(...)
The Formula, or On Potentiality
1. This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet. It is not surprising, therefore, that he dwells so obstinately in the abyss of potentiality and does not seem to have the slightest intention of leaving it. Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must do is its dominant theme. This is what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby. When he asks him to go to the post office ("just step around to the Post Office, won't you?"), and Bartleby opposes him with his usual "I would prefer not to," the man of the law hastily translates Bartleby's answer into "You will not?" But Bartleby, with his soft but firm voice, specifies, "I prefer not" ("I prefer not," which appears three times, is the only variation of Bartleby's usual phrase; and if Bartleby then renounces the conditional, this is only because doing so allows him to eliminate all traces of the verb "will," even in its modal use). 2 When the man of the law honestly tries, in his own way, to understand the scrivener, the readings to which he dedicates himself leave no doubts as to the categories he intends to use: "'Edwards on the Will,' and 'Priestly on Necessity.'" 3 But potentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity; despite the salutary impression that the books give him, the categories of the man of the law have no power over Bartleby. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do)--this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
Medieval theologians distinguish between potentia absoluta, an "absolute potentiality" by which God can do anything (according to some, even evil, even acting such that the world never existed, or restoring a girl's lost virginity), and potentia ordinata, an "ordered potentiality," by which God can do only what is in accord with his will. Will is the principle that makes it possible to order the undifferentiated chaos of potentiality. If it is true that God could have lied, broken his oaths, incarnated himself in a woman or an animal instead of in the Son, he thus did not want to do so and he could not have wanted to do so; and a potentiality without will is altogether unrealizable and cannot pass into actuality.
Bartleby calls into question precisely this supremacy of the will over potentiality. If God (at least de potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable only without wanting; he is capable only de potentia absoluta. But his potentiality is not, therefore, unrealized; it does not remain unactualized on account of a lack of will. On the contrary, it exceeds will (his own and that of others) at every point. Inverting Karl Valentin's witticism "I wanted to want it, but I didn't feel able to want it," one could say of Bartleby that he succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting it. Hence the irreducibility of his "I would prefer not to." It is not that he does not want to copy or that he does not want to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to. The formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing, between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. It is the formula of potentiality.
2. Gilles Deleuze has analyzed the particular structure of Bartleby's formula, likening it to expressions that linguists define as agrammatical, such as Cummings's "he danced his did" or "j'en ai un de pas assez." Deleuze argues that the destructive force of Bartleby's formula consists in its secret agrammaticality: "the formula 'disconnects' words and things, words and actions, but also speech acts and words--it severs language from all reference, in accordance with Bartleby's absolute vocation, to be a man without references, someone who appears suddenly and then disappears, without reference to himself or anything else." 4 Philippe Jaworski, for his part, has observed that Bartleby's formula is neither affirmative nor negative and that Bartleby neither accepts nor refuses, stepping forward and stepping backward at the same time. As Deleuze suggests, the formula thus opens a zone of indistinction between yes and no, the preferable and the nonpreferable. But also--in the context that interests us--between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do). The final "to" that ends Bartleby's phrase has an anaphoric character, for it does not refer directly to a segment of reality but, rather, to a preceding term from which it draws its only meaning. But here it is as if this anaphora were absolutized to the point of losing all reference, now turning, so to speak, back toward the phrase itself--an absolute anaphora, spinning on itself, no longer referring either to a real object or to an anaphorized term: I would prefer not to prefer not to. . . .
What is the origin of this formula? Critics have cited one of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, in which he praises "no" over "yes" as a possible precursor to Bartleby's phrase ("For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travelers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpetbag--that is to say, the Ego"). The reference could not be more out of place. Bartleby does not consent, but neither does he simply refuse to do what is asked of him; nothing is farther from him than the heroic pathos of negation. In the history of Western culture, there is only one formula that hovers so decidedly between affirmation and negation, acceptance and rejection, giving and taking. The formula, which is morphologically and semantically similar to the scrivener's litany, is recorded, among other places, in a text that was familiar to every cultured man of the nineteenth century: Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers. We are referring to the expression ou mallon, "no more than," the technical term with which the Skeptics denoted their most characteristic experience: epokhē, suspension.
