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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 15 number 2 august 2010
In ‘‘On Potentiality’’ Giorgio Agamben rules
out interpreting potentiality in Aristotle’s
metaphysic as like the child to actuality’s adult.
The basis for this ruling is that the child exists
in a state of not yet in relation to their potential
(as not yet having knowledge; as not yet being
head of state; etc.). The child is not potentially an
adult (or knower; or leader) in the relevant sense,
according to Agamben. Rather, the potentiality
with which Aristotle is interested, he says,
pertains to one who already possesses knowledge,
and specifically to the nature of such ‘‘pos-
session’’ (Potentialities 179). Whilst the child is
sequestered in the ‘‘not yet’’ of their potentiality,
however, Agamben also draws upon the figure of
the child in order to imagine a future political
community in which we belong to one another
without reduction (of one to the other), exclusion,
or exploitation. The child, then, comes torepresent the potentiality of community – its
hidden power for political agency, change, and
the emergence of difference – precisely as this
‘‘not yet.’’
This essay explores the various nuances of
Agamben’s treatment of the concept of potenti-
ality, and how these relate to an ethics of
community and the kinds of agency available to
those who comprise it. Although Agamben is best
known for a critique of the liberal state that seemsto leave little room for personal agency, I will
argue here that the concept of potentiality is a
dense kernel of his political and ethical philoso-
phy, through which we can glimpse an account of
agency grounded in inter-subjective (rather than
sovereign vs. subject) relations. By refocusing
Agamben’s critique so that it speaks to the
dynamics between classes of subject rather than
between the citizen and the liberal state, I hope to
demonstrate that the political agency of some is
guaranteed by others’ marginalization. In other
words, some individuals stand in for the
potentiality of others, by setting aside their own
possibilities and thereby becoming a resource
for the rest of the community.
Those who have come to represent thepotentiality of others, I will argue, are increas-
ingly those children whom contemporary affluent
communities sentimentalize, and in whom they
invest their hopes and fears for the future. This
equation of ‘‘the child’’ with society’s potentiality
affects children in different ways, however,
depending on their place in the global socio-
economic order. Some children have become
privileged bearers of cultural value in so far
as they are seen to approximate an ideal
joanne faulkner
INNOCENCE, EVIL,
AND HUMAN FRAILTY
potentiality and the child
in the writings of giorgioagamben
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/10/020203^17ß 2010 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2010.521419
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‘‘innocence’’ that obscures their actual experi-
ences and capacities. Yet the equation of the child
with potentiality also conceals the material
disadvantage of children who ‘‘fail’’ to satisfy
our notions of ‘‘innocent childhood’’: children of
the Third World, for instance, as well as statelessand indigenous children. For those who inhabit
the ‘‘zone of indistinction’’ between childhood
and adulthood, conversely, the affective invest-
ment in childhood leads to their abrupt devalua-
tion at the onset of puberty. Adolescents are
charged with responsibility not only for society’s
loss of innocence but also for its vulnerability
to ideas and events that threaten it. That the
child represents the community’s potentiality
thus confers dubious benefits to children,perhaps even leading to their disempowerment.1
In order to pose this line of questioning to
Agamben, I have needed to adopt ‘‘minor’’
strategies of reading the political significance of
potentiality in his work. Particularly, my reading
frames Agamben’s understanding of potentiality
in terms of his suggestions regarding ethics and
the community rather than his political critique
(in Homo Sacer ). This is because the former
context offers a more promising means to theorizea path away from the reification of all possibility
– as well as vulnerability and danger – in the
child. By taking our course of thought through
his writings on ethics and community, we
might also recuperate some promising aspects
of Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality that
Agamben chooses to underplay. As we shall see,
Aristotle’s grounding of potentiality in a concern
for agency – understood as the capacity to
produce change in oneself and relations with
others – is reflected in Agamben’s writings of
ethics and community in ways that are absent
in his writings concerning biopolitics. From this
analysis, then, we no doubt draw only a modest
account of agency: an agency bound by the
psychological intimacy of our relations with
others; an agency, moreover, grounded in an
acceptance of one’s own vulnerability, so as not to
expel this vulnerability into others who would
contain it at the cost of their own ability to seek
change and growth.2
In this first section, let us read Agamben’s
understanding of potentiality across Aristotle and
Heidegger on potentiality, in order to engage
in dialogue these incrementally different, but at
times competing, concepts.
i potentialityAgamben alludes to potentiality frequently
throughout his political writings. His elucidations
of the concept are, however, often fleeting
and repetitive, referring us to the same passages
of Aristotle and to his own, sometimes obscure,
meditations upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby.
Agamben’s most lucid reference to potentiality –
and one to which he continually returns – cites
chapter 3 of Metaphysics Book Theta, where
Aristotle takes the Megarians to task for obscur-ing the vital difference between actuality, or
activity (energeai) and potentiality (dunamis).
The aspect of being that Aristotle wished to
preserve is the capacity to perform a task, when
it is not in use. According to Aristotle, the
Megarians do not acknowledge such a mode of
being. For the Megarians, he writes, ‘‘there is a
power only in the act and . . . there is no power
apart from its operation’’ (Met. y 3, 1046b 30).
The Megarians have no conceptual resources tothink the being of a capacity at rest; un-actualized
potential held in reserve for a later enactment.
The builder who does not build ‘‘now’’ cannot
build, for the Megarian, because a capacity is only
through its enactment.3
As Heidegger points out in his analysis of
this argument (Aristotle’s Metaphysics 155), what
makes Aristotle an original thinker is that the
Megarians’ viewpoint is entirely in keeping
with the Greek manner of thinking, whereby
being is understood as presence. Because potenti-
ality appears only in its actualization, there is a
difficulty in comprehending the notion of a latent
capacity, retained precisely within its inactivity.
The equation of being with what presents itself
misses the moments of being through which the
appearance is given: those unconscious or sub-
terranean aspects of being. As Aristotle argues,
this viewpoint fails to take into account transition
from one state to another. If we were to accept the
Megarians’ view, then how would the builder
procure the ability to build the moment he
commenced building? And equally, what is the
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process whereby this art is instantaneously lost
once he ceases? (Met. y 3, 1046b 33-1047a 5).
Because the Megarians cannot explain such gain
and loss, and the passage between doing and not
doing, they miss the essential quality of capacity:
it is something that does not have to be in use;
which, moreover, one might possess, rather
than exhaust or extinguish in the act. Rather,
for Aristotle potentiality is the origin of move-
ment and change (kinesis), so that it is the
moment of being that can be withheld in order
that beings and actions may come into
presence, as actuality/activity (energeia), in
their own time.
