7

Language and Labor,

Silence and Stasis
Bartleby among the Philosophers

Kevin Attell

The Stoic [placed felicity] in philosophic pride,

By him called virtue; and his virtuous man,
Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing,
Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer,
As fearing God nor man, contemning all
Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life,
Which when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can,
For all his tedious talk is but vain boast,
Or subtle shifts conviction to evade.
—John Milton, Paradise Regained

Is there a single short story of the American nineteenth century that has
generated as much critical commentary over the last half century, and from
such a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, as “Bartleby the Scrivener”?
To mention just a few examples: Bartleby the impassive employee has been
seen as an alienated proletarian laborer and his inertia in the law office
as a figure for a revolutionary disruption of commerce and the capitalist
system; Bartleby and his employer have been traced to various real people,
including Melville’s friends Eli James Fly and George J. Adler and several
of the many lawyers in Melville’s family; Bartleby has been read as an ironic
portrait of Thoreau in his civil disobedience, of Emerson and his aloof
transcendental sages, and of Melville himself, the maniacally prolific writer
(his entire career as a novelist lasting only twelve years) who eventually fell
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 195

into silence and a dull desk job (see, for example, Shannon L. Mariotti’s
essay in this volume); Bartleby has been cast as an existentialist antihero;
he has played Oedipus to the lawyer’s Laius in psychoanalytical readings;
he has served as a case study in anorexia, catatonia, and schizophrenia;
deconstructive critics have seen the scrivener as an allegorical figure for
différance, the unstoppable movement and displacement within signifying
systems that undermine all appeals to stable meaning; and in its narrative of
mysterious suffering and final self-sacrifice, Bartleby’s story has been read
as a Passion or imitatio Christi.1 Bartleby, that is to say, has been many
things to many people, a sort of Galatea, as J. Hillis Miller suggests in his
book Versions of Pygmalion, with all the ambivalences that that object of
desire entails.2
Perhaps more curious than this explosion of critical interest is the
great fortune—possibly greater than that of any other single text in Amer-
ican literature—“Bartleby” has enjoyed among European philosophers
over the last thirty years. That “Bartleby the Scrivener” is in some way
a philosophical story has of course been an axiom of the critical com-
mentary for quite some time. And indeed, as the epigraph to this essay
suggests, Bartleby’s signature phrase—“I would prefer not to”—might
plausibly be read as an oblique reference, via Milton, to the same Stoic
philosophy alluded to even more elliptically by the bust of Cicero that
momentarily occupies Bartleby’s gaze in the lawyer’s office.3 Limiting
oneself, however, to major contemporary Continental theorists who have
commented on the tale, one must list Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze,
Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
and Slavoj Žižek. And here Galatea becomes a Rorschach test, as com-
mentary on “Bartleby” affords the occasion for these thinkers to present
key ideas from their own conceptual repertoires as well as elliptically po-
lemicize with one another.
Out of this constellation of philosophical readings of “Bartleby” two
main lines of interpretation emerge. On the one hand, there is the question
of language and the withdrawal of language (or language of withdrawal)
represented by both Bartleby’s signature phrase and his eventual silence;
on the other, there is the question of human action or labor and its disrup-
tion or reformulation in Bartleby’s mechanical repetition as a copyist and
final unwillingness to do even this. Two rubrics, then, and two negations:
language and silence, labor and stasis.
196 Kevin Attell

Language and Silence

Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze’s essay “Bartleby; or, The Formula” first appeared in 1989 as an af-
terword to a French translation of “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas,” and “The
Bell-Tower,” and it was later revised and republished in Critique et clinique
in 1993. As the title of the piece suggests, Deleuze’s central point of con-
cern is what he calls Bartleby’s “formula,” that is, his signature phrase. He
begins the piece, however, by setting out some general reading protocols,
namely, that “Bartleby” is neither a metaphorical nor a symbolic tale but
rather a “violently comical text,” and that as a comical text it is absolutely
literal.4 The tale, he writes, “means only what it says, literally. And what it
says and repeats is I would prefer not to.”5 Though this opening gesture
is made quickly, it is worth emphasizing how important this concept of
literality is for Deleuze’s reading and for the argument he ultimately makes
for the politically disruptive power of Melville’s text. For it is here that we
are notified that what follows will be a reading of Bartleby’s formula as a
linguistic-syntactic operation. The “violence” of Bartleby’s comedy is the
linguistic—literal—violence that this formula wreaks on all hegemonic and
majoritarian linguistic and political formations, whether they be those of—
in expanding concentric circles—the law office, Wall Street, New York’s
Halls of Justice, America, or the West. As Deleuze points out, Bartleby’s
preference not to do anything but copy, and eventually not even to copy
at all, disrupts the smooth functioning of the law office; it confounds the
attorney, provokes the other employees to near violence, and even causes
the attorney to move his offices to another location when Bartleby obsti-
nately will not leave after being fired. And the operator or focal point of this
disruptiveness is, of course, the formula “I would prefer not to.” “Without a
doubt,” he writes, “the formula is ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing
standing in its wake.”6
Why does the phrase wreak such havoc? Deleuze argues that the
famous phrase functions as an “agrammatical formula,” that is, as a con-
struction that lies at or just beyond the limit of a set of syntactically-
grammatically correct expressions. Though Bartleby’s “I would prefer not
to” is not in fact ungrammatical or incorrect, Deleuze nevertheless notes
that there is a “certain mannerism, a certain solemnity” in the phrase, and
that the attorney and his other employees find it “queer” and do not—or
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 197

claim not to—ever use it.7 The phrase seems indeed to ring oddly in the
hearers’ ears, and in this sense, Deleuze argues, it “has the same force, the
same role, as an agrammatical formula,” standing by analogy as the “limit
of a series such as ‘I would prefer this. I would prefer not to do that. That is
not what I would prefer . . .’”8
There are two distinct frames within which Deleuze situates the dis-
ruptive power of Bartleby’s quasi-agrammatical formula, though they can
each be seen as a modulation or recalibration of the other. They might be
called the linguistic frame and the literary frame. On the one hand, De-
leuze analyzes the ambiguous logical or propositional status of the formula
itself, emphasizing the difficulties involved in assigning it any clear linguis-
tic status as an utterance. On the other hand, the unease that the formula
produces at the level of the sentence stands as an example or metonymy
of the unease Melville’s entire literary practice produces in the field of
English-language literature. This latter is a question of what Deleuze calls
“minor literature,” and it will, for Deleuze, place Melville squarely within
a tradition that also includes, among others, Beckett, Celine, Artaud, and,
above all, Kafka.
First, let us take the linguistic frame. At the level of the statement,
Deleuze argues, the disruptive power of the formula lies in its being an ut-
terance that cannot be easily placed in any system of either (1) propositional
and representational truth or (2) performative speech. In the first case, as a
statement concerning two possibilities (that is, what would be preferred and
what would not be preferred), Deleuze notes that it is neither an affirmation
nor a negation. Unlike, say, “I do not want to” or “I refuse to,” or even “I would
rather,” Bartleby’s formula never settles on any affirmation—including, and
especially, the affirmation of his preference solely to keep copying: “You
will not?” asks the lawyer; “I prefer not,” replies Bartleby (“Bartleby,” 648;
emphases in original). Indeed, Bartleby never states a preference for copy-
ing, and soon enough that activity, too, gets swept up into the space of in-
activity that is Bartleby’s defining gesture. In a sense Bartleby’s eventual
ceasing even to copy is already written into the formula, which “not only
abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other
term it seemed to preserve, and that becomes impossible. In fact, it renders
them indistinct.”9 As a statement the formula “excludes all alternatives, and
devours what it claims to preserve no less than it distances itself from every-
thing else. . . . [It] hollows out a zone of indetermination that renders words
198 Kevin Attell

