Before beginning I would just like to remind you something which seems obvious that is to

say that i will give my talk in English but as english is not my mother tank something rail
event will certainly be lost twice a day and what I want about it would like to underline is
that today general domination of English in conferences universities and other places of that
kind should not be considered so innocent or along the SWA the commonplace here is that
english is used as a kind of lingua franca as Latin was used in europe in sixteenth and
seventeenth century the analogy is misleading because let in did not belong to any
particular country was not spoken to by to any particular country while english as you know
is proper let's say to a capital of the nation's and I think this we should reflect on that I'm
not now

let's meet begin my talk the title of my talk echoes the title of a lecture that Deleuze gave in
Paris in March. if by chance you have seen the video who was taken that moment you will
remember that Deleuze defines the act of creation has an act of resistance. resistance to
death first of all but also resistance to the paradigm of information to which the power is
exerted in those society that there is called control society . each act of creation according
to Deleuze resist to something. so for instance Bach music is a act of resistance against the
separation of the Holy and the profane. As you see Deleuze did not define what does
resistance mean and seems to give to the term the current meaning of the opposition to an
external force or treat. the way in which he works and is often an attempt to perceive what
Feuerbach called the capability of a development contained in the work of the authors I
love. so I will try to develop this idea that the act of creation is an act of resistance. so we
will try to interrogate what remain unsaid in Deleuze picture. I must first see that I do not
feel at ease concerning the usage of the term creation referring to artistic practice. by the
way while they I was investigating the genealogy of this term I discover that a part of
responsibility it belongs to the architects: when medieval theologians trying to explain the
divine creation of the world they had this example they will say as the house pre exists in
the mind of the architect so God created the world looking to a model in his mind. so
Thomas will write like this: Thomas distinguished clearly between the creare ex nihilo or to
create starting from nothing which defines divine creation and facere de materia and to
make from matter that defines human productions. but as you see the comparison between
the activity of the architect and God's creation is a transposition of a theological paradigm
to the activity of the artist. so I prefer to speak instead of the act of creation of a poetic act
and if in my talk I will continue to use the term creation and it should be understood simply
in the sense of the greek verb poie: produce. the fact of explaining resistance only as an
opposition to an external threat does not seem sufficient adequate to me in order to
comprehend, to understand what a poetic act is. I think and convinced that as the
potentiality which the act of creation allows, frees, must be internal to act, in the same way
also the resistance must be internal to the act of creation. let me now say something about
this concept of potentiality. as you know the concept of potentiality in western philosophy
has a long history and starting from Aristotle's has indeed a central position. as you know
Aristotle opposes, and the links together at same time, potentiality and actuality , and this
opposition has been transmitted as an heritage to Western philosophy and also to Western
science. and it is trough this opposition of potentiality and actuality that Aristotle explains
what we call poetic act, act of creation which coincided for him with the act of tecknai. so
the example which he uses in order to explain the passage from potentiality into actuality
are simply that the architect, the flute player, the sculptor, the grammarian etc . in any case
each time that a certain technique is processed by certain man. but according to Aristotle
the man who has a potentiality can both exert it, realize it in the act, but also not to exert it .
this potentiality, and this is the genial thesis of Aristotle, is essentially defined in its
possibility of not being exerted. so the architect has a potentiality because it can build but
also can not build. there were philosophers called Mmegarians that objected to Aristotle
that a potentiality can only exist in act. but A. answer if this would be true, then an arch.
Would be an arch. Only when he builds, while we considered an architect or poet being a
poet oR architect also in the moment when they do not build or exhibited the potentiality.
so what defines the mode of being of potentiality is that it exists in the form of the mastery
on a privation. so a potentiality , the man was the potentiality, must remain in relation to
this potentiality also when it does not exert it. and Aristotle will push to the extreme these
theses and he will say, i quote Impotentiality is a privation contrary to potentiality. each
potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same. so each potentiality
of doing something is at the same time potentiality not to do something. so there is a kind
of specific ambivalence in each human potentiality, which maintains potentiality in relation
to its privation. and this relation defines according to Aristotle the essence of potentiality .
so man, we could say, is the living being which exists in the mode of potentiality: that is to
say that he can its impotentiality . he possess his potentiality in the mode of impotentiality .
so he can do and be because he can remain in a relation which is not being and not doing.
so now if we remember that in the example that A. gives for potentiality-impotentiality
refers to essentially to technologies: music, grammar architecture, medicine etc, then we
can say that man is the living being which exists essentially in the dimension of the
potentiality, but also at the same time in the dimension of impotentiality. each human
Commented [c1]: The peculiar potentiality of man is that of
opting for impotentiality, i.e decide to self-refuse, resisting an
internal drive to do. While animals will always actualise their
specific biological potentiality, man is 1) undetermined, in the sense
that he does not possess a specific task/vocation. This is the source
of his extreme potential, this is the reason it is so versatile. This is
the reason for which man exist in the Aristotelian mode of
potentiality. And 2) the specific, and greater, potentiality of man is
that of having the faculty of not expressing/actualising any specific
potentiality, in any given moment. Human potentiality exists in the
humans possibility of impotentialiy: it exists in the mode of
impotentiality.

