georges didi-huberman, the potential not to — review
if you wanted to experience how it feels to read a text that's passively trying to run away from you, or if you want to see didi ranting about agamben without actually explaining where the problem is in his writing, this is for you
didi undeniably owns agamben around the 45th to 55th citation, where through agamben's reading of aristotle, he criticizes the way in which agamben argues that a statue's raised hand at least gestures, whereas a modern protestors hand doesnt, by saying "it amounts to forgetting that the raised arm of the niobid, expressing terror, is not without an end, since it is also a gesture of fleeing." this single statement encompasses the way in which agamben's politics could preclude struggle itself in an obscured reading of abstractions against experiences.
didi uses benjamin to show how a careful deconstruction of experience doesn't amount to its re-coming, but only its under-coming, its de-triumphal death under neoliberalism, one that agamben cannot help abuse in order to seek an impossible "third potency" within. even though didi never adresses the distinction between a foundation and a program, he ends his essay claiming that agamben's inoperativity risks becoming an ascetic ideal in nietzsche's sense, which could be seen as a valid critique, if only he had worked through agamben's philosophy instead of outside of it.
didi says "in agamben, the "arcanum of politics" demands a politics of the arcanum. this explains why the greatest re proach that he could make against the heidegger of 1933 was to have transformed, for a whlle, essential inoperativity into a "historical mission," that is to say, to place the ascetic poiesis of the pure thinker on his top of the vulgar social proxis of an ideologist." in a sense, it is true that to missionize a de-missionification is to hold intellectualism to the conservative standard of mediating between the stretching of ideology across the "form of life" instead of the "form of being" of our entire civilization but especially of our thinkers, and, as didi aptly puts it, the spanish would naturally seek that the french "manner" of a being only preserves a style under which the very experiential volition of man is truncated under his own preservationalist rhetoric. to "manner" at something is not an action but an ability to hold a type of power, the same "power not to" that, if we read didi in this way, has no positive impulse.
didi again, rightfully uses deleuze against agamben, by comparing an outward-reaching theoretical vision with agamben's inward reaching one, the basis of a call for political potency against a mediated call to self-willed restitude. yet, by having to hold onto this polemical attack, didi is trading away agamben's political nuance far too fast in the first half of his writing, before didi finally manages to bring benjamin and real political struggle into the question. when didi is analyzing agamben through the french predecessors that built him, he's minimizing his conceptual clarity so he can land rhetorical points. didi says that deleuze holds "i would prefer not to" in suspension between yes and no, whereas agamben collapses it into pure negativity and "decreation". the need to go over the whole thing bit by bit including the implications arises becasue the way didi characterizes agamben is subtle but extremely motivated, where didi's own political or revolutionary fervor becomes just as ambigous the more he narrows down agamben's own vision into a caricature of the opposite.
the early conclusion is that didi is actually tracing a stylistic artifact, a post-implicative style where the results of a thought-line (agamben's consistent desire for mediated inoperativity, seen maybe also in figures like zizek) influence real-world political directions, but his reading of agamben is not only slightly reductive but slightly uneven, not enough for the conclusion to appear unfair, but very obviously in total lack of an actual close account of agambens ideas, as didi traces the micro-climate of socio-political intimate motives rather than the macro-climate of ideas that underscore them. didi says: “his way of following foucault ... on ‘biopowers’ ... was extended or completed, with regard to potency, by the choice of returning to gilles deleuze on the notion of potentia according to spinoza or macht according to nietzsche.” [...] “deleuze subtly united these motifs in 1989 in a beautiful text on bartleby...” [...] “from 1990 on, this same motif appeared in agamben’s work in the coming community and in a text entitled ‘on potentiality.’”
this remains partially inappropriate, as agamben decided to pull from a variety of authors and scripts (aristotle, medieval theology, avicenna, maimonides, kabbalah, leibniz etc) to extend the issue. agamben's bartlebey is a 16 page work where he carefully deconstructs the idea from every trajectory at his immediate disposal, and pinning his work purely within the caucus of a couple of french thinkers probably does give a good temporal rundown of what was happening influence-wise around that time, but treating canonical figures as either iconic or as particularly pungent within a certain field heavily underscores how varied sources and motivations tend to be when entering a certain piece like this.