indistinguishable, that creates a vacuum within language [langage].”10 What

is expressed in the formula, then, is not a will for the negative or a nihilism,
but something even stranger, something that entails no will at all. In the
formula we see “not a will to nothingness, but the growth of a nothingness
of the will. . . . Pure patient passivity, as Blanchot would say. Being as being,
and nothing more.”11 “I would prefer not to” is the index of a patience and a
passivity beyond even the dialectic between passivity and activity, between
choosing to and choosing not to.
Blanchot invokes Bartleby as a figure for such a radical passivity in The
Writing of the Disaster (1980), in which he anticipates in a very condensed
form Deleuze’s analysis of the formula’s neither-active-nor-passive gram-
matical construction. And like Deleuze, Blanchot proposes that Bartleby’s
phrase expresses a patience and a passivity that are more radically neu-
tral than merely the negation of any given positive activity. Indeed, being
bound by our philosophical tradition to thinking of passivity as simply the
“contrary of activity” is, for Blanchot, a defining characteristic of the “ever-
restricted field of our reflections,” beginning, presumably, as early as the
principle of noncontradiction.12 By contrast, Blanchot’s reflections, here and
in many other texts, are tasked with the thinking of a nondialectical and
nonoppositional negativity, of a patience that “opens me entirely, all the
way to a passivity which is the pas [‘not’] in the utterly passive, and which
has therefore abandoned the level of life where passive would simply be the
opposite of active.”13
In this sense, Blanchot introduces the insight that Deleuze will later
develop, in that he identifies in the grammar of Bartleby’s formula, which
has “none of the simplicity of a refusal,” precisely this step beyond refusal or
will-to-the-negative and into the radically neutral.14 He writes: “This is the
core of refusal which Bartleby the scrivener’s inexorable ‘I would prefer not
to’ expresses: an abstention which has never had to be decided upon, which
precedes all decisions and which is not so much a denial as, more than that,
an abdication. . . . ‘I will not do it’ would still have signified an energetic
determination, calling forth an equally energetic contradiction. ‘I would
prefer not to . . .’ belongs to the infiniteness of patience; no dialectical inter-
vention can take hold of such passivity.”15 This “pure patient passivity,” then,
is the strange ontological ground, neither positive nor negative, out of which
the peculiar grammar of Bartleby’s formula arises. To what is Bartleby re-
ferring when he says, “I would prefer not to”? It is true that at first it is to
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 199

correcting his copy, but as the formula eventually overtakes every specific
option presented to Bartleby, it becomes evident that the radical though
“not particular” (“Bartleby,” 667) negation of Bartleby’s quasi-agrammatical
phrase encompasses all specific references and propositions, that is to say,
the entire logic of symbolic representation itself. This, on Deleuze’s reading,
is the first way in which the formula hollows out a zone of indetermination
or vacuum within language.
In addition to upsetting the notion of a propositional model of linguis-
tic truth, however, the phrase is equally disruptive of the logic of the speech
act, as analyzed most famously by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with
Words. In this text Austin makes a fundamental distinction between what
he calls the “constative” function of language—broadly speaking, the use of
language to make statements—and the “performative” function. Performa-
tive utterances are not statements of fact or descriptions of states of affairs;
rather, they are acts of language—speech acts—that by virtue of their own
taking place bring about facts or states of affairs. Performative speech acts,
then, cannot be evaluated as either true or false on the model of a proposi-
tional or constative statement, and for this reason Austin instead proposes
the notions of “felicity” and “infelicity.” The infelicitous speech act is not
a false utterance but one that does not work; it “misfires” and is therefore
voided or vitiated.
The specific nature of Austin’s criteria for the felicitous speech act is
directly relevant for Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby’s formula, and this is
because a speech act can be felicitous only if it is uttered under certain
necessary conventional conditions.16 The point to emphasize here is not
the completeness or imperviousness of Austin’s “felicity conditions” but the
way the logic of the performative blurs the distinction between words and
things. Instead of the word either accurately or inaccurately representing
the thing, in the performative act we have a functional interdependence
of the spoken word and the seemingly extralinguistic world in which it is
embedded. Performative utterances are not true or false; they either work
or do not work depending on whether they are uttered properly in certain
necessary conventional socio-politico-linguistic conditions.
This, Deleuze argues, is the second linguistic logic that Bartleby’s
formula unsettles, and it is perhaps in its disruption of the performative
function of language that the formula most directly enters into that “pas-
sive resistance” that the lawyer claims “so aggravates an earnest person”
200 Kevin Attell

(“Bartleby,” 646). In stubbornly reiterating his formula, Bartleby views with

complete indifference all the conditions necessary for the speech act to
function and thus severely undermines not only the logic of the speech act
itself, but all the conventions of the social contract. As Bartleby’s repeated
response to every command, order, request, pronouncement, and promise
of the lawyer, the formula seems to neglect and thus short-circuit all the
social and conventional presuppositions that are required for the felicitous
speech act to take place. Bartleby is the attorney’s employee; his context is
the law office; he has a professional, economic, social, contractual relation
to the lawyer, his boss; and yet his obstinately repeated formula demolishes
everything the lawyer might reasonably expect of his employee as a result
of his speech acts.17
The lawyer in fact rightly interprets why his speech acts misfire. He has
wrongly believed that Bartleby is a full participant in the act, that he and
Bartleby have assumed the same conventions, and that a new state of affairs
(say, Bartleby’s dismissal and departure) would be smoothly ushered in by
the felicitous performative. As the lawyer complacently muses to himself
after calmly firing Bartleby, “Without loudly bidding Bartleby depart—as
an inferior genius might have done—I assumed the ground that depart he
must; and upon that assumption built all I had to say” (“Bartleby,” 658;
emphasis in original). Yet when that procedure turns out to have failed, the
lawyer is quick to pinpoint the reason: “My procedure seemed as sagacious
as ever,—but only in theory. How it would prove in practice—there was the
rub. It was truly a beautiful thought to have assumed Bartleby’s departure;
but after all, that assumption was simply my own, and none of Bartleby’s.
The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but
whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of preferences than
assumptions” (ibid., 658–659). All the way up to and including the ultimate
performative utterance that an employer holds in reserve—namely, “You
are fired!”—“the formula,” Deleuze writes, “stymies all speech acts, and at
the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social
position can be attributed. This is what the attorney glimpses with dread:
all his hopes of bringing Bartleby back to reason are dashed because they
rest on a logic of presuppositions according to which an employer ‘expects’
to be obeyed, or a kind friend listened to, whereas Bartleby has invented a
new logic, a logic of preference, which is enough to undermine the presup-
positions of language as a whole.”18
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 201

Bartleby’s response to the lawyer’s speech brings the performance, so

to speak, to a crashing halt. The “doctrine of preference” implicit in his for-
mula cannot be assimilated to what Melville calls “the doctrine of assump-
tions” (“Bartleby,” 660), the presuppositional and conventional logic of the
performative function of language, just as that very same utterance eludes
any constative statement of preference for one thing over another. Thus,
when viewed through the lens of either propositional logic or the pragmat-
ics of the speech act, Bartleby’s formula stands outside both constative and
performative “grammar” and chips away at the very foundation of every
linguistic category. As both constative and performative “agrammaticality,”
the formula impassively, disruptively sits there, like Bartleby himself on the
banister, as a radically indeterminate linguistic event, bringing language as
a whole face to face with its prereferential, preperformative, perhaps prelin-
guistic presuppositions.
This linguistic frame for Deleuze’s reading of the story is preliminary
to his analysis of the tale’s literary frame. The uncomfortable linguistic sta-
tus of the formula is centrally important to Deleuze’s reading because it
leads to his argument concerning the “foreign” languages that “minor lit-
eratures” open up within major languages and literatures: “The formula at
first,” he writes, “seems like a bad translation of a foreign language,” but, in
fact, the truth is something like the inverse of this hypothesis: “Perhaps it
is the formula that carves out a kind of foreign language within language.”19
This suggestion alludes directly to an argument put forth by Deleuze and
Félix Guattari in their 1975 monograph Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
For Deleuze and Guattari minor literature is a writing that creates
something like an estrangement of language within the major language, a
peculiar literary practice that they argue must be the starting point for any
consideration of nonhegemonic writing. Deleuze and Guattari schematize
three of its key characteristics, all of which will later be evoked in Deleuze’s
reading of Melville. In minor literatures, they argue, (1) “language is af-
fected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization,” that is to say, writers
of a major language who are either displaced from the rich native soil of that
language or are not members of the dominant ethnic or national identity
of its speakers operate a deterritorialization on the language; (2) “every-
thing in them is political” because, in contrast to major literatures, wherein
the social milieu serves as a seemingly neutral and unproblematic backdrop
against which individual or private concerns can be dramatized and nar-
202 Kevin Attell

