Bartleby’s refusal signals exhaustion and apathy, not pure potentiality.

Evidence

Agamben’s ontotheological interpretation of “Bartleby,” which pays no attention to pathological elements, already founders on the facts of the narrative. … Bartleby exhibits neither self-reference nor reference to anything else. He exists without a world and is absent and apathic. If he counts as a “white sheet” at all, this is because he has been voided of any and all relation to the world or meaning. Bartleby’s “dim eyes” (45) already speak against the purity of divine potentiality he is supposed to embody. It is just as unconvincing when Agamben claims that Bartleby’s stubborn refusal to write announces the potency of being able to do so—that his radical renunciation of willing [das Wollen] betokens potentia absoluta. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 63

Categorization

• XREF: The reader’s key idea — the neuronal-not-metaphysical reading of burnout — requires distinguishing Han’s pathologizing interpretation from Agamben’s metaphysical one. This is the explicit dismissal of the competing reading.

Related

• Bartleby’s story is one of exhaustion, not metaphysical liberation. (similarity 0.83)