"The Skeptics," Diogenes writes in his life of Pyrrho, "use this expression neither positively [thetikōs] nor negatively [anairetikōs], as when they refute an argument by saying: 'Scylla exists no more than [ou mallon] a chimera.'" 5 The term, however, is nevertheless not to be understood as indicating a genuine comparison: "But the Skeptics refute even the 'no more than.' For just as providence exists no more than it does not exist, so the 'no more than' is no more than it is not." Sextus Empiricus reaffirms the self-referential status of ou mallon just as decisively: "Even as the proposition 'every discourse is false' says that it too, like all propositions, is false, so the formula 'no more than' says that it itself is no more than it is not. . . . And even if this expression appears as an affirmation or a negation, still this is not the sense in which we use it but rather an indifferent [adiaforōs] and illegitimate sense [katakrēstikōs]." The way in which the scrivener makes use of his obstinate formula could not be characterized more precisely. But the analogy can also be followed up in another direction. In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, having commented on the meaning of the expression ou mallon, Sextus adds: "the most important thing is that, in uttering this expression, the Skeptic says the phenomenon and announces the affect without any opinion [apaggellei to pathos adoxastōs]." Although it is not usually recorded as such, this last expression (pathos apaggellein) is also a technical term of the Skeptics' lexis. We find it once again, in the same sense, in another passage of Sextus's Outlines: "When we say 'everything is incomprehensible,' we do not mean to state that what the dogmatics seek is by nature incomprehensible; we limit ourselves to announcing the passion [or affect: to heautou pathos apaggellontos]."
Aggellō and apaggellō are verbs that express the function of the aggelos, the messenger, who simply carries a message without adding anything, or who performatively announces an event (polemon apaggellein means "to declare war"). The Skeptic does not simply oppose aphasia to phasis, silence to discourse; rather, he displaces language from the register of the proposition, which predicates something of something (legein ti kata tinos), to that of the announcement, which predicates nothing of nothing. Maintaining itself in the epokhē of the "no more than," language is transformed into the angel of the phenomenon, the pure announcement of its passion. As the adverb adoxastōs specifies, "passion" here indicates nothing subjective; pathos is purified of all doxa, all subjective appearance, and becomes the pure announcement of appearance, the intimation of Being without any predicate.
In this light, Bartleby's formula shows its full sense. It inscribes whomever utters it in the line of aggeloi, messengers. One of these messengers is Kafka's Barnaby, who, we read, "was perhaps simply a messenger, one who knew nothing of the content of the letters entrusted to him," one whose "gaze, smile, and walk seemed to be those of a messenger, although he himself was not aware of it." As a messenger, Bartleby was sent or some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a simple mortal . . . to fathom." 6 But if the formula he repeats hovers so obstinately between acceptance and refusal, negation and position, if it predicates nothing and, in the end, even refutes itself, what is the message he has come to tell us, what does his formula announce?
3. "The Skeptics understand potentiality-possibility [dynamis] as any opposition between sensibles and intelligibles. By virtue of the equivalence found in the opposition between words and things, we thus reach the epokhē, the suspension, which is a condition in which we can neither posit nor negate, accept nor refuse." According to this striking text of Sextus, the Skeptics viewed suspension not simply as indifference but as an experience of possibility or potentiality. What shows itself on the threshold between Being and non-Being, between sensible and intelligible, between word and thing, is not the colorless abyss of the Nothing but the luminous spiral of the possible. To be able is neither to posit nor to negate. But in what way does what is-no-more-than-it-is-not still preserve in itself something like potentiality?
Leibniz once expressed the originary potentiality of Being in the form of a principle usually defined as the "principle of sufficient reason." This principle has the following form: ratio est cur aliquid sit potius quam non sit, "there is a reason for which something does rather than does not exist." Insofar as it cannot be reduced either to the pole of Being or to the pole of the Nothing, Bartleby's formula (like its Skeptic archetype) calls into question the "strongest of all principles," appealing precisely to the potius, the "rather" that articulates its scansion. Forcibly tearing it from its context, the formula emancipates potentiality (potius, from potis, which means "more powerful") from both its connection to a "reason" (ratio) and its subordination to Being.
Commenting on the principle of sufficient reason, which his teacher Leibniz had left unproven, Christian Wolff explains that our reason is disgusted by the idea of something taking place without a reason. If one takes away this principle, he writes, "the true world becomes a fairy-tale world, in which the will of men takes the place of reasons for what happens" (mundus verus abit in mundum fabulosum, in quo voluntas hominis stat pro ratione eorum, quae fiunt). The mundus fabulosus at issue here is that of the absurd fairy tale told by old women and that, in our vernacular, is called Schlarrafenland, the Land of Plenty. . . . You would like a cherry--and, at your command, there appears a cherry tree full of ripe fruit. According to your wish, the fruit flies toward your mouth and, if you so will it, divides in half in mid air, letting the pit and the bad parts fall to the ground so that you do not have to spit them out. Pigeons roasted on a spit fall from the sky and spontaneously enter the mouths of whoever is hungry.
