Efekt kompresji. Bartleby, czyli tajemnica inności

Abstract

Compression Effect. Bartleby, or the Mystery of Otherness The text proposes to read Bartleby, the Scrivener as a case of modern genealogy of Otherness. The aporias in Melville’s intertextual prose loudly reverberate in theology and philosophy – therefore one cannot read Melville’s novella without referencing the Bible but also the writings of Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze. Bartleby owes his popularity to the genius of Melville, who, by commenting on the America of his times, included in his short prosaic works hundreds of ambiguous and internally contradictory tropes. The aporias which we now call Bartleby have been discussed by such contemporary critics as Žižek and Butler, who in the formula “I would prefer not to” see the outline of an emancipatory project in late-modernity capitalism. “Compression Effect” is the literary testimony of the experience of a new community which faces an “excess” of politically and religiously engaged texts with a simultaneous “shortage” of divinity in life institutionalized by modernity.