The Quodlibet and the Good: On Agamben’s Ethics of Potentiality
Resource
中外文學, 44(3), 019-060
Journal
中外文學
Journal Volume
44
Journal Issue
3
Pages
019-060
Date Issued
2015-09
Date
2015-09
Author(s)
Abstract
At the beginning of The Coming Community, Agamben points out that
quodlibet ens or whatever being is “being such that it always matters.” Such
being “matters” not only because it is determined as singular but because the
determining can become a pure place of potentiality. We need a “coming”
community, not one imagined in the future, precisely because something takes
shape in potentiality as if in a place or medium. A community that can be
realized must be already moving, from some place to some other place.
Thus potentiality is already movement. At issue is a will to live that adds
an expressiveness to the individual experiencing potentiality. Expressiveness
implies not only a give and take between interiority and a common space,
but also a gesturality when its movement is interrupted by specifics in the
actually existing context of bodies and desires. This gesturality suspends the
expressiveness, turning its movement into potentiality.
This article examines the quodlibet to clarify why it is said to lead to love
and how it maintains a place of resistance even in an age when “self-moving”
projects are typically expressed as violence. Based on Agamben’s comments
on Deleuze’s disparaging critique of movement in his theory of cinematic
images, a review of accounts of gesturality and pure means or pure mediality
from various sources leads to a new understanding of the political relevance of
movement. In addition, Agamben’s move to link the quodlibet to love allows
us to see that an ethics of potentiality does not merely abandon the frame
of propriety and with it the distinction between good and evil. Rather, the quodlibet returns propriety to a place of mediality where impropriety can be
taken up as potential propriety.
The last part of this paper explores connections with psychoanalytic
theory, mainly through a look at the letter and the unary trait as elaborated
by Lacan, and with the uncanny in accounts of the “uncanny valley” in
robotics and animation technology, where the uncanniness of images of the
human challenges us to accept the quodlibet in being. Agamben’s account of
an ethics of potentiality pinpoints aspects of the uncanny left unexplored by
Freud. Under this ethics, the robot does not need to be “properly” human,
since impropriety is already a constant arriving at propriety. In the same way,
the good is not an imagined destination or a peak to be accomplished, but a
tarrying with the imperfect and a vigilance about the ethical vicissitudes of its
movement.
Subjects
阿甘本，德勒茲，拉康，班雅民，緣定在，運動，體觸，潛勢倫理
Agamben, Deleuze, Lacan, Benjamin, whatever being, movement,
gestureality, potentiality
gestureality, potentiality
SDGs
Type
journal article
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