potentiality is at the same time impotentiality. each ability to do or to be is constitutively

related to its own privation. and this is precisely the origin of the exorbitance of human
potentiality. human potentiality is so stronger than any animal potentiality because it can
remain in relation with its own privation. other animals, other living beings CAN only their
specific potentiality, Can these or that behaviour which is described in their biological
vocation. men on the contrary is an animal who can its own impotentiality. and the
greatness of his potentiality is measured by the abyss of this impotentiality.

Now after this philosophical digression let me go back to our interrogation of the act of
creation. if we consider what we said, this means that the poetic act cannot be understood
according to the an ordinary representation, as a simple transition from potentiality to
actuality. the artist is not a man who has a potentiality to create that, at certain moment,
we do not know how and the why, he will carry out into actuality. if any potentiality is
constitutively impotentiality: potentiality not to, how can we understand the passage to the
act? let's see: if the pianist, if for the pianist the realization of its potentialities to play is
certainly the execution of the sonata on the piano, what happens to his potentiality not to
play in the very moment in which he begins to play? how can a potentiality not to, realize
itself? I think that we can now understand in a better way perhaps the relation between
creation and resistance: in any poetic act there is something that resists to creation and
counters expression. you know, the verb Resist comes from the latin Sisto which means it
etymologically: to arrest, to restrain something but also to stand still. this power that
hinders and arrests potentiality in its movement towards the act is what Aristotle calls
impotentiality: the power not to. Potentialty contain within itself an ambivalence: it is an
ambiguous being which not only can both a thing and it's contrary, but contains in itself an
intimate and irreducible resistance. now if this be true, we must look at the act of creation,
the poetic act as a field of tensions stretching out between potency and impotency: to can
and cannot: acting and resisting. man can master his potentiality only through his in
impotentiality , but precisely for that reason there is not such a thing as a mastery on
potentiality. this means that to be a poet means to be fully and helplessly delivered to once
own impotentiality . this is a poet. a man who is completely abandoned to it's in Commented [c2]: Completely delivered, fully delivered: not
only because the resistance of impotentiality is always present in
impotentiality . so the highest potentiality is a potentiality that can both its potency and it's the work of a poet, in the masterpiece, but also because the poet is
delivered to its own impotentiality of not exerting potentiality.
impotency .if every potentiality is potentiality not to be able to do, the transition to the Act
can take place only transferring into the act the potentiality-not to: the resistance. this
means that each pianist has the potentiality to play and the potentiality not to play. but
Glenn Gould is only the pianist who cannot-not play. And turning his potentiality to his own
impotentiality , can ,so to say, his potentiality not to play. contrary to the mere ability and to
talent which can only play, thus the act, maestria and mastery keeps and exerts in the act
the potentiality not to play. let's now consider more than tentatively the action of the
resistance in a poetic, what is this inner resistance in the poetic act. Similarly to what
Benjamin calls the inexpressive , which breaks and interrupt in the work the pretension of
the appearance to give itself as a totality, in the same way resistance acts as a critical power
which holds back and restrains the blind drive of potentiality towards the act, and in this
way it impedes that potentiality consumes itself and exhaust itself entirely in the work. if
creation was only a potentiality to do something, ( potentiality which can only pass blindly
into the act) then art would be reduced to an execution of an order or even a prescription
which has dismissed and denied the resistance and the potentiality not to. so it would be
really an inadequate conception of art : as something that must be necessarily pass into the
act. so contrary to a common misunderstanding the maestria is not a formal perfection
(virtuoso), it is rather the ability to conserve impotency and potency in the act. It is the
retention of an imperfection in the perfect form. this is like the navaho woman who said Commented [c3]: Does he consider perfection as totality, unity,
univocal act?
that she would leave a little imperfection in the tissue she was waving in order not to
remain imprisoned. if she did not leave an imperfection in the tissue then there would have
been no exit for her. and the same is true for the artist and the maestro has to leave an
imperfection.

