I would Prefer not not-to: Critical Theory after Bartleby

Abstract

The politics of critical theory after ’68 revolves around the question of the new revolutionary subjectivity and its conditions of possibility. The so-called post-theories attempt to criticize the classic Marxist idea of resistant subjectivity and to pay a closer attention to the complex mechanism of power. As Foucault insisted, the analysis of power leads to a realm that traditionally remains outside political analysis. This was the result of serious critical reflections on the failure of the resistant politics of May ’68. The failure of May forced critical theorists to rethink the political itself at least in terms of subjectivity and power, and the main question became how to leave the old framework of Marxist political analysis. Since then, the politics of critical theory have included the various turns that alternatively dominated the intellectual atmosphere in the western world. As Gilles Deleuze summed up, the urgent task of critical theory after ’68 was to answer the question why people voluntarily fight for their own servitude. Focusing on how various critical theorists address the figure of Bartleby and his famous formula “I would prefer not to” in terms of a new political subjectivity, this essay reassesses the significance of the so-called politics of Bartleby and his gesture of inaction as a new possibility of political resistance in a micro-fascist system of capitalism, criticizing at the same time critical theory's unconscious desire to separate Bartleby's passive resistance from the character's textual and cultural context. In the era of a global civil war, the most radical form of political subjectivity is arguably to be found in the realm of culture, where various Bartlebys struggle to cope with the system of micro-fascism in the network and in the street.