rated, the situation of minor literature is “completely different; its cramped

space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics”;
and (3) “everything takes on a collective value” because the impoverished
conditions under which the minor author works mean that his or her autho-
rial activity and expression are expropriated and subsumed into the collec-
tive.20 Minor literature, in short, is a recognizable type of avant-garde or
experimental literature, one whose experiments are determined by these
specific conditions of lexical-syntactic impoverishment, lack of psychologi-
cal interiority, and authorial collectivity or impersonality. And without hav-
ing to follow Deleuze and Guattari too far into their own system or their
reading of Kafka’s texts, one can see clearly enough how this concept of
minor literature works directly against what are traditionally some of the
most valorized notions about great literature: its verbal richness, its psycho-
logical depth, and the personal genius of the individuals who write it.
This is the “literary” background for Deleuze’s suggestion that Bar-
tleby’s agrammatical formula is the utterance of some sort of foreign lan-
guage—an American English—within English. “Is this not,” he asks
rhetorically, “the schizophrenic vocation of American literature: to make
the English language, by means of driftings, deviations, de-taxes or sur-
taxes (as opposed to the standard syntax), slip in this manner? To introduce
a bit of psychosis into English neurosis?”21 With its urban law office setting,
its symmetrically organized clerks, Turkey and Nippers, its figure of patri-
archal authority in the lawyer, the tale “starts off as in an English novel, in
Dickens’s London.”22 But Bartleby arrives, “contaminates everything” with
his utterance, breaks this scene to pieces, and institutes the fractal geom-
etry of a minor literature: “Everything began à l’anglaise but continues à
l’américaine. . . . The American patchwork becomes the law of Melville’s
oeuvre, devoid of a center, of an upside down or right side up.”23
In this overturning of the English novel by the American, Deleuze sees
an analogy—in fact, something more than an analogy—to the American
revolutionary project at its most radical, thus drawing a parallel between
American literary and political form, both of which take on the shades of
the “minor.” He writes that “what Kafka would say about ‘small nations’ is
what Melville had already said about the great American nation: it must
become a patchwork of all small nations.”24 It is a universal political project
whose exemplary figure may indeed be the patchwork itself, “the American
invention par excellence, for the Americans invented patchwork, just as the
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 203

Swiss are said to have invented the cuckoo clock.”25 This last comment may
be a joke at the expense of the Swiss, but the point being made is about
all of Europe (or at least the major powers), with its political imaginary so
rooted in blood and soil. Though its promise may not ultimately have been
met, America nevertheless “sought to create a revolution whose strength
would lie in a universal immigration, émigrés of the world.”26 And in terms
that may be debatable but are nevertheless defensible (and perhaps even
orthodox), this is the way Deleuze understands the early American political
imagination: “Even before their independence, Americans were thinking
about the combination of States, the State-form most compatible with their
vocation. But their vocation was not to reconstitute an ‘old State secret,’ a
nation, a family, a heritage, or a father. It was above all to constitute a uni-
verse, a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community of
anarchist individuals, inspired by Jefferson, by Thoreau, by Melville.”27
Though as big as a continent, this is the foreign country where Mel-
ville’s “minor literature” is written, written as if in a foreign language within
the English canon. And while Bartleby’s mutism—his broken and unre-
sponsive speech—has often been read as a sort of pathology, his formula
here stands instead as a radical cure for the America of 1853 (or 1989):
“Even in his catatonic or anorexic state, Bartleby is not the patient, but the
doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother
to us all.”28
As intimations of a new community, a new type of sociality, a new eth-
ics, Bartleby and his formula assume in Deleuze’s reading something like
the contours of a philosophical self-portrait, a gesture that is shared to some
degree by all the thinkers discussed in this chapter. Let us now turn to
Derrida, who also reads in Bartleby’s reluctance to respond a figure for an
ethical-political problem, namely—and paradoxically—responsibility.

Jacques Derrida
Like Deleuze, Derrida in his discussion of Bartleby in The Gift of Death
(1990) is most interested in the grammar of Bartleby’s utterance, and he
suggests in very similar terms that the phrase is like what Deleuze has
termed agrammaticality.29 Bartleby’s equivocal phrase, he argues, may not
state anything determinate, but it nevertheless “doesn’t say absolutely noth-
ing. I would prefer not to looks like an incomplete sentence. Its indetermi-
204 Kevin Attell

nacy creates a tension: it opens onto a sort of reserve of incompleteness; it

announces a temporary or provisional reserve, one involving a proviso. Can
we not find there the secret of a hypothetical reference to some indecipher-
able providence or prudence?”30 There are two claims being made here for
the formula: (1) that the indeterminacy of the statement’s modality itself
constitutes the statement’s reference, and (2) that the referent of this inde-
terminate grammatical openness is some sort of providence or prudence.
Both these cryptic claims become clearer when they are placed in the
context of Derrida’s extended discussion of one of the most fundamental,
and shocking, episodes in the Scriptures. Deleuze is not the first to draw
an analogy between Bartleby and Christ, but Derrida is probably the first
to draw one between Bartleby and Abraham, particularly Abraham in the
terrible episode of the near sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah. Indeed,
Derrida’s Bartleby appears only briefly at the end of his long reading of this
episode and stands there more or less as a modern proxy for Abraham.
Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is especially disconcerting because it is
presented as an archetypal example of a moral or ethical dilemma, indeed
as perhaps the moral or ethical dilemma, insofar as it places in irreducible
conflict Abraham’s responsibility to God, on the one hand, and his responsi-
bility to his beloved son (and everyone else in his family, for that matter, or
even every other person on earth) on the other. Abraham obeys God, hon-
ors his duty to obey God’s command, and consents to commit a terrible act,
and yet, unlike, say, Agamemnon, he is “never considered a hero. He doesn’t
make us shed tears and doesn’t inspire admiration: rather stupefied horror,
a terror that is also secret.”31 Terror, secret, responsibility, alterity: these are
the coordinates of Derrida’s discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice, which the
following few pages will review before returning to Bartleby’s indetermi-
nate phrase, which for Derrida is fundamentally a repetition or modulation
of Abraham’s almost total silence while undertaking the terrible task of of-
fering God the gift of his son’s death.
Upon receiving his command, Abraham keeps his intention to sacrifice
Isaac a secret, but he keeps this secret in a very specific way. As Derrida
notes (following Kierkegaard’s reading of the episode), Abraham offers a
“strange reply” to Isaac when he asks his father where they will find the
lamb for the sacrifice.32 “It can’t be said,” he writes, “that Abraham doesn’t
respond to him. He says God will provide. God will provide a lamb for the
holocaust ([‘burnt offering’] Genesis 22:8). Abraham thus keeps his secret
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 205

at the same time as he replies to Isaac. He doesn’t keep silent and he doesn’t
lie. He doesn’t speak nontruth.”33 And yet in his, to say the least, evasive
reply, Abraham does not quite speak the truth, either. His utterance lies on
the border between truth and untruth, between speaking and not speaking,
and by not entering fully into the sphere of speech, by not communicating
to others the terrible fact of his decision to kill Isaac, Abraham commits a
transgression that is both linguistic and ethical. In fact, in the terms of Der-
rida’s discussion, the two are one and the same: “Because, in this way, he
doesn’t speak, Abraham transgresses the ethical order. . . . By keeping the
secret, Abraham, betrays ethics.”34 But what exactly does Derrida mean by
the ethical order here? And why is the refusal to speak a betrayal of ethics?
At issue is a distinction (again from Kierkegaard) between the “singu-
lar” and the “general,” the latter being the proper sphere of ethics insofar
as it roughly corresponds to what we might call the “social,” or at least the
sphere in which individual singularities share a common space. And the
medium of that sharing—in a sense, the substance of that common space
itself—is language. By speaking (and this necessarily means speaking to
others), the individual enters into and acknowledges the domain of the gen-
eral at the same time he or she renounces the absoluteness of his or her
singularity. Language puts the self in relation to others, and in this sense it
is the ethical medium par excellence. The general is the space of common-
ality made both possible and necessary by language, and it is precisely what
is disrupted by Abraham’s refusal to speak and reveal his secret. Derrida
writes: “To the extent that, in not saying the essential thing, namely the
secret bond between God and him, Abraham doesn’t speak, he assumes
the responsibility that consists in always being alone, retrenched in one’s
singularity at the moment of decision. . . . But as soon as one speaks, as
soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity.
. . . Speaking relieves us, Kierkegaard notes, for it ‘translates’ into the gen-
eral.”35 By revealing his secret, Abraham would, in this sense, be shirking
his responsibility to God by seeking a very tempting “relief” in the sphere of
the ethical, where reasons might be given, where justifications might be of-
fered, where forgiveness might be sought, where, in short, Abraham might
confront this terrible divine imperative by bringing it out into the open. But
Abraham refuses to speak, refuses to respond to Isaac. Derrida’s question
for Abraham here is the same one the baffled lawyer asks Bartleby: “Why
do you refuse?” (“Bartleby,” 644; emphasis in original). Why does Abra-
206 Kevin Attell

