“To be capable, in pure potentiality, to bear the ‘no more than’ beyond Being and Nothing, fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both ––this is the trial that Bartleby announces.” ––Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities It has become something like a low-level commonplace—circulating with equal ease in continental theory, analytic metaphysics, and political theology—to say that “potentiality” has returned as a central philosophical concern; but, as is often the case with commonplaces, the renewed ubiquity of the term has not necessarily entailed a corresponding clarification of what, exactly, is meant when we speak of potentiality today. On the one hand, analytic metaphysicians working under the banner of so-called “post-modal metaphysics” have sought to move beneath the level of possible-world operators, grounding modality in more primitive notions such as essence, ground, or power (Fine; Sider; Vetter). On the other hand, a rather different, though not unrelated, revival of dynamis has taken place in the wake of Heidegger, Foucault, and Schmitt, in which potentiality becomes the name for a certain ontological fissure at the heart of life and sovereignty (Agamben, Potentialities ; Homo Sacer ). What these developments share—despite their divergent vocabularies and institutional genealogies—is the intuition that possibility, in the thin logical sense, cannot bear the theoretical weight we have increasingly asked it to carry, and that something like Aristotelian potentiality must be rethought if we are to understand both the structure of nature and the structure of power.
It is in this context that the juxtaposition of Charles Sanders Peirce and Giorgio Agamben, which might otherwise look merely idiosyncratic, becomes methodologically legible. Peirce, in the Monist essays of the 1890s, elaborates a tripartite metaphysics of nature—Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness— within which his doctrine of tychism (the thesis that there is genuine, irreducible chance in the universe, and that even laws of nature must be understood as historically grown “habits”) amounts to a potentiality-first cosmology: Firstness as qualitative suchness and pure possibility, from which fact (Secondness) and law (Thirdness) emerge via habit-taking (Peirce, “Doctrine” 321–37; “Law of Mind” 533–39). Agamben, by contrast, returns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ and De anima with a rigorously philological eye and radicalizes a seemingly technical point—that every potentiality is also impotentiality —into an ontology and politics centered on the capacity not to be and not to do, a capacity that, in his view, defines the human as the animal capable of its own non-act and that underlies both sovereign power and the possibility of its destitution (Agamben, Potentialities 177–83; Use of Bodies 263–69). To place Peirce and Agamben side by side, then, is to stage a kind of internal dialogue within the broader post-modal landscape: between a metaphysics of potentiality as productive chance and habit, and a politics of potentiality as impotentiality and inoperativity.
The aim of this paper is not to collapse these projects into a single theory, nor to anachronistically recruit Peirce as a proto-Agambenian (or vice versa), but to use their tension as a diagnostic instrument for thinking potentiality in a way that is adequate both to the structure of nature and to the structure of contemporary political life. Part I reconstructs, in deliberately schematic fashion, the conceptual field in which this comparison takes place: from Aristotle’s “thick” ontology of dynamis and energeia , through the thinning of potentiality in possible-worlds semantics, to the recent neo-Aristotelian turn in powers and potentialist metaphysics (Fine; Vetter; Bird). Part II turns to Peirce’s triadic categories and doctrine of tychism, reading Firstness as an ontological register of pure potentiality and showing how his evolutionary cosmology offers a potentiality-first account of law and chance. Part III then turns to Agamben’s reactivation of Aristotelian potentiality as impotentiality and traces how this reconfiguration underwrites his analyses of sovereignty, bare life, and inoperativity, culminating in the notion of “destituent potential.” The conclusion suggests that the dissonance between Peirce’s growing universe of habits and Agamben’s practices of destitution is not a defect to be resolved, but an index of the double demand any contemporary metaphysics of potentiality must meet: to think a world that can still become otherwise, and a life that can, at least sometimes, refuse to do what it can.
I. Potentiality Before and After Modality
Aristotelian Thickness: Dynamis , Energeia , Teleology
It is by now almost a classroom cliché to say that “potentiality” is an Aristotelian bequest, but clichés often index precisely those conceptual sites where a term has been both overused and underthought. In Metaphysics Θ, as well as across the Physics and De Anima , the now-familiar pair dynamis and energeia — translated, somewhat flaccidly, as “potentiality” and “actuality”—does not mark a generic opposition between what may be and what is, but a densely articulated ontology of powers, their proper ends, and the forms of activity in which they attain completion (Aristotle, Metaphysics Θ.1–3; Physics II; De Anima II–III). To call something “potentially F” is, for Aristotle, not to mutter that it “might, for all we know, turn out to be F,” but to ascribe to it a determinate capacity— dynamis —whose intelligibility is bound up with the characteristic telos of the kind to which it belongs: the bronze is potentially a statue, the acorn potentially an oak, in virtue of a structured relation between matter and form, in which the potential is always “for” a certain range of fulfillments that are themselves normatively ranked (Aristotle 1046a– 1050b).
This “thickness” of potentiality is underscored by Aristotle’s internal differentiations: non-rational versus rational powers, passive versus active capacities, “first” versus “second” actuality (the difference between merely having a skill and actually exercising it), and, crucially for what follows, the asymmetry between the powers of merely natural beings and those of rational animals. A stone has the power to fall; it does not have the power to suspend its falling. The architect, by contrast, has the power to build and the power not to build; the doctor has the power to heal and to refrain from healing ( Metaphysics Θ.2; De Anima III.9). Already here—this is the hinge on which Agamben will later turn—the structure of power includes its own privation: a potentiality that could not not be actualized would be indistinguishable from actuality; it would simply be a temporally delayed act (Aristotle 1047a–1048b). Teleology in Aristotle therefore never quite achieves the smooth, frictionless closure that some textbook schematizations suggest; the famous “sea-battle” problem in De Interpretatione 9 (are propositions about tomorrow’s battle already determinately true or false?) indexes the same tension between a universe in which the future is, in some sense, open and a logic that tends, almost against itself, toward bivalence and determinacy.
