DescriptionThis cultural critique employs the philosophical concept of potentiality to interrogate the relationship between economic and ontological processes of production - that is, how does our material infrastructure both arise from and shape our nature as socially-imbricated individuals? The reigning neoliberal ideology presents capitalist relations as the final formula for human happiness, suggesting that material surpluses guarantee the fulfillment of our needs and desires. But this elides the possibility of any “ontological surplus” accruing to human communities, the sense of increased degrees of freedom to reorganize social life. It is obvious that extreme material deprivation confines an individual or community’s efforts to the pursuit of necessities, but why, in an age of vast material excess, do we continue to put our time and talents primarily into work-related activities instead of self-work? I argue that the answer hinges on a narrow understanding of potentiality (dynamis). This key concept derives from Aristotle, as do those of economics (oikonomia) and the political life (bios politikos). Putting these ancient ideas in dialogue with events that exemplify our present and discourses that seek to define it, I am to develop a discourse that could effectively subvert the dominant “post-political” neoliberal paradigm and actualize creative resistance to our present conditions. To think this project through from theory to practice, I draw from a set continental philosophers beginning with Marx, Heidegger and Arendt, then progressing to Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and Catherine Malabou. Each of them has applied philosophy to social conditions, not to develop a “political philosophy” in the old prescriptive and normative sense, but a sort of template for improvisational praxis rooted in conceptual revaluation of current conditions. I attempt to apply this template to our own situation and expand it into a program of discursive action geared toward breaking the ideological deadlock enabling the constant reproduction of an ontologically limiting social order.