ham withdraw from what would seem to be, at the very least, his ethical
responsibility?
Derrida’s argument plays on two apparently distinct and indeed in-
compatible senses of the term responsibility. On the one hand, there is
the intimate responsibility that one is bound to as a solitary individual, a
responsibility that is one’s and one’s alone and that cannot be mitigated or
collectivized by any appeal to others (say, in the form of asking for advice or
approval or assurance that one is making the right decision). On the other
hand, there is the etymological sense of responsibility, the responsibility
before others with whom one has a more or less mutual and symmetrical
(and ultimately linguistic) relation—a relation that is at base a responsibility
to respond to the other. It is this latter responsibility that Abraham evasively
betrays when he answers-without-answering Isaac’s question. Abraham is
caught between two responsibilities, each of which appears to be a betrayal
of the other.
In this characteristic gesture, Derrida identifies and puts pressure on
an irresolvable aporia in this keyword for so many of the Western philosoph-
ical tradition’s accounts of ethics. And it is precisely this aporetic impasse
that is dramatized in the story of Abraham and Isaac, which, on Derrida’s
account, “can be read as a narrative development of the paradox that inhab-
its the concept of duty or of absolute responsibility. This concept puts us
into relation (but without relating to it, in a double secret) with the absolute
other, with the absolute singularity of the other, whose name here is God.”36
It is worth emphasizing Derrida’s identification of one of this story’s pro-
tagonists—namely, God—with absolute otherness or the absolute other, for
God or the absolute other serves a very specific logical function in this text’s
analysis—or better, deconstruction—of the ethical category of responsibil-
ity.37 What then is the role and significance of Abraham’s secret bond to this
absolute and singular other, which seems to be in fatal conflict with his ethi-
cal bond to others “in general”? What does it mean, precisely, to say that
God is the absolute other? Obeying God’s command is, the Scripture sug-
gests, an absolute responsibility, but is it not impossible to respond to God?
Indeed, as Derrida notes, Abraham does not respond to God beyond
the almost tautological and certainly self-reflexive statement “Here I am,” a
response that, in the asymmetry it establishes with its addressee, suggests
that insofar as God is the absolute other, he is not of the order of language.
On one reading—say, a more or less negative theological one—this asym-
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 207

metry would be a result of God’s absolutely unique and transcendent posi-

tion outside even the sphere of positive existence, and certainly outside the
common space of the general (that is, the world). But in Abraham’s inability
to respond to God as the absolute other, can we not, Derrida suggests, see a
situation that is similar or indeed identical to what is the most common ex-
perience of the ethical “in general,” and one that would recast the absolute
other or God not as a transcendent essence, but as the very otherness that
distances each of the infinitely numerous finite beings within the space of
the general? 38 Or, in the case of Bartleby, can we not see how, in the space
behind his green screen, “privacy and society [are] conjoined” (“Bartleby,”
642)? The general—as the sphere of responsibility and responsiveness—
proves, in truth, to be no less essentially characterized by the impossibility
to respond to the other, since for every singular other (loved ones, friends,
peers, pets) to whom I am able to respond and be responsible, there are
countless others to whom I cannot and never will be able to respond or act
ethically.
And what can one say about this? Abraham does not speak about
his sacrifice, does not offer justifications or reasons; this is his secret, his
Bartleby-like withdrawal from responsibility “in general” and from the re-
lief, as Kierkegaard puts it, of displacing his responsibility onto the general
or “ethical.” The general, however, harbors within it something of the abso-
lute and secret, and this is because any single relation or responsibility that
is acknowledged or met necessarily entails the neglect of infinite others.
Because I am a finite being, it is impossible for me to respond to the infinite
number of finite others; the impossibility of the absolute is a constitutive
element of the general. To choose to save one other is to sacrifice the other
others—indeed, infinite others. “And I can never justify this sacrifice,”
writes Derrida. “I must [like Abraham—and by extension Bartleby] always
hold my peace about it. Whether I want to or not, I will never be able to jus-
tify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other. I will
always be in secret, held to secrecy in respect of this, for nothing can be said
about it.”39 Even the most ethical choice boils down, ultimately, to a prefer-
ence, and this “remains finally unjustifiable (this is Abraham’s hyperethical
sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifices I make at each moment.”40
What is to be read in the episode of Abraham’s archetypal encounter
with the transcendent God’s impossible and unanswerable command is for
Derrida nothing other than the structure of everyday ethical experience,
208 Kevin Attell

which, though in terms perhaps less hyperbolic, nevertheless reproduces

the aporetic and unsettling ethical dilemma of Mount Moriah all the time.
This is an assertion that Derrida fleshes out in the final moments of the
chapter, where the distinction between the absolute otherness of God and
the otherness of others in general finally collapses (or is deconstructed) and
the transcendence of the divine sphere is presented as nothing other than
the structure of the profane world (or vice versa, if you wish). On the one
hand, “God, as wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something
of the wholly other,”41 and on the other, “there is no longer any ethical gen-
erality that does not fall prey to the paradox of Abraham.”42 That is the
secret Abraham keeps when he elusively responds without responding and
speaks without speaking.
Bartleby’s formula, whether as Deleuze’s quasi-agrammaticality or
Derrida’s pseudo-incomplete sentence, is, of course, another unresponsive
response, a statement that borders on senselessness or silence—or at least
appears to harbor a secret. For Derrida this is a perfect repetition of Abra-
ham’s speaking-without-speaking, whose ultimate referent, so to speak, is
the aporetic impasse of ethics and responsibility. “Just as Abraham doesn’t
speak a human language,” he writes,

just as he speaks in tongues or in a language that is foreign to every other

human language, and in order to do that responds without responding,
speaks without saying anything either true or false, says nothing de-
terminate that would be equivalent to a statement, a promise, or a lie,
in the same way Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” takes responsibility
for a response without response. It evokes the future without either
predicting or promising; it utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive
or negative. The modality of this repeated utterance that says nothing,
promises nothing, neither refuses nor accepts anything, the tense of
this singularly insignificant statement, reminds one of a nonlanguage
or a secret language. Is it not as if Bartleby were also speaking “in
tongues”?43

For Derrida Bartleby’s secret language brings the canonical language of

ethics—and especially of ethical responsibility—to an aporetic impasse,
forcing it to confront, as if in a “dead-wall revery” (“Bartleby,” 656), its
internal ambivalences and limits. Indeed, for the thinkers I have discussed
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 209

thus far, as Bartleby’s “ravishing, devastating” formula collapses into agram-

maticality or glossolalia or silence, it brings its hearers and readers—the
lawyer, us—face to face with the uncertain and fugitive foundations of the
political-ethical order.

Labor and Stasis

As we move from the question of “language and silence” to the question
of “labor and stasis,” the dominant voices become Italian. This is perhaps
not surprising, since in no other western European country was the ques-
tion of labor so central to philosophical debates of the last few decades of
the twentieth century, a period in which the national philosophical milieu
was dominated by Marxism and post-Marxism, the most relevant strand of
which, for the present discussion, was known as Autonomia.44 Autonomia
is something of a blanket term—and a contested one at that—used col-
lectively to name several related leftist movements in Italy in the 1960s and
1970s that were distinct from, and to varying degrees hostile to, the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), at the time the largest communist party in Europe
and a major force in the Italian parliament. Arising out of and comprising
workers’ movements, feminist movements, and student movements, Auto-
nomia is a larger phenomenon than can be adequately accounted for here.45
One particular issue, however—namely, the call for a “refusal of work”
within the workers’ movement—must briefly be reviewed as a context for
the Bartlebys of this section.
Though the broad notion of the refusal of work has had many propo-
nents and has gone through a number of modulations within the Marxist
and anarchist traditions—from Lafargue’s “droit à la paresse” to the Situ-
ationist slogan “Ne travaillez jamais”—it is the formulation of the “strategy
of refusal” by the Italian Marxist theorist Mario Tronti that most directly
concerns us here. Though his relation to the party fluctuated, Tronti never
left the PCI; his thought, however, and in particular the texts collected in
his 1966 book Workers and Capital, had an enormous influence on the
autonomist development of the workers’ movement. In a famous phrase
Tronti asserts, “To struggle against capital, the working class must struggle
against itself insofar as it is capital.”46 In contrast to the notion that the work-
ing class must reclaim its laboring activity and the fruits of its labor from
the capitalist class, and in contrast even to the idea of an eventual work-
210 Kevin Attell

