My philosophical project of radical democracy stands on two foundational intertwined discoveries that offer a firm ontological grounding of power.^[i] 1. The world is radically contingent but is simulated by a world that presents itself as necessary through potestas (power as domination) and Entelecheia (when becoming obeys an external finality). 2 Politics can only be grounded in democracy and democracy can only be grounded in Energeia (unqualified, anarchic, synergistic power). 

The point of this article is to show how both discoveries are necessarily grounded in what I consider the foremost radical philosophical creation of our times, perhaps of Modernity, Quentin Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos. Nevertheless, paradoxically, Hyper-Chaos concomitantly offers my project its primordial ontological mainstay: sheer contingency as the sole unfounded base of the world and thus of Energeia, and its most severe hurdle, since my ontological grounding of politics in Energeia (actuality without condition) could be refuted within the Meillassouxian construction because it is still deterministic, necessary, in short, metaphysically dependent. 

Henceforth, my mission here is to show that there is no contradiction in the grounding of my project in Hyper-Chaos (as it proves Energeia as the only requisite for power as it is an anti-requisite) and that my Energeia is not contradictory with Meillassoux’s virtuality (precisely his part of the construction that claims that becoming and thus potentia is still trapped in determinism and dependent on necessary models of becoming), but rather, it is a necessary complement. 

Nonetheless, I anticipate the greatest power of the thesis, as follows: Radical contingency can only produce Energeia because Entelecheia is a logical aberration, a contradiction to its nature. Entelecheia, which represents a predetermined finality (telos), logically requires a pre-established model to exist. This violates the core principle of radical contingency, which states that no prior conditions or models can rationally preexist time’s immanent chaos. If contingency could create Entelecheia, it would mean that a final form somehow preceded the process of its own creation, which violates the rational tenets of Meillassouxian contingency. Therefore, the outcome of radical contingency must be Energeia, which is a process of becoming that emerges without any pre-existing model, allowing time to be truly immanent and creative.

The Grand Question

Now, the first warning we must heed to is that Meillassoux ‘s philosophy is fundamentally non-normative. It’s a speculative project to describe the world as it is, independent of human thought, values, and certainly, concerns. It reveals that there is no “reason” for the universe to be as it is. The biggest hurdle for me then is answering the question: if the universe is without inherent purpose, and my project is anchored in radical contingency, why should we strive for a “decrypted democracy”? Why is this political project based on Energeia, inherently better than its opposite? Am I conflating ontology as normativity? rationality as ethics? The answer is thus the outline of my small advance in the present piece which I already anticipated in a thesis above that I will now prove.^[ii]

Allow me to briefly outline my project, then Meillassoux’ s and see the apparent short-circuits and how to overcome them.

First, my ontological opposition between Energeia (unqualified actuality, unqualified becoming) and Entelecheia (imposition of an external telos or finality for becoming) reveals that politics can only mean the unqualified and unconditioned expression of difference that follows no telos, no model (Arché) or external imposition for being. Energeiais not the realization of a pre-given end; it is the immanent and irreversible unfolding of becoming, irreducible to any schema of qualification.

Second, for this to hold ontologically, we must confront the world as it is: a world structured by Potestas, by violent qualifications and exclusions. Nevertheless, the ontological grounding of Energeia leads us to discover that this world, when it is legitimized through potestas and Entelecheia  (power as oppression and denial of Energeia) is not the world—it is its negation, a mere simulacrum. Henceforth, the conclusion is that to thoroughly ground the world ontologically, we must ground it in sheer Meillassouxian contingency and dispel potestas and its imposed sense of necessity, where the principle is clear:

There is no ultimate reason or schema for anything—not for any law, not for any being, not any model, not for any master.

Consequently, as I anticipated, at the heart of this inquiry lies a stake that is ontological: Can we ground politics in democracy, and democracy in Energeia? I believe the only way to do this is through reconciling this construction with Meillassouxian virtuality and the abyss of Hyper-Chaos.

As we have ascertained “Only in contingency is the world possible. When the world is harnessed in necessity, it becomes a simulacrum of the world, sustained by a simulacrum of power”. And “Contingency—whose name in politics is democracy—is the infinite extension of intense difference, is necessary in all possible worlds” (Sanín-Restrepo 2021).