What matters for my purposes is that in the classical picture, potentiality is not a thin, operator-like notion that merely tracks which propositions are possibly true. It is a position within an ontological and teleological matrix: powers are distributed across kinds; ends are hierarchically ordered; matter is intelligible only in relation to the forms it can receive; and rational powers (unlike merely natural ones) include the possibility of non-exercise. In other words, dynamis is already an intersectional concept in Aristotle—crossing ontology, ethics, and a proto-politics of the rational animal—long before it is flattened into a generic “can” or “might.”
Possible Worlds and the Thinning of Potentiality
If we now move—too abruptly, but in a way that is symptomatic of the conceptual discontinuity I want to stage—from Aristotle’s dense web of powers and ends to the austere space of twentieth-century analytic modal logic, what strikes one is precisely the disappearance of this thickness. With the advent of possible-worlds semantics (Kripke, Lewis, and the subsequent orthodoxy), modality is regimented via operators and models: □ and ◊ are interpreted over a set of “worlds” with accessibility relations; to say that p is possible is, roughly, to say that p is true in at least one accessible world; to say that p is necessary is to say that p is true in all such worlds. The gain is undeniable—formal clarity, inferential control, a unified treatment of logical, metaphysical, and even epistemic modalities—but the cost, from an Aristotelian vantage, is equally evident: “potentiality” no longer names an ontological structure in which powers, matter, and ends co-articulate one another; it becomes, at best, a picturesque manner of speaking about which propositions are true at which indices.
In this canonical picture, to say that an agent “has the potential” to φ is just a façon de parler for the claim that there exists a possible world, suitably related to the actual one by laws and past facts, in which that agent φ’s. The metaphysical work is done by the relational structure of worlds; dynamis and energeia have been silently displaced by ◊ and □. The question “what is the mode of being of a capacity?”—in virtue of what does a power exist, how is it individuated, how does it relate to matter and form?—is overshadowed by the semantic question “what are the truth conditions of ‘can’ and ‘must’?” The latter is answered with admirable technical finesse; the former is largely bracketed.
I am not claiming that possible-worlds semantics “refutes” Aristotelian potentiality; the two frameworks operate at different levels and with different ambitions. The point, rather, is diagnostic: in the dominant analytic idiom, modality is treated as conceptually primitive (or at least not further analyzed), and potentiality, insofar as the word appears at all, is typically paraphrased into modal terms. When we ask whether a given action was “really possible,” the standard move is to ask whether there exists a world compatible with the laws and initial conditions in which that action occurs, not whether there is something like a power in virtue of which the agent could have acted otherwise.
Powers, Dispositions, and Neo-Aristotelian Potentiality
Against this background, the so-called “powers” or “neo-Aristotelian” turn in recent metaphysics appears as a kind of counter-movement—one that is sometimes explicitly motivated by dissatisfaction with a purely Humean ontology of categorical properties under external laws and, more implicitly, by a sense that possible-worlds talk has rendered the metaphysics of causation and modality strangely bloodless. Beginning in the late twentieth century and intensifying over the last two decades, a number of philosophers (Alexander Bird, Brian Ellis, Stephen Mumford, Rani Lill Anjum, among others) have defended an ontology of irreducible causal powers or dispositions—fragility, charge, mass, spin, solubility, and so on—arguing that these are not reducible to categorical bases plus laws and that a Humean mosaic of inert qualities under an external lawbook cannot account for the directedness and counterfactual robustness of causal behavior (Bird; Mumford and Anjum; Anjum and Mumford).
On such views, to be fragile is not merely to belong to a class of things that in fact break under certain conditions; it is to have, as part of one’s very nature, a tendency or directedness toward breaking when struck in the right way. Modality (what could or would happen under various circumstances) is no longer represented externally, in a space of worlds; it is anchored in the properties of things themselves. The rhetoric of “neo-Aristotelianism” that accompanies this turn is not accidental: it signals a partial rehabilitation of the idea that potentiality (or at least something formally analogous to it, under the headings of powers, dispositions, or tendencies) is a basic ontological category, even if the language has shifted away from dynamis and energeia to talk of bases, manifestations, and counterfactuals.
Barbara Vetter’s work crystalizes this trend by making the deliberately provocative move of taking potentiality itself as primitive and then deriving modality from it. In Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality , she proposes a version of “potentialism,” according to which individual objects possess potentials—paper has the potential to burn, an acorn to become an oak, a person to run a mile in under four minutes—and metaphysical possibility is to be understood, roughly, as whatever falls within the range of some such potential (Vetter 1–5). Instead of saying that it is possible that the paper burns because there is a world in which it burns, we say that it is possible because the paper is such that it can burn. The logical space of possibilities is thus not prior to and independent of the actual; it is generated by, and constrained by, the potentials of actual entities.