ers’ self-management of the entire cycle of production, Tronti’s operaismo

(workerism) seeks to refuse the notion of “work” at its very core, and this
is because such a notion has the class relation already written into it. He
writes: “Productive labour [as distinct from labor power] . . . exists not only
in relation to capital, but also in relation to the capitalists as a class. It is in
this latter relationship that it exists as the working class.”47 The working class
is constituted as such by the conversion of its labor power into “work” in the
capitalist social formation. “What are workers doing,” Tronti asks, “when
they struggle against their employers? Aren’t they, above all else, saying
‘No’ to the transformation of their labor power into labor?”48 This “no,” this
refusal of work, entails a reconsideration of the very nature of human pro-
ductivity and the human capacity for action. Ultimately, the refusal of work,
which is to say, the refusal of the conversion of human activity into labor, is
not an appeal to idleness or passivity, but rather an effort to develop human
capacities for productivity and self-constitution (at both the individual and
collective level) in ways entirely free from—autonomous from—the capi-
talist social formation as well as the state form. As Nicholas Thoburn puts
it, Tronti “proposes that to be alienated from work, its form, function and
subject, becomes the founding condition of revolutionary politics. Politics is
hence not the reclamation of work against an ‘external’ control, but a refusal
of work and the very subject of worker.”49

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Tronti’s operaismo sets the stage for Hardt and Negri’s portrayal of Bartleby
as an icon of the refusal of work in Empire (2000), for their Bartleby is an
equivocal figure in which lie certain implicit critiques of Autonomia and
workerism, which in turn have a long and dense history in Negri’s writings
from the 1960s to the 1990s. As they write in a subchapter titled “Refusal”:
“[Bartleby’s] refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but
it is only a beginning.”50 To understand this engagement with autonomist
theory better, we must review the ontology of human labor and production
that lies beneath Hardt and Negri’s evocation of Bartleby’s passivity and the
limits of his “refusal.”
Though it also owes a great deal to the Marxian materialist conception
of history, Hardt and Negri’s ontology of human productivity is grounded
above all in Negri’s reading of Spinoza, especially in his 1981 book The Sav-
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 211

age Anomaly. In this book Negri lays the groundwork for his Spinozist iden-
tification of being with the ceaseless power of production, a concept that
in this text derives from the Spinozan figures of potentia and conatus but
will later be codified in what is perhaps Negri’s signal concept: constituent
power. He writes, “Production as a constitutive ontology. Spinoza founds
this possibility of philosophy, or rather of the destruction of philosophy, with
absolute coherence. Constitutive ontology recognizes production within the
structure of being. It is not possible to say being, except in terms of produc-
tion.”51 But what is the nature of this production and this productivity?
On the one hand, what is being produced is nothing less than human
existence itself. As we read in Hardt and Negri’s most recent book, Com-
monwealth, where it is viewed under the lenses of “immaterial labor” and
“biopolitical production,” this ontology sees in human labor (that is to say,
human activity as such) “not the production of objects for subjects, as com-
modity production is often understood, but the production of subjectivity
itself.”52 For Hardt and Negri biopolitical production, in its revolutionary
and liberated form, is the free, spontaneous, and vital production of human
existence in a collective praxis (the subject—and indeed object—of this col-
lective praxis is what they term, following Spinoza, the “multitude”).53 Thus,
the product of this production is none other than the producer, in an auto-
genetic and autarchic dynamic in which the collectivity of humanity—the
multitude—is a self-constituting artifact.
On the other hand—and this is the more important point for the pres-
ent discussion—this human productivity is ceaseless, unstoppable, exces-
sive, and exuberant. For Hardt and Negri this ceaselessness is central to the
nature of the human capacity for productive activity, which is “a power of
self-valorization that exceeds itself, flows over onto the other, and through
this investment, constitutes an expansive commonality. The common actions
of labor, intelligence, passion, and affect configure a constituent power.”54
Just as it is impossible to speak of being without speaking of production, so
too is it impossible to speak of collective existence without speaking of living
labor and constituent power. As we read in Negri’s 1992 book Insurgen-
cies (whose translated Italian title is, precisely, Constituent Power), “Living
labor constitutes the world, by creatively modeling, ex novo, the material it
touches,” and “constituent power is a creative strength of being. That is, of
concrete figures of reality, values, institutions, and logics of the order of re-
ality. Constituent power constitutes society and identifies the social and the
212 Kevin Attell

political in an ontological nexus.”55 The internal articulations among these

near-synonyms within Hardt and Negri’s argumentation over numerous
texts need not be mapped in detail here; what is crucial is that in whatever
guise it assumes, this basic human capacity for productivity is (1) ceaseless
and (2) ontological. And on both those scores, Bartleby make a gesture in
the right direction, but he ultimately comes up short; his refusal is “the be-
ginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning.”56
What then is the step not taken by the scrivener? What is it that Bartle-
by does not do? In short, he does not produce. To be sure, ceasing to work
for the lawyer is the first step away from his alienation in the capitalist mode
of production, but he does not then redirect his capacity for production into
the collective and free praxis that works toward the construction of a “new
mode of life and above all a new community,”57 which is in turn a “new
regime of production.”58 For Hardt and Negri Bartleby’s refusal of work is
“absolute”; 59 he remains inert, passive, and alone—in short, a “suicide.”60
“Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents
us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more.
And in the course of the story he strips down so much—approximating ever
more closely naked humanity, naked life, naked being—that eventually he
withers away, evaporates in the infamous Manhattan prison, the Tombs.”61
This passage shows how the ontological gesture in “Bartleby” is ul-
timately incompatible with the Spinozan “metaphysics of production”62
valorized by Hardt and Negri, and indeed they write of Bartleby’s self-
immolation precisely as a failure to be fully Spinozan: “As Spinoza says,
if we simply cut the tyrannical head off the social body, we will be left
with the deformed corpse of society. What we need is to create a new so-
cial body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal.”63 In contrast to
taking on this positive project, Bartleby simply refuses absolutely, and in
stripping away everything to arrive at “being and nothing more,” Bartleby
vanishes to a point where the productive capacities of man—the power to
act—have been jettisoned to arrive at an anterior or underlying pure and
passive “being as such.” The ontology implicit in “Bartleby,” in short, is
based on what Hardt and Negri would find to be a mistaken metaphysics,
one in which pure and passive being precedes production and activity—a
being that is simply and inertly there. That this is in large part a critique
of a Heideggerian conception of being—and of the Heideggerian philo-
sophical project of a fundamental ontology64 —is perhaps clear enough, but
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 213

this characterization of Bartleby’s negative and passive inertia is even more

pointedly and more specifically a polemical rejoinder to Agamben’s reading
of Bartleby, to which we will now turn.

Giorgio Agamben
“I’m a Spinozan, whereas the ontology and the metaphysics of Agamben
are Heideggerian,” Negri states in a 2005 interview.65 Agamben’s relation
to Heidegger, with whom he studied briefly in the late 1960s, is a com-
plex one, but Negri’s claim here is accurate enough. For Negri, Agamben’s
Heideggerianism entails a reduction of being to a neutral, impassive, and
impotent bare fact: “being and nothing more.” Whether this is a legitimate
characterization of Heidegger’s thought itself is a question that must be left
open here; but it is a mischaracterization of Agamben’s “ontology and meta-
physics” and of what is perhaps the key concept in Agamben’s philosophical
lexicon, impotentiality. As we will see, it is absolutely true that for Agamben
Bartleby is a figure for impotentiality, but this is not, as Negri suggests,
mere passivity.
Agamben begins his 1993 essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency” by noting
that Bartleby belongs to a literary constellation that includes such dark stars
as Akaky Akakievich, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Simon Tanner, Prince Myshkin,
and Kafka’s courtroom clerks.66 But this figure is, he suggests, perhaps only
a dim outline of the truer image we might get when Bartleby is placed in his
proper philosophical constellation. The first section of Agamben’s essay, titled
“The Scribe, or On Creation,” seeks to map out this strange house of the zo-
diac, and in a typically eclectic and erudite survey of Byzantine and medieval
Christian, Cabbalistic, and Islamic texts, Agamben traces the ways in which
thinkers from these traditions have commented on the Aristotelian question
of the passage from potentiality to act (from dunamis to energeia), the pro-
cess by which things emerge out of nonbeing into being—that is to say, the
question of creation. “This,” Agamben writes, “is the philosophical constel-
lation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped
writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation
derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication
of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality.”67 But what is the nature of this
Nothing and this pure, absolute potentiality? And why is Bartleby’s ceasing to
write the critical gesture for understanding the act of creation?
214 Kevin Attell