Agamben rightly emphasizes, in his own
analysis of Met. y, the ability to withhold itself proper to potentiality. Potentiality is what
negotiates non-being: it ‘‘welcomes non-Being,
and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality,
fundamental passivity’’ (Potentialities 182).
Without this relation between being and non-
being, brokered by potentiality, there would be
no room for becoming – for beings of all kinds
to pass in and out of being. Agamben also draws
our attention, however, to the special relation
between human being and its own potentiality,and thus underscores the ethical and political
significance of these ancient musings:
If we recall that Aristotle always draws his
examples of this potentiality of non-Being
from the domain of the arts and human
knowledge, then we may say that human
beings, insofar as they know and produce, are
those beings who, more than any other, exist
in the mode of potentiality. Every human
power is adynamia [sic ], impotentiality; everyhuman potentiality is in relation to its own
privation. (Ibid.)
If we look to Heidegger’s interpretation of
Met. y, adumania here might refer to mastery,
conceived as the very self-restraint-from-doing
the Megarians deny exists. Potentiality, then, in
so far as it is not active, attests to one’s
proficiency. For, only one who truly knows
their art can leave it [to] idle, thus holding it in
readiness whilst refraining from its enactment.
If, for instance, I can only inhabit a relation to
my capacity to write whilst I am writing , then
this craft could never become well honed.
One would have to start over again each time if
putting the pen down also meant losing the
ability to write. But as every writer knows, an
almost unbearable process of not-writing –
anxiety, reading, thinking, error, and erasure – supports the achievement of the written work.
Developing proficiency – in building, playing an
instrument, or writing – necessitates a course of
negotiation with what one cannot do through
practice, thereby enlarging the scope of what one
can do. Adunamia, then, refers not simply to
incapacity but rather to a being-able that abstains
from doing. The athlete must rest in order to
recover her energy for the next run; and the
musician must rest between sounding notes so asnot to produce a cacophony. Any human
endeavour of value requires a measured balance
between exercise and restraint. To exist in
relation to this not-doing is then a means of
accomplishment through overcoming; and once
one has developed expertise, this non-being or
-doing (adunamia) is outdone in order to produce
a masterly act.4
Yet while human potentiality enables the
development of proficiency, as Heidegger empha-sizes, it also signals a darker relation to non-being
that orients us ethically through guilt, fear, and
deception. For this relation to non-being under-
lies and supports human abilities and arts, but
also undermines them by indicating our incapa-
cities, our frailties, the possibility of evil, and the
inevitability of death. With the above-quoted
passage, then, Agamben subtly locates a specifi-
cally human impasse that inaugurates our agency,
and not only expertise, in potentiality.
Humanity’s grounding in potentiality enables
distinctively human conducts such as planning,
speculation, imagination, and speech – each of
which involves a particular comportment to non-
being, or what doesn’t (yet) exist in actuality.
But, moreover, that we are the beings who think
abstractly connects us to a great depth of
potentiality in language, which is not in use all
the time but rather for the most part remains
silent: the two faces of language being the
enunciation and a vast muteness that supports
it. Humanity, as a being that dwells in language,
is then in a privileged position to comprehend
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potentiality as the potential to be and not-be;
and to extend our power by virtue of this
understanding.
It is, then, this double nature of potentiality
that situates human freedom. Potentiality main-
tains itself in the tension between positive
possibility and a withdrawal from being and
doing: between the capacity to be and not-be.
Agamben articulates this duplicity by introducing
a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s adunamia.
Traditionally translated as incapacity, or even
impossibility, Agamben renders adunamia as
‘‘impotentiality’’ so as to keep it coupled to
potentiality as part of the machinery of agency.
This double ‘‘face’’ of potentiality has ethical
implications not only because the choice betweendoing and not doing is the most minimal
condition of a freedom of will.5 Human being
must countenance the negative face of potenti-
ality in order to be capable of ethical thought and
action:
The greatness – and also the abyss – of human
potential is that it is first of all potential not to
act, potential for darkness . . .
To be capable of good and evil is not simply
to be capable of doing this or that good
or bad action (every good or bad action is,
in this sense, banal). Radical evil is not
this or that bad deed but the potentiality
for darkness. And yet this potentiality
is also the potentiality for light.
(Potentialities 181)
Impotentiality not only unravels the illusion
of mastery implicit in Heidegger’s account of
potentiality (as proficiency) but also places
humanity within the fertile, yet fragile, ground
in which an ethics can take root. Such a ground
in impotentiality might better be described as
groundlessness, however. For ethics is only
possible in view of the irreconcilable uncertainty
of human action: ‘‘if humans were or had to be
this or that substance, this or that destiny, no
ethical experience would be possible – there
would be only tasks to be done’’ (Coming
Community 43). This uncertainty from which
ethics emerges is the interval moderated by
potentiality, given its intrinsic relation to non-
being. Humanity is faced always with its own
possibility of not being, and manages the anxiety
that connects it to this non-being by producing
and thinking. The ability to choose, create,
and extend oneself is, in turn, made available
precisely because ‘‘every human potentiality
is in relation to its own privation’’
(Potentialities 182).
Yet in this capacity to not-be that is
impotentiality we also find the source of guilt
from which morality – understood as a technol-
ogy of social hierarchy – takes its cue. The notion
of original sin that organizes Christian subjectiv-
ity indicates, according to Agamben, morality’s
foundational relation to non-being (Coming
Community 44). Judeo-Christian humanity and
morality is engendered through God’s abandon-ment of Adam and Even after the fall, and the
idea that henceforth human being has no essence
or vocation. Sin, as what separates us from
divinity (traditionally conceived as absolute
actuality), designates the lack that persists at
the nucleus of human being as impotentiality.
By the same token, what we call evil is also
characterized by this non-being, and ‘‘the devil is
nothing other than divine impotence or the power
of not-being in God’’ (ibid. 31). If evil isconventionally rendered metaphorically as a
darkness – representing the non-being of good-
ness and light – we find Agamben also discussing
impotentiality with regard to perception, as the
darkness and shadow that brings forth light
and visibility. Agamben thus lends to ethics an
aesthetic dimension, as values are rendered
according to the principles of painterly chiar-
oscuro. Light and darkness, good and evil, are
situated in the same plane, but they offset oneanother to give place to a more complex, three-
dimensional sense of life. Indeed, by Agamben’s
lights, the dichotomous thinking about good and
evil found in morality is akin to the error of the
Megarians, who failed to recognize the intrinsic
dependence of presence upon absence. For
Agamben, conversely,
Ethics begins only when the good is revealed
to consist in nothing other than a grasping of
evil and when the authentic and the proper
have no other content than the inauthentic and
the improper. (Ibid. 13)
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their own lives, and in ethical relations with
others.