its not like agamben's account is extremely polemical, it happens to be varied, constructed, very difficult to pierce or pin down, and looks cartographical and inspired rather than subsumptive, the exact opposite of some type of social media column thats trying to maximize its sentimental and subversive value. it is true partially that agambens task and motive was to create an account of potency that draws from ancient inspiration to attempt to pull western history away from an idea of volition as inherently politicized or actualized only within a certain "form of identity", and again, didi: "agamben clearly states his refusal of any party community. his motivations for symmetrically rejecting the community of "absence of any condition of belonging" seem less clear. perhaps they are linked to the antipathy he felt for a long time toward that smouldering thinker in whom blanchot found his own authority, and who was his friend: georges bataille"
disregarding whether these social motives may have been true or not, which didi surely has a hand on far better than any divorced critic could reliably be aware of, the idea that agamben's disavowal of the party community is purely socially caused seems, even if true, to disregard the nature of intellectual work itself. its far more likely that in the 90s, the first "intellectual discontempt for pre-submitted categories" was finally taking that same nancy-rancierian direction of being phenomenologized into thinkers like agamben trying to find an account, or a way, to divorce identity from encounter, or to create situations where experiences took political presedence without the political character that we expect them to take.
this task not only aligns with a more common base philosophical intuition, but it makes far more sense to do as a compromise between political identity and a certain aesthetic vision of sensibility, than to deny the concept of a party because of a single supporter of said concept. and here is the cruical line that reveals this, right before the previous line: "here, then, the ontology of potentiality becomes, through the theoretical character bartleby, the ethics and poetics of inoperativity. but how can we not see a politics in this too?"
agamben doesn't focus explicitly on politics explicitly in the essay as much as he does the surrounding concepts it assumes, such as contingency, potentiality, impotentiality, creation, command, law, and bartleby’s formula itself. but there is something behind what didi is saying that holds more ground, and thats the general question he already poses of how the western world came to organize itself around behaving towards political questions with the aspect of negativity, or using certian character traits to amplify an "aura of non-decision" when ideology stretched and surplused various personalities or created the conditions for an intellectual divorcement between message, identity, action and clear stakes.
didi makes that statement with this line “here, then, the ontology of potentiality becomes, through the theoretical character bartleby, the ethics and poetics of inoperativity.” which is not only accurate, but clearly shows how institutions, laws and languages were suspended on account of those very political individuals that needed to use their platform to do the opposite of suspending them. didi's cruical point that "the "writing of potentiality" is then seen as a purepower not to" not only doesn't apply to agamben because of its overtly over-political character, but doesn't apply to agamben's text either, since that's not even the conclusion agamben ends up with. didi does however further clarify what he means in this, tying political inactivity with a communal sense of non-operational belonging that is supposed to be an antithesis to existing organized power, and clarifying how deleuze used spinoza to achieve the opposite, to upbring the potential in political power.
yet, didi's cruical error is that he views this very political act in a shroud of binary propositions that are supposed to give an advantage to a revolutionary character, which is itself already a certain form of operationality. the term operation designates cruical political functions that dont have to neatly correspond to particular ideological visions, which is precisely how the term inoperativity is really used. yet, it is in a sense true that an overaestheticzation of this very same inoperativity can give birth to a radical over-approximation and lack of nuance towards the inoperative community itself. it helps to look at exactly the claims agamben makes about bartleby first as a theoretical model, so that we can then look at the assumptions, in the opposite manner of didi's existing polemic.
this only happens precisely when the inoperative community is overfantasized as abusing the power of sense so wholely that there is no more willed intention, or that commands themselves empty out of all acting power and are replaced by a constant mutualism. this, as long as it isnt the case, allows bartleby to be a subject that can also abuse commands in intra-institutional contexts without suspending his own judgement and volition. the "minimal i" of bartleby is a conditional minimal i, because in melville's own essay we can clearly see the way in which his "i" is otherwise a whole and complete "i".
agamben's point about bartleby in short can be seen through this exact command chain: "i would prefer not to" -> minimal “i” (subject as pure potentiality) -> “would” (conditional suspension of action volition) -> “prefer” (weakening of will) -> “not” )(negation without refusal) -> “to” (action as possibility) -> logical structure (coexistence of doing and not doing) -> ontological implication (potentiality that preserves its own non-actualization) -> political implication (neutralization of command). this very same neutralization of command that is clearly visible in agamben is not the same neutralization that suspends all volitions from all base commands. what becomes increasingly obvious as you read this text is that agamben is precisely being a deleuzian about bartleby and political praxis in general. take a look at these key statements:
"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" [...] "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 or must do is its dominant theme" [...] "but potentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity" [...] "if god is truly capable only of what he wants, bartleby is truly capable only without wanting, but his potentiality is not therefore, unrealized, it doesnt remain unactualized on account of will., on the contrary, it exceeds will" [...] "as deleuze suggests, the formula thus opens a zone of indistinction between yes and no" [...] "bartlebey is a messenger, to be able is neither to posit nor to negate". agamben's clear point throughout: will is not the same as potentiality, potentiality is not the same as possibility, impotentiality is not the same as necessity, impossibility is not the same as command. "hence it does not even want what it desires".