The first and critical assertion Agamben makes about potentiality is its
constitutive co-belonging—and ultimate identity—with what he calls “im-
potentiality.” The essential intimacy of potentiality and impotentiality is the
key point in Aristotle’s polemic with the Megarians in book Theta of the
Metaphysics. Against the Megarian position that all potentialities are al-
ways actualized and that the only potentialities that exist are those that pass
into act, Aristotle asserts that for there to be potentiality at all, and there-
fore for any sort of change to happen, the potentiality to be or do something
must also equally entail the potentiality not to be or do that thing. “Every
potentiality (dunamis),” he writes, “is impotentiality (adunamia) of the
same and with respect to the same” (Metaphysics 1046a 32). If this were
not the case, then all potentialities would immediately realize themselves
as particular actualities and all potentialities-not-to would always have been
absolute impossibilities, or more simply, there would be only a static and un-
changing actuality. This potentiality-not-to is what Aristotle calls adunamia
or “impotentiality.” In Agamben’s usage, then, “impotentiality” (impotenza)
does not mean inability, impossibility, or mere passivity, but rather the po-
tentiality not to (be or do), which is the constitutive counterpart to every
potentiality to be or do. For Agamben the necessity of an impotentiality in
every potentiality is the “cardinal point on which [Aristotle’s] entire theory
of dunamis turns,” and it is on this basis that he develops his own doctrine
of potentiality.68
The inherently two-sided structure of potentiality-impotentiality means
that actuality is not just the realization and fulfillment of the potentiality-to-
be, but also the paradoxically negative “fulfillment” of the potentiality-to-
not-be. If it is the case that in the passage to act potentiality modifies itself
not by simply effacing its impotential side, but rather by turning that side
back on itself in such a way that it too remains in some way as a constitu-
tive element of the act—that is to say, of being—then the nature of being
or act needs to be rethought as something more complex than simply the
realization of positive potentialities. In a way that resonates with the issues
informing the preceding discussion, Agamben goes about this reevaluation
of (im)potentiality and act by considering the nature of work, conceived in
its most fundamental sense as the activity that realizes potentialities.
In the essay “The Work of Man,” Agamben notes that the term ener-
geia—which is derived from the word ergon (“work”; Italian “opera”) and
literally means “being at work”—“was, in all probability, created by Aristo-
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 215

tle, who uses it in functional opposition to dunamis.”69 In the Nicomachean

Ethics Aristotle considers the way certain “works” or activities provide the
criteria for defining certain types of beings. For example, the flute player is
defined by playing the flute, the sculptor by making statues (and the scriv-
ener by copying). But problems arise when we ask about the human being
as such. The sculptor clearly produces agalmata, but what is the “work of
man” as man? Is there no distinct ergon into which the potentiality of the
human as such realizes itself? This quandary in the Aristotelian argument
provides Agamben with the basis for his account of the human not as a
being endowed with this or that particular potentiality or capability (or any
corresponding “work”) but as a being of “pure potentiality.” Because of the
impossibility of “identifying the energeia, the being-at-work of man as man,
independently of and beyond the concrete social figures that he can as-
sume,”70 Agamben suggests that in Aristotle we can discern “the idea of an
argia, of an essential inactivity [inoperosità] of man.”71 Inoperosità (another
keyword in Agamben’s vocabulary, and translated variously as inactivity, in-
operativeness, and inoperativity) is the distinctive potentiality of man inso-
far as what characterizes the human as such is not the capacity to do or be
this or that, but precisely the capacity not to (be or do), a potentiality that
exists autonomously and indifferently to any particular actuality or “work.”
Just as actuality must be thought of not merely as the realization of potenti-
ality but also as the “act of impotentiality,” so the ergon and energeia of man
must be thought of as the work of inoperativity.72 Contrary to the sort of
misreading we find in Hardt and Negri’s critique of what they see as Agam-
ben’s quietism, then, this does not mean mere passivity, but rather indicates
a kind of “working that in every act realizes its own shabbat and in every
work is capable of exposing its own inactivity and its own potentiality.” 73
Bartleby’s oddly passive activity, or active passivity, or undecidable po-
sition between passivity and activity is for Agamben the supreme figure for
this “work of man,” and for this reason he stands as the brightest—or, as
it were, darkest—star in the constellation of literary-philosophical figures
with which Agamben opens his essay. Though it is certainly the case that for
Agamben Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” establishes the linguistic frame-
work for suspension of the logic of will and necessity, truth and untruth,
being and nonbeing, the decisive moment in the tale comes when Bartleby
finally ceases to copy.74 For this is the point at which Bartleby passes from
being a scrivener who copies, and indeed only copies—that is to say, whose
216 Kevin Attell

being is defined by his copying—to being a scrivener who does not copy
but nevertheless retains the potentiality for copying. Bartleby’s paradoxi-
cal “work” after he has ceased to work is to move from the ceaseless and
determinate actualization of his potentiality-to-copy to an experience of his
potential-to-and-not-to-copy. As Agamben puts it: “In [his] obstinate copy-
ing . . . there is no potential not to be. . . . This is why the scrivener must stop
copying, why he must give up his work.”75
Bartleby does not just not work; he has ceased to work. But he has
certainly not ceased to be capable of that work; indeed, his capability—his
virtuosity even—as a scrivener is never in doubt. As his formula so insis-
tently puts it, it is not that he cannot work but rather that he prefers not to.
And this is why his inoperativity (again, not to be confused with inability) is
a figure for pure potentiality. Bartleby’s nonwork withholds itself from the
passage into act of which it is fully capable and remains in the mode of a
pure having, in which what is seized and held is not any ergon or energeia,
but the potentiality to be or not be, the capacity to pass or not pass into the
act, which, contra Negri, is the true “a priori of every act of production.” 76
For Agamben, in the moment of not exercising his capacity, Bartleby “writes
nothing but [his] potentiality to not-write,” and in his inoperativity Bartleby
has settled into the most fundamental level of creation, the obscure zone in
which creation, so to speak, happens.77
This in turn is why Bartleby’s work in the Dead Letter office proves so
decisive for him. In keeping with his optimistic reading of the tale even in
its sepulchral finale, Agamben writes that the “undelivered letters are the
ciphers of joyous events that could have been but never took place.” For
Agamben these letters reveal themselves to be not only “works” but also
“acts of impotentiality.” They are indeed erga inscribed on the blank sheet
of paper and thus mark the “passage from potentiality to actuality,” but they
therefore equally mark the “non-occurrence of something” as well;78 that is
to say, in the vision of the undelivered letter, the letter that never arrives,
Bartleby sees not only the ergon of a realized dunamis, but also the possi-
bility that was never realized in any work. And the experience of that point
of contingency—the suspended moment of potentiality as such—is what
the scrivener who does not write retrieves in his obscure gesture.
The stakes of such a reconfiguration of our conception of work, of
thinking of work as the act of impotentiality as well as of potentiality, are
high. In remaining balanced at the pivot point between potentiality and im-
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 217

potentiality, Bartleby thus moves toward “the construction of an experience

of the possible as such” 79 and thus “risks not so much the truth of his own
statements as the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropologi-
cal change that is just as decisive in his subjective history as the liberation of
the hand by the erect position was for the primate or as was, for the reptile,
the transformation of the front limbs that changed it into a bird.”80 First
behind his green screen in the law office, then balanced on the banister in
the stairwell, and finally in the Tombs, Bartleby situates himself ever more
securely on this point of contingency, an intervallic space that reveals it-
self, under Agamben’s lens, to be anything but melancholy: “In the end, the
walled courtyard is not a sad place. There is sky and there is grass. And the
creature knows perfectly well ‘where it is.’”81 In the figure of the scribe who
does not exercise his capacity to write (or who exercises his capacity not to
write) Agamben presents us with a Bartleby who achieves the “restitutio in
integrum of possibility,”82 which is in turn the starting point for an “anthro-
pological change” that will unite human action with the human’s definitive,
constitutive, and creative impotentiality.

