Potential, Act, and Violence

Potential, Act, and Violence March 11, 2015

Paolo Virno (Deja Vu and the End of History) observes that potential and act occur simultaneously. Take language: “The language faculty irrupts into becoming in concomitance with the phrase that I am speaking. It appears precisely now, as I speak, neither before nor afterwards: but, note, right now it appears as something persistent which was already there before and still will be after the fleeting actual utterance” (105).

From this and other examples he draws the conclusion that we must reckon with “the simultaneity of the permanent and the changeable, of time-as-a-whole and a specific position in time.” Thus, “in chronological progression, the ‘always’ depends on the now,’ and is its echo or corollary. The permanent exists in function of the changeable: while change is taking place and thanks to it taking place.” This, he says, explains the “touching, even heart-rending character of each given ‘now.’ Each act is full of pathos because it allows us to glimpse for a brief second the enduring potential that accompanies it” (106). 

Potential exists only in the presence of the act – but this must be qualified with the phrase “in time”: “the language faculty is dateable only while an utterance is taking place.”

In taking this position, Virno is aware of diverging from Aristotle who “devoted himself to refuting the simultaneity of potential and act.” Aristotle opposed the Megaric notion that equated potency and act. Virno responds by saying that simultaneity isn’t the same as identity. Indeed, the difference of potential and act is revealed only when we recognize that they are simultaneous: “Their simultaneity is a decisive expression of” the difference between them, since “the never-actual faculty falls in time only because (and in the moment in which) it is correlated to its wholly heterogeneous opposite: its execution, which, conversely, coincides with a calculable ‘now’” (107-8).

Far from equating potential and act, Virno sees them as opposing principles, at war. Against Aristotle, act doesn’t realize potential; that cannot be if they arise simultaneously. Rather, act “contradicts it and puts it on notice. The form of concomitance is that of an opposition: the ‘now’ clashes with the not-now, the specific execution contravenes the perpetual latency of the faculty, the word spoken breaks with the amorphous and undifferentiated capacity to speak. The date that the potential obliquely takes on – by virtue of its relation to a determinate act – is the date of its negation by that same act” (108).

It is Aristotle, he charges, who undermines the distinction of act and potential since for Aristotle potential is already a “potential act,” always already on the way to realization. There is no genuine potential in Aristotle, nothing that is sheerly possible. 

Virno may get the better of Aristotle here, but at what cost? He demonstrates the simultaneous and mutual-dependence of potential and act, but only dialectically: Act brings potential into time only by killing it, by destroying it as potential. Violence is built into act: potential never enters history except as act, but act is ever the murderer of potential. 

Without knowing precisely how to tease it out, I suspect that the resolution here has to come through theology, and Trinitarian theology in particular. (Cusa’s Possest might also be of service.) For in the Trinity there is no potential, but only the eternal utterance that does not negate but is the exact character and radiance of the Father. In Trinitarian theology lies the potential for a theory of potential and act that avoids both the blurring of Aristotle and the violence of dialectic.


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