melville writes: "as days passed on, i became considerably reconciled to bartleby. his steadi ness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind his screen), his great, still ness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valu able acquisition. one prime thing was this,—he was always there;—first in the morning, continually through the day, and the last at night. i had a singular con f idence in his honesty. i felt my most precious papers perfectly safe in his hands"
there are clearly two elements here. first, there is the fantasy of the over-sensitized, over complete individual, which is of course simply a simulacrum the boss is experiencing in hindsight of bartleby's indirect yet infinitive yet potential refusal. yet, behind it, not only is it clearly a depiction of this quality rather than of bartleby's character or real position, it clearly shows that bartleby's "minimal i" is only invoked in beurocratic confrontation rather than in total confrontation. this total confrontation makes it so that the "possibility of command as still tied to volition" doesnt necessarily have to escape bartleby as a "western" subject.
this same fantasy of desire is the fantasy that didi clearly slightly later in the text demonstrates exists in "the coming community", where the relations towards desire of certain groups are seen as organic, or politics is seen as a type of "pure gesturality", what in a sense is tied to a higher "level" of sensibility. these ideas are, in very many ways, simply mutated, flipped accounts of western political jurispridence, and didi is right to link them to proudhon, bakunin and bonaventure, and to link agamben to a slightly more patient or reductivist visionary of the same divorced political vision.
but cruically, what it does show is precisely not that agamben forces us into a position where we have to confront the western subject as a manipulator of conditional negativities, but on the contrary, as a subject that demands that politics is primarily an economy where volition is met with request, request is met with command, and command is met with uprising. as long as this view is contested on both sides as the fundamental way to approach politics, then any minimization of character and its ties to political potential will be seen automatically as a refutation of politics within the western world.
this becomes clearer in agamben's 2000 text "the form of life" where he asks "the question about the possibility of a non-statist politics necessarily takes this form: is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible?" and answers in the same breath "only if i am not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered to a possibility and a power, only if living and intending and apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what i live and intend and apprehend – only if, in other words, there is thought – only then a form of life can become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like naked life."
he continues "among beings who would always already be enacted, who would always already be this or that thing, this or that identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power in these things and identities – among such beings there could not be any community but only coincidences and factual partitions. we can communicate with others only through what in us – as much as in others – has remained potential".
there are a few things to unpack, primarily, when agamben says thought, he does not mean the nietzschean aesthetic, but the ability to encounter differences in the daily context of an ability posited as a potential rather than a possibility. the possibility for agamben is already the tribe-and-territory, the mark of an identity that swallows the acting logic of an action. the thought is not the act of intellect, reason, or thinking, but the ability to differentiate yourself along an axis of your own self-overcoming of the identity, which includes also the future potential to exist in "new forms", forms which are able to encounter and dissipate acts.
yet, in the same way, there is an odd strand amongst what agamben says too, and that is that, if will is not reducible to potential, then all those who create the possibility for the cultivation of new forms of life yet who do not get to experience those forms are for agamben in a sense themselves "inoperable", or in other words, if we christianize redemption in the very same way, irredeemed from their requirement to tie their volition to their will, or tie their fate to a command. naturally, this is because agamben doesn't believe that the "weightholders" of capital are holding any valid weights at all, and that the coming community in walterian fashion will have to battle against the entire existing fascism of the planet. yet it is odd that these two strands exist for him at the same time. take a look at "without classes"
"if we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved: the petty bourgeoisie has inherited the world and is the form in which humanity has survived nihilism", says agamben in one breadth, and then, in the very next "the contradiction of the petty bourgeois, however, is that they still search in the footage for the product they were cheated of, obstinately trying, against all odds, to make their own an identity that has become in reality absolutely improper and insignificant to them".
it is evident that agamben is not giving us a critical polemic here, but simply an analysis of this model of existence, an analysis that is on all accounts phrased appropriately. and also that for him, doing so risks making the lived experience of struggle appear secondary or even misguided, rather than him failing to give us a proper account of the stakes, since clearly, he does in fact very clearly delinate his exact standpoint. yet, stylistically, it is quite visible that agamben holds this class in contempt, and in fact, sees only in their waste the possibility of redemption, the waste of their own death, where, comparing them in image almost akin to a bug or something seen classically as worthless, their realization has no savior-complex, yet simultaneously, they are not models or sacrifices for a higher aim.
