Agamben says: “The act of creation is God’s descent into an abyss that is
simply his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not
to. . . .Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our
own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets”
(Potentialities 253). Such potentiality qua impotentiality of God the Scribe, that is,
the ability to suspend His own possibility, finds its profane analogue in Bartleby.
Bartleby’s usual formula “I would prefer not to,” a perfect illustration of the undead
Kantian “infinite judgment” as explicated from Žižek’s perspective at the beginning
of this essay, opens up a zone of indistinction between affirmation and negation,
acceptance and refusal, the preferable and non-preferable (254-55); it calls into
question and exceeds the supremacy of the will that destroys the ambiguity of
potentiality and stands as “the perpetual illusion of morality” (254). Bartleby’s
7
In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Bartleby is a clerk who does nothing
but make handwritten copies of legal (perhaps metaphorically also “sacred”) documents every day,
until one day he decides to stop copying anything anymore, saying “I would prefer not to.”
8
In the concluding chapter of his Agamben and Theology, Colby Dickinson tackles the
possibility of bridging the missing link between Agamben and “the Spinoza-Deleuzian nexus,”
while here I am more oriented toward Agamben’s messianism in alignment with Marxist-socialist
revolutionary thinking and praxis. Actually, Dickinson does not—and neither do I—posit
Agamben as a thinker of pure immanence. As Dickinson notes, “As with the force of the
messianic which renders the boundary between the transcendent and the immanent completely
obscured, a philosophical movement toward a plane of immanence likewise undoes the
representations of thought founded upon a dichotomous logic of transcendence/immanence”
repeated use of this formula, as a manifestation of irreducible singularity, ultimately
becomes the absolute anaphora “I would prefer not to prefer not to . . .” that spins
on itself and undermines all causal and representational relations; it engenders a
“luminous spiral of the possible” at the threshold between Being and non-Being, the
sensible and the intelligible, word and thing (257, 259). Agamben reads Bartleby, as
in The Coming Community, as a Messianic figure who comes to “save” (or make
possible) the potential to not-be, not-think, and not-write—that is, to save
impotentiality—or who announces the trial of impotent possibility that creates an
ontology beyond Being and non-Being (Potentialities 259, 270). In a word, the
messianic according to Agamben is “constitutively weak,” and it is from such
weakness that the messianic wields its power (Agamben, Time 97).
Han-yu Huang
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