What is truly disgusting to the philosopher's eyes, however, is not that will and caprice take the place of reason in the domain of things but that ratio is thus also extinguished in the domain of will and potentiality. "Not only are there now no principles of possibility and no principles of actuality external to man; what is more, not even the will has a principle for its willing, but instead indifferently wills anything. Hence it does not even want what it desires [ideo nimirum vult, quia libet]; there is no reason for it to want one thing rather than another." It is not true, therefore, that once the principle of reason is removed, human will takes the place of ratio, transforming the true world into a fable. Precisely the contrary is true, namely, that once ratio is removed, the will is ruined together with it.
In the ascetic Schlarrafenland in which Bartleby is at home, there is only a "rather" fully freed of all ratio, a preference and a potentiality that no longer function to assure the supremacy of Being over Nothing but exist, without reason, in the indifference between Being and Nothing. The indifference of Being and Nothing is not, however, an equivalence between two opposite principles; rather, it is the mode of Being of potentiality that is purified of all reason. Leibniz did not allow the possible to have any autonomous "potential to make itself exist" (puissance pour se faire exister), which he argued was to be found outside the possible, in God, insofar as he is a necessary being, that is, "existentifying" (Est ergo causa cur existentia praevaleat non-existentiae, seu ens necessarium est existentificans). Now wholly subverted, the Leibnizian principle instead takes on the Bartleby-like form of the following statement: "the fact that there is no reason for something to exist rather than not to exist is the existence of something no more than nothing." In the place of the Prince of Denmark's boutade, which reduces every problem to the opposition between to be and not to be, Being and non-Being, the scrivener's formula suggests a third term that transcends both: the "rather" (or the "no more than This is the one lesson to which Bartleby always holds. And, as the man of the law seems to intuit at a certain point, the scrivener's trial is the most extreme trial a creature can undergo. For to hold to the Nothing, non-Being, is certainly difficult; but it is the characteristic experience of the ungrateful guest--nihilism--with whom we are all too familiar today. And to hold simply to Being and its necessary positivity is also difficult; but is this not precisely the sense of the complicated Western ontotheo-logical ceremony whose morality is in secret solidarity with the guest it would like to drive away? To be capable, in pure potentiality, to bear the "no more than" beyond Being and Nothing, fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both--this is the trial that Bartleby announces. The green screen that isolates his desk traces the borders of an experimental laboratory in which potentiality, three decades before Nietzsche and in a sense that is altogether different from his, frees itself of the principle of reason. Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike, potentiality thus creates its own ontology.
The Experiment, or On Decreation
1. In a work on Robert Walser, Walter Lüssi invented the concept of an experiment without truth, that is, an experience characterized by the disappearance of all relation to truth.
Walser's writing is "pure poetry" (reine Dichtung) because it "refuses, in the widest sense, to recognize the Being of something as something." This concept should be transformed into a paradigm for literary writing. Not only science but also poetry and thinking conduct experiments. These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of something, as in scientific experiments; rather, they call into question Being itself, before or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiments are without truth, for truth is what is at issue in them.
When Avicenna, proposing the experience of the flying man, imagines a dismembered and disorganized human body, showing that, thus fragmented and suspended in the air, man can still say "I am," and that the pure entity is the experience of a body without either parts or organs; when Cavalcanti describes the poetic experience as the transformation of the living body into a mechanical automaton ("I walk like a man outside life / who seems, to those who see him, a man / made of branches or rocks or wood / who is led along by artifice"); 7 when Condillac introduces his marble statue to the sense of smell, such that the statue "is no more than the scent of a rose"; when Dante desubjectifies the "I" of the poet into a third person (I' mi son un), a generic, homonymous being who functions only as a scribe in the dictation of love; when Rimbaud says "I is another"; when Kleist evokes the perfect body of the marionette as a paradigm of the absolute; and when Heidegger replaces the physical "I" with an empty and inessential being that is only its own ways of Being and has possibility only in the impossible--each time we must consider these "experiments without truth" with the greatest seriousness. Whoever submits himself to these experiments jeopardizes not so much the truth of his own statements as the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in the context of the individual's natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird.