In later work, Vetter explicitly stages a contest between essentialism and potentialism : for the essentialist, modal facts are grounded in essences (what things are, in their deepest nature); for the potentialist, modal facts are grounded in potentialities (what things can do or undergo) (Vetter; Bird; Bauer). Either way, the direction of explanation is reversed with respect to the possible-worlds orthodoxy: modality is no longer sui generis; something like Aristotelian act/potency, recoded via the language of powers or potentials, does the metaphysical work. What is “possible” or “necessary” is what follows from deeper facts about what things are (their essences) or what they can do (their powers), not vice versa.
Post-Modal Metaphysics: Essence, Ground, Potential
This reversal is one instance of a broader reorientation that Theodore Sider, among others, has labeled “postmodal metaphysics”: a family of approaches that seeks to “get beneath” modality by appealing to notions such as essence , grounding , or structure (Sider 1–4). Kit Fine’s canonical critique of the “modal account” of essence is exemplary. In “Essence and Modality,” Fine argues that we cannot define what it is to be Socrates in terms of what is necessary of Socrates across possible worlds, since there are many necessary truths about Socrates (for example, that 2 + 2 = 4) that do not seem to be part of his essence, and conversely, there are essential truths that are not captured by simple necessity claims (Fine 1–5). Essence, on his view, is logically and metaphysically prior to modality: what is necessary is what follows from the essence of things, not vice versa.
“Post-modal metaphysics,” in this sense, is not a single doctrine but a shift in explanatory strategy: whether one is an essentialist, a grounding theorist, or a potentialist, the shared gesture is to dethrone modality and install some more fine-grained metaphysical notion—essence, ground, potentiality—as the true bearer of explanatory weight. The relevant contrast, for my purposes, is not between different brands of post-modalism but between this entire family of views and the possible-worlds orthodoxy it displaces. In both the essentialist and potentialist variants, the claim is that there is a deeper level of structure —a level at which questions about what things are (their essences) and what they can do (their powers and potentials) are prior to questions about which worlds are possible.
At the same time, the powers and dispositionalist literature tends to remain relatively modest in its ambitions, confining itself (with some exceptions) to the metaphysics of laws, causation, and scientific explanation. It rarely asks, in an explicit way, what becomes of teleology, of the relation between potentiality and fulfillment, or of the peculiar status of rational powers that include their own non- exercise—those questions that occupied Aristotle and that will be at stake, in a very different register, in Agamben’s work. It is precisely here that Peirce and Agamben can be made to speak to the contemporary analytic scene: not as quaint historical curiosities, but as thinkers who radicalize, in distinct and incompatible ways, the thought that potentiality is more than a thin modal operator—that at the heart of nature and of politics there is a mode of being (a how of being, rather than a that ) which cannot be captured by the combinatorics of possible worlds alone.
From This Landscape to Peirce and Agamben
Against this contemporary backdrop—where potentiality has re-entered analytic metaphysics as a live candidate for a fundamental category, but largely stripped of its classical teleological and anthropological entanglements—I want to place Peirce and Agamben. Both can be read, I will suggest, as offering alternative “post-modal” ontologies of potentiality, albeit ones articulated in very different philosophical idioms: Peirce’s in a speculative cosmology of categories, chance, and habit; Agamben’s in a genealogy of sovereign power, bare life, and inoperativity.
What links them, beyond any straightforward line of influence (Agamben, to my knowledge, never cites Peirce), is precisely the conviction that potentiality is not exhausted by modal operators, and that any serious thinking of nature or politics must grapple with a dimension of the real that is neither simply actual nor simply possible in the thin, semantic sense. In what follows, I turn first to Peirce’s doctrine of Firstness and tychism, which reconfigures potentiality at the level of a cosmic metaphysics of nature, and then to Agamben’s reactivation of Aristotelian dynamis as potentiality-as-impotentiality, which displaces the problem into the heart of subjectivity and political life. The wager is that reading them together, against the horizon of contemporary post-modal metaphysics, allows us to glimpse a different—perhaps more disquieting, but also more promising—metaphysics of potentiality.
II. Peirce: Tychism, Firstness, and the Ontology of Pure Chance
Architectonics: Categories and Cosmology
If “post-modal metaphysics” (in the Fine–Vetter sense) attempts to dig beneath modal operators to something like essence or power, Peirce, writing a century earlier and in a very different idiom, can be read as constructing nothing less than a cosmic architectonic in which modality is displaced by a triadic ontology of categories—Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness—that are at once phenomenological, logical, and cosmological (and that, importantly, already encode something like potentiality, actuality, and law without ever saying so in those exact terms). In the Monist essays of the early 1890s, especially “The Architecture of Theories,” Peirce presents these three as “universal categories” of experience and being, deployed first at the level of phaneroscopy (his quasi-phenomenology of “whatever is present to the mind”) and then extended into a metaphysics of cosmic evolution (Peirce, “Architecture” 161–64; Colapietro 1–4).
Firstness, in this familiar but still recalcitrant scheme, is the mode of being of what is “such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else”—pure quality, “feeling” in a non-psychological sense, mere suchness or possibility; Secondness is brute confrontation, reaction, this-here-now resistance; Thirdness is mediation, habit, law, generality (Peirce, Collected Papers 1.300–1.302). To the extent that these categories are not simply a classificatory curiosity but the scaffolding of an entire cosmology, they entail a precise order of dependence: Firstness is not an abstract possibility-space supervenient on facts; it is the most originary mode of being, out of which facts (Secondness) and laws (Thirdness) emerge historically. As one commentator puts it, Peirce’s metaphysics is “architectonic” in the strong sense that his logic of categories and his narrative of cosmic growth are two faces of the same structure (Burch; Colapietro 2–6).
