What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be. To set im-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary to fulfil it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself. […] Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it other than its own ability not to be.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46.