bartleby
"I would prefer not to"
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben says, “For Aristotle, all potential to be or to do something is always also potential not to be or not to do… the ‘potential not to’ is the cardinal secret of the Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality, which transforms every potentiality in itself into an impotentiality.”1
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“an angel, whose name is ‘Pen’ (Qalam)”2
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“The scribe who does not write (of whom Bartleby is the last exhausted figure) is perfect potentiality, which a Nothing alone now separates from the act of creation.”3
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“How is it possible to think a potential not to think? What does it mean for a potential not to think to pass into actuality?”4
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“the hardest thing is being capable of annihilating this Nothing and letting something, from Nothing, be.”5
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Wittgenstein: “I marvel at the sky because it exists.”6 So do I, Ludwig.
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Agamben’s meditiations on Bartleby’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” conjure a dizzying maze of thoughts on past, future, now, necessity, contingency, and existence and non-existence, remembrance as a way to mess with time. Walter Benjamin once dreamed of creating a work composed solely of quotes, and failed to do so in his lifetime, but he got close. Bartleby still prefers-not-to anything, even now, when you reread him. You should, even if you prefer not to.
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Overall: consider yr relationship to the ‘potential not to’ and how that shows up in yr life and perhaps even defines what you actually do.
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See you again on Friday Nov 21, 2025.
Cover photo by Pete Willis on Unsplash.
Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), 245.
Ibid., 247.
Ibid.
Ibid., 250.
Ibid., 253.
As quoted in Agamben, “Bartleby,” 261.