Potenza nuda?

Abstract

"part 3.2 of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben raises serious concerns about the conception of constituent power elaborated by Antonio Negri. Quoting from Negriʼs 1992 text Il potere constituente, Agamben turns to Aristotleʼs Metaphysics to argue for the impossibility of isolating the revolutionary potential of constituent power from the constituted forms of sovereign power. He writes: “Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality… has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable.”1 At stake is a radical rejection of Negriʼs Spinoza-based view of absolute democracy as immanent in the desire of the multitude and separable from the formal structures of constituted power. This criticism, which opens a point of contention between two of Italyʼs most prominent political thinkers, attracts Negriʼs response in a variety of contexts, sometimes directly and at others more allusively. Tracing this response through Hardt and Negriʼs Empire, Negriʼs 2001 essay “Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza,” the introduction to the 2002 Italian reissue of Il potere constituente, and Negriʼs 2003 review of Agambenʼs Stato di eccezione, the present paper explores the divergent theoretical and political positions implied by this disagreement. Without adjudicating the matter or seeking to derive a via media, the aim is to interrogate the biopolitical complexities inherent in the notion of potentiality and to explore their relevance for contemporary practical-political struggles. To this end, reference is made to the work of Paolo Virno, another Italian philosopher whose thought bears strong affinities to that of both Agamben and Negri, but which develops the notion of potentiality in an altogether more challenging and politically enabling direction