On Potential, Decay, and Abjection

The infamous scene of maggot-ridden meat in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) functions as both material document and political metaphor. What should sustain the sailors—fresh meat, a guarantee of nourishment—has instead become inedible, crawling with life. The image dramatizes a negation of potential: the capacity of food to nourish is suspended, its promise unfulfilled. Here one can recall Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of potentiality as not simply the capacity to do, but the capacity not to do (Agamben, Potentialities, 1999). The meat contains the potential to sustain life, but it remains unrealized, converted into waste.

At the same time, however, the writhing of the maggots signals another, unexpected form of potential. For Georges Bataille, such matter embodies “base materialism”—a register of material excess that escapes utility and resists sublimation (Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” 1929). The rotten meat, stripped of nutritional value, nonetheless becomes a kind of generative vitality, an eruption of life within decay. Its abjection does not signify pure loss but a displacement of potential into another register.

Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject is particularly relevant here. The spoiled meat occupies a liminal zone between food and filth, life and death, sustenance and contamination (Powers of Horror, 1980). It destabilizes categories and provokes disgust precisely because it cannot be securely placed: once-edible, now intolerable, it confronts the subject with the precariousness of boundaries. Abjection, then, is not simply negation but also a threshold—an unstable space where transformation becomes thinkable.

Eisenstein’s montage amplifies this instability, converting abjection into political energy. The sailors’ refusal of the rotten meat becomes more than a rejection of spoiled food; it becomes a refusal of their reduction to bare survival. In Agamben’s terms, the transition from impotentiality (sustenance denied) to potentiality (collective action) is precisely what marks the passage from passivity to revolt. Decay, in this sense, does not merely symbolize systemic corruption but catalyzes the emergence of revolutionary possibility.

I am drawn to such thresholds—moments when matter refuses fixed categories, when potential is simultaneously denied and reasserted. The rotten meat in Potemkin serves as an eemplary figure of this precarious dialectic: potential degraded into waste, yet insisting on its return through abjection, through revolt, through transformation.