Mills, again: “Agamben interprets this phrase to mean that ‘if a potential to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such‘ (Potentialities 183, italics in original). Hence Aristotle’s phrase concerns the conditions in which potentiality is realized; potentiality is not destroyed in the passage to actuality, with im-potentiality set aside or overcome. Rather, the potentiality to not be or do is conserved in the passage to actuality. Agamben writes that ‘potentiality…survives actuality and, in this way, gives itself to itself‘ (ibid 184, italics in original). Or as DAniel Heller-Roazen explains the point, ‘actuality is nothing other than a potentiality to the second degree…actuality reveals itself to be simply a potential not to be (or do) turned back upon itself, capable of not being and, in this way, of granting the existence of what is actua'” (31).
Mills continues to say, “The significant aspect of Agamben’s interpretation of this apparently paradoxical statement is the way in which it highlights the suspension or setting aside of im-potentiality in the passage to actuality. But this suspension does not amount to a destruction of im-potentiality; instead, it entails its fulfillment. Agamben claims that to maintain the distinction between potentiality and actuality, and explicate the effective mode of potentiality’s existence, it is necessary that potentiality be able to not always pass over into actuality. Therefore potentiality is defined precisely by its capacity to not (do or be) and is thus also ‘impotentiality'” (31).
“What is distinctive about Agamben’s approach is his focus on the question of potentiality, impotentiality and the modal operators of necessity and contingency, such that Bartleby ultimately appears as a privileged figure of a ‘pure potentiality’. In a sharp critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return that draws on Walter Benjamin’s portrayal of it as ‘copying projected onto the cosmos’, Agamben suggests that the significance of Bartleby’s statement ‘I would prefer not to’ is to break the cycle of ‘innumerable repetitions’ that exhaust all potentiality in actuality. In breaking this cycle, the figure of Bartleby restores potentiality to tis relation to contingency by making it possible that something be impossible. Or, more specifically, Bartleby’s achievement is to keep ‘possibility suspended between occurrence and nonoccurrence, between the capacity to be and the capacity not to be’. Thus Bartleby thwarts the Shakespearean question of ‘to be or not to be’ by remaining in the (ontological) interregnum of being and not-being, by breaking from the dictates of necessity and will, and wholly residing in the appropriation of an incapacity in capacity. Or. to put the point more pithily, Bartleby does not ‘not write’ but instead manages to ‘not not-write’” (32).
Realism 