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The Retreat of Reality: On Agamben’s What is Real? (2018)

by Justin Loke

For much of Western thought, reality was understood as something necessary, of necessity: things happened for reasons, and even if humans did not yet know those reasons, they were assumed to exist. This view goes back to Aristotle, who described reality in terms of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). For Aristotle, potentiality was not just the chance that something might happen; it was a real capacity that also included the power not to happen. A seed could become a tree, but it could also remain a seed. Meaning arose from this relation between what can be and what need not be. Agamben’s core idea of potentiality is not the same as probability. Potentiality means a real capacity that also includes the power not to pass into action (can be / can not be). Probability, by contrast, is a measured likelihood inside a system designed to predict and produce outcomes. So probability is a tool of operativity; potentiality is a deeper openness that resists being reduced to outcomes.

Modern science originally shared this belief in necessity. Its task was to discover the laws that made events inevitable. Quantum physics, however, breaks this picture. At the atomic level, scientists can no longer say what is happening, only what is likely to happen. For example, you cannot know both an electron’s exact position and its exact motion. Scientists no longer say “the electron is here,” but “the electron is likely to be here.” Nature itself does not allow such certainty. Based on the uncertainty principle: reality cannot be fully known as determinate. Instead of necessity, science works with probability. At this scale, particles no longer appear as definite objects but as statistical distributions, described not by what is but by what may occur.

This shift does not weaken science; it strengthens it. Even if individual events are uncertain, large numbers allow outcomes to be engineered with remarkable reliability. Modern technologies, from nuclear power to nuclear weapons, depend on this logic. Reality retreats, but control increases. Science no longer reveals truth in the classical sense; it manages uncertainty.

Ettore Majorana, the physicist at the centre of Agamben’s What Is Real?, grasped this problem with unusual clarity. He argued that probability was not merely a limit of human knowledge but a feature of reality itself. If the world is fundamentally probabilistic, the scientist no longer stands as a witness to truth, but becomes a technician of models. Agamben reads Majorana’s mysterious disappearance not as an accident or suicide, but as a symbolic gesture: the subject of science disappears along with reality.

Simone Weil sharply criticizes this transformation. She observes that science has abandoned the search for necessity, which once gave meaning to the world (the sense of “it must be so,” which gives meaning). Modern science explains how often things happen, not why they must happen. It becomes effective but spiritually empty. For Weil, when necessity disappears, meaning disappears with it.¹

To reiterate, probability is not the same as potentiality. Probability is calculated, measured, and used to produce outcomes; it belongs to systems of prediction and governance. Potentiality, by contrast, includes the capacity not to act, not to pass into actuality. For Agamben, a proper life lies in potentiality, not in probability. So what do we mean by “real” now: reality is no longer something stable and necessary that truth reveals; it becomes something managed through statistical prediction.

This led me to think about how Borges shows that worlds can be “real” because a system, such as an encyclopedia, a language, a model, takes hold and organizes life, fiction becoming reality. In stories such as Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a fictional system becomes real because people begin to be enveloped by it. An invented encyclopedia begins to determine how people think, speak, and study, until its fictional world becomes more operative than the one it displaced..²

What seems important here is the difference between fiction becoming reality and the idea, often stated cynically, that reality itself has become fiction. The latter expresses a kind of resignation: that nothing is true anymore, that everything is just narrative, and that belief no longer matters. It dissolves responsibility by flattening truth and fiction into the same indifference.

What Borges points to is something more precise and more troubling. Fiction does not replace reality, nor does it expose reality as mere illusion. Rather, constructed systems gradually take on the weight of reality because they are used, inhabited, and relied upon. Reality is not negated but produced: worlds come into being not through truth, but through their capacity to organize life.

When people say “reality is fiction,” they usually mean it in a cynical way. It suggests giving up: that nothing is really true anymore, that everything is just spin, stories, or opinions, and that believing in anything is pointless. It treats the world as fake and assumes there’s no reason to take truth or responsibility seriously.

“Fiction becoming reality” means something else entirely. It doesn’t say the world is fake. It says that ideas, models, and stories can slowly start to shape how people live, until they function as reality. A system may begin as an invention or theory, but once people rely on it, organize their lives around it, and act as if it were real, it becomes real in practice. The danger here isn’t illusion, but effectiveness: things gain power not because they are true, but because they work and are widely used. We can start thinking the “real” is produced and maintained.³

Is Agamben warning us that modern reality increasingly functions in this way, constructed like fiction, yet enforced as truth? It is assembled from models, probabilities, and scenarios, structures that resemble fiction in their construction but are enforced as unquestionable reality. This is not a claim that nothing is real. It is a more uncomfortable insight: that reality today is often something made, stabilized, and governed, and that the task is not to deny it, but to learn how to live within it without being entirely absorbed by it.

The world is not fake; it is being shaped by what people use and believe to be true. And truth (before we draw distinctions between the true and the real, often assumed to be synonymous) has always been constructed through language. We describe and name the world through words from the very beginning; we have never encountered it without them. What has changed is not that reality has disappeared, but that its construction has become increasingly technical, probabilistic, and governed. The task, then, is not to retreat into cynicism, but to remain attentive to how reality is made, and to how one might live within it without surrendering entirely to its mechanisms.

1. Sur la science, Simone Weil, Gallimard, 1966 ↩︎
2. “Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres. Le pregunté el origen de esa memorable sentencia y me contestó que The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia la registraba, en su artículo sobre Uqbar. La quinta (que habíamos alquilado amueblada) poseía un ejemplar de esa obra. En las últimas páginas del volumen XLVI dimos con un artículo sobre Upsala; en las primeras del XLVII, con uno sobre Ural-Altaic Languages, pero ni una palabra sobre Uqbar. Bioy, un poco azorado, interrogó los tomos del índice. Agotó en vano todas las lecciones imaginables: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr… Antes de irse, me dijo que era una región del Irak o del Asia Menor. Confieso que asentí con alguna incomodidad. Conjeturé que ese país indocumentado y ese heresiarca anónimo eran una ficción improvisada por la modestia de Bioy para justificar una frase. El examen estéril de uno de los atlas de Justus Perthes fortaleció mi duda.” Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1940 ↩︎
3. I began to think about money, about currencies, as a promise, and about the creation of debt. Money is not powerful because it is true, but because it works. A banknote, a digital entry, a currency has no intrinsic reality beyond the system that sustains it. It is a promise, backed not by substance but by collective belief, institutional enforcement, and habitual use. Money becomes real because it circulates, because it is accepted, because lives are organized around it. Its power lies not in truth, but in effectiveness. Currency is therefore one of the clearest examples of fiction becoming reality. ↩︎