My work in Decolonizing Democracy and Being and Contingency affirms that the dominant Western interpretation of power, even inadvertently as in Agamben’s case, has privileged Entelecheia—actualization as the realization of a predetermined end, a telos. This tradition has mistaken closure for becoming, qualification for existence, and sovereignty for life. It has encrypted power within models, laws, and transcendental schemas that deny the immanence of difference.

Against this, I propose an ontological proof: a critical re-reading of Aristotle’s concepts of potentia and actuality, and a rescue of Energeia as the modal grammar of unqualified, irreversible becoming. Energeia is not the perfection of being—it is its unfolding without model, its actualization without telos, its power without transcendence.

But this proof must be grounded in contingency—and here we encounter both the promise and the hurdle of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. His principle of factiality (the necessity of contingency), liberates us from the prison of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, cancels Entelecheia, and prohibits all transcendent models. 

Meillassoux’s Philosophical Breakthrough

Meillassoux’s foundational weapon is the principle of factiality (or unreason): the logical proof that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain as it is. The only absolute necessity is the necessity of contingency itself. This principle marks a rupture in the history of philosophy—it is not a metaphysical claim, but a speculative truth that allows us to rationally, I mean truly rationally think about the possibility of a world without us, without subjectivity, without correlation.

To reach this point, Meillassoux (2006) turns Hume’s irresolvable problem of induction^[iii] into the mast of his rational project. 

Meillassoux reactivates Hume’s problem of induction, not to solve it (as Kant tried and failed), but to radicalize it: Hume argued that we can’t prove the necessity of natural laws (like gravity or the sun rising) because our belief in them is based on habit, not on logical deduction. The future isn’t logically bound to repeat the past. We cannot justify the persistence of laws, and this failure is not a weakness of reason but, according to Meillassoux, its greatest insight. A rational world, the French philosopher argues, is one where everything is contingent, as long as it is not contradictory.

Instead of asking, “Can we prove that laws are necessary?”, Meillassoux rephrases the question: “Can we prove that laws are not necessary?” He argues that we can’t logically justify why the future must resemble the past, but we also can’t justify why it must change. The key takeaway is that the persistence of laws is contingent, not necessary. It’s a “factical constant”—something that happens to be true now and even continue to be truth according to complex programs of probability, but! And this is the crucial point, they have no ultimate reason or necessity for being so! And, consequently, it is not empirically nor statistically possible to demonstrate their necessity.

The truly radical part of Meillassoux’s argument is that this contingency applies to everything, including the laws of nature themselves. He proposes that we can rationally conceive of a future where laws of physics change or disappear for no reason at all. This is what he calls Hyper-Chaos. It’s not a law that laws must change (as this would be necessary). Rather, it’s the possibility that anything can happen, as long as it isn’t a logical contradiction.

Meillassoux breaks free from centuries of metaphysics, correlationism, idealism, and transcendent models that have dominated Western thought. Incredibly enough, for me, I don’t see enough people noting this gigantic shift of philosophical tectonic plates. 

At any extent, Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos is a direct challenge to what he dubs Correlationism, and in this huge neatly-threaded-cage of correlationism he holds from Husserl’s intentionality to Heidegger’s Dasein to Wittgenstein’s Language games. 

Now, Correlationism holds that we can only know what is given to a subject (See Meillassoux 2008). 

By affirming the possibility of ancestral statements—scientific claims about a time before any subject—Meillassoux opens the door to a realism without metaphysics, a world that exists independently of thought, or rather, independent of a thinking subject. In the most cunning way to defeat Correlationism, Meillassoux’s critique reveals a deep contradiction. Correlationism, which argues we can only ever know the relationship between thought and being, tries to avoid two extremes: realism (the belief that we can know a reality independent of our minds) and idealism (the belief that reality is nothing but our minds).

Meillassoux brilliantly argues that in its attempt to refute idealism, correlationism must admit that the link between thought and being is not a necessary one, it must be utterly contingent. To be sure, this is where the whole system collapses. If the correlation itself is contingent, it means we can logically conceive of a reality without it, and even the “non-being” of the correlation itself.

This very act of admitting contingency inadvertently opens the door to absolutism, the very thing correlationism seeks to deny! Touché! By stating the correlation could disappear, that it is not truly necessary, it implies that a reality independent of thought is thus conceivable. 

The Limits of Reason

For Meillassoux, a rational world is not one where everything is uniform and predictable; it’s one where everything is contingent, but nothing is contradictory. This means that reason’s role is not to predict the future but to understand the fundamental contingent nature of reality itself.

