This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in an altogether new light.

喬吉奧·阿甘本（Giorgio Agamben），意大利當代著名哲學傢、思想傢，生於1942年，曾先後任教於意大利以及歐美的多所大學和研究機構，著述頗豐並且在歐美學界有很高的聲譽和影響。除《潛能》外，另著有《詩節：西方文化中的詞語與幽靈》《語言和死亡》《散文的理念》《開放：人與動物》等，20世紀90年代以來以“神聖的人”（homo sacer）為主題的係列著作體現瞭他在政治思想領域的建樹，其中包括《神聖的人》《例外狀態》《至高貧窮》《神的作品》等等。阿甘本曾主持編輯本雅明著作的意大利文譯本，並與帕索裏尼、卡爾維諾、英格博格?巴赫曼、皮埃爾?科羅索夫斯基以及20世紀法國諸多思想名傢有過交往或閤作。