Potentiality and its Discontents: Against Agamben’s Political Ontology

Agamben’s political philosophy claims to offer an ontological account of the problem of state violence and the ‘desubjectification’ involved in our idea of citizenship, which manifested itself in the emergency measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Agamben’s theory of the homo sacer traces a constitutive potential, lurking at the heart of all forms of Occidental politics, for suspending the rule of law, exposing the lives of its subjects to a violence that is both legally permissible and free of legal sanction. The article criticizes Agamben’s logic of potentiality, as it appears in several crucial junctures of his theory: his ontologization of historical configurations of political violence; his concept of form of life; and the way his messianic vision is based on a problematic notion of the destituent potential of human life. The article ends by examining a more promising treatment of potentiality, offered by political theories centered around the notion of human dependency, and the potential abuse or exploitation thereof.