This ‘‘not-yet’’ being the child apparently
embodies, for Aristotle as for contemporary
political subjects, becomes a promising field
for the accumulation of the impotentiality thecommunity denies, as these two distinct reso-
nances of potentiality – teleological principle and
possibility – are conflated. What must be stressed
is that this positing of the child as a partial, or
‘‘not-yet,’’ humanity conforms to an adult
fantasy, and serves adult modes of being and
doing. And because adulthood is then the
standard by which children are conceptualized,
this has peculiar consequences for the ‘‘tempor-
ality’’ of childhood. For the child is figured bothas our past and our future, and is thereby
excluded from the present, from being, from
actuality: appearing only as a kind of effigy or
phantom that at bottom signifies absence. As our
future, the child is caught in the ‘‘not-yet’’ of
being, understood as only partial and impotent.
This has material effects upon children’s social
agency. Because of this perceived incompleteness,
for instance, it is taken for granted that the child
requires a custodian to discern and representtheir interests. Children are perceived to be
nothing in them-selves, and this ‘‘non-being’’ that
prefigures being as its ‘‘not-yet’’ appears infi-
nitely malleable to others’ interests. Once
emptied of a particular content, the child
becomes a screen upon which the community’s
various affects and denials are projected,
rehearsed, and purged. But a further implication
of this identification of the child with not-yet
being – or as something that will emerge only
in the fullness of time – is that the child bears
responsibility for humanity’s destiny. We all have
a vital interest in how the child will ‘‘turn out.’’
As this undecided and highly charged future, the
child is the object of anxiety about uncertainty
and not-yet being in general.
Yet equally, the child also represents a lost
temporality: every individual’s own personal past.
Understandings of childhood are saturated with
the nostalgia for our own childhoods, revised by
memory as a simpler, purer time. Childhood
is enviously imagined to be a period of pure
potential, before life snatched away our promis-
ing futures, before we failed to live up
to expectations, and were burdened with adult
responsibilities and concerns. The child is thus
a fantasized object that aids adults in coming to
terms with the non-being that permeates andfractures our everyday existence. The child
represents a lost plenitude that is reclaimed
through the fantasy. Through the fantasy of
innocent childhood, children are continually
emptied, thus becoming the non-being – the
impotentiality – they negotiate for others.
Children – understood at once as weak,
provisional, anachronistic beings . . . and as
bearers of society’s future – are the focus of
anxiety about our present vulnerabilities anduncertainties. And this has political implications.
The sentimentalized Western child represents a
ground cleared of the exigencies of quotidian
political existence: a zone of purity, untroubled
by the concerns and sacrifices that occupy
ordinary folk. Such an impossible ‘‘existence,’’
prior to or outside political life, furnishes the
polis with its pure possibility: the innocent child,
as a character in humanity’s scratch book, brings
humanity into being by refraining from being.And as such they constitute the space of fantasy
that facilitates the traffic of hope, fear, anxiety
and creativity through which political and social
realities are negotiated. As this site of fantasy,
children stand in for the impotentiality that must
be negated and overcome so that these citizens
may act. The fantasy of the innocent child,
conceived as not-yet being, supports the actions
of others, whilst children’s own potentiality is
alienated from them.
Meanwhile, this over-sentimentalization of
Western childhood also obscures the abandon-
ment of non-Western children to our economic
necessity. Children in the developing world –
whose material circumstances cannot support our
fantasies of childhood innocence – are ignored, a
source of embarrassment to our prosperity. Their
use to us is not as fantasized impotentiality, and
their value not drawn from a fetishized innocence.
Their value is, rather, as a labour source – and
so they can have no place in our fantasy.
The exceptions are those exemplary children
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who spruik for World Vision (for instance),
who interpellate us as their saviours from our
television screens: these children offer themselves
to us as figures of vulnerability into which our
own impotentiality can take flight.
Children, then, are positioned variously asmembers of the community most fragile and in
need of protection. The rest of us can then
imagine ourselves to be invulnerable, acting in
the interests of children rather than our own.
This denial of one’s own vulnerability, and
subsequent projection of it onto others, is one
means by which the flight from impotentiality is
elaborated in everyday life. Yet it is important to
remember that, for Agamben, this mismanage-
ment of impotentiality leads to exploitation andevil. When one class of individual is sheltered
within an enclosed, domestic sphere – their lives
the focus of close regulation – they are separated
from their capacity, from what they can do.
Meanwhile, the community manages anxiety
regarding its impotentiality – its capacity to not
be – in relation to the figure of the helpless child.
In this manner, children become a resource
through which we access our potentiality cheaply,
without having to face up to the frailty that is ourown. That children’s agency is substantially
limited ensures that, for the rest of us, the face
of non-being is kept at a distance. If children are
imagined to be our future, our best hope and
solace, then it is also true that there is a darker
aspect to the idealization of children, commensu-
rate with their role as containers of communal
anxiety about human frailty.
Children who fall short of the ideal of innocent
plasticity, conversely, may be excluded from the
usual domestic zones of exclusion, but are still
routinely targets of scrutiny, signalling not so
much an innocent vulnerability as the degrada-
tion of society in general. This fear of the child,
conceived as a threat to the community, is
underscored by a recent assault on children’s
participation in society: the introduction of the
MosquitoTM device to deter young people from
congregating in public areas. The device emits a
high frequency that falls outside most people’s
range of hearing after the age of about twenty-
five, but is extremely irritating to anyone who can
hear it. In numerous public and commercial
spaces in Britain, and now in parts of Australia
and the USA, the sound is played to discourage
youths from ‘‘loitering’’ in areas where their
presence might cause public anxiety.6 The
Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir AlAynsley-Green, is currently attempting to outlaw
the Mosquito’s use on the grounds of discrimina-
tion, given its indiscriminate targeting of children
and youths who may have legitimate reasons to be
in its range.7 But the device has garnered general
acceptance amongst citizens who equate personal
safety with the absence of young people.8
The existence of the Mosquito device, and the
fear that motivates its acceptance, indicates the
power that the community attributes to youngpeople. Yet, to the contrary, children and
adolescents are routinely curtailed in what they
can do in relation to the rest of the community,
through various measures such as censorship,
juvenile justice policies, and practices regulating
the use of public space that disempower them in
the name of their protection. These regimes of
protection, in turn, either sanitize children or
give them to be threats to the public’s safety and
future.9
In attending to differences in relativepower between members of the political commu-
nity, then, we might acknowledge that some have
come to be identified as ‘‘impotential’’ so as to
support the agency of the rest. Specifically, the
child is understood as the passivity that ‘‘wel-
comes’’ non-being into being. The child is seen as
a tabula rasa: ontologically ambiguous, a kind of
life not yet lived, or pure potentiality through
which more substantial beings (adults) come to
exist. In Agamben’s own work, the child is again
theorized in terms of potentiality: as infans, a
proto-human muteness that is not excluded by,
but rather maintained within, humanity.
