Maciej Kuster

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.

The paper is a hermeneutic attempt at parallel, messianic reading of the two modern narratives – Melville’s story about Bartleby, the poor scrivener and the Freudian joke about the French king. The main point of the text is to speculatively treat these two formulas as the acts of resistance, which succeeded in overcoming and disenchanting what Foucault calls the Power. The author treats the novella and the joke as parables which are inherently ironic and comic in the Hegelian sense, which means, that they operate on and thus shatter the symbolic order and such dichotomies as the lack and the excess, the transcendental and the material as well as the absolute and the concrete. Confronting the readings of “Bartleby” by Deleuze and Derrida and supplementing them with Bloch’s messianic hope, enables the author to claim, that the scrivener and the jester are figures of subversion, if not revolution. What comes next is the analysis of above-mentioned allegories that use theories of comedy by Zupančič, and McGowan, showing that they are in fact the stories about becoming of the modern subject and the latter one emerges in the structure of the comic play of power and resistance. The paper claims that scrivener and the jester show us that there is, in fact, hope for the fragile and precarious modern being mercilessly subjugated to the power.