So in the painting of the maestro and in the page of the great writer, the resistance of the
potentiality-not-to, inscribes itself as an inner mannerism always present in every true
artwork, every true masterwork. and it is precisely on these internal resistance that also
critique can find its foundation. what an error of taste, the lack of taste, reveals is always a
lack concerning the potentiality not to. an artist an artist who lacks of taste is incapable to
refrain from doing or adding something. so the lack of taste is always the impossibility of a
refraining from doing an act. this spoils very often artworks. so we can represent in this
perspective the act of creation as a complicated dialectics between an impersonal element
which precedes and overcomes the subject and the personal element which tenaciously
resists to the first. the style of an artist does not depend only from the impersonal element,
from his creative power. it depends also from what seems to resist to it and almost fight
against it . this is the inner mannerism I mentioned before, that always marks the style of a Commented [c4]: Auto-mannerist lets say. Self referential. But
not solely self-referential to an artists own art, but self-referential,
great artist. a truly great artists contains always an inner mannerism. For example: an art somehow recursive, to the particular art (form of expression) itself.
It starts referring not only to the object, but to a particular practice
of expressing it. Another example is Fellinis 8 .
historians knows that the old Tiziano completely changes his style. the late painting of the
Titian are so different from what it used to be his Style, that art hist. Say that Titian becomes
Impressionists . if you are familiar with the later titian paintings. If you like like for instance
the Annunciation in san Salvatore in venice, there you will see that Carla becomes a kind of
confused magma, and the brush paint seems to strike and an injure the canvas. and that's
very interesting tiziano used to sign his painting with the formula titian made it but these
late paintings for instance the annunciation in san salvador is a signed titian made it, made
it: twice. meaning he made it and unmade it: exaggerated: there is an undoing.

that is also true for the style of the old Goethe and also for Plato. Allready ancient
commentators say that in the late dialogues Plato becomes completely artificial, full of a
mannerism and repetitions. The old Goethe, according to some linguists does not write
anymore in German etc etc. this is true , always true. ... the late Shakespeare also becomes
mannerist.

But another and in my opinion even better example is the allegories of the creation in Kafka,
where the great artist is defined by its absolute in capability concerning its own art . if you
remember the marvelous short piece by k. and it's the confession of the great swimmer. I
quote it: I have, admittedly, broken a world record. If, however, you were to ask me how I
have achieved this, I could not answer adequately. Actually, I cannot even swim. I have
always wanted to learn, but have never had the opportunity. and then another instance of
the same thing famous story of Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk who does not
know how to sing and can only whistle like any Mouse can do but even not so good as the
other mouse. but precisely for this inability she, i quote, can produce effects that no other
singer would never realize and that her inadequate means can achieve . I think that
nowhere as in this two figures, the usual representation of the artist has been so radically
called into question. Josephine sings with her impotentiality of singing, like the great
swimmer swims with his incapability to swim.

The fact is that the potentiality-not-too is not simply another potentiality besides the
potentiality to do. It is what i will call it's inoperativity. that is to say something that results
from the deactivation of the usual conception : the usual relation between potentiality and
actuality. I mean that there is an inner link between the potentiality-not-to and what I called
inoperability. like Justine, through her inability to sing, makes inoperative and exhibits, so to
say, that witch every Mouse can do, in the same way the potentiality-not-to, suspending
and deactivating the potentiality-to, shows it as such... exposes it as such. so in order to
represent in a correct way the relation between potentiality and impotentiality, we must
not think that there is a potentiality-not-to which precede the potentiality-to ( for instance
the potentiality-not-to sing which precedes the potentiality-to sing), and that must
therefore abolish itself so that the potentiality can realize itself into the act. the potentiality-
not-to is a resistance internal to potentiality which impedes it's exhaustion in the act and
oblige potentiality to turn towards itself and to become, so to say a potentia potentiae: a
potentiality which can its own impotency. Let me do an example: the work of velasquez, las
meninas, which results from this suspension of potentiality, does not represent and expose
only its subjects/object. it presents itself at the same time, and in the same gesture the
potentiality through which the painting came to be. Great poetry does not simply says what
is saying but also says the fact that it is saying it: the potentiality and the impotentiality of
saying. while painting is the suspension and the exposition of the potentiality of the sight,
exactly like poetry is the suspension and exposition of language. and I think this is the only
possible meaning of expressions such as: poetry-of-poetry or painting-of-painting. poetry is
suspended and exposed in the poem like painting is suspended and expose it in the painting.

