The Actuality of Actuality

The Institute of Philosophy at ZRC SAZU, in collaboration with the Centre for Theoretical and Critical Research of the University of Rijeka, is pleased to invite you to the international symposium The Actuality of Actuality, to be held on 1 June 2026 in the Gosposka Hall of ZRC SAZU. Organised as part of Dr Ozren Pupovac’s visiting fellowship at the Institute, the symposium will bring together theorists from Austria, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Germany, and Slovenia.

In which way can thought respond today to the exigency of its relevance and effectivity, let alone its realisation? How can critique be of the present, in the active and not simply passive sense of the genitive – participating in its unfolding, contributing to the seizing of the emancipatory chances that offer themselves as scantly as they do subterraneously? Amidst the reigning obscurantism and disorientation signalling the defeat of any active referents of rupture – when “a present is lacking”, as Mallarmé had already diagnosed it – is it enough to take plight in projections and deferrals, in imaginings and hopes? Does it suffice, in order to affirm ruptural capacity, to place our bets on the holding fast to the “not yet” as something real, albeit inactual, on the virtual or potential as ever present subversive openings? For should one not at the same time attempt to echo that what the past century had thought and practiced in the radical registers of the real and the present: the manifest unfolding of the actuality of emancipatory action, the actuality of the revolution? But then again how to stage once more the actuality of such an idea of actuality? In which way can thought render it thinkable today? Which operators of thought, which conceptual articulations might it be necessary to evoke in this regard? From the subject and truth to the object and the act, from force and form to the void and substance, from power to effectivity, from the actuality of the present moment to the actuality of an activity of (self)constitution, from act to actuosity, from action to actual infinity – what are the categorial and conceptual moves required, as we necessarily pass through the history of philosophy in search for elements of refoundation of the concept of actuality? And, moreover, which temporal complications of actuality as present are we confronting here in the first place? For if the very notion of actuality, etymologically stemming from agere and ἄγειν, is something that draws out or pushes to the front – and does not march at the head, as ἄρχειν or ducere – something present and instantaneous, while at the same time moving and producing, albeit without being measured by its result, by its completion alone as facere – is the concept itself adequate to capture in thought such a radicality of time unfolding here?

Schedule

10:30 – 11:00 Opening remarks

11:00 – 12:00 Boyan Manchev: "The Front of the Actual"

12:00 – 13:00 Bojana Jovićević: "Hegel on Action and Actuality"

Pause

14:00 – 15:00 Ozren Pupovac: “The Actual Concept”

15:00 – 16:00 Bruno Besana: "Sketches of an Indeterminate Present"

Pause

16:30 – 17:30 Alexi Kukuljevic: "Hell’s Actuality: Pasolini’s Imperative"

17:30 – 18:30 Nadia Bou Ali: "The Actuality of Allegory"

18:30 – 20:00 Closing discussion

Follow online (Zoom link)

Abstracts

Boyan Manchev: The Front of the Actual 

Ten years ago, I introduced the concept of the “front of the actual” in my book Clouds: A Philosophy of the Free Body. I was thinking indeed of clouds, and of the ontological, epistemological, and political potential of these striking yet intangible bodies (or images, or concepts). Over the following decade, I have felt that the actual vibrations of this concept were becoming dramatic, at once stimulating and frightening. The concept of the front emerged in meteorology alongside, and under the influence of, military theory – but it reached it through anatomy and moral philosophy. I will briefly examine the seemingly heterogeneous image of the scala naturae alongside Spinoza’s notion of the faciēs totius universi, confronting them with the (ontological, political) idea of a common front of the actual.

Bojana Jovićević: Hegel on Action and Actuality 

In this talk, I will analyse Hegel’s idea of action as articulated in The Science of Logic, in the section on the Idea of the Good. I will show that, for Hegel, action expresses the objective efficacy of thought in the world without either grounding it logically from within or exceeding logic and reasoning. Specifically, action has a twofold structure. In one’s concrete doing, reality is revealed as it is. Action is not about what happens in reality; it is not an event one undergoes. Rather, in what one does, one brings about what reality is. In this sense, one’s intention is constitutive of what happens. At the same time, what one does is not reducible to what one intends to do. In and through action, reality is revealed as given and as intending, that is, as process.
If action can be reduced neither to its intention nor to its isolated outcome – since it is validated only through the entirety of its process – how, then, should we interpret its actuality? And what, from this perspective, counts as a virtuous or political action (given that both deontological or pragmatist takes would, in this respect, prove to be insufficient)?

