“To Taste Something New, First Empty Your Cup”: Bartleby Politics, Anti-Colonial Resistance and State Violence

Abstract

This paper brings together Žižek's Bartleby politics with the praxis of organic intellectuals emerging out of the “Bougainville crisis”, in order to generate a new vantage point for theorizing anti-colonial resistance to state violence. Bartleby politics, it is argued, conceptualizes how socio-symbolic orders naturalize their existence, and the strategies required to disrupt this completeness of power, so we can begin again. Applying this approach, it is argued during colonization metropolitan powers shatter the permanency of indigenous socio-symbolic orders, by situating them within a wider (contrived) teleological historical sequence. However, the metropolitan power's capacity to manage this risky enterprise—where the possibility of possibility emerges—is shaped by anti-colonial resistance. This resistance can shift a teleological moment to a contingent moment, where multiple vectors of history are opened up by the colonized “subjects,” that go beyond the set sequence offered by the colonial power. One of the most radical forms of violence colonized “subjects” can inflict on the colonial powers during this open historical moment, it is argued, is refusal. Refusal, that is to negotiate the terms and conditions of incorporation into Empire, and instead unilaterally setting a different historical course. The violence refusal inflicts on Empire, and the greater violence Empire inflicts back, will be examined through the case study of the Bougainville war.