This publication is the first translation into Russian of a text that is key to understanding Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical project. First presented in the form of a paper at a conference in Lisbon in 1987, this text is known to the general reader under the title “On Potentiality”, published in the English-language collection Potentialities (1999). The translation is based on an expanded and refined version of the text, which was first published in Italian in 2005. The article is a detailed commentary on two key concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy — potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia) — clarifying the relationship between them, which plays a key role in Agamben’s works. Wondering about the ontological status of the statement “I can,” Agamben shows that one of the most important forms of potency (potenza) is the experience of deprivation. Clarifying the mode of existence of this kind of experience leads Agamben to the fundamental aporia of the Aristotelian theory of potency, according to which every capacity/potency is at the same time its own incapacity/impotency. The proposed archaeology of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy aims to highlight not only the ontological but also the ethical and political problems of the Western tradition of thought rooted in this aporia. Agamben links the proposed solution to the posed problem with the development of a mode (modality) of being that prevents every capacity/potency from being fully exhausted in action (actualization). By reading the Aristotelian doctrine of potency as an archaeology of subjectivity, Agamben lays the foundations for his own concept of form-of-life, which is central to his Homo Sacer project.

This publication is the first translation into Russian of an article by Giorgio Agamben, originally published as “The Work of Man: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics” in the first issue of Forme di vita in 2004. This text builds upon and expands upon the main ideas presented in “The Potency of Thought.” The work raises the question of human capacity, which is always accompanied by inherent incapacity, in connection with the problem of defining human nature in terms of activity and inactivity. The clarification of these concepts aims to reopen the inquiry into the essence and nature of man in relation to the experience of political life. Agamben begins by asking how we can understand the experience of man’s essential inactivity if man inherently possesses a vocation. By linking the experience of human life to the experience of pure potency, Agamben hypothesizes that man’s essence is not confined to any identity or cause, thus requiring a reevaluation of notions within the Western tradition of thought rooted in the constitutive relation of man to his action (activity). By suggesting an alternative interpretation of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, dynamis/ energeia and zoē tis (“a certain kind of life”) and raising the question of a form-of-life that is not encompassed by the biopolitical apparatus, Agamben turns to Dante and his work Monarchy. Through Dante’s experiences, Agamben demonstrates that human thought, by its very structure, is open to the possibility of its own absence and inactivity. Consequently, this raises a question that further research aims to address: Is it possible today to conceive of a politics that corresponds to the absence of work of man without succumbing to the biopolitical imperative of assuming it?

This publication marks the first Russian translation of an essay by Giorgio Agamben, originally published in 1980 as a preface to the Italian edition of Paul Valéry’s cycle of works on Monsieur Teste. Agamben’s essay delves into the philosophical genealogy of Valéry’s character, Monsieur Teste, presenting him as an extension and radicalization of the Cartesian gesture of self-justification through the experience of cogito. Through Valéry’s texts, Agamben uncovers a constitutive link between Descartes’ legacy and the ultimate experience of language as revealed in Valéry’s poetry. This exploration identifies the aporia of Cartesian subjectivity, characterized by an inherent split between the experinces of seeing (eye) and hearing (voice). The significance of this essay lies in its connection to Agamben’s broader project on the human voice, which he contemplated throughout the 1980s. While some ideas from the never-completed book The Human Voice surfaced in other works, such as “Childhood and History: The Destruction of Experience” (1978) and “Language and Death: The Place f Negativity” (1982), “The I, the Eye, the Voice” holds a special place in this series. It not only offers an interpretation of Valéry’s experiences within a philosophical context but also lays the groundwork for several key ideas about voice in Agamben’s recent writings. Particularly, these concepts are elaborated upon in the chapter on voice from What is Philosophy? (2016). Therefore, this commentary on Valéry’s writings not only stands as an independent work but also serves as a pivotal element of Agamben’s overarching philosophical project.

This article aims to further develop Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the landcape, along with the body and language, is a phenomenon of the “inappropriable”. According to Agamben, the landscape inherently resists being captured as property and can only be revealed through the experience of simple use. Agamben presents this claim in his works The Use of Bodies (L’Uso dei corpi), the final volume of the Homo sacer project, and Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and he Religion of Capitalism. The article asserts that the landscape is not merely another example of the inappropriable, but rather its most complex manifestation, encompassing relationships with both language and embodiment. A significant aspect of this discussion is Agamben’s dispute with Husserl, who diminishes psychologism and physicalism in his phenomenological project but upholds juridiism as a foundational attitude of consciousness that shapes the constitution of its objects. Consequently, the recognition of the “inappropriable” as an original realm of human experience can be achieved through the deconstruction of the “I” that falsely assumes possession of something unique. Ultimately, the landscape unveils itself when we no longer exist as subjects of rights, but rather as “persons” in the legal sense. To illustrate the precise emergence of such an experience with the inappropriable, the article analyzes artistic works, specifically a story by Alexander Grin and two paintings by Edvard Munch.