The experiment that Melville entrusts to Bartleby is of this kind. If what is at issue in a scientific experiment can be defined by the question "Under what conditions can something occur or not occur, be true or be false?" what is at issue in Melville's story can instead be formulated in a question of the following form: "Under what conditions can something occur and (that is, at the same time) not occur, be true no more than not be true?" Only inside an experience that has thus retreated from all relation to truth, to the subsistence or nonsubsistence of things, does Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" acquire its full sense (or, alternatively, its nonsense). The formula cannot but bring to mind the propositions with which Wittgenstein, in his lecture on ethics, expresses his ethical experience par excellence: "I marvel at the sky because it exists," and "I am safe, whatever happens." The experience of a tautology--that is, a proposition that is impenetrable to truth conditions on account of always being true ("The sky is blue or the sky is not blue")--has its correlate in Bartleby in the experience of a thing's capacity to be true and, at the same time, not to be true. If no one dreams of verifying the scrivener's formula, this is because experiments without truth concern not the actual existence or nonexistence of a thing but exclusively its potentiality. And potentiality, insofar as it can be or not be, is by definition withdrawn from both truth conditions and, prior to the action of "the strongest of all principles," the principle of contradiction.
In first philosophy, a being that can both be and not be is said to be contingent. The experiment with which Bartleby threatens us is an experiment de contingentia absoluta.
(...)
Solely concerned with repressing the spirit of revenge, Nietzsche completely forgets the laments of what was not or could have been otherwise. An echo of this lament is still audible in Blanqui, when, in a prison cell in the Fort du Taureau, evoking the eternal return ten years before Nietzsche, he bitterly grants actual existence to all the possible worlds of the Palace of Destinies:
The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. One can hardly demand more from the mind. These doubles are flesh and blood, even in pants, in crinolone and chignon.
They are not ghosts but eternity made real. And yet this is a great defect; there is no progress. Alas, these are vulgar new editions, repeats. Such are the exemplars of past worlds, of worlds to come. Let us not forget that everything that could have happened here has happened somewhere else.
In Zarathustra, this echo is completely muffled. In the end, Nietzsche's eternal return is only an atheistic variation of Leibniz Theodicy. Each of the pyramid's apartments now hosts the eternal repetition of what happened, thereby canceling the difference between the actual world and the possible world and returning potentiality to what was. And it is not an accident that Leibniz was the first to formulate--in almost the same terms--Nietzsche's decisive experience:
If the human species lasted long enough in its present state, a time would necessarily come in which even the lives of individuals would return in the same circumstances, down to the smallest details. I myself would return, to live once again in the city called Hannover, on the banks of the Leine river, once again busy studying the history of Brunswick and writing the same letters to the same friends.
Bartleby holds fast to this solution until he decides to give up copying. Benjamin discerns the inner correspondence between copying and the eternal return when he compares Nietzsche's concept to die Strafe des Nachsitzens, that is, the punishment assigned by the teacher to negligent schoolchildren that consists in copying out the same text countless times. ("The eternal return is copying projected onto the cosmos. Humanity must copy out its texts in innumerable repetitions.") The infinite repetition of what was abandons all its potential not to be. In its obstinate copying, as in Aristotle's contingency, there is no potential not to be. The will to power is, in truth, the will to will, an eternally repeated action; only as such is it potentialized. This is why the scrivener must stop copying, why he must give up his work.
6. At the end of Melville's story, the man of the law discretely proposes an interpretation of Bartleby on the basis of a piece of gossip. This "report" is that Bartleby "had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration." 11 I As elsewhere in the story, the man of the law furnishes the reader with correct information; but as always, the explanation he draws from it is off the mark. He insinuates that having worked in that office pushed the scrivener's innate temperament to "a pallid hopelessness." Bartleby's deplorable behavior and his mad formula, he suggests, can be clarified as the final stage of a preexistent pathological disposition precipitated by unfortunate circumstances. This explanation is trivial not so much because, like all psychological explanations, it ends by presupposing itself, as because it entirely fails to question the particular link between dead letters and Bartleby's formula. Why does a pallid hopelessness express itself in precisely this way and not another?
Yet it is the man of the law, once again, who allows us to answer the question.
"Sometimes," he says, from out of the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. 12
There could be no clearer way to suggest that undelivered letters are the cipher of joyous events that could have been, but never took place. What took place was, instead, the opposite possibility. On the writing tablet of the celestial scribe, the letter, the act of writing, marks the passage from potentiality to actuality, the occurrence of a contingency.