If every thought can be classified according to
the way in which it articulates the question of
the limits of language, the concept of infancy
is then an attempt to think through these
limits in a direction other than that of the
vulgarly ineffable. The ineffable, the un-said,
are in fact categories which belong exclusively
to human language; far from indicating a limit
of language, they express its invincible power
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of presupposition, the unsayable being pre-
cisely what language must presuppose in
order to signify. The concept of infancy,
on the contrary, is accessible only to a thought
which has been purified, in the words of
Benjamin writing to Buber, ‘‘by eliminatingthe unsayable from language.’’ The singularity
which language must signify is not some-
thing ineffable but something superlatively
sayable: the thing of language. (Infancy and
History 4)
Infancy, according to Agamben, ‘‘purifies’’
humanity of an ontological hierarchy between
language and the experience it is understood
merely to represent. The ‘‘infant’’ – the speech-
less individual, insofar as they experience (ibid.58) – is not ‘‘outside’’ language, being the
‘‘thing’’ integral to language that provides its
motive force.10 Infancy, the ‘‘thing of language,’’
is produced in the rupture that comprises our
experience of language: in the moment the
subject first begins to speak (Remnants of
Auschwitz 121). Infancy is in this sense the
‘‘impotentiality’’ (or ‘‘pure potentiality’’) that the
potentiality for language continuously transforms
and overcomes, thus giving rise to speech andwriting.
In a further, and perhaps more obviously
‘‘political,’’ sense, the child signifies potentiality
for Agamben as a purely creative, experimental,
and speculative way of being, without which
nothing could come to pass into actuality. In this
respect, Agamben’s figuration of the child is
more positive, and less ambivalent, than the
affectively dense image of the Christian imagin-
ary. Yet it still conforms to a disturbing tendency
to signify in the child a separation from the
remainder of the community. Agamben evokes
the figure of the child at play, in Infancy and
History, in order to represent the possibility of a
break from the metaphysics of everyday life.
Through play, the child plucks objects from their
historico-material context, transfiguring everyday
things into toys. Child-play is then, for Agamben,
‘‘a machine for transforming synchrony into
diachrony’’ (83) – such that the child strips the
object of its meaning and value, thus readying it
for a new deployment, new ways of being and
doing. This transformative relation to material
history also bears upon Agamben’s enigmatic
proclamation in State of Exception:
One day humanity will play with law just as
children play with disused objects, not in
order to restore them to their canonical usebut to free them from it for good. What is
found after the law is not a more proper and
original use value that precedes the law,
but a new use that is born only after it. And
use, which has been contaminated by law,
must also be freed from its own value.
This liberation is the task of study or of
play. (64)11
For Agamben, the hope for a future politics and
human freedom is such a destruction of conven-tional relations between the state, the law, and the
individual. And the child at play furnishes
the central figure for this transformation.
Yet in so doing, we might understand
Agamben to recapitulate the very same gesture
that places the child within a conceptual zone of
exclusion. Set apart from the ‘‘ordinary life’’
of the polis – consigned to the social imaginary,
or a fantasy space, or even the philosopher’s pure
intellection – children are deemed incapable of
full agency so that they can function as a reserve
for the impotentiality citizens fail to apprehend as
their own. This failure of apprehension emerges
from the anxiety native to impotentiality:
an anxiety that, according to Agamben, condi-
tions humanity as undetermined, and in its
specifically productive relation to other beings.
Impotentiality, the capacity to not-be – our state
of abandonment by God and our fall from grace –
is what gives us our humanity. This is what must
be understood: we are constituted by the gap
between life as it is lived and an ideal perfection –
and should thus not strive to close or flee from it.
Identifying our native impotentiality with the
‘‘innocent’’ – as a quasi-existence, outside of
politics – serves to protect the citizen from
knowledge of their own fragility, or from the
possibility that they might not be. The conse-
quence for the one labelled as innocent, however,
is that they are idealized as passive and vulner-
able, thus containing the community’s passion
and fragility, and enabling others’ activity at the
expense of their own. Let us now turn to possible
innocence, evil, and human frailty
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solutions to this predicament, in Agamben and
beyond him.
iii re-conceiving potentiality
To re-imagine a community that does not exploitone class of its members for the sake of others,
we would need to think through the source of the
citizen’s agency, the potential of children,
and, more fundamentally, we would need to
re-evaluate the concept of potentiality itself.
Agamben indicates such a need for re-evaluation
in Homo Sacer , in which he demonstrates a
connection between the Western conceptualiza-
tion of potentiality and the sovereign ban that,
according to Agamben, inaugurates the citizen intheir indistinction from the sacred, abandoned
man. Agamben situates this discussion within an
interrogation of power, asking: what is the
difference between constituting and constituted
power – between the power that establishes
the state and the power that maintains it?
This question of political theory references the
metaphysical inquiry into the difference between
potentiality and actuality: where at issue is the
puzzle of how a power exists when it is not inforce. Constituted power draws upon constituting
power as its reserve: otherwise, constituted power
would exhaust its authority the moment it was
exercised. As with the relation between potenti-
ality and actuality, constituting power must
have an autonomous existence from the power
exercised by the state. There could be no
explanation for why the state can do what it
does to its citizens in the name of their protection
without belief in the autonomous existence of
constituting power. Indeed, for Agamben this
distinction is entirely unconvincing before it is
articulated in terms of the ‘‘ontological categories
of modality.’’ In order to alter social relations,
not only is a critique of the state needed
but also a critique that reconstructs first philo-
sophy: the relation between potentiality and
actuality.
In this vein, Agamben suggests that the
sovereign in its actuality – in the exercise of its
powers of coercion – founds itself upon the
withholding of potentiality through the sovereign
ban, wherein the citizen is excluded from rather
than incorporated under the law’s protections.
