oblivion to which the Megarians had consigned it Agamben, on the other hand, challenges and reverses this order of priority, by placing potentiality before actuality in significance, and further, marking out impotentiality as the most integral quality of being and doing Understanding this difference in evaluation of the modes of being allows better access to the ethical and political meanings of potentiality for Agamben The philosophical conception of free will depends upon the premise that one has free will only to the extent that, at least in the relevant circumstances, one might have acted otherwise, or have refrained from acting This principle is borne out in relation to the dual structure of potentiality, in that a capacity is thereby defined as something that may be enacted or not Otherwise it would be a necessary predicate of the subject in question, rather than a capacity or potentiality (which signals contingency) Likewise, without the ability to otherwise or refrain from doing, our actions would be determined and not the consequence of free choice See A J Ayer, “Freedom and Necessity.” I am aware that the distinction between ethics and morality invoked here is controversial Ethics is meant in a secular, somewhat Spinozian, sense, as a way of life wherein it is not stipulated in advance what are good and bad actions, but rather values are determined with respect to relevant relations and conditions Morality, on the other hand, refers to a behavioural code wherein a set of admissible actions is decided in advance Those who accord to a moral code, then, flee from their potentiality, insofar as they refuse to admit of the uncertainty of human action and possibilities Notably, Heidegger renders this passage as: “That which is in actuality capable … is that for which nothing more is unattainable once it sets itself to work as that for which it is claimed to be well equipped” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics 188) This passage speaks, then, for Heidegger, to the being of potentiality as expertise: that a failure to attain mastery is the non-being that lags behind true potentiality, and is completely exhausted in the act for which one has expertise This is not quite what Agamben has in mind Stephen Makin, for instance, interprets the passage in the context of Aristotle’s argument against the Megrarians, as a ‘test.’ What Agamben translates as ‘potentiality’ is for Makin ‘impossibility’— where impossibility indicates the presence of contradiction: that whatever is actual can only be so if its actuality entails no contradiction; if, in other words, it hadn’t first been capable of being in that way This, is, indeed tautological (it is possible only if there is no logical contradiction that would indicate against it), but it also addresses directly the Megrarian view (that something has a potential only at the moment this potential is actualized) by putting it to the test And this is a strategy fairly common to Aristotle’s method of argument See Makin, 72-79 The website for one outlet at which the device is sold (www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/teenage_control_products.html) boasts that “trials have shown that teenagers are acutely aware of the MosquitoTM and move away from the area within just a couple of minutes.” The image used to sell the device shows hooded teenagers covering their ears See also this BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7240306.stm, both items last accessed Wednesday 26th November 2008 The official Children’s Commission website (http://www.11million.org.uk, last accessed Friday 2nd May 2008), provides the following reasons for their opposition to the use Mosquito devices: • They affect all children and young people, even babies and toddlers • They don’t work They only move the problem along • They build barriers between younger and older people • They force us [youths] to move away from places we feel safe in In a poignant display of agency, many young people have turned the mosquito sound to their advantage by downloading it as a ring-tone onto their mobile phones, and thereby being able to receive calls and text messages without the knowledge of parents or teachers See, for instance, this website: http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/, last accessed Thursday 28th February 2008 10 Note, for instance, that public policy issues are frequently framed in terms of either a threat to children, or else the present degradation of the character of children that puts the community itself at risk Health risks are understood in terms of childhood obesity, for instance; domestic violence and rape in terms of child abuse; poverty in terms of child neglect; commercialisation and advertising in terms of the sexualisation of children; community morality in terms of teenage pregnancy, and so on 11 See also Agamben, Infancy and History, where he writes: If there was no experience, if there was no infancy, language would undoubtedly be a ‘game’ in Wittgenstein’s sense, its truth from the point where there is experience, where there is infancy, whose expropriation is the subject of language, then language appears as the place where experience must become truth In other words infancy as Ur-limit in language emerges through constituting it as the site of truth What Wittgenstein posits, at the end of the Tractatus, as the ‘mythical’ limit of language is not a psychic reality located outside or beyond language in some nebulous so-called ‘mystical experience,’ it is the very