Why They Prefer Bartleby? Ethics of Theory in Political Critique

Abstract

Herman Melville's famous novella "Bartleby" has been circulated and consumed in the terrain of philosophical discourses aptly demonstrating the problematic status of a literary text within the realm of critical theory. Plenty of literary and critical theorists from Agamben to Deleuze like to take the figure of Bartleby as a political symbol supporting their arguments, but they often ignore the way he is represented as a part of a singular literary narrative. They tend to separate Bartleby from "Bartleby," capitalizing exclusively on his peculiar implication as a resistant political subjectivity which is supposed to signify something subversive in the systematic order of global capitalism. As a result, the figure of Bartleby, isolated from the literary context, has been easily reduced to a free signifier representing what the critical theorists desire to prove. But Bartleby in "Bartleby" is constitutively described by the unnamed lawyer to be a pathetic melancholic or a man of mental disorder whose inscrutable commanding presence with enigmatic formula, "I would prefer not to," is thought to configure a certain political potentiality. Reformulating the way Bartleby is co-opted and pathologized by the discourse of the lawyer, I would like to re-situate the figure of Bartleby within the contextual representation, taking the issue with theoretical and philosophical appropriation of a literary text. Taking example of recent critical analyses of Bartleby, I hope to demonstrate how theoretical analysis of a literary text often depends upon the cursory reading of the syuzhet of the text and how it drives the whole argument into its own ethical abyss.