Issue 16 of the Chto Delat newspaper (March 2007) was dedicated to “Potentialities Beyond Political Sadness,” and contains a drawing by Monika Marklinger that appropriates/detourns the Microsoft slogan.
In early 2024, the university closed the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom’s longtermist think tank. See Nick Robins-Early, “Oxford Shuts Down Institute Run by Elon Musk-Backed Philosopher,” The Guardian, April 20, 2024 →. William MacAskill is a also a key player in Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute.
Alexander Zaitchick, “The Heavy Price of Longtermism,” New Republic, October 24, 2022 →.
Nick Bostrom, “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development” (2003), quoted in Yannick Fritz, “Philosophy Against the Present: The Foundations and Critique of Longtermism,” Umbau, no. 2 (n.d.) →.
Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority,” Global Policy 4, no. 1 (February 2013).
Fritz, “Philosophy Against the Present.”
See →.
Sandra Leonie Field, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), 8.
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Penguin, 2004); for form and matter, see in particular book Zeta 6–9, pp. 185–99; for potentiality, in particular book Theta, pp. 253–82.
My wording here is inspired by Werner Heisenberg, Physik und Philosophie (S. Hirzel, 1959), 137.
It should be noted, however, that Aristotle’s terms have proven ambiguous, with dunamis having been interpreted variously as logical possibility and as capacity. Both Schelling and Agamben fall into the latter camp. See Kevin Attell, “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power,” Diacritics 39, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 39.
Field, Potentia, 34. Field here quotes from Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1996), 17.
Field, Potentia, 34.
Thomas Kjeller Johansen, The Powers of Aristotle’s Soul (Oxford university Press, 2012), 13.
Nicholas Kahm, “Aquinas and Aristotelians on Whether the Soul is a Group of Powers,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2017): 115.
Field, Potentia, 68.
Field, Potentia, 80–91.
See, in particular, chapters 16–19 of Leviathan.
See Field, Potentia, 159–63, for an analysis based on Negri’s 1981 book The Savage Anomaly, on which the later collaboration with Hardt was built.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2005), 212–22.
Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021), 152.
Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Addison-Wesley, 1994) contributed largely to popularizing the language of hives, swarms, and emergent properties.
Ben Quinn and Dan Milmo, “How TikTok Bots and AI Have Powered a Resurgence in UK Far-Right Violence,” The Guardian, August 2, 2024 →.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 44.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 44. For his reading of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” see in particular “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1999); and “Bartleby,” chap. 9 in The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minneapolis Press, 1993), 35–37.
Peter Dews, Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel (Oxford University Press, 2022), 117.
Dews, Schelling’s Late Philosophy, 146–50; F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, ed. Manfred Frank (Suhrkamp, 1977), 154–64.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 131.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 156–64.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 172–74.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 165–83, 194–96.
Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, 162.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 48.
Agamben, “Bartleby,” 35–36.
Stephen K. White, “Affirmation and Weak Ontology in Political Theory: Some Rules and Doubts,” Theory & Event 4, no. 2 (2000).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (Continuum, 2001), 211. For a similar point (made in the context of linguistics), see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Bloomsbury, 2013), 115, where “potential” and “virtual” appear to be used as synonyms.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 212.
The quotation is from Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?,” in The Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (March 1996), 11. For Simondon’s critique of hylomorphism, see Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 21–54.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 191.
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 220.
One obvious shortcoming of this genealogy is that I have not found a way to do justice to Ernst Bloch, an important early twentieth-century Schellingian Marxist, or Marxist Schellingian.
Sean Cubitt, “Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image Commons,” in Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Image, ed. Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 28.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019), 277.
The quotations are from Helena Horton and Nina Lakhani, “Longer Heatwaves Driven by ‘Turbo-Charged’ Climate Change, Say Scientists,” The Guardian, July 17, 2023 →.
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (Basic Books, 2022), caption of Figure 1.2 in chap. 1. I have not been able to source a paginated version of the book online, and I have no interest in obtaining a copy of the print edition.
MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, chap. 5.
“In longtermism, these expected probabilities are used to feign objectivity, but in reality can be arbitrary or even informed by the person invoking them.” Fritz, “Philosophy Against the Present.”
MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, chap. 1.
MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, chap. 1.
MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, chap. 6.
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016). As Malm emphasizes, coal was not necessarily cheaper than water power, but steam-powered factories in large urban centers gave the capitalists greater control over production and greater power over the workers. Malm’s magisterial study has serious blind spots, including his neglect of slavery and the plantation system, and his Leninist and statist orientation. “Leninist practice always relies on an ecology of struggles, but demands a strategic decision which radically suppresses it. Its line—take state power—is fiercely critical of, yet relies on a popular power it cannot bring into being, and that it does not respect, even as it mythologizes it. Again, the prioritization of agency-as-unified-will—be it a green Lenin or a climate Leviathan—obscures other forms of agency which are as essential to the abolition of fossil capital.” Bue Rübner Hansen, “The Kaleidoscope and the Catastrophe: On the Clarities and Blind Spots of Andreas Malm,” Viewpoint Magazine, April 14, 2021 →.
Malcolm Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écolohgie depuis le monde caribéen (Seuil, 2019), 11, 43.
Fred Moten, in Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 10.
T. J. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023), 88.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment (Harun Farocki Institut, 2023), 16.
Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 284 Gaza: ‘The Decade After’—The Surreal Geoeconomic Imaginary of Netanyahu’s Economic Peace,’” Chartbook (newsletter), May 23, 2024 →.
See also my article “Counterpublics in Search of Infrastructures: Lessons from German Anti-Antisemitism,” October, no. 189 (Summer 2024).
This essay is based on parts of chapter 2 of my forthcoming book States of Divergence (Minor Compositions). Thanks to Sven Anders Johansson for a stimulating exchange on matters of potentiality.