What is potentiality? Potentiality is conventionally understood as that which is opposed to actuality. This is an Aristotelian inheritance. By definition, what is potential [dynamis δυναμις] is something that is not-yet actual, but that which over time and through the principle of development has the power to actualize [energia ενεργεια]. Potentiality is therefore a kind of power, with an inertial, directional force whose aim is to manifest itself in actuality. This motif can be found in Hegel’s system. For Hegel, Reason is what is capable of actualizing itself; it is a purposive activity that unfolds its inner potentiality (the “in itself”) into explicit actuality (the “for itself”). Marx overturns Hegel and relocates this power of actualizability from subjective thought (Spirit) to the sensuous material activity of man (labor-power). What unites Hegel and Marx is the idea of potentiality as the substrate for the actual world. Yet, insofar as potentiality precedes actuality, it is something that disappears, becomes annulled in its becoming actual. The idea of development intends to bring potentiality to its end [telos τέλοϛ], to realize the teleology of potentiality to actuality. This is why in the contemporary discourse of development what remains merely potential risks the opprobrium of under-development. Potentiality, on this view, is nothing more than what subsists in the peripheral, substance-less shadow of actuality. Giorgio Agamben offers a radically different account of potentiality. “On Potentiality” is Agamben’s critical effort to go beyond the binary of potential/actual. His theoretical gesture is to give form to an aspect of potentiality that is not reducible to actuality, a potentiality that “conserves itself and saves itself in actuality” (184). He therefore identifies a certain kind of persisting , a living-on of potentiality that remains in and for the actual world.