The sovereign ban represents for Agamben a
capacity to not-be whence the sovereign derives
its originary power. For Agamben, a reserve of
power is accumulated not by means of the proto-
citizen’s free decision to exchange their freedom
for security. Rather, it is the sovereign’s
prerogative to withdraw protection that provides
the impetus for life in the polis. This withdrawal
of protection that constitutes the ban, and renders
the citizen subject to law, creates a reserve of
power as impotentiality. The sphere carved out
by the sovereign ban, politics, corresponds to the
sphere carved out by the divine ban, ethics – such
that, according to Agamben, God and the
sovereign each initiate humanity in its abandon-ment, by withdrawing from it. Our ethico-
political task for Agamben is, then, to ‘‘cut the
knot that binds sovereignty to constituting
power’’ by rethinking the relation between
potentiality and actuality:
[O]nly if it is possible to think the relation
between potentiality and actuality differently –
and even to think beyond this relation – will it
be possible to think a constituting power
wholly released from the sovereign ban. Until
a new and coherent ontology of potentiali-
ty . . . 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.
(Homo Sacer 44)
Freedom would thus abide in the cultivation of a
negative space – a pure, autonomous potentiality:
impotentiality – the individual, rather than a
sovereign, can appropriate. What is needed for
a non-exploitative form of agency to take place
is the capacity to be in a relation to one’s own
non-being, one’s abandonment, in the absence
of an all-powerful sovereign, or the messianic
promise (fantasy) of complete actualization in
the fullness of time. In other words, such a
confrontation with our impotentiality can occur
only outside of teleological thinking.
Agamben employs a number of figurations to
demonstrate what is meant by this appropriation
of, or confrontation with, one’s own non-being.
In the first instance, he figures pure potentiality
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simply as ‘‘agent intellect,’’ or the thinking of
thinking: ‘‘an impotence that turns back on itself
and in this way comes to itself as a pure act’’
(Coming Community 37). As we saw above,
potentiality per se – in so far as it exists apart
from actuality – gives itself (as the capacity tonot-be) to itself (as the capacity to be), thus
passing into actuality without extinguishing itself.
And in this way the difference between potenti-
ality and actuality is preserved. The existence of
impotentiality guarantees the autonomous exis-
tence of potentiality, so that through his reread-
ing of Aristotle, Agamben is able to reverse the
hierarchy of value, prioritizing impotentiality
over actuality. (In light of this, Aristotle’s
preference for actuality contradicts his owninsights about potentiality. The Megarians’ fail-
ure to understand the relation between actuality
and potentiality is recapitulated in Aristotle’s
teleological explication of potential as subordi-
nate to its full, actual expression.)
In the case of intellect, Agamben returns again
to Aristotle to reprise an aporia regarding what
the purest thought might think. Thinking is a
potentiality to be affected by this or that object of
thought – and ‘‘before thinking it is absolutelynothing’’ (Aristotle, De Anima 429a 21-2 qtd in
Agamben, Potentialities 245). Aristotle ponders,
however, that the perfect thought should not be
subordinate to its object – but neither should it
think ‘‘nothing,’’ as thoughtlessness is hardly
venerable. His solution is that the highest thought
thinks thought itself: that is, it thinks its own
potentiality, so that the object into which it passes
is thinking as a pure act. This is what is meant
by the idea that intellect is a pure potentiality:
a potentiality that remains potential throughout
its passage to actuality. Aristotle clarifies this
somewhat when he writes that the activity of such
intellect is abstract thought, or thought from
which any materiality that might affect it has
been emptied (Met. Ã 9 1074b 35-1075a 4).
Agamben turns, however, to a more obscure
explanation, citing Aristotle’s comparison of
thinking that thinks itself with a ‘‘writing tablet
on which nothing is written’’ (Potentialities 244;
Coming Community 36–37): or more precisely,
upon which what is written is nothing – so that,
even when in force its potential remains
in potentia. What this purest of thoughts
thinks, he writes,
. . . is not an object, a being-in-act, but the
layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is
nothing but its own passivity, its own purepotentiality (to not-think): In the potentiality
that thinks itself, action and passion coincide
and the writing tablet writes by itself or,
rather, writes its own passivity. (Coming
Community 37)
This image of the slate upon which nothing is
written represents pure potentiality as impotenti-
ality, which abides in its capacity to not-be. For
agency, this means that to endure in one’s own
capacity to not-be would open a way to non-violence: a comprehension of one’s capacities
for change and growth realized in relation to one’s
vulnerabilities, hesitations, and reinterpretations
of the past and present.
Agamben extends this meditation upon the
tabula rasa in his next trope for pure potenti-
ality, Bartleby: the scribe who does not write.
Melville’s Bartleby is an eccentric copyist for a
small law firm on Wall Street. His eccentricity is
a profound passivity, represented in his resolu-tion one day that he would ‘‘prefer not to’’ copy.
This ‘‘preferring not to,’’ according to Agamben,
falls short of either a refusal or an acceptance, but
instead rests uncomfortably in potentiality.
Bartleby’s preference frustrates and renders
impotent the ‘‘law man’’ for whom he works.
But more than this, the ‘‘law man’’ is strangely
compelled by Bartleby’s passivity, the consterna-
tion and confusion it incites becoming his central
preoccupation. The law man’s world is decentred
and reorganized by Bartleby’s refusal, so that we
can see that in the hands of some, to say ‘‘I prefer
not to’’ can be an instrument of change.12
For Agamben, Melville’s story contains clues
for how we might reappropriate our impotenti-
ality from the sovereign, not through violence
or democratic representation (which relies on a
myth of consent and reduces all to a common
identity), but by means of passive resistance – a
stepping back from willing represented by
Bartleby’s constant refrain ‘‘I prefer not to.’’
For Agamben the metaphor of copying is
significant. In copying, Bartleby has no agency
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about the words he writes: he simply repeats what
has been decided in advance. Agamben refers us
to ontologies of repetition, such as Nietzsche’s
eternal return and Leibniz’s Theodicy. Nietzsche
offers eternal recurrence as a means to take back
agency from the past, by willing in the presentwhat has already been, and thus infusing every
‘‘it was’’ with ‘‘so I willed it.’’ Agamben counters
this, however, by arguing that eternal return folds
all potentiality back into actuality, thus extin-
guishing agency propre (Potentialities 268). It is
the potentiality not-to that maintains potentiality
per se, according to Agamben. By downing his
tools, then, Bartleby preserves his impotentiality
and abides in the relation to his own non-
existence. In so doing, however, he also quietlywrests control over his alienated capacity from his
employer, and transforms the relation of power
between them.