for agamben, they simply are, and they are very poor at being their own "are", at that. yet, as bibi has already noted, the raised arm, the "fleeting" nature of it, coincides with the experience of the doom of capital itself. if agamben fails to prioritize this, to define secular death as something other than nothing, it appears that there's something in his writing pushing him away from giving us a final judgement on the topic, a hesitation that rests on uncomfortability. agamben's real failure isn't in undermining experience itself, but in undermining the fate of somebody who has to enact the formless experience of contemporary misfortune. there is no salvation in agamben's story, dissipation is the rule-of-law if the form of life is reduced to the biological once the subject is seen as the locus of civilization itself.
bibi says of agamben's call to deconstruct western philosophy "it is certainly an immense task to "expose the void" of western political concepts. but to do this amounts to going only half way; in other words, it is absolutely vain to do only this." yet, instead of prioritizing experience by seeing it through the lense of the existing political struggle against the nazis, we can also see it far more adamantly in cultures that have already arrived at standpoints. bartleby doesnt have to be a western hero at all, if he heralds the premise about nothingness, he can easily be retrofitted in every other culture too, and this retroffitting can fill the other half of bibi's acknowledged problem or void. (paternalistically, it must be added, the retrofittal is necessary precisely because of the belief that non-western cultures would not need a bartleby the way we do, an imposition held in this article that will not further be demonstrated here, but may be encountered elsewhere, for example in the countertext to vincent garton or other sinofuturist polemics)
we can imagine bartleby's confrontation outside of the lens of western beurocracy by seeing through different ontological categories that, during the 90s would have been difficult to access without epistemic volatility, but are now in front of us due to technological mediation. if bartleby's "i prefer not to" was actually superimposed onto the "preferential non's" of different languages, with slight subtractive meaning, then becomes possible the ability to question the dichotomy between the coexistence of doing and not doing (negativity and affirmation) as differentially something other than self-preserved non-actual potentiality or the neutralization of command as arising from the will. think of it as the way that bartleby would answer the protagonist, in the most literal sense.
what none of the transliterated terms for withheld possibility across languages or cultures share with the agamben/didi problematic is the assumption that a subject is the relevant unit of analysis. in all four cases the will-act-possibility complex is either distributed (àṣà), pre-subjective (icchā), subtractive (wuwei), or heart-located-but-not-ego-located (niyya). however, the subject-form can in fact be superimposed back into the language without losing the relevant gods, communities, lack-of-volitions or alternative non-impositionary commands or intentions that actually create the differential quality of the terms themselves.
then, for the yoruba's àṣà (practice-as-inheritance where individual will is not the relevant axis), the answer would be: "the way i already did must not be lost to you" / "what they have told me contradicts your will" , for wuwei (action that doesn't originate in a commanding subject) - "by maybe not doing so i will get closer to where you want us to be" / "this act as well must be forgiven for its ability to cause us a calamity, or else, to be cultivated in withdrawal", similarly, for zhi (cessation as active achievement, not absence of act) it would be - "i will do it, but let me pause first, let me pause first, and i will do it" / or otherwise "something about standing still right now is the answer" [volitional tone].
for the arabic niyya, (intention as a discrete ontological layer that precedes and is separable from both act and outcome) it would be "by doing so, i will not do what you wish for me, as is to be known by you already" / or, "you know that what you say is not what can be done", similarly, for the saksnrit iccha or kriya (desire without motion vs. motion without the origin of desire), it would be "whatever you want sounds too unlike you" / or, [non volitional tone] "follow your decision, don't make a mistake".
the final step is to briefly analyze how these shift the meaning of the term, juxtaposed both through agambens existing analysis and didi's commentary on the topic, using the previous model we already made sense of and a further analysis of both of their texts. we can simply give one example for this rather than diluting all of them at once. "the way i already did must not be lost to you" is clearly not a reactionary sentiment, but a remembrance of lost fortune. this same remembrance is enough to problematize the entire field of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary political fervor. nostalgia actually has no positive power, even if it has propagandistic power, the intimate tie-in of lived experience itself is revolutionary in its nature, and the even older folk or pre-civilian form of "remembrance" would entirely dissipate the logic of a modern uprising or totalitarian disposition. yet, naturally, politics doesn't answer just to conviction. so what is the bartlebyian aspect of this sentiment, the one that preserves potential? clearly, "must not be lost to you" confronts the request itself, not just its memory. it has the quality of a riddle, something to be mediated upon.