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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

203



‘‘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

innocence, evil, and human frailty

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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


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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


216




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]

faulknerfaulkner

ANGELAKI Agamben 17pp

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