Abstract
In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail.
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Notes
An important exception to this is Mills (2007).
Jacob Taubes, in his own book on Paul, suggests that it ‘would be worth the trouble to collect all the negative reviews’ of Barth’s book, but nonetheless, cannot avoid a sustained engagement with it. See Taubes (2004) at 62.
This is true of his argument, which appears most prominently in Homo Sacer, that Western politics increasingly takes the form of biopolitics, because it has not succeeded in healing the fracture between mere life and forms of life, or zoe and bios, that was central to Aristotle’s account of the polis and of the human.
Agamben’s characterisation of Bartleby seems to become slightly less enthusiastic as he becomes more concerned with the concrete aspects of sovereign power and the state of exception. In Homo Sacer, he recognises that while Bartleby is the strongest objection against the principle of sovereign power, he, nonetheless suggests that none of those who have ‘pushed the aporia of sovereignty to its limit’ have managed to ‘completely free themselves from its ban’ (Agamben 1998, p. 48).
While Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s metaphysics owes much to Heidegger’s 1931 course, Agamben attempts to find in Aristotle’s writings the basis for problems as diverse as contemporary medical decisions about what constitutes death and the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. What brings these diverse themes together, in Agamben’s view, is the problem of sovereignty and what, following Gérard Mairet, Agamben terms the ‘ideology of potentiality’ that sustains it.
Heidegger writes that the Megarian thesis is ‘thought in a good Greek manner’—that is, on the basis of Being as presence. In contrast, Aristotle’s novelty consists in his attempt to think the existence of that which, as he puts it, does not exist in ‘complete reality’, i.e. in actuality (Heidegger 1995, p. 154; Aristotle 1999, p. 228).
Unfortunately, given space constraints, I am unable to address the importance of language to Agamben’s account of potentiality (and law), but it would be worthwhile to examine his reading of Bartleby’s previous employment in the dead letter office, alongside his theorisation of language, in which every letter is, in a sense, a dead letter, relying on the abandonment of the pure potentiality of language.
In an essay devoted to Aristotle’s conception of potentiality, Agamben suggests that if Aristotle had meant only to suggest that the possible is that in regard to which nothing is impossible he ‘would then have uttered a banality or a tautology’ (Agamben 1999, p. 183). Nonetheless, the ‘traditional interpretations’ are given weight by the fact that Aristotle devotes the following chapter, entitled ‘Impossibility’, to refuting this very tautology. Here he writes, ‘if we are to suppose that something which is not but which is possible either exists or has come into being, we must make sure that nothing impossible is involved’. (Aristotle 1999 , p. 229) For instance, Aristotle suggests, we cannot say it is possible to calculate the diagonal of a square from the side because this is impossible.
As Heller-Roazen suggests, this is, nonetheless, an account that is heavily indebted to Heidegger’s ‘project to conceive of the “quiet power of the possible”’ as, not the possibility of a particular actuality, but as Being itself.
Agamben’s analysis seems to suffer from his earlier reduction of the ambiguity in Aristotle’s account of the status of impotentiality after the passage to the act. In the Bartleby essay, he suggests of the principle of conditioned necessity that ‘Aristotle himself seems to belie it’, citing as evidence Aristotle’s claim that what is potential can be or not be. Central to the principle of conditioned necessity is whether that which is happening is capable of not happening (or of happening otherwise), and thus it is closely linked to the question of the status of adynamia in the passage to actuality. Interestingly, in describing the principle of conditioned necessity, Agamben seems to depart from his central argument that Aristotle’s formulation leads to the preservation, not the nullification of impotentiality in the act; once more citing Aristotle’s ‘A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential’, Agamben asks: ‘how is one to understand this nullification of the potential not to be?’ (Agamben 1999, pp. 262–264).
Paul, Taubes suggests, faces the same problem Moses faced after the iniquity of the golden calf, and the breaking of the original tablets; like Moses, Paul is faced with a people who has sinned, a people who, in Paul’s case, has rejected the Messiah. Yet, while Moses ‘rejects, twice rejects the idea that with him begins a new people and that the people of Israel should be eliminated’, this role, the founder of a new people of God, is, in Taubes’s view, precisely the one that Paul accepts.
Agamben sees such a nihilistic embrace of law’s nothingness in deconstruction, which, he argues, reveals the entirety of tradition to be in force without significance, but maintains this empty form in place. Deconstruction, thus, is in his view, a ‘thwarted messianism’, in which there can be no fulfilment (Agamben 2005 , p. 103).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Daniel McLoughlin, for reading an earlier draft of this paper and providing insightful comments. I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Paul Fletcher, with whom I had the enormous pleasure and privilege of discussing many of the ideas contained therein.
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Whyte, J. ‘I Would Prefer Not To’: Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby and the Potentiality of the Law. Law Critique 20, 309–324 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9059-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9059-9