Kopista i błazen, czyli dwie mesjańskie formuły wolności. Frojdeska hermeneutyczno-spekulatywna
The Scrivener and the Jester, or the Two Messianic Formulas of Freedom. Hermeneutic-speculative Freudesque

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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