CONTRIBUTI / 10 / Carlo Crosato
To be able not to pass into actuality. On Agamben’s strategic interpretation of Aristotelian ontology
This paper addresses the strategy by which Giorgio Agamben interprets the Aristotelian texts about the potentiality-actuality ontology. In Agamben’s critique, the Aristotelian ontology is responsible for having prioritized the actuality over potentiality and established the concept of hexis for explaining the passage between them. The traditional interpretation of these texts, then, has attributed an ethical meaning to such a polarity, ultimately leaving in shadow the dimension of potentiality as such, the meaning of which is not related to the immediate passage into the actuality. This also introduces a violent movement into ethics and politics, in order to overcome which, it is necessary to go back to the horizon of potentiality as such, that is, inoperativity.