transcendental origin of language, nothing other than infancy The ineffable is, in reality, infancy Experience is the mysterion which every individual intuits from the fact of having an infancy (58) 12 The relation between Agamben’s use of the term ‘thing’ here and Lacan’s reinterpretation of das Ding in Freud should not be overlooked The Thing in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory designates an imaginary loss, or internal un-representable rupture, that is precipitated by the acquisition of language (the splitting of the self between unconscious and conscious), and which thereby sets desire into motion See Lacan, 118 13 For an excellent analysis of Agamben’s treatment of law in terms of his accounts of history and play, see Catherine Mills, “Playing with Law.” 14 Aristotle’s characterisation of the highest form of thought as abstract thought is hardly surprising given his own vocation, and is not likely to be questioned by the philosophers who read him 15 An apt example of the kind of power Bartleby represents is Rosa Parks’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus, in 1955 in Alabama: an action which galvanised the civil rights movement Thanks to Robert Sinnerbrink for suggesting this example 16 See also Jenny Edkinds, “Whatever Politics.” 17 It’s often suggested that children live in between fantasy and reality Yet research in child psychology suggests that, if children are given accurate information about their environment, they can tell the difference For instance, they might play with an imaginary friend, or attribute agency to a doll for the purposes of a game, but children are usually fully aware of the provisional nature of this ‘reality.’ The boundary breaks down, however, when children are given inaccurate information about the world: for instance, that a fat man in a red suit breaks into their house to deliver presents at Christmas time, but only if they’re good Children often struggle to incorporate the contradictions the Santa Claus myth generates into the fabric of their everyday understanding of reality, and once the myth is debunked, can feel misled and betrayed See Jacqueline D Woolley, ‘Thinking about Fantasy”; and Marjorie Taylor, “The Role of Creative Control.” 18 Another example of adults’ attempt to limit teenagers’ use of public space is the case of a British local council that spent considerable funds rebuilding three steps so that they were no longer comfortable to sit on, on the basis that teenagers were gathering there after school For news coverage see: http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/2272425.taking_steps_to_deter_kids_having_a_sitdown_ in_rosehill/ (last accessed Wednesday 26th November 2008) The comments section to the article is also instructive 19 Bill Henson became a household name in Australia after the image on an invitation to his 2008 Sydney exhibition caused a media row, leading to the seizure of some of the exhibition’s photographs by police, and the investigation of Henson as a child pornographer Although ultimately charges were not laid, the incident ignited a debate in Australia that mirrors those in the US (in relation, for instance, to the photographer Sally Mann) regarding the meaning of child nudity, and whether the representation of it always constitutes pornography For a detailed ‘anatomy’ of the moral panic over Henson’s exhibition, see David Marr, The Henson Case One notable omission during the media ruckus over the image was the girl’s own view on the photographs, and indeed, the opinions of any children, as children’s rights activists took it upon themselves to speak on their behalf For an account of this omission, see Kylie Valentine, “Innocence Defiled, Again?” 20 The quotation reads in full: The reason behind the ambiguity or unknown dimension to the landscape element in all my pictures is that I’ve always been fascinated with intervals in the landscape, the no man’s land between one thing and another thing It is like the vacant lot between the shopping mall and the petrol station All those kind of intervals in the landscape are a universal theme It does not matter which country you’re in, they are everywhere What is interesting is that this is also where kids naturally go to muck around Kids naturally gravitate toward that sort of interval in the landscape I suppose, as we grow older, all those places sort of become a bit of a lost domain (ibid.) 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The Art of Bill Henson and the Welfare of Children.” Australian Review of Public Affairs (June 2008) http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2008/06/valentine.html (Last accessed 11 December 2008) Witt, C Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003 Woolley, J D “Thinking about Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Different Thinkers and Believers from Adults?” Child Development 68 [6] (December 1997): 991-1011 ... examples of this potentiality of nonBeing from the domain of the arts and human knowledge, then we may say that human beings, insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other,... impotentiality as the most integral quality of being and doing Understanding this difference in evaluation of the modes of being allows better access to the ethical and political meanings of potentiality. .. fascinated with intervals in the landscape, the no man’s land between one thing and another thing It is like the vacant lot between the shopping mall and the petrol station All those kind of intervals