I am aware that terms such as: suspension, inoperativity, deactivation , continuously

punctuate my lecture, and therefore it is perhaps time for me to try to define something as
a-poetics-of inoperativity . in order to do that let me just quote again an extraordinary
passage from Aristotle Nicomachean ethics, where the philosopher is reflecting on the
problem of: what is the work of man, what is the Ergo: the work of man. I go to this
extraordinary passage : as for the flute player for the sculptor for every artists on and more
generally for all those who have a work, an ergo and the praxis, it should be in the same way
also for men as such, if there is for men as such a thing as a work. Or should we rather say
that for the carpenter and for the shoemaker there is at work, but for men as such there is
none, because he was born Argos: without a precise work? so man he is born without a
proper work. this very interesting hypotheses of the kind of the constitutive worklessness
of men as such, absence of a precise work for man as such, is so disturbing that A.
immediately abandoned the question. so A. will not continue to take seriously this question.
let me try on the contrary to take it to take this hypothesis seriously and attempt to take
man as a being without any possible work . A being that no proper work can pretend to
define. (by the way these hypotheses is not scandalous and does not cease to appear in the
history of Western culture). we will just quote two example to appreciate the
reappearances of this worklessness of man in 20th century.

there are two little books and just two little books. the first one is the extraordinary little
book by the Dutch anatomist ludvig bulk title is the the problem of mentioned they don't go
of the becoming human of men of the anthropogenic Genesis according to bulk come it's
very interesting men does not derive from another's the primate but from the fatal phase of
a primate. a primate who acquired the capability of reproducing themselves. so man is a
baby of monkey who has constituted himself in an autonomous species he's a Nazi. I would
not release but it proves deep from anna karenina anatomy of men which is a similar not to
the anatomy of an addict monkey butt is similar to the anatomy of the baby of but then this
fatality of men explains the peculiar effect that compared as you know with other animals
men remain forever in a potential condition so that we can adapt themselves to all
environment to all of our limit or documentation to all formal activity but no one of these
activities can define can find him so you know so men is a potential being which can kitchen
which legs any biological predetermined location .

The second case comes from a history of art it is an extraordinary little booklet by kazimir
Malevich. the title is Inoperativity as the real truth of the Man. against the tradition which
sees man's realization only in work, Malevich states clearly that in Inoperativity is the
highest form of humanity and then what in his painting responds to this highest form of
humanity is the use of the blank, the white, all white paintings: the last stage of
Suprematism in painting. so it is an example of the poetics of Inoperativity at work. I think
that we can now better understand the essential function, the traditional role, that
philosophy always assigned to theory and contemplation and Inoperativity. the true human
praxes is a praxes which by making inoperative all the works and functions of living being
opens there to a new possible usage. Contemplation and Inoperativity (but Inoperativity
does not mean : do nothing in here. Quite the contrary) are in this perspective the
metaphysic agent operators of anthropogenesis: of the becoming human of man, which
freeing men by any biological or social destiny or vocation, opens him to those peculiar form
of worklessness that is our custom to name politics and art. I hope that what I meant when I
spoke of poetics of Inoperativity is now perhaps better understandable. and perhaps the
most appropriate paradigm for this operation, this activity which consists in making
inoperative all human work, is poetry itself. because what is poetry if not an operation in
language and on language that deactivates and renders inoperative the usual
Communication and Information functions of language (cfr. Deleuze of art) in order to open
it to a new possible use. I mean that divine comedy and Cavalcantis poems are the
contemplation of Italian language. Rimbauds illuminations are the contemplation of the
French language . Holderlin Hymn are the contemplation of German. Hopkins or John
Donne's poem are the contemplation of the English language. And what poetry
accomplishes for the potentiality of speaking, politics and philosophy must achieve for the
potentiality to act: by making inoperative all economical, religious and social discourses,
they show what the human body can do and open it to new possible Usage.

In fact, he may be right, since architecture would explore the potentiality of constructed
form (architecture proper), rendering inoperative all the programmatic (the acting potential
of the body), political, economical discourses.