A perpetual power of withdrawal enables sensation rather than weakening it

Evidence

Between the fact of being blind and that of always being able to see, there is a kind of ‘not seeing’ which is still the power to see, just as between ignorance and knowledge applied there is a third term which represents the mere possession of knowledge. By claiming that sensation is ‘potentially in act’ before anything has been sensed, Aristotle defines sensation precisely as that which at every moment has the possibility of bringing itself to completion. Seeing could not be seeing without possessing such a possibility. If seeing were simply and absolutely identified with the act of seeing, then it would be a kind of blindness. Without the power to close one’s eyes, the gaze would be impossible. Hence it follows that the withdrawal of sensation which is inherent to sensation itself paradoxically testifies to the constancy of sensation, the things that can be sensed, and to sensing itself: it keeps open a critical space without which neither distinction nor identity could ever become manifest. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 449

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Aristotle’s sense of sensation as ‘potentially in act’ — a held-open withdrawal that is itself constitutive of seeing, not its negation.
• XREF: Connects to earlier chapter claims on the active-passive nous split and how receptivity is itself an achievement; also echoes ch50-51 on the intellect’s capacity to receive form. — connects to: Limiting desire may intensify rather than deaden it — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 164; Withdrawal itself is not enlightening; staying in the midst of life is — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 128