In a postscript, Melville leaves a final clue to
Bartleby’s ‘‘pathology’’ that will figure again in
Agamben’s discourse on potentiality. It concerns
an unsubstantiated rumour that he had previously
worked in the ‘‘Dead Letter Office’’: the place
where communications are caught in a loop, mid-
transmission, stopping short of their destination,and of actualizing the event they herald. As
Agamben writes, undelivered letters, greeting
cards, announcements, bank notes, rings, ‘‘are
the cipher of joyous events that could have been,
but never took place’’ (ibid. 269). Bartleby’s
‘‘intolerable truth’’ is that every letter has the
potential to become a dead letter – that every
letter, in its capacity as a sign for something that
is yet to be, may lose its way, and so rest in the
uncomfortable void between being and not being.
The dead letter thus undoes the metaphysic of
teleology, affirming instead potentiality as anti-
teleological principle par excellence. Bartleby’s
genius for this state of being in non-being,
gleaned through his experiences in the Dead
Letter Office, lends him to becoming Agamben’s
‘‘new Messiah,’’ who will ‘‘save what was not,’’
instead of redeeming or completing what was.
Bartleby is the messenger of pure potentiality,
whose refrain from copying teaches of the
interruption, difference, reflection, and reinter-
pretation that allows for new creativity, and a new
relation to law.
Yet if Bartleby is the prince of pure
potentiality, he is therefore also a prince of
darkness, evil, and death – or at least of an
interval between darkness and light that we might
call ‘‘Limbo.’’ Limbo is, indeed, for Agamben,
the most hallowed place on the Christian map:the place where a passive resistance against
Christian ideology, Western ontology, and the
sovereign might be staged. It also, again,
concerns children. In The Coming Community,
Agamben writes of the Christian dilemma
concerning what happens to children who die
before their baptism: before the knowledge of
God has been impressed upon their souls. Limbo
is a place of ambiguity, between reward and
punishment, good and evil, being and non-being.But it is also a place of innocent abandonment,
without penalty or force: the children do not
suffer from the privation of God, because they
have no knowledge of him. In fact, Agamben
refigures Limbo so that it is the place where God
is forgotten, and the children are freed to live for
themselves, in the present rather than another’s
imaginary past or future. Agamben likens these
abandoned children to dead letters, and the
resonance with Bartleby should not be lost here.The abandoned children are ‘‘like letters with no
addressee, these uprisen beings remain without a
destination’’ (Coming Community 6). Without,
that is, a teleological principle. In Limbo there is
no promise of the pure presence that divinity
represents, so there is also no schism between
good and evil, potentiality and actuality, being
and non-being. Instead, there is a community.
But what would characterize this community?
According to Agamben, Limbo is the place
from whence ‘‘whatever singularities’’ come.
‘‘Whatever singularity’’ is Agamben’s answer to
the problem of exploitation in relations with
others, and his attempt to establish a notion of
community through a manner of belonging that
does not impose conditions of belonging, such
as a shared identity or values, but which instead
provides an opening for different modes of being
(ibid. 1–2, 85).13 ‘‘Whatever’’ picks out that
which resists a being’s assimilation to other
beings, comprising instead its ineffability, or
the je ne sais quoi that renders it desirable.
Whatever being, Agamben writes, also ‘‘inheres
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in potentiality and possibility, insofar as they are
distinct from reality’’ (Coming Community 35).
‘‘Whatever singularity’’ perforates the fabric of
representation, according to which we register
being thanks only to conventions of presentation.
‘‘Whatever’’ being is, rather, a product of
impotentiality, withheld from being because it
falls outside the parameters of representability.
Such withholding, however, preserves
‘‘whatever’’ singularity for a moment of fleeting
recognition in the emergence of presence.
‘‘Whatever’’ being is the internal principle of
rupture through which our everyday understand-
ings can be overturned.
Whatever being – as this principle of internal
rupture, of unexplored possibility, and of therecognition of something that thwarts all conven-
tions of belonging and representation – reveals
itself in the structure of potentiality, understood
as what can withhold itself from actuality.
Whatever being’s place is Limbo: where abandon-
ment does not matter, where evaluation is not
organized teleologically, and where light and
darkness, truth and untruth, being and becoming
coexist. Because of these metaphysical displace-
ments, Agamben suggests, the possibility of non-exploitative community is opened. This is thanks
to a new inter-subjective relation, which he
explicates with reference to the integral place of
the neighbour. Agamben refers us to a doctrine
of the Talmud, which teaches that, for each good
person, a place in Eden is also reserved for their
neighbour, and in Gehenna for the neighbour of
the guilty. Agamben concludes from this princi-
ple of double justice that:
At the point when one reaches one’s final state
and fulfils one’s own destiny, one finds oneself
for that very reason in the place of the
neighbor. What is most proper to every
creature is thus its substitutability, its being
in any case in the place of the other.
(Potentialities 23)
This doctrine could be interpreted to underscore
the dynamic of exploitation issuing from the
flight from impotentiality, whereby one’s own
‘‘sins’’ are heaped upon the backs of others. Less
perniciously, but in a similarly evasive spirit, it
could be taken for a settling of accounts: ‘‘A loss
is compensated for by an election, a fall by an
ascent, according to an economy of compensation
that is hardly edifying’’ (ibid. 24). The alternative
interpretation for which Agamben opts involves
an empathetic identification with the other, which
enables the ‘‘destruction of the wall dividingEden from Gehenna’’ (ibid.). Substitutability,
in this instance, would not involve burdening the
neighbour with one’s detritus and uncertainty,
but rather making a place to receive the other in
their specificity (‘‘whatever’’ being), which has
nothing to do with ‘‘identity,’’ or with their
belonging to this or that class, age, culture,
gender, or ideology.
This community of whatever singularities –
belonging to one another in their substitutability – could support a mode of inter-subjective agency
addressed by Aristotle’s account of potentiality,
but not explicitly attended to by Agamben.
For Aristotle identifies dunamis first and fore-
most as what pertains to ‘‘the source of change in
another thing or in another aspect of the same
thing’’ (Met. 2 1046a 11). This is for Aristotle
the primary sense of potentiality: the sense that is
contained in all other of its uses. This definition
speaks to the relations between bodies: thecapacity to affect and to be affected, and the
change wrought by such interactions. With this
economical passage, Aristotle articulates the bare
bones of human agency: a power that emerges
within, and is supported by, the relations between
individuals in a community. In order to under-
stand and exercise one’s own potentialities
one needs to possess an adequate sense for the
relations with others that give rise to this agency.
The exercise of agency does not have to be a
zero-sum game: rather, agency flourishes within
an inter-subjective context in recognition of
our constitutive dependency upon others –
materially, emotionally, and psychologically –
and the vulnerabilities to each other that such
dependencies entail.