Slavoj Žižek
The final theorist we will discuss is Slavoj Žižek, who—in terms more explicit
and imperative than those of any of the theorists discussed above—calls for
a “Bartleby politics,” which in turn is a synonym for what he perhaps equally
opaquely calls a “politics of subtraction.” Paradoxically, however, in contrast
certainly to Deleuze and Agamben, Zižek does not really engage or closely
read the text of “Bartleby” in the course of his presentation of the politics of
subtraction.83 Indeed, he seems to take for granted that a sort of constella-
tion of political-philosophical Bartlebys has already come into view and that
its basic contours are familiar enough to his readers that he can allude to
it—polemically as we will see—without elaborating on the tale itself. This,
however, does not mean that he does not stake a particular claim within
the Bartleby-political debate; in fact, he does. What then does Žižek’s own
Bartleby politics look like? Perhaps the best way begin to answer this in the
present context is to examine how Žižek positions his own Bartleby politics
against that of the two theorists with which this section opened: Hardt and
Negri.
As noted above, Hardt and Negri see Bartleby’s refusal as a figure for
218 Kevin Attell

both a thwarted Autonomia and an Agambenian-Heideggerian passivity (as

they see it), and thus appeal to an immanent Spinozan productivity as the
step Bartleby must, but does not, take. Though the Agambenian response
to this is that they misconstrue the nature of potentiality and thus fall into
a sort of Megarianism, Žižek in The Parallax View suggests that Hardt and
Negri forcibly, if surreptitiously, attempt to efface any and all negativity
within the immanent productivity of the multitude. It is a point that has
great resonances with the Agambenian valorization of the impotentiality
that inheres within all potentialities, but unlike Agamben, Žižek appeals to
the force of the negative as it is conceived within the Hegelian-Marxist tra-
dition. In short, one might say that for both Agamben and Žižek, Hardt and
Negri’s insistently productivist and “active” Spinozism neglects or indeed
forcibly represses the work of negativity. Contra Hardt and Negri’s view
that Bartleby’s refusal constitutes “the first move of, as it were, clearing the
table, of acquiring a distance toward the existing social universe,” Žižek
suggests that Bartleby’s gesture is instead the index of “a kind of arche,
the underlying principle that sustains the entire movement: far from ‘over-
coming’ it, the subsequent work of construction, rather, gives body to it.”84
Žižek’s question concerns the direction of the inquiry, that is, whether at-
tention is directed toward the future resolution and self-overcoming of the
dialectic or toward the first principle grounding or sustaining it and the
ways this principle can become intelligible.
This sustaining principle is what Žižek elaborates over the course of
this text as the “parallax gap,” an irreducible incompleteness of perspective
or instability of ground, a “minimal difference” dividing everything from it-
self at its most fundamental level, which Žižek acknowledges is very close to
the Derridean notion of différance but which is also akin to the more clearly
Hegelian idea of negativity, the driver, as it were, of the dialectic (and I have
already suggested a proximity to Agambenian impotentiality).85 In contrast
to a thinking oriented toward the working through of the dialectic toward
its telos (in either its Hegelian or Marxist modulations)—that is, toward the
dialectic’s reconciliation with itself in the absolute—“the wager of [Žižek’s]
book is that, far from posing an irreducible obstacle to dialectics, the notion
of the parallax gap provides the key which enables us to discern its subver-
sive core.”86 For Žižek, Bartleby’s attitude is not merely an initial abstract
step toward a second, decisive one of “forming a new alternative order; it is
the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation.”87
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 219

The reason this point is so important for the debate between Hardt and
Negri and Žižek is that in their conceptualization of an affirmative biopoli-
tics of the multitude, Hardt and Negri seek both to derive the coming im-
manent order of the multitude from within the workings of the dialectical
unfolding of the capitalist order and to imagine the body of the multitude
as an immanent absolute positivity. In their vision of the final triumph of the
multitude’s total biopolitical self-production, Hardt and Negri embrace, in
Jodi Dean’s words, “an ethics of affirmation that eliminates negativity from
the political. Politics becomes immanent, part of the nature of things.”88
Bartleby’s refusal, in this model, is a half measure because it remains stuck
in negativity and does not reverse itself into positive productivity. But for
Žižek this final reversal to the immanent and positive productivity of a free
and unhindered multitude—what Hardt and Negri refer to as “absolute de-
mocracy”—effectively attempts to kick away the ladder of the dialectic that
led to it, allowing them to imagine an absolute democracy without (or at
least implicitly without) negativity.
In In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek further develops this argument
(and indeed it is in this book that he actually uses the term “Bartleby
politics”). Here he evokes once again the way that for Hardt and Negri
Bartleby’s refusal remains stuck at a “suicidal marginal position with no
consequences,” 89 but he elaborates this dynamic in terms of a critical ten-
sion between the Hegelian categories of abstract and determinate negation,
categories that he finds implicitly operative in Hardt and Negri’s overtly
anti-Hegelian thought. Arguing that Hardt and Negri covertly “tak[e] over
the underlying Marxist schema of historical progress,”90 Žižek proposes that
for them “Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is a Hegelian ‘abstract negation’
which should then be overcome by the patient positive work of the ‘deter-
minate negation’ of the existing social universe.”91 In presenting Bartleby in
these terms, Hardt and Negri unintentionally not only make “the most stan-
dard (pseudo-) Hegelian critical point,” but also reveal a fault line in their
thinking on the way the positive biopolitics of the multitude arises out of the
conditions of capital (that is, becomes in-itself) and then finally overcomes
those conditions (that is, becomes for-itself).92
Biopolitical production promises, for Hardt and Negri, a stage of human
praxis and production that is finally unsubsumable by capital, insofar as it is,
in Žižek’s gloss, “‘directly’ socialized, socialized in its very content, which
is why it no longer needs the social form of capital imposed onto it.”93 This
220 Kevin Attell

biopolitical praxis of the multitude, in turn, “opens up the possibility of

‘absolute democracy,’ it cannot be enslaved, because it is immediately, in
itself, the form (and practice) of social freedom.”94 Žižek, however, points
again to Hardt and Negri’s implicit assumption of a historical teleology and
its “wager that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marx-
ist gesture and enact the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism,” an ultimate
determinate negation in which the revolutionary dialectic finally comes to
rest in the immanent self-production of the multitude or general intellect in
an “absolute democracy.”95
There is much to say about the details of this expansive and often ar-
cane debate, but the central issue here—since Bartleby is a figure for it—is
the role of negativity in these models of resistance and refusal. Bartleby, for
Hardt and Negri, does not make it to the last stage because he is stuck in
negativity—he is negativity—for which there is no clear place in the imma-
nent collective praxis of the multitude, which has more or less overcome the
dialectic and entered into a new absolute space that, in an important sense
of the term, would be postpolitical. But for Žižek, not only is this beatific
vision symptomatic of a current line of leftist thinking that, he argues, is
animated by a tacit acceptance of the victory of capital and renunciation
of oppositional (that is, class) politics, but it implicitly operates on an im-
manentist ontology of an absolute that has purified itself of the negative.96
By contrast, Žižek argues for an ontology of irreducible negativity, the
fundamental level of which, in Žižek’s Lacanian terminology, is called the
“Real,” which he glosses as “not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap which
prevents our access to it, the ‘rock’ of the antagonism which distorts our
view of the perceived object through a partial perspective . . . the very
gap, passage, which separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this
case: social antagonism) which makes the two perspectives radically incom-
mensurable.”97 Whether and to what degree this gap is to be identified with
différance, Lacanian lack, or Hegelian negativity—or any combination of
these— is a question that lies too far afield from the present discussion, but
insofar as it is the first principle on which Žižek’s political ontology is based,
and the principle by virtue of which Žižek distinguishes his Bartleby poli-
tics from that imagined by Hardt and Negri, it marks the stark divergence
in their conceptions of the nature of the absolute (or, in the precise termi-
nology of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s final chapter, “absolute knowing,”
the self-arrival of spirit at the end of its journey through history). As Adrian
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 221

