Publication:
Innocence, Evil, and Human Frailty: Potentiality and the Child in the Writings of Giorgio Agamben

dc.contributor.author Faulkner, Joanne en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2021-11-25T13:42:33Z
dc.date.available 2021-11-25T13:42:33Z
dc.date.issued 2008 en_US
dc.description.abstract With his concept of ‘potentiality,’ Agamben offers a promising means of approaching questions of power and agency. Yet arguably, by situating potentiality as a reserve created through the sovereign ban, Agamben neglects the inter-subjective context of ordinary everyday agency. This means that while Agamben’s theory is particularly well suited to the analysis of interactions between states and their citizens, and those excluded from citizenship, it provides poor tools for understanding how social disparity develops within communities, understood as networks of individuals of varying capacities and ways of being. By revisiting Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality from which Agamben’s concept is drawn, the essay develops from potentiality ways of thinking about agency. The essay focuses upon a class of individual who are increasingly seen to embody the political community’s potentiality, to the extent that their ability to exercise agency is reduced: that is, the ‘innocent child’—glossed at once as humanity’s future and best hope, and as its most vulnerable and unrealised quotient. While human potentiality is thought only in terms of childhood innocence, not only will these individuals’ agency be stymied, but citizens will also continue to separate themselves from their own unrealised potentials and frailties. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/40368
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.source Legacy MARC en_US
dc.subject.other Potentiality en_US
dc.subject.other Agamben en_US
dc.subject.other Aristotle en_US
dc.subject.other Agency en_US
dc.subject.other Children en_US
dc.title Innocence, Evil, and Human Frailty: Potentiality and the Child in the Writings of Giorgio Agamben en_US
dc.type Conference Paper en
dcterms.accessRights open access
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.description.notePublic Presently under review with a journal en_US
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/600
unsw.relation.faculty Arts Design & Architecture
unsw.relation.ispartofconferenceLocation Auckland, New Zealand en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofconferenceName ASCP 2008: The Post/Human Condition en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Faulkner, Joanne , History & Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of Humanities & Languages *
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