If we read Peirce with the suspicious eyes of a post-Kripkean metaphysician, what is striking is that he does not ask, at least not in these essays, which propositions are necessary at which possible worlds; he asks what kinds of being (or modes of being) must be posited if one is to render intelligible a universe in which novelty, law, and continuity are real. Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness are thus not merely “levels” of description but ontological operators: they tell us that there is, at the root of things, a layer of qualitative potentiality (Firstness), a layer of brute facticity (Secondness), and a layer of generalizing habit or law (Thirdness), and that any adequate metaphysics must show how the latter two can only arise out of, and remain dependent upon, the first (Peirce, “Architecture” 171–75).
Tychism Contra Necessitarianism
It is in this architectonic context that Peirce’s better-known doctrine of tychism —the insistence that there is genuine, objective chance in the universe—needs to be placed. In “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” the second Monist essay, Peirce takes aim at what he calls “necessitarianism,” the thesis (familiar from Laplacean fantasies of an all-knowing demon) that given the laws of nature and the complete state of the universe at any time, every subsequent fact is strictly determined (Peirce, “Doctrine” 321–23). The determinist, on this picture, reads the world as a completed book whose chapters are already written, even if we, as finite readers, have only made it so far as page t : contingency is epistemic, not ontological.
Peirce’s strategy is not merely to say that we do not know the laws or initial conditions (a modest skepticism that a determinist could cheerfully accept); it is to argue that the assumption of exact, exceptionless lawfulness is a metaphysical extrapolation , unsupported by the very empirical evidence it claims to honor. Statistical regularities, he notes, show only that events tend to conform to laws on average, not that each individual event is necessitated; moreover, our best physical theories already seem to tolerate small deviations and probabilities (Peirce, “Doctrine” 329–34). In other words, determinism is not the sober voice of science but a speculative thesis about the “absolute perfection of law” that goes beyond what observation justifies (Peirce, “Doctrine” 335).
Tychism is the name Peirce gives to the opposite speculative thesis: that there is an element of absolute spontaneity in the universe, that is, events which are not the inevitable outcome of antecedent conditions under fixed laws but introduce genuine novelty into the course of things (Peirce, “Doctrine” 334–36; “Architecture” 171–73). Crucially, this is not a regress to sheer randomness understood as unintelligible noise; nor is it a romantic celebration of free will as a kind of metaphysical wildcard. Tychism is framed as a scientific hypothesis—Peirce repeatedly calls it such—whose point is to make sense of the actual behavior of the world, especially the phenomena of evolution, growth, and the statistical character of physical law (Burch; Herdy 12).
Here the connection to Darwinism becomes explicit. If biological evolution depends upon accidental variation plus selection, and if our best cosmology suggests that the universe itself has a history (rather than being an eternal, static block), then the assumption that all variation is merely apparent—a reflection of our ignorance of the underlying precise laws—is, Peirce contends, less plausible than the hypothesis that the universe itself has “grown” through a process in which chance events and habit- taking have co-produced its current structure (Peirce, “Law of Mind” 533–35). Tychism, in this sense, is one pillar of a broader evolutionary cosmology, the other two being synechism (the doctrine of continuity) and agapism (the hypothesis that love, or something like a preferential tendency toward harmonious cooperation, plays a role in evolution) (Peirce, “Architecture” 175; “Evolutionary Love”).
From the vantage of Part I, one could say that Peirce refuses both the thin modalization of possibility into “worlds” and the exclusively essentialist reading of modality as grounded in fixed natures: his universe is not a combinatorial space of possible arrangements but a growing cosmos in which chance is metaphysically primitive and laws are contingent habits that have sedimented over time.
Firstness as Pure Potentiality (Without Worlds)
Within this evolutionary architectonic, Firstness is the category that quietly bears the weight of what we would now call potentiality. It is tempting—especially for readers already trained by possible-world semantics—to assimilate Firstness to a set of merely possible states of affairs, or to redescribe it as a “space” of ways the world might be. But this translation would miss what is most radical in Peirce’s construction, since Firstness is not a catalog of counterfactual configurations but a mode of being: the being of “suchness” or “quality” before it is attached to any subject, instantiated in any fact, or governed by any law (Peirce, CP 1.303–1.305; Colapietro 3–5).
One way to approximate this (while risking some anachronism) is to say that Firstness is the ontological register in which what Part I called “potentiality” appears as qualitative immediacy rather than as a modal predicate of propositions. Redness, for example, is not first of all the property instantiated by this or that object in this or that world; it is the sheer suchness of red, the “feeling of red” as Peirce sometimes puts it, which can be instantiated in many objects, in many worlds, and yet is never exhausted by those instantiations (Peirce, CP 1.304). In Aristotelian terms, we might say that Peirce displaces dynamis from the micro-ontology of individual substances and their powers to a macro- ontology of categories: potentiality is not just what a thing can become, but the pre-individual field of qualitative possibilities out of which both things and laws emerge.
This is why the oft-quoted passages about the “original chaos” of the universe—“a state of things in which nothing existed but feeling”—should be read not as mythic cosmogony but as a statement about the ontological primacy of Firstness (Peirce, “Architecture” 171–72). The “beginning” of the universe, on this account, is not a temporal instant but a limit concept: a stage at which there are no fixed individuals, no strict facts, no settled laws, but only a vague “blooming” of qualities and tendencies. Secondness (fact) and Thirdness (law) arise out of this field as more determinate forms of being, but they never abolish or absorb it; Firstness persists as a standing dimension of the real, always in excess of what happens to be actualized.