Ozren Pupovac: The Actual Concept

The enigma of Althusser’s recourse to Spinoza concerns not only all those echoes of substance and its cause, or the theory of the adequate idea in its synthetic and generative movement, but even more so the notion of the actual essence – the conatus – seized intuitively to express and envelop the immensity of the problem of the revolutionary tendency in its continuity and its autonomy: how to continue, how to incessantly reaffirm one’s rupture with the logic of domination? Such a Spinoza "pour Lénine", in fact, situates politics decisively in the register of intellectuality, where problems of organisation, strategy and direction pivot upon not only an immanence of thought in its movement – capable of always renovating itself by producing its contents from within itself – but also upon thought’s immediacy – as the concept itself is pushed towards attentiveness and decisiveness with regard to contingent openings – which is precisely what ensures its actuality vis-à-vis concrete situations. And yet there is something profoundly unstable in this: the Spinozist recasting of Lenin’s dictum „Marxist theory is all-powerful because it is true“, if it opens up and infinitises the „true“ as activity, as the power of production – instead of a guarantee, or a sign – thus precluding any fall into dogmatic ossification or ineffectivity, falls short of being able to capture its own effects outside itself – the actuality of political action to which it is coupled. The “true” cannot, from within itself, envelop the effects of its inscription into decisions and acts, as the “correct” course taken – or, the actuality of the concept falls short of seizing the actuality of the act which is nevertheless both its aim and its condition. Does this ultimately render Althusser’s proposal of Spinoza’s Lenin uninhabitable? Or does it rather recast the very understanding of the actuality of the avant-garde?

Bruno Besana: Sketches for an Indeterminate Present

The concept of actuality seems at once essential and at odd with the idea of acting into the present, of producing a radical break or disjunction into it. Actuality defines in fact, since its conceptual foundation, a regime of absolute presence, while the performance of a break is what estranges or divides a present from itself, from the coordinates allowing us to identify it. The question therefore rises if a revolutionary interruption of the present has any actuality, and if so, which one.

The problem is mainly that the actuality of a revolutionary fracture seems to necessarily take the form of the fulfilment of a telos, of a finalistic pattern in which an idea, nurtured and formed in a time, according to the logic of the latter, passes from potentiality to actuality, therefore hanging from a formed structure, projected in the future, rather than imposing a radical formal break in the present. The only possible escape seems then to take shelter into an infinitely delayed potentiality.

This paper attempts at a preliminary sketch of this problem, by pointing the resonance between two moments: first, the lurking, throughout Aristotle’s Metaphysics, of the idea that, although matter is potentiality of being informed, and only form is fully actual, nonetheless matter has an actuality, and hence a certain formal presence irreducible to form. Something thus exists like an actual effectivity of potentiality, ultimately identifiable with the indetermination of accidents.

Such an idea of the actuality of indetermination will then be further sketched via the confrontation of Agamben’s rand Deleuze’s readings of Melville’s Bartleby, in which the idea of resistance qua retreat into sheer potentiality, is confronted to the idea resistance qua construction of an effective and infective, expanding, indetermination.

The image appears thus of an actuality that is not the fulfilment of a finality consistent with the received structures articulating the present, but that rather operates in the present by introducing in it an opening, an opening that neither fulfils nor holds promises, an opening that transforms the present by indetermining it, by giving to it what one could call a determinate form of indetermination.

Alexi Kukuljevic: Hell’s Actuality – Pasolini’s Imperative

In the poem, “Picasso,” written on the occasion of major retrospective of the painter in Rome in 1954 and included in the collection Ashes of Gramsci (1957), Pier Paulo Pasolini formulates an imperative that I argue orients his thinking, writing, artistic and cinematic practice as a whole. The imperative obliges the poet to stay in hell. Staying in hell defines the actuality of actuality. It defines the poet’s commitment to thinking the actuality of the present as a refusal to shy away from its horror. By staying in hell, the thinker does not betray the damned, the wretched of the earth, those whose lives bear witness to what hell on earth is like under the capitalist mode of production. To think this imperative, I argue, requires a rethinking of allegory and a critique of its exemplification in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This will provide the framework for an interpretation of Pasolini’s last and most controversial film, Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975). 

Nadia Bou Ali: The Actuality of Allegory

Allegory emerges where historical consciousness fails to coincide with lived experience, where concepts fall short of grasping the actuality of the historical present. It carries an excess that cannot be fully represented and thus preserves unrealized or negative potentialities within actuality itself. Following Jacques Lacan’s claim that history is only retroactively historicized from the standpoint of the present, I argue that allegory and fantasy function as mechanisms through which subjects mediate historical rupture. Fantasy operates as what Lacan calls an “imaginary prop,” introducing symbolic consistency into a reality already fractured by antagonism. Yet the actuality of catastrophe—ecological collapse, genocide, serial crisis, and endless war—disrupts the dialectical postponement through which historical contradictions are normally absorbed into narrative continuity. Fantasies of the end are therefore approached as allegories of a Utopian desire and as symptomatic attempts to cognitively map social totality under conditions in which history increasingly becomes accessible only through catastrophe, while actuality itself appears severed from historical intelligibility.