In The messianic idea in Judaism and other essays on Jewish spirituality. The crisis of tradition in Jewish Messianism. The narrator already employs two scriveners, Nippers and Turkey. Bartleby is a new addition to the narrator's staff. In The correspondence of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. The narrator, an elderly lawyer who does a comfortable business helping wealthy men deal with mortgages, title deeds, and bonds, relates the story of the strangest man he has ever known. Letter to Walter Benjamin: September 20, 1934. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice. Aristotle’s metaphysics theta 1-3: On the essence and actuality of force. In Walter Benjamin’s philosophy: Destruction, experience, ed. Afformative, strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.ĭeleuze, Gilles. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.īenjamin, Walter. London: Oxford University Press.īenjamin, Walter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Īristotle. The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the Romans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Īgamben, Giorgio. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Īgamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Interestingly, in describing the principle of conditioned necessity, Agamben seems to depart from his central argument that Aristotle’s formulation leads to the preservation, not the nullification of impotentiality in the act once more citing Aristotle’s ‘A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential’, Agamben asks: ‘how is one to understand this nullification of the potential not to be?’ (Agamben 1999, pp.

Central to the principle of conditioned necessity is whether that which is happening is capable of not happening (or of happening otherwise), and thus it is closely linked to the question of the status of adynamia in the passage to actuality. In the Bartleby essay, he suggests of the principle of conditioned necessity that ‘Aristotle himself seems to belie it’, citing as evidence Aristotle’s claim that what is potential can be or not be. Agamben’s analysis seems to suffer from his earlier reduction of the ambiguity in Aristotle’s account of the status of impotentiality after the passage to the act.

Bartleby the scrivener i prefer not to