The article proposes an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy in the context of the idea of self-inflicted immaturity. If Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an exit out of the condition of immaturity marks the pinnacle of the human effort of maturation, Agamben’s philosophy locates itself on the opposite pole. This opposition is justified by the fact that the main task of the Italian philosopher is to develop the concept of a “simply human life”: undivided and unproblematic. In Agamben’s books the simply human life emerges in the realm beyond “the world of guilt and justice” as well as beyond God, spirit, and history, that is, beyond any overarching transcendental structure which the human subject used to assume in order to give its life a form and charge it with a task of bringing this form to perfection. It has neither form nor task, nor vocation, nor mission. It just is what it is, like an infant left to itself from the moment of its inception, counting for nothing in great eschatological schemes, and precisely because of that “naturally joyful.” In order to demonstrate the problematic nature of this approach to defining human life, the article offers an analysis of the basic concepts of Agamben’s philosophy in relation to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Otto Rank, Jean Laplanche and others. A reading of Agamben’s writings in the context of the psychoanalytic tradition of thought allows us to question the foundations of ethics and the politics of form-of-life, which the last volumes of the Homo Sacer series aim to clarify. As a result, it is possible to show that the underlying motif in Agamben’s work — the reversion of the trauma of birth, now taking the form of living as if this wish could indeed be realized, by putting into operation a “destituent potential,” virtually regressing the psyche to the prenatal bliss — despite its appeal is seen as problematic. Agamben’s philosophy paints an image of life that no livable or attributable life can sustain, yet he tempts us, by putting forward a seemingly possible messianic agent: a perverse de-natus, either un-born (most preferably) or already-dead/dying (as a second option).

The paper addresses the notion of the messianic event in the philosophical project of Giorgio Agamben. The central reference for this paper is the book The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, in which the Italian philosopher proposes his conception of messianism. The central event that lies at the foundation of this conception is the event of deactivation of the apparatus of law, which introduces the time of anomia. Based on a close reading of The Time that Remains, the author singles out three key features of the messianic event: 1) This event has already taken place in the past. 2) The event, as conceptualized by Agamben, is deprived of its capturing power and is deactivated and decomposed into parts. 3) The messianic event cannot be a foundation of any positive historical power, which constitutes an important aspect of the critical component of Agamben’s project. As the fifth section of the paper demonstrates, such understanding of the messianic event leads to an abolishment of the horizon of the future itself, which poses obstacles to the political potential of messianism and introduces serious limitations to Agamben’s philosophical strategy: if we abolish the possibility of the future event itself, we have nothing to do but to overlook and neglect the future.

This article aims to explore the significant implications of the term potenza in Giorgio Agamben’s thought. The concept of potency holds a unique place in Agamben’s thinking strategy: it serves as a way of thinking within his own philosophy while coinciding with it. Through the theoretical assimilation of this category, Agamben performatively fulfills the aim of his thought, which is the return of thought to the realm of potency. Drawing upon Aristotle, Albert the Great, and Averroes, Agamben establishes the true essence of potency. It is crucial to consider the range of meanings that the content of this concept disperses into over time in Western thought. The Russian language, in this regard, reflects the situation with its modern counterparts in other European languages, such as “possibility,” “power,” “strength,” and “capacity.” The article begins with an analysis of translation difficulties stemming from the original semantic richness of the concept, which tends to be lost in modern language equivalents. It then delves into the problematic nature of potency, a key focus in Agamben’s philosophy. The article argues that the core of Agamben’s philosophical exploration is partly determined by the performative striving to actualize thinking in the mode of potency.

The article attempts to clarify the place and meaning of musical-acoustic metaphors that appear in the last volume of Homo Sacer, The Use of Bodies, in connection with the project of modal ontology. The definition of philosophy as the “supreme music,” increasingly common in the pages of his later texts, suggests that this is not just a figurative meaning of musical images but an attempt to give them conceptual weight. To clarify the musical basis of philosophy, the article offers an analysis of a number of statements from The Use of Bodies in the context of Agamben’s early reflections on language and voice (most notably in Language and Death). The analysis allows us to show that musical metaphors mark the direction of Agamben’s positive program, particularly the project of modal ontology, which seeks to resolve the aporia of the ontological apparatus thattraces back to Aristotle. Although the aim of the article is mainly technical — to fit only apparently incidental musical metaphors into the logic of Agamben’s entire philosophical project — it seems that this analysis may be useful in clarifying the basis for understanding and critiquing the thought of the Italian philosopher.