From the standpoint of contemporary metaphysics, one might say that Peirce offers a potentiality- first ontology, but one in which potentiality is not locked into the Aristotelian pairing with a determinate telos . Firstness is directionless in itself; teleology, to the extent that it appears, is a product of Thirdness (habit, law), which is historically contingent and in principle revisable. In this sense, Peirce’s potentiality is already less tightly teleological than Aristotle’s and closer, in spirit, to the “open- ended” potentialities of powers and dispositions accounts, though articulated in a wholly different conceptual vocabulary.
Chance, Habit, and the Growth of Law
Tychism alone would leave us with an ontology of pure spontaneity (a universe of dice throws with no emergent regularities); Firstness alone, with an ontology of pure suchness (a world of qualities without facts or laws). The crucial move in Peirce’s Monist series is thus to articulate a dynamic relation between Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness under the heading of “habit-taking.” In “The Law of Mind,” he suggests that just as individual human minds form habits when certain processes are often repeated, so too the universe as a whole tends to “take habits,” stabilizing recurring patterns of behavior into laws (Peirce, “Law of Mind” 533–39).
On this picture, chance events (tychistic deviations, eruptions of Firstness into Secondness) are not mere noise to be averaged out but the raw material out of which new regularities can emerge. When a spontaneous variation proves “fit”—to borrow the Darwinian metaphor—that pattern of behavior is more likely to repeat; repetition, in turn, breeds habit; habit, once sufficiently entrenched, appears to us as law. Synechism, the doctrine of continuity, ensures that this process is not conceived as a series of disconnected leaps but as a continuous growth of generality and order; agapism, the controversial thesis that something like “love” or sympathetic attraction plays a role in evolution, functions as a speculative hypothesis about why certain habits—those that foster increasing complexity and cooperation—might be favored (Peirce, “Evolutionary Love”; Herdy 12–14).
What matters for our purposes is less the theological overtones of agapism than the structural point: laws are not timeless necessities inscribed once and for all in the fabric of reality but historical products —habits the universe has formed and could, in principle, break. There is, in Peirce’s universe, no final state in which all chance has been expunged and all potentiality fully actualized; Firstness continues to “feed” Secondness and Thirdness, generating new possibilities and new habits. The universe is, as he likes to say, “a work of art, not a machine” (Peirce, CP 6.189), which is to say: an ongoing composition whose future movements are not wholly determined by its past.
Translated into the idiom of Part I, Peirce is offering a story about how objective chance and law- governed behavior can co-exist without reducing either to the other: chance is ontologically prior (tychism), law is historically emergent (habit-taking), and potentiality (Firstness) is the medium in which this dialectic plays out. Rather than grounding modality in essence (Fine) or in object-level powers (Vetter), he grounds it in a triadic categorical structure and a narrative of cosmic growth.
Peirce in the Post-Modal Landscape
If we place Peirce back into the landscape sketched in Part I, his position can be formulated, admittedly schematically, along three axes. First, he is a potentiality-first metaphysician in the sense that possibility is not defined in terms of consistency across a space of worlds but in terms of an originary mode of being—Firstness—that is qualitatively richer than any of its actualizations (Peirce, CP 1.303– 1.305). Second, he is an anti-necessitarian in the strong sense that law is not only contingent in content but historically contingent in scope and even in its approximate exactness; there is no a priori guarantee that nature is governed by perfectly strict laws, and considerable empirical reason to doubt it (Peirce, “Doctrine” 321–37). Third, he is an evolutionary thinker for whom metaphysical categories and cosmological narratives are internally linked: the triad Firstness–Secondness–Thirdness is not a timeless table but a dynamic schema for understanding how a universe with genuine novelty and law could grow.
Seen this way, Peirce does not fit neatly into the current opposition between essentialism (Fine) and potentialism (Vetter). He is neither primarily concerned with the essences of individuals nor with the dispositional profiles of objects; his fundamental units are categories and habits, not substances and their powers. And yet his project anticipates the central intuition of “post-modal metaphysics”: that modality is not primitive, that what can be is a function of how reality is structured at a deeper level, and that this deeper level is better described in terms of categories, powers, or essences than in terms of bare operators.
This is also the point at which a dialogue with Agamben becomes possible. For if Peirce’s Firstness can be (cautiously) described as a metaphysical register of potentiality—a field of qualitative suchness and chance that is ontologically prior to law—then Agamben’s reactivation of Aristotelian dynamis as impotentiality , and his insistence on the capacity not to be or not to do as constitutive of human life, can be read as a kind of critical counterpoint. Peirce’s universe is one in which potentiality continuously blossoms into new habits and forms; Agamben’s, as we will see, is one in which potentiality is equally marked by suspension, deactivation, and non-realization. To put it in the vocabulary of Part I: Peirce gives us a metaphysics of potentiality as growth; Agamben, a politics of potentiality as inoperativity. The tension between these two will frame, in the next section, the question of whether a metaphysics of nature adequate to chance and law is sufficient to account for the forms of withheld or arrested potentiality that characterize contemporary political life.