By withholding information from children
so as not to compromise their ‘‘innocence,’’ we
therefore decrease their agency, cutting them out
of the network of relations that enables action.14
This excision of children from the network of
social relations exacerbates their situation of
vulnerability, establishing a psychological
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relation whereby they represent to the commu-
nity its own fragility. Equally, by relegating the
part of vulnerability to children, adult actors
fail to apprehend their own powers, which are
actualized by virtue of a confrontation with
weakness, limitation and fear, not through itsdenial. For notwithstanding his neglect of the
finer points of Aristotle’s definition, this nuance
of potentiality speaks to the reinterpretation of
the relation of potentiality to activity suggested
by Agamben. By reserving a place within
ourselves for the other we approach our own
impotentiality, and thus create an ease – or
adjacent space (Coming Community 25) – for the
expression of human frailty.
This inter-subjective account of potentialitythus also speaks to a reinterpretation of the
relation between children and adults, to the
extent that were such ethics in play, children
would be unburdened of their role as communal
reservoir for impotentiality. Aristotle’s emphasis
upon relations of change between bodies, coupled
with Agamben’s affirmation of abandonment
(his ‘‘Limbo ethics’’), encourages an acceptance
of those aspects of experience from which we
usually take flight – guilt, ambiguity, uncer-tainty, loss. Children and adolescents need to
manage their own impotentiality, without also
having to minister to adults’ anxieties. What is
needed, then, is to develop an orientation towards
the change that one’s actions and thoughts
(fantasies and projections) bring to bear upon
others. The secret of agency would be found
in these relations of change through which we
belong to one another not through conditions
of belonging but simply because we are
co-implicated in the world that we make together.
The dynamic of social interaction, and the
dynamic between being and non-being navigated
through potentiality, are both part and parcel of
everyday political agency. By identifying our own
impotentiality with children – consigning them to
a sphere of protective concern and oversight –
citizens exploit and disempower a whole section
of the community. But they also alienate
themselves from an essential element of their
own agency because, as Agamben demonstrates,
impotentiality and fragility are integral to
potentiality and ethics. In order, therefore, to
reappropriate our impotentiality, it is first
necessary to release children from their fantas-
matic function as purveyors of impotentiality.
Recognition of the fantasies through which the
material future is negotiated reveals the relation
of presence and absence through which life’s
possibilities are afforded: that fundamental
passivity comprehended by intellection.
In keeping with Agamben’s own insights, we
might also rethink the kinds of places that are
deemed ‘‘appropriate’’ for children, in both
practice and theory. What ongoing disputes
over public space and children’s place within it
tell us is that children do not desire merely to be
corralled into playgrounds or other ‘‘authorized’’
spaces, but want instead to share common spacesin their own manner, and without being branded
menaces to the community.15 Agamben’s own
positioning of children within his theorizing
within ‘‘Playland’’ – and other hypothetical
spaces that symbolize a coming politics –
represents a similar excision of them from
everyday political concerns. Instead they have
come to represent precisely the ‘‘not-yet’’
potentiality that elsewhere Agamben dismisses
as teleological: a possibility that will unfold intothe future, but which is abstract, at best, to the
present living context.
I will conclude this paper by suggesting a place
for children that is consistent with Agamben’s
critique of potentiality, but which is drawn
instead from the reflections of the Australian
photographic artist Bill Henson. Henson, who
famously works with children and adolescents,16
stated in an interview about his work:
The reason I like working with teenagers is
because they represent a kind of breach
between the dimensions that people cross
through. The classical root of the word
‘‘adolescence’’ means to grow towards some-
thing. I am fascinated with that interval, that
sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period
where you have an exponential growth of
experience and knowledge, but also a kind
of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult
life. (Sidhu)
Henson gestures towards precisely the duplicity
of potentiality, and the invidious position of
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children and adolescents – who inhabit an
ambiguous interval, but are not thereby bereft
of agency. On the contrary, one gathers from this
statement that it is precisely this in between state
that produces the child’s agency, bringing them
in close proximity to the uncertainty and
receptivity that characterizes impotentiality.
Henson’s depiction of children’s preferred
spaces evokes, again, intervals and interstices
within the normal fabric of the community’s
spatiality, rather than a place of seclusion and
protection: ‘‘the no man’s land between one thing
and another thing . . . like the vacant lot between
the shopping mall and the petrol station’’ (ibid.).
Thus, children appropriate disused spaces, imbu-
ing them with their own significance, throughplay. This topography, together with the chiar-
oscurist play of light and shadow that his
photography affects, is reminiscent of Limbo:
the place of abandonment, in which the wall
dividing Eden from Gehenna is finally dis-
mantled. When adults learn to make a place
alongside for their child and adolescent neigh-
bours – to share public space, without building
into it obstacles to participation such as Mosquito
devices, skateboard studs, and graffiti-resistantsurfaces – perhaps then they will be in a position
to confront their impotentiality,
and traverse the fantasies of
‘‘innocent’’ and ‘‘evil’’ children
that keep at bay fear of
vulnerability.
notes
I wish to acknowledge Angelaki’s anonymous
reviewer, through whose helpful advice I was able to improve the article. I would also like to thank
Magdalena Zolkos, Peter Chen, and Cressida
Heyes for reading and commenting on early drafts
of the paper. This research was supported under
Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects
funding scheme (project DP0877618). The views
expressed herein are those of the author and are
not necessarily those of the Australian Research
Council.
1 My choice of methodology to elucidate child-
hood disempowerment ^ in terms of ontology
rather than economics ^ may seem unusual. I do
not wish to disregard other more descriptive and
empirical types of account, and hope this reading
might complement them. My intention here is
rather to bring out the conceptual frame that
shapes our ideas about children’s capacities and
their relation to adults ^ a frame which, in turn,
affects the manner in which resources are distrib-uted. I would like to thank Angelaki’s anonymous
reviewer for urging me to clarify the purpose of
this methodology.
2 The development of more ‘‘humble’’ notions of
agency ^ in response to critiques of the fully
autonomous, rational self, and emerging from a
psychoanalytically informed account of social
dynamics ^ is part of a largerresearchproject cur-
rentlyin process. For further work in this project,
see my ‘‘The Innocence of Victim-hood vs. the
‘Innocence of Becoming’’’ and ‘‘Terror, Trauma,and the Ethics of Innocence.’’
3 For a comprehensive treatment of the ontologi-
cal significance of potentiality in Aristotle’s work,
see Witt.