Meillassoux’s principle of factiality thus opens a temporal abyss—a hyper-chaotic time in which laws, entities, and structures can emerge and vanish without reason. It is a time liberated from metaphysical necessity, a time where contingency reigns not as disorder, but as the condition of possibility for any order. This abyss is not nihilistic—it is generative. It allows us to think a world that is not governed, not enclosed, and not predetermined. No epistemological masters, no tepid relativism. 

It is within this abyss that I seek to ground Energeia—not as a metaphysical invariant, but as a modality, even a figure, that persists within contingency. Energeia does not contradict factiality—it inhabits it. It’s in a certain way the flow of actualization that holds without reason, the truth of difference that unfolds without telos. And it is this that I believe can also offer the ontological infrastructure for Rancière’s politics—a democracy without arché, without qualification, without command (although I will not develop this here).

Bridging to Energeia

From a strictly Meillassouxian perspective, is not Energeia itself a return to a form of necessity? For Meillassoux, any principle that dictates how becoming must unfold, even an immanent one, risks becoming another version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. So, yes, even Deleuzian flat ontologies or Hugh Everett’s Multiple worlds are still caught in the web of metaphysics! 

Meillassoux makes the point in “Potentiality and Virtuality” (2006). For him, potentiality refers to the non-actualized cases within a pre-determined, indexed set of possibilities governed by a given law where becoming X is already programmed and thus is predictable form the potentiality of X. In contrast, contingency is the property of an entire set of cases not being a subset of a larger, higher-order set (in Cantorian infinite set language). The most radical concept, virtuality, describes the property of any set of cases that can emerge within a becoming not constrained by any pre-constituted totality of possibles. This perspective posits that time can bring forth new laws and situations that were not previously “potentially” contained in a fixed set, thus creating new cases rather than merely actualizing existing ones. This implies that such new events irrupt ex nihilo, or “from nothing,” making pure immanence the very concept of a temporality delivered to its chaos, unbound by any higher, non-temporal principle.

If we claim that Energeia is a necessary condition of actualization, do we fall back into the metaphysical trap? positing a necessary law that governs becoming? An easy wat out of the conundrum would be simply to announce that Energeia belongs to a normative world (politics, democracy) that is incommensurable with Meillassoux’ s framework which works regardless of the normative. Nonetheless, this would simply be abjuring the ontological foundation of radical democracy that we are proving through the simulated necessity of Entelecheia. 

Consequently, Hyper-Chaos could be tempted to identify isolated Energeia as a deterministic structure, a pre-determined set of rules that limits the absolute anarchy of contingency. The question then becomes urgent and unavoidable: can we ground Energeia within Hyper-Chaos without betraying the radical contingency that makes Hyper-Chaos so powerful?

The Resolution: Energeia as a Factual Figure of Chaos

The answer is yes, but only when we make a crucial distinction. Energeia is not a law that constrains Hyper-Chaos. It is a contingent, factual figure produced by Hyper-Chaos. 

This is the core of the argument: Energeia itself is not necessary. It is a persisting fact, not a metaphysical principle. In a universe where anything can happen, one of the things that can happen is the emergence of a contingent stability—a world that, for now, unfolds according to a specific, non-necessary grammar. Nevertheless, when it does happen, Energeia is the name for the grammar of our contingently stable, irreversible world. In other words, when contingency happens only Energeia can follow! When contingency happens, it prohibits Entelecheia! Entelecheia is contradictory within contingency and therefore irrational.

This move allows us to do two things at once: We preserve Meillassoux’s absolute contingency as the ultimate, ungrounded ground of everything, but we can simultaneously posit a positive, materialist, and descriptive grammar for our actual world: the world of politics, life, and irreversible time, without falling back into metaphysical necessity, furthermore, prohibiting metaphysical necessity, that works from Aristotle’s virtue to citizenship or race as rigid models of becoming.

The proof is in the ontological pudding. When contingency acts and if it acts (consistent with Hyper-Chaos) only Energeia (unconditioned becoming) can follow, hence Entelecheia would be an aberration that immediately signals that it is only capable of itself, a self-referential anti-contingent, contradictory being (no becoming, no contingency), thus becoming necessary and by this gest becoming irrational as it denies contingency at its core. 

This gives our political project its footing, the firm ground of Energeia’s irreversible becoming, while knowing that this very ground is contingent before Hyper-Chaos. Our politics is thus grounded in a fact, not a necessity, which is the only ground a truly contingent politics can have. 

