ЗАКОН И ОТПОР: КЊИЖЕВНОТЕОРИЈСКЕ РЕАКЦИЈЕ НА ИЗАЗОВ „БАРТЛБИ“
LAW AND RESISTANCE: LITERARY-THEORETICAL REACTIONS TO THE ’BARTLEBY’ CHALLENG

Summary/Abstract: Melville’s novella ’Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wallstreet’, written in the middle of the nineteenth century, encountered unexpected processing in the second half of the twentieth century. Prominent philosophers and literary theorists revitalized and reinterpreted it in the key of their conceptions, reading the character of Bartleby or loading in it some paradigmatic property that could be instructive for contemporaneity. The author of this paper believes that this unconcluded debate could be presented through two key concepts: law and resistance. After presenting the plot and some significant moments of Melville’s text, the first part of the paper comments on Deleuze’s and Rancière’s interpretation of Bartleby’s ’agrammatical’ formula, a sentence that responds to all the offers and demands before him: ’I would prefer not to.’ The central parts of the paper are dedicated to the analyses of (in)possibility or (in)desirability of a transition or generalization that these interpreters attribute to that statement, the transition from grammatical to ethical and political resistance. In that respect opposed, Deleuze’s and Rancière’s views are joined by the radically emancipatory-oriented suggestions of Negri and Hardt. The final parts of the paper, inspired by Agamben’s vision of Bartleby as a character representing the pronouncebility and necessity of rehabilitation, in the history of Western thought neglected, ’potentiality’, pointing to a kind of conscious reduction procedure of Melville and/or Deleuze in articulating a figure of ’absolute potentiality’. It would not establish a new law, but would only enable the game of power and resistance of benevolent singularities in the multitude which would not be – which should not be – regulated in advance.

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