III. Agamben: Potentiality, Impotentiality, and the Politics of Inoperativity
Aristotle Reloaded: Potentiality as Impotentiality
If Peirce’s speculative architectonic relocates potentiality at the level of cosmic categories and evolutionary habit, Agamben’s intervention is at once more philological and more explosive: he returns to the same Aristotelian texts that sustained the classical picture ( Metaphysics Θ, De anima ), but reads them in such a way that what had appeared as a relatively contained doctrine of dynamis and energeia becomes the fault line of Western ontology—and, crucially, of Western politics. “On Potentiality,” the central essay collected in Potentialities , stages this operation with a certain almost scholastic patience: Agamben begins by following Aristotle’s definitions of potentiality as a capacity “for” being otherwise, then insists that if potentiality is not to be reduced to a mere prelude to act (a sort of ontological waiting room), it must possess “its own consistency,” which can only mean that it is capable not to pass into actuality, that it is essentially the dynamis me einai , the potentiality not to (Agamben, Potentialities 179– 80).
The decisive Aristotelian formula—“every potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same”—which in Θ 8–9 still appears as a somewhat technical clarification of rational powers, is elevated by Agamben into the linchpin of a new ontology (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1047a24–26). Where Aristotle, even as he acknowledges that the doctor can heal and can not heal, continues to think the “dignity” of potentiality in terms of its orientation toward its proper act, Agamben reverses the hierarchy: if a power could not not-be, it would be indistinguishable from actuality; the “proper” mode of existence of potentiality is precisely its ability to withhold itself, to remain in suspense (Agamben, Potentialities 182–83). Potentiality’s autonomy, then, does not consist in an abstract openness to a range of possible actualizations (as in certain contemporary modal logics), but in a more originary relation to its own privation, which Agamben, following the Greek adynamia , names impotentiality .
This is why, in Agamben’s reconstruction, rational potentiality (the can of the speaking, acting, thinking animal) becomes the privileged site of ontology. Other beings—plants and animals—are, as he likes to say, entirely consigned to the exercise of their specific powers (the bird cannot not fly, except by injury; the fish cannot decide not to swim); the human, by contrast, is the animal that is capable of its own impotentiality, capable of not-doing and not-being, of suspending the exercise of its faculties without thereby losing them (Agamben, Potentialities 182). To “have” a language, on this account, is not only to be able to speak but to be able not to speak; to “have” sight is to be able to see and to be able to close one’s eyes without becoming blind. This doubleness—capacity as at once power and non-power—is what allows Agamben to claim, with some rhetorical extravagance, that potentiality, rather than actuality, bears ontological priority in the Western tradition, even if that priority has been systematically disavowed.
In the idiom of Part I, we could say that Agamben radicalizes the Aristotelian fissure that analytic post- modal metaphysics often glides past: whereas Fine and Vetter are concerned with whether modality is grounded in essence or in potentiality (and whether that potentiality is best modeled as a dispositional profile), Agamben insists that how potentiality exists—only insofar as it is also impotentiality—is the real question. Freedom, politics, and even theology are for him nothing but variations on this ontological motif. Secondary commentators have not hesitated to name him, on this basis, “the philosopher of potentiality” (de la Durantaye 3; Salzani 160).
Freedom qua Relation to One’s Own Non-Act
Once potentiality is redefined through impotentiality in this way, the standard liberal or existentialist figures of “freedom” begin to look conceptually thin. Freedom can no longer be thought primarily as a series of discrete choices among pre-given options, nor as the absence of external constraint on self- determining agency; rather, it names, for Agamben, a more basic stance of the subject with respect to its own non-act, its own can-not . Thought is paradigmatic here—not in the sense of Cartesian transparency, but in the sense that thinking is the experience of a capacity that can both be exercised and withheld, an “I can” that does not immediately attach itself to any determinate deed (Agamben, Potentialities 246– 47).
Several readings—Brown on “the modality of sovereignty,” Balskus on “impotentiality turning back on itself,” de la Durantaye on vocation and revocation—converge on this point: freedom, in Agamben’s lexicon, is the capacity to hold oneself in relation to one’s own impotentiality, to sustain the tension between what one can do and one’s power not to do it (Brown 12–15; Balskus 25–27; de la Durantaye 114–18). A knowing that is incapable of not being used, a language that is incapable of silence, a body that is incapable of rest—each of these would, in his terms, be less than fully potential, and thus less than fully free.
In strictly metaphysical terms, this means that a potential that never actualizes is not, for Agamben, thereby unreal or negligible. The capacity to play the piano that I never in fact exercise, the unwritten book I nevertheless have the power to compose, the life I might have lived but do not—these are not simply “possible worlds” that fail to obtain; they persist as impotentialities, as real non-acts that structure my existence. In temporality, this shows up as a peculiar suspension: the “time of potentiality,” as de la Durantaye glosses it, is neither the empty future of projects to be realized nor the simple present of acts performed, but a kind of held-open now, in which fulfillment is indefinitely deferred without being simply cancelled (de la Durantaye 120–23).
From the vantage of our earlier discussion, one might say that Agamben is uninterested in the question that obsesses analytic libertarians— Could I have done otherwise at t, given the actual past and the laws? —and fascinated by a different question: What does it mean to inhabit the gap between power and act at all? The answer, for him, is that the human is the being that can experience its own potentiality (and impotentiality) as such, and that this experience—this relation to one’s own non-act—is the condition both for ethics and for a certain politics.
Sovereignty, Bare Life, and the Capture of Potentiality
It is here that Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life enters, not as a sudden pivot from ontology to political theory, but as the extension of the problem of potentiality into the domain of law and the state. The basic thesis of Homo Sacer is by now familiar: modern politics, far from leaving behind the ancient nexus of life and power, has intensified it by inscribing biological life ( zoē ) into the mechanisms of the state, producing what Agamben calls “bare life,” life stripped of every political qualification and exposed in its pure killability (Agamben, Homo Sacer 8–11).
