Potentiality as Method: a Reflection on Giorgio Agamben's Philosophical Methodology

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading thinkers of our time. He aspires to bring Walter Benjamin's project of future philosophy to completion through a complicated sort of archeological thinking. He believed that Kant had thought of philosophical archeology before Foucault did, and that he did not bring this thought to fruition. Taking the path of philosophical archeology, Agamben's approach is distinguished from that of Foucault due to His debt to Heidegger. This has led to his new treatment of words and the nature of language that can be introduced as an "archeology of concepts." An archeology of concepts involves the application of philosophical archeology to the examination of language and the function of words when man encounters Being as an opened-up being towards Being. The concept is fraught with a particular temporal understanding, in turn loaded with an "arche" which can merely be approached by archeology. This article shows that understanding Agamben's philosophical methodology requires an appropriate conception of an influential concept in his philosophy, namely that of "potentiality". Potentiality paves the way for attaining the arche of things. That is why archeology is fundamentally based on potentiality. This concept has made Agamben's philosophy face new and old problems of man and philosophy in a differentlight. The most significant of these problems is Heidegger's relation of Being and language.