4 Discussing a runner poised in the starting posi-
tion ^ in her potentiality to run ^ Heidegger
writes:
what we call ‘‘kneeling’’ here is not kneeling
in the sense of having set oneself down [like
the old peasant woman who kneels before a
crucifix]; on the contrary, this pose is much
more that of being already ‘‘off and running.’’
The particularly relaxed positioning of the
hands, with fingertips touching the ground, is
almost already the thrust and the leaving
behind of the place still held. Face and glance
do not fall dreamily to the ground, nor do they
wander from one thing to another; rather, they
are tensely focused on the track ahead, so that
it looks as though the entire stance is stretched
taut toward what lies before it. No, it not onlylooks this way, it is so, and we see this immedi-
ately; it is decisive that this be attended to as
well. What limps along afterwards and is
attempted inadequately, or perhaps without
seriousness, is the suitable clarification of the
essence of the actuality of this being which is
actual in this way. (Aristotle’s Metaphysics187)
Thus Heidegger signals the temporality of force,
wherein potentiality and actuality co-determine
one another. Dumania anticipates and enables the
act, energeia, just as the actual then corrects or
clarifies that nature of potentiality, because,
Heidegger notes, capability is always capability for
innocence, evil, and human frailty
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something. Heidegger thus remains faithful to
Aristotle’s hierarchy of ways of being, which
awards actuality priority over potentiality, even
while salvaging potentiality from the oblivion to
which the Megarians had consigned it. Agamben,
on the other hand, challenges and reverses thisorder of priority, by placing potentiality before
actuality in significance, and further, marking out
impotentiality as the most integral quality of
being and doing. Understanding this difference in
evaluation of the modes of being allows better
access to the ethical and political meanings of
potentiality for Agamben.
5 The philosophical conception of free will
depends upon the premise that one has free
will only to the extent that, at least in the relevant
circumstances, one might have acted otherwise,or have refrained from acting. This principle is
borne out in relation to the dual structure of
potentiality, in that a capacity is thereby defined
as something that may be enacted or not.
Otherwise it would be a necessary predicate of
the subject in question, rather than a capacity
or potentiality (which signals contingency).
Likewise, without the ability to do otherwise
or refrain from doing, our actions would be deter-
mined and not the consequence of free choice.
See Ayer.
6 The website for one outlet at which the device
is sold (www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/teenage_
control_products.html) boasts that ‘‘trials have
shown that teenagers are acutely aware of the
MosquitoTM and move away from the area
within just a couple of minutes.’’ The image
used to sell the device shows hooded
teenagers covering their ears. See also this
BBC report: 5http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_
news/wales/7240306.stm4
(both items lastaccessed 26 Nov. 2008).
7 The official Children’s Commission website
(http://www.11million.org.uk) (last accessed 2 May
2008), provides the followingreasons for its oppo-
sition to the use of Mosquito devices:
They affect all children and young people,
even babies and toddlers.
They don’t work. They only move the
problem along.
They build barriers between younger and
older people.
They force us [youths] to move away from
places we feel safe in.
8 In a poignant display of agency, many young
people have turned the mosquito sound to their
advantage by downloading it as a ring-tone onto
their mobile phones, and thereby being able to
receive calls and text messages without the
knowledge of parents or teachers. See, forinstance, this website: 5http://www.freemosqui
toringtones.org/4(last accessed 28 Feb. 2008).
9 Note, for instance, that public policy issues are
frequently framed in terms either of a threat to
children or else the present degradation of the
character of children that puts the community
itself at risk. Health risks are understood in terms
of childhood obesity, for instance; domestic
violence and rape in terms of child abuse; poverty
in terms of child neglect; commercialization and
advertising in terms of the sexualization of chil-dren; community morality in terms of teenage
pregnancy; and so on.
10 The relation between Agamben’s use of the
term ‘‘thing’’ here and Lacan’s reinterpretation
of das Ding in Freud should not be overlooked.
The Thing in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory
designates an imaginary loss, or internal
un-representable rupture, that is precipitated by
the acquisition of language (the splitting of the self
between unconscious and conscious), and which thereby sets desire into motion. See Lacan 118.
11 For an excellent analysis of Agamben’s treat-
ment of law in terms of his accounts of history
and play, see Mills.
12 An apt example of the kind of power Bartleby
represents is Rosa Parks’s refusal to move from
her ‘‘white’’ seat on an Alabama bus, in 1955: an
action which helped galvanize the civil rights
movement. Thanks to Robert Sinnerbrink for
suggesting this example.
13 See also Edkinds.
14 It is often suggested that children live in
between fantasy and reality. Yet research in child
psychology suggests that, provided with accurate
information about their environment, children
easily tell the difference. For instance, they might
play with an imaginary friend, or attribute agency
to a doll for the purposes of a game, aware of the
provisional nature of this ‘‘reality.’’ The boundary
breaks down, however, when children are given
inaccurate information about the world: for
instance, that a fat man in a red suit breaks into
their house to deliver presents at Christmas
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time, but only if they’re good. Children often
struggle to incorporate the contradictions the
Santa myth generates into the fabric of their
everyday understanding of reality, and once the
myth is debunked, can feel misled and betrayed.
See Woolley; and Taylor.15 Another example of adults’ attempt to limit
teenagers’ use of public space is the case of a
British local council that spent considerable funds
rebuilding three steps so that they were no longer
comfortable to sit on, on the basis that teenagers
were gathering there after school. For news cov-
erage see 5http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.
uk/news/2272425.taking_steps_to_deter_kids_having_
a_sitdown_in_rosehill/4 (last accessed 26 Nov.
2008).The comments section to the article is also
instructive.
16 Bill Henson became a household name in
Australia after the image on an invitation to his
2008 Sydney exhibition caused a media row, lead-
ing to the seizure of some of the exhibition’s
photographs by police and the investigation of
Henson as a child pornographer. Although ulti-
mately charges were not laid, the incident ignited
a debate in Australia that mirrors those in the
USA (in relation, for instance, to thephotographer
Sally Mann) regarding the meaning of child nudity,
and whetherits representationinitself constitutes
pornography. For a detailed ‘‘anatomy’’ of the
moral panic over Henson’s exhibition, see
Marr. One notable omission during the media
ruckus over the image was the girl’s own view on
the photographs, and indeed the opinions of any
children, as children’s rights activists took it upon
themselves to speak on their behalf. For an
account of this omission, see Valentine.
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Joanne Faulkner
ARC Research Fellow
School of History and Philosophy
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Room 338, Morven Brown Building
University of New South Wales
Kensington, NSW 2052Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
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