Bartleby as Subject

Abstract

Interpreting Bartleby the scrivener’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” in Herman Melville’s short story is a challenge for many philosophers, and Bartleby’s inaction also hints at a political position. The problem is how to explain this (in)action. It is unclear whether the scrivener is an active subject or a passive object. One potential solution would be to reduce Bartleby’s duality to one of its modes. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim the scrivener is a revolutionary subject; the uncertainty of his actions is regarded as a refusal. Hardt and Negri link this refusal with the next stage in the production of a new society and a new subject. Slavoj Žižek is also ambivalent about “Bartleby politics”. Although the Slovenian philosopher criticizes the authors of Empire, he still declares Bartleby a parallax figure combining action and inaction. However, Žižek did not stake out a position on the ontological status of the scrivener: is he a cunning subject and escape artist, or is he a distinction-basis of the system itself? In the contrary direction, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben propose a program for the desubjectification of the scrivener from Wall Street. Here Bartleby is not a subject, but a figure of the ontology of a transcendental source which exists before all ontic differences. The essay offers a radically different solution to the Bartleby problem. It rejects the dichotomy between the subject and object and moves toward the object-oriented theory of action and relational ontology as presented in the works of Bruno Latour. In this ontology, any actors (human or non-human) may turn out situationally to be active or inactive, depending on their position in relation to other actors.