tabula rasa

quotes from the coming community by giorgio agamben

"only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. . .in de anima aristotle articulates this theory in absolute terms with respect to the supreme theme of metaphysics. if thought were in fact only the potentiality to think this or that intelligibly, he argues, it would always already have passed through to the act and it would remain necessarily inferior to its own object. but thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think, and as such, as possible or material intellect, aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written. (this is the celebrated image that the latin translators render with the expression tabula rasa, even if, as the ancient commentators noted, one should speak rather of a rasum tabulae, that is, of the layer of wax covering the tablet that the stylus engraves.)

thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the thought of thought. what it thinks here, however, is not an object, a being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality (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."

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"there is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: it is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality. but precisely because of this things become complicated; precisely because of this ethics becomes effective.

since the being most proper to humankind is being one's own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason . . . humans have and feel a debt. humans, in their potentiality to be and not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act. . .

this is why ethics has no room for repentance; this is why the only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the experience of being (one's own) potentiality, of being (one's own) possibility -- exposing, that is, in every form one's own amorphousness and in every act one's own inactuality."

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"the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: what was technologized was not the body, but its image. thus the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence."