Description:

The Critical Theory Cluster presents French scholar and novelist Gwenaëlle Aubry:

From Potentiality to Omnipotence: Some Groundwork for an Archeology of Power

“A terminological transformation,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “if it expresses a change in ontology, can turn out to be just as effective and revolutionary as a material transformation.” It is precisely one of these fundamental transformations that we intend to analyze: That of inpotency (or potentiality) into potency considered as power.

Being-in-potency and being-in-act (dunamei/energeiai) are, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the principles of both a unified ontology and a unique theology which equates God with the good and designates God’s being as a pure act, radically free of all in-potency as from all power. How, then, did this God without potency come to be replaced by the all-powerful God? How is such a process correlative to the reinterpretation/subversion of Aristotelian dunamis? We shall try to identify the double gesture which both builds up the theology of omnipotence and binds being and power together. In so doing, we shall consider the specific problems raised by the attribute of omnipotence: How is it both metaphysically necessary and ethically problematic? To what extent does it lead to reformulate what Hans Jonas, in The Concept of God after Auschwitz, calls “the old question of Job ... the chief question of theodicy?” Can we conceive of the convergence in God of good and power, or does the attribute of omnipotence sketch the catastrophic figure of a tyrant-God? What are its effects on the theologico-political? How does this history of dunamis modify the seemingly parallel story told by Heidegger, at the end of his Nietzsche, of the translation of energeia into actus?

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, The Classics Cluster, the French Interdisciplinary Group, the Center for Global Studies and Communication and the Departments of English, Religious Studies and Political Science.