The juridical figure of homo sacer —the Roman man who may be killed by anyone but not sacrificed— serves as the emblem of this capture. What is decisive in Agamben’s reading is less the antiquarian detail than the structural analogy between sovereign power and potentiality : the sovereign, defined (following Schmitt) as he who decides on the exception, possesses the capacity to suspend the law, to place it “outside itself” while still preserving it in force (Schmitt 5–8; Agamben, Homo Sacer 15–18). In other words, the law has a potentiality not to apply, an impotentiality that is constitutive of its power. The state of exception is the space where this impotentiality is actualized: the law is in force as a pure potential, without determinate content, and life appears as that which can be included in the legal order only by being excluded from it.
Seen through the optic of dynamis and adynamia , the camp—the concentration camp, the refugee camp, the detention center—emerges as the “nomos of the modern,” the hidden paradigm of our political space, because it is the place where life is exposed precisely as potentiality, as a body that can be killed without homicide, detained without trial, abandoned without recourse (Agamben, Homo Sacer 166–80). Here, one might say, the ontological structure of potentiality/impotentiality is mirrored in a perverse key: the state’s power to suspend the law (its impotentiality) is mobilized to expose the impotentiality of its subjects (their ability to be killed, detained, excluded). Brown aptly notes that, under these conditions, the “modal priority” of potentiality over actuality—Agamben’s reversal of Aristotelian hierarchies—becomes politically ambivalent: the same structure that grounds human freedom (capacity for non-act) underwrites the horror of lives whose only remaining “potential” is death (Brown 14–18).
In this light, the state of exception is not merely a juridical technicality or a constitutional anomaly; it is the point at which the metaphysics of potentiality becomes biopolitically operative. Sovereign power is a kind of institutionalized dynamis me einai : the power not to apply the law, the power to suspend, the power to let live and make die. That this power is structurally homologous to the human’s capacity for impotentiality is precisely what renders Agamben’s analysis so disquieting: the very structure that defines us as free (our relation to our own non-act) becomes the structure through which we are captured.
Inoperativity, Use, and Destituent Potential
The later volumes of the Homo Sacer project, and especially The Use of Bodies , attempt to turn this structure inside out. If Homo Sacer shows how sovereign power exploits the law’s impotentiality to produce bare life, The Use of Bodies asks what it would mean to imagine a form-of-life that would no longer be separable from its way of living, and a politics that would not consist in founding yet another order of constituted power but in deactivating the apparatuses that capture life (Agamben, Use of Bodies xiii–xv).
Here, Aristotle resurfaces again, but now through the distinction between energeia (operation), ergon (work), and chresis (use). Agamben proposes that “form-of-life” names a mode of existence in which life is not defined by its subjection to a determinate work or function, but by its relation to a use of bodies that is irreducible to ownership, property, or labor (Agamben, Use of Bodies 3–10). In this context, he introduces a cluster of notions— inoperativity , profanation , destituent potential —that attempt to reconfigure potentiality around separation and deactivation rather than around realization and production (Agamben, Use of Bodies xiii–xv; “In Praise of Profanation”).
“Inoperativity” (inoperosità) is not mere inactivity; it names the suspension of a given operation or apparatus that renders it available for another use. A factory that no longer produces commodities but becomes a space for assemblies, a school that suspends its pedagogical function to become a site of experimentation, a liturgical ritual stripped of its religious telos and turned into a game—these are Agamben’s privileged figures of profanation, in which what was separated and sacralized (set apart from common use) is returned to use without being re-sacralized in another form (Agamben, Profanations 73–75). “Destituent potential,” in turn, names a kind of power that does not seek to found a new law (constituent power) but to render inoperative the very logic of sovereignty, to neutralize the state of exception by making the qualification of life as bare inoperative (Agamben, Use of Bodies 263– 69; Watkin 101–04).
From the angle of potentiality, this means that the highest exercise of power is not the production of new acts or institutions, but the capacity to withhold from founding, to suspend the very gesture that would re-inscribe life into the dialectic of constituent and constituted power. Watkin’s formulation— that Agamben’s project orbits around a “potentiality-impotentiality complex” whose political form is inoperativity—captures this nicely: what is new in The Use of Bodies is not the emphasis on impotentiality (already present in “On Potentiality”) but its translation into a practice of destitution, a praxis that lives its own non-act (Watkin 100–03).
Agamben with Peirce: Between Growth and Destitution
Placed back alongside Peirce, Agamben’s reworking of potentiality both resonates with and sharply diverges from the metaphysics of nature sketched in Part II. Like Peirce, he refuses to treat potentiality as a thin modal operator or as a merely logical qualification of propositions; like Peirce, he insists that there is a real dimension of the world—whether we call it Firstness or dynamis —that is not exhausted by actual facts or laws (Agamben, Potentialities 177–80; Peirce, CP 1.303–1.305). Both, in this sense, can be read as “post-modal” thinkers avant la lettre, for whom the deep structure of reality is better described in terms of potentiality (and its correlates) than in terms of possible worlds.
But where Peirce’s tychism and synechism produce a universe in which chance continuously blossoms into new habits and laws—a cosmos whose “teleology,” if the term still applies, is an open-ended growth of Thirdness—Agamben’s insistence on impotentiality and inoperativity tends toward a de- teleologized image of potentiality. For Peirce, potentiality is structurally oriented toward growth, even if that growth is contingent, probabilistic, and never complete; for Agamben, potentiality is structurally marked by its power not to actualize, its capacity to remain in suspense, to deactivate itself. Peirce’s laws are “habits of the universe” that form and evolve; Agamben’s politics seeks the points at which such habits (legal, institutional, liturgical) can be rendered inoperative without simply giving rise to new ones.