Insofar, Entelecheia can never proclaim its rationality, in other words that it is the rational consequence of contingency. This is a major advancement in the grounding of radical democracy as the only possibility of the world, a possibility that opens up every other possibility.

In Decolonizing Democracy, I affirm that:

“Democracy, as the possibility of another world, is necessary in all possible worlds” (Sanín-Restrepo 2021b).

And in Being and Contingency, I propose that:

“In a genuine (non-liberal) democracy, there can be no qualification to communicate difference. Democracy, as the only materiality of politics, casts forth the most beautiful paradox of philosophy: politics is the question of all questions because it is the question of who can formulate questions, of who counts” (Sanín-Restrepo 2021).

This is the terrain we now enter: a speculative field where Energeia, factiality, and democracy resonate. It is not a synthesis. It is a new surface of thought, a new field of logical possibilities, where ontology becomes political, and politics becomes ontological.

This is where Energeia enters as a complementary, not contradictory, principle. Drawing from Aristotelian fragments but radically reconfigured against his logic of finality or final causes, Energeia is not the perfection of being (Entelecheia), but its unqualified, immanent, and non-teleological unfolding. It is not a what but a how: a modal grammar, a form of actualization, while Entelecheia, as proved before, cannot be but necessary and thus irrational.

Energeia does not determine what will happen—that remains the domain of contingency. Instead, it describes the mode in which anything that does happen, actually happens. 

Consequently, Meillassoux’s concept of virtuality (or Hyper-Chaos) and the concept of Energeia can be understood as distinct coordinates in time and contingency and of time and becoming. Meillassoux’s virtuality occupies the domain of temporal possibility, representing chaotic all-powerful time. It is a temporal abyss that can jump, reverse, or annihilate itself—the time of what could happen, logically containing every conceivable outcome, even the reversal of any actualized event.

In contrast, Energeia exists in the domain of modal actuality. Its time is the irreversible synchronic, the unfolding, immanent present—akin to Ilya Prigogine’s “Entropy” (1980). This is the time of what is happening. Logically, Energeiais the modal grammar of becoming, a concrete and irreversible vector. Nevertheless, and this is the key point, when contingency does happen it can only create Energeia, or better yet, it would not and cannot create Entelecheia that by this token becomes a figure akin to the impossibility Meillassoux awards to radical contingency to create a contradictory being. 

Insofar, Energeia does not contradict factiality—it inhabits it. In a world where nothing is necessary, Energeia is a factual, materiality of irreversible becoming that has contingently emerged and persists. 

Conclusion: Toward a Speculative Politics of Difference

By grounding Energeia in the irreversible, anarchic multiplicity of the world, we arrive at a speculative infrastructure for a politics of immanent, creative, and irreversible difference. It affirms that actualization is unqualified. Being does not require a model, a telos, or a sovereign qualification to exist and act, and, as importantly, that Entelecheia(the order of the model, of the telos) is irrational as its necessity denies contingency. 

Energeia thus constituted affirms that being is an irreversible process. This gives political events real weight. A revolution, a declaration, a protest—these are not reversible moments in a virtual roulette but irreversible actualizations that create a new time and foreclose old futures, that is, and this is the ontological point of all the exercise, when and if it has actualized itself as Energeia and not Entelecheia, as the latter would only produce necessity and thus a simulacrum of power.

Democracy, in this light, is the political expression of the modal grammar of Energeia and Energeia is (alongside non-contradiction) the only possible necessity of radical contingency (Hyper-Chaos).

Potestas and Entelecheia, by contrast, are performative contradictions: they claim to be necessary, they claim to produce the only possible world, they claim to hold on and execute sufficient reason, but can only exist by denying the very contingency from which they rationally arise.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Aristotle. 2015 Metaphysics. Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/.

Meillassoux, Quentin. 2006. “Potentialité et virtualité” in Failles no. 2.

Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Bloomsbury Academic.”

Prigogine, Ilya. 1980. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. London: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Rancière, Jacques. 2001. Ten Theses on Politics. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo. 2016. Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo. 2021. Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger’s Terminology. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. 

^[i] With it I also try to ground Jacques Rancieres’ unfoundedness of politics in the same ontological ground

^[ii] This article is a small speculative advance of a vast project tentatively titled “Decrypting Time” on which I am working on at the present time.

^[iii] I cannot synthesize the complexity of Meillassoux’ s proposal in this brief space.