But precisely for this reason, every letter also marks the nonoccurrence of something; every letter is always in this sense a "dead letter." This is the intolerable truth that Bartleby learned in the Washington office, and this is the meaning of the singular formula, "on errands of life, those letters speed to death."
Until now, it has not been noted that this formula is, in fact, a barely disguised citation from Romans 7:10, euretē moi hē entolē hē eis Zōēn, autē eis thanaton, which, in the translation Melville would have known, reads as follows: "And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death" (entolē is a "mandate," what is sent for a reason--hence epistolē, "letter"--and is more correctly rendered by "errand" than by "commandment"). In Paul's text, the mandate, the entolē, is that of the Law from which the Christian has been freed. The mandate is referred to the "oldness of the letter" to which the apostle has just opposed the "newness of spirit": "But now we are delivered from the Law, that being dead where we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, not in the oldness of the letter" ( Rom. 7:6, but see also 2 Cor. 3:6, "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life"). In this light, not only the relationship between Bartleby and the man of the law but even that between Bartleby and writing acquires a new sense.
Bartleby is a "law-copyist," a scribe in the evangelical sense of the term, and his renunciation of copying is also a reference to the Law, a liberation from the "oldness of the letter." Critics have viewed Bartleby, like Joseph K., as a Christ figure (Deleuze calls him "a new Christ") who comes to abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate (ironically, it is the lawyer himself who recalls this to him: "A new commandment give I unto you that ye love one another"). But if Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something." And Bartleby comes not to bring a new table of the Law but, as in the Cabalistic speculations on the messianic kingdom, to fulfill the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom. Scripture is the law of the first creation (which the Cabalists call the "Torah of Beriah"), in which God created the world on the basis of its potential to be, keeping it separate from its potential not to be. Every letter of this Torah is, therefore, turned both toward life and toward death; it signifies both the ring and the finger intended for it, which disintegrates in the grave, both what was and what could not be.
The interruption of writing marks the passage to the second creation, in which God summons all his potential not to be, creating on the basis of a point of indifference between potentiality and impotentiality. The creation that is now fulfilled is neither a re-creation nor an eternal repetition; it is, rather, a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not.
A Persian Neoplatonist once expressed the shadow that contingency casts on every creature in the image of the dark wing of the archangel Gabriel:
Know that Gabriel has two wings. The first, the one on the right, is pure light. This wing is the sole and pure relation of Gabriel's Being with God. Then there is the left wing. This wing is grazed with a dark figure resembling the crimson color of the moon at dawn or the peacock's claw. This shadowy figure is Gabriel's capacity to be, which has one side turned toward non-Being (since it is, as such, also a capacity not to be). If you consider Gabriel in his act of Being through God's Being, then his Being is said to be necessary, since under this aspect it cannot not be. But if you consider him in his right to existence in itself, this right is immediately to the same degree a right not to be, since such is the right of a being that does not have its capacity to be in itself (and that is, therefore, a capacity not to be).
Decreation is the immobile flight sustained by the black wing alone. At this wing's every beating, the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence. Sextus the ill-fated tyrant of Rome and Sextus the happy peasant of Corinth blend together and can no longer be told apart. Gabriel's dark wing is the eternal scale keeping the best of all possible worlds carefully balanced against the counterweight of all impossible worlds. Decreation takes place at the point where Bartleby stands, "in the heart of the eternal pyramid" of the Palace of Destinies, which, in this ironic and inverted theodicy, is also called the Halls of Justice. His word is not justice, which gives a reward or a perpetual punishment to what was, but instead Palingenesis, apokatastasis pantōn, in which the new creature--for the new creature is what is at issue here--reaches the indemonstrable center of its "occurrence-or-nonoccurrence." This is the irrevocable end of the letter's journey, which, on errands of life, sped toward death. And it is here that the creature is finally at home, saved in being irredeemable. This is why in the end, the walled courtyard is not a sad place. There is sky and there is grass. And the creature knows perfectly well "where it is."
1. A different translation of this passage can be found in Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1979), p. 209.
2. Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," in Billy Budd Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver ( London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 73.
3. Ibid., pp. 88-89. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 73-7
4; the original is in Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique ( Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993), p. 95.
5. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 488.
6. Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," p. 89.
7." I' vo come colui ch' è fuor di vita / che pare, a chi lo sguarda, ch' omo / sia fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno / che si conduca solo per maestria."
8. Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. 19: The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1139 b 6-10 (p. 331).
9. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 372.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann ( London: Penguin, 1954), p. 139.
11. Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," p. 99.
12. Ibid.
POTENTIALITIES Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben
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