Potentialities (review)

Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 307.

In the reading of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” that concludes this collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben makes a distinction between the significance of the copyist’s enigmatic response to his employer’s injunctions–“I would prefer not to”–and that of Hamlet’s more famous and equally resonant boutade. For Agamben, the prince’s “To be, or not to be” recognizes merely an opposition between Being and non-Being, while Bartleby’s formulation proposes a third term that transcends both existence and nothingness. This term is potentiality, a concept that has exercised Agamben’s thought elsewhere and that dominates his reflections in this volume. It would be possible, of course, to read in Hamlet’s celebrated soliloquy and in Shakespeare’s play as a whole, a concern precisely with the theme of potentiality as the very stuff out of which the play’s dramatic action is made. Such a reading would be justified both by traditional interpretations of Hamlet and perhaps also by Agamben’s comments in Idea of Prose concerning the scholar as one condemned to dwell perpetually in the realm of potential: in the realm, that is, of study. The scholar, for Agamben, is one who persistently rehearses the redemptive yet terrible catastrophe that will bring to an end the dramatic narrative of study, yet who recognizes that it is in the very nature of scholarship to leave the work ruined, unfinished. The essays collected here, leading up to the analysis of Melville’s story and this brief commentary on Shakespeare, suggest a vision of criticism as the effort to inhabit fully the experience of potentiality, an experience in which the opposition between potentiality and actuality is dissolved. Accordingly, it becomes the task of knowledge–as it is the task of criticism, for Benjamin– “to read what was never written.”