The ethics of potentiality are only effective precisely because there is no clear-cut moral certainty, as Agamben points out, there are no mere tasks that must be fulfilled in the enactment of human existence, just as there is no divine, nor naturally given ordering of humanity. The existence of potentiality is embodied, in the virtuality of the ellipsis – the literary device of suspensions that both closes yet leaves open, while not fading away as it is inscribed and actualized. The ellipsis ‘deposes the power of syntactical ties,’ it redistributes sensibility by suspending the completeness of meaning, by revealing the gap between sense and sense. [The ellipsis ..., . . ., also known informally as dot-dot-dot, is a series of (usually three) dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The word, (plural ellipses) originates from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis meaning 'leave out'.]
Where the period declares and states, the ellipsis exposes an indefinition that is the root of potentiality, an indefinition that brings with it the arduous struggle of its modes of (non)/articulation. The ‘I can’ of potentiality is further diversified as the ‘I can …’ in the richness of its political signification, it is nothing less than a movement of de-actualization, an unraveling of the thresholds that delineate the instantiation of inequality and modes of sensible distinction-making. Potentiality is the contingent state of equality that constitutes the root of all forms of social organization. It is the very faculty of non-consensus which both can and can-not instigate the appearance of other worlds and other grammars of being; the metaphorical syntax of which is the aesthetical stake of politics …
Patricia Reed, The Politics of I Can