In the language of Part I, one might say that Peirce offers a metaphysics of potentiality as productive contingency (chance giving rise to law), whereas Agamben offers a politics of potentiality as destituent contingency (impotentiality undoing law). The open question—which this paper can only gesture toward—is whether these two registers can be brought into a single metaphysics of nature and history, one that would be adequate both to the generativity of chance (Peirce’s universe that grows by taking habits) and to the necessity of suspension (Agamben’s form-of-life that lives in its own non-act). If potentiality is to be more than a slogan, it must be able to name, at once, the capacity of the world to become otherwise and the capacity of life to withhold itself from what it can do—to grow and to destitute, to take habits and to render them inoperative.
IV. Conclusion: Between Act and Non-Act
If the itinerary of this paper has been, in appearance, rather classical—Aristotle, Peirce, Agamben, with a detour through possible worlds and powers—its wager has been less to offer yet another gloss on dynamis and energeia than to test what happens when we take seriously (perhaps more seriously than either Aristotle or the analytic tradition has allowed itself to do) the thought that potentiality is not a secondary, derivative notion, but a name for a basic mode of being in which ontology and politics, nature and form-of-life, are already knotted together. Aristotle gave us the initial grammar: a world in which powers are ordered to ends, in which rational capacities include their own non-exercise, and in which the dignity of potentiality is nevertheless measured by its fulfillment (Aristotle, Metaphysics Θ.8– 9). Peirce, in his speculative cosmology, displaced this grammar to the level of categories: Firstness as qualitative suchness and possibility, Secondness as brute fact, Thirdness as habit and law, in an evolutionary universe where chance is real and law is a historically grown habit rather than an eternal decree (Peirce, CP 1.303–05; “Doctrine” 334–36). Agamben, finally, returned to the Aristotelian text with an eye sharpened by the twentieth century and saw in the phrase “potentiality is also impotentiality” not a minor clarification but an opening into a different ontological and political topology, in which the decisive question is how a being relates to its own non-act (Agamben, Potentialities 182–83; Homo Sacer 8–11).
Against the backdrop of post-modal metaphysics—Fine’s essences, Vetter’s potentials, Sider’s structures —the combined effect of these readings is, I think, double. On the one hand, they confirm the basic intuition that motivates the “post-modal” turn: modality, in the thin sense (what is true at which worlds), is not enough; we must descend to a more primitive level at which what matters are not propositions and their truth conditions but powers, capacities, categories, and the ways in which they exist. On the other hand, they complicate the relatively serene image that some neo-Aristotelian metaphysics still projects: an ontology of powers comfortably oriented toward their manifestations, a universe of dispositions patiently waiting to be triggered. Peirce’s tychism insists that potentiality—if it is real—is not simply a stock of pre-scripted possibilities but an irreducible spontaneity that can generate genuinely new forms and laws; Agamben’s impotentiality insists that potentiality—if it is to be autonomous—is not simply oriented toward realization at all, but equally toward non-realization, suspension, deactivation (Peirce, “Architecture” 171–75; Agamben, Use of Bodies 263–69).
The result is that “potentiality,” once restored to its full thickness, refuses to sit still. It oscillates between Peircean growth (chance giving rise to habit, a universe that “takes” laws the way a mind takes habits) and Agambenian destitution (impotentiality undoing law, forms-of-life that live in their own non-act), between an ontological exuberance and a political asceticism. If there is an ethical or political lesson here, it is not that we should simply choose one figure over the other—celebrate the creativity of chance and habits while ignoring the necessity of deactivation, or conversely, romanticize inoperativity while forgetting that a world without the slow work of Thirdness would be uninhabitable. It is, rather, that any adequate metaphysics of nature and history must be able to think both: the way in which the world is capable of becoming otherwise (Peirce’s potentiality as qualitative Firstness, stochastic variation, habit-taking) and the way in which life is capable of withholding itself from what it can do (Agamben’s potentiality as impotentiality, inoperativity, form-of-life).
One could, at this point, be tempted to resolve the tension dialectically—to say, for instance, that growth and destitution are two “moments” of a higher synthesis, or that Peirce gives us the metaphysics and Agamben the politics, neatly separated. I have tried to resist that temptation, not out of a taste for aporia, but because the dissonance between their projects seems to me diagnostic of something about our present: that we inhabit, at once, a world in which the technical and economic apparatuses continuously extend the reach of what can be done (a hypertrophy of potentiality as power) and a world in which the most urgent task is often to suspend, deactivate, or simply survive those very capacities (a politics of impotentiality lived as exhaustion). Between these two poles— between a universe that endlessly “takes habits” and a life that seeks forms of non-habit, non-work, non-act—our concepts falter.
If there is a modest contribution this paper can claim, it is perhaps to have shown that the old Aristotelian word dynamis —once we let it be troubled by Peirce’s categories and Agamben’s inoperativities—names neither a consoling reservoir of unrealized possibilities nor a mere technical tool of modal semantics, but a site where metaphysics and politics are already entangled. To think potentiality today is to think, at once, the chance that the world might still become otherwise and the possibility that we might, for once, not do what we can. Whether this double thought can itself become a habit—or whether it must remain, in Peirce’s sense, a kind of controlled chance, and in Agamben’s sense, a practiced inoperativity—is a question I can only leave, appropriately, in suspense.
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