Johnston puts it, for Žižek “absolute knowing, as the self-relating of pure
negativity, entails the insight that there is no such position of conclusive
stability; the reconciliation achieved by absolute knowing amounts to the
acceptance of an insurmountable incompleteness, an irresolvable driving
tension that cannot finally be put to rest through the one last Aufhebung.”98
What, then, of Bartleby and of Bartleby politics? Bartleby, in his with-
drawal, short-circuits the traditional progression of sublation by insisting on
the persistence and, so to speak, presence of the negative in every social or
indeed ontological formation. Along these lines, Žižek, too, draws attention
to the fact that Bartleby’s phrase is not really a refusal or straight negation.
“Bartleby does not negate the predicate; rather he affirms a non-predicate,”
and in doing so steps into a “new space outside the hegemonic position
and its negation.”99 In distinction from a politics of resistance or protest,
which is caught up in a dialectical unfolding that is ceaselessly engaged in
a chase for its own tail, insofar as it seeks the final negation and reconciling
Aufhebung, Bartleby’s is a “gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduc-
tion of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference,”
which instead illuminates or makes visible (and, most important, affirms)
the irreducible parallax sustaining the entire dialectical edifice.100 As Žižek
summarily puts it, in terms that resonate strongly with the logic of impoten-
tiality proposed by Agamben: “The difference between Bartleby’s gesture
of withdrawal and the formation of a new order is . . . that of parallax: the
very frantic and engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained by
an underlying ‘I would prefer not to’ which forever reverberates in it—or, as
Hegel might have put it, the new postrevolutionary order does not negate its
founding gesture, the explosion of the destructive fury that wipes away the
Old; it merely gives body to this negativity. The difficulty of imagining the
New is the difficulty of imagining Bartleby in power.”101
For Žižek and Agamben, in his obscure and minimal existence Bartle-
by is the embodiment, or the placeholder, of a negativity or potentiality that
exists and persists as such, and does not simply efface itself or disappear in
the onto-political drama of becoming. The tension Bartleby creates on this
stage is not that between two opposing or successive positivities, but that
between all positivities—all “somethings”—and the negativity or “nothing”
that persists within them, not “the gap between two ‘somethings’ [but] the
gap that separates a something from a nothing, from the void of its own
place.”102
222 Kevin Attell

This is the field that Žižek’s politics of subtraction is intended to open

up and—to borrow a Heideggerian term—dwell in. And in doing so, in
subtracting or withdrawing itself radically from the dynamic of direct resis-
tance to (but also definition by) the ruling hegemonic power, the subject of
a Žižekian Bartleby politics seeks to remove the keystone from the politi-
cal edifice, causing it to collapse. “Subtraction is the ‘negation of negation’
(or ‘determinate negation’), in other words, instead of directly negating-
destroying the ruling power, remaining within its field, it undermines this
very field, opening up a new positive space.”103 Bartleby’s withdrawal for
Žižek is not a passivity and acceptance of the hegemony of the ruling order,
but rather a passive aggressiveness whose radicalness renders it more threat-
ening to that order than any direct resistance. As Žižek writes, in a passage
that visualizes the triumph—if not the precise concrete performance—of
a politics of subtraction: “Imagine the proverbial house of cards or a pile of
wooden pieces which rely on one another in such a complex way that, if one
single card or piece of wood is pulled out—subtracted—the whole edifice
collapses: this is the true art of subtraction.”104 And Bartleby, on Žižek’s
reading, is the great virtuoso, and indeed namesake, of this subtractive po-
litical “art.”
Admittedly, this account of Žižek’s Bartleby politics, like that of every
philosophical Bartleby discussed in this chapter, has focused on what might
be called the first principles of the philosophical-political argument, cer-
tainly to the neglect of many practical and concrete questions. Whether
these accounts are more about philosophy than politics is a question that
will be left open here; nevertheless, in surveying the ways in which Mel-
ville’s foundling scrivener has been adopted by the theorists discussed in
the preceding pages, one finds that it is indeed at the point of political-
philosophical first principles that Bartleby tends to intervene, appearing,
as it were, motionless on the “office threshold, the door being open” (“Bar-
tleby,” 641–642), as if he had always been there, “a perpetual sentry in the
corner” (ibid., 646). Why is Bartleby so emblematic for these thinkers? The
answer lies, unsurprisingly, in his impassivity, his neutrality, his negativ-
ity, his preference-not-to—everything that is conveyed in his “mildly ca-
daverous reply” (ibid., 655) to the lawyer. And as the foregoing discussion
has sought to show, these thinkers’ interpretations and appropriations of
Melville’s tale, as brilliant and perceptive as they all are, can be read as a
series of Rorschach tests, in which projected onto the inkblot of the scriv-
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 223

ener (who, unlike Turkey, was never “incautious in dipping his pen into his
inkstand” [ibid., 637]) we can see illuminated the often obscure conceptual
cores of their political ontologies.
Or perhaps he is more like a constellation of stars, a clear sparkling B.
This essay began by noting how Bartleby in the 150 years or so since his
death has been many things to many people. And so perhaps he would not
be surprised to find himself cast in this role as a new sign of the zodiac in
the coelum stellatum of contemporary philosophy.

Notes
1. For a comprehensive overview and bibliography of the criticism, to which
this very brief distillation is greatly indebted, see the chapter on “Bartleby” in Lea
Bertani Vozar Newman, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 19–78.
2. J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990). Additionally, in a sort of inversion of Bartleby being many things to
many people, in Enrique Vila-Matas’s marvelous Bartleby & Co., many people be-
come versions of Bartleby. In this book’s idiosyncratic pantheon of “writers of the
No,” Vila-Matas constructs an international canon of Bartlebys, including Robert
Walser, Franz Kafka, Felipe Alfau, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Joubert, Bobi Bazlen,
B. Traven, and many more. Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne
(New York: New Directions, 2000).
3. In his copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton, Melville did not mark
these lines (which are IV:300–308). He did, however, mark lines 289–290 and
316–318. See Robin Grey, ed., Melville and Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 176.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68.
5. Ibid; emphasis in original.
6. Ibid., 70.
7. Deleuze suggests that in this case the “usual formula would instead be I
had rather not” (Essays, 68; emphasis in original), though the grammar of this
phrase, in fact, is much harder to map and, to some American ears at least, would
sound no less odd than Bartleby’s formula. Moreover, even though it appears not
to have anything like the disruptive force of the famous formula, Bartleby’s gram-
matically strangest phrase is probably “I know you . . . and I want nothing to say
to you.” Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in Pierre, Israel Potter, The
Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd (New York:
224 Kevin Attell

Library of America, 1984), 669; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by title
and page number.
8. Deleuze, Essays, 68–69; emphasis in original.
9. Ibid., 71.
10. Ibid., 73.
11. Ibid., 71.
12. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 15.
13. Ibid., 13; emphases in original.
14. Ibid., 141.
15. Ibid., 17.
16. For Austin’s schema of these conditions, see How to Do Things with Words
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 14–15.
17. Indeed, as the tension between Bartleby and the lawyer escalates, Bartleby
is described as being precisely alone, that is, outside all social relations and conven-
tions. Upon his announcement that he has given up copying permanently, Bartleby
seems, in the lawyer’s words, to be “alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of
wreck in the mid Atlantic” (“Bartleby,” 657). And after being fired and instructed
to leave the offices, Bartleby “answered not a word; like the last column of some
ruined temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the other-
wise deserted room” (ibid., 658).
18. Deleuze, Essays, 73; emphases in original.
19. Ibid., 71.
20. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–17.
21. Deleuze, Essays, 72.
22. Ibid., 77.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 89.
25. Ibid., 86–87.
26. Ibid., 86.
27. Ibid., 85.
28. Ibid., 90; emphasis in original.
29. Bartleby also makes a cameo appearance in another text by Derrida, the
1991 lecture “Resistances,” where the neither-active-nor-passive response of his
formula is read as a figure for the repetition compulsion in psychoanalysis. The
psychoanalytic context of that reading, however, puts the Bartleby of “Resistances”
too far afield of the more political-ethical argument at issue here. See Jacques Der-
rida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and
Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 24.
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 225

30. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, 2nd ed., trans.
David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 75.
31. Ibid., 79–80.
32. In truth, this chapter is in large part a reading of Kierkegaard’s reading of
Abraham’s sacrifice in Fear and Trembling (1843), and indeed at times Derrida
writes in a sort of free, indirect style that makes it difficult to separate his and
Kierkegaard’s claims. Nevertheless, whether it is the text of Genesis or of Fear and
Trembling that Derrida is reading, the argument is transposed into and subsumed
by Derrida’s own distinctive conceptual vocabulary.
33. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 59–60.
34. Ibid., 60.
35. Ibid., 60–61.
36. Ibid., 67.
37. And this identification in Derrida is not a mere passing comment: “The
other as absolute other, namely God” (ibid., 67); “God is the name of the absolute
other as other and as unique” (ibid., 68); “the absolute other: God if you wish”
(ibid., 69).
38. This is a distinction that Martin Hägglund has helpfully glossed as that be-
tween what Hegel defined as a “positive infinity” and a “negative infinity.” See his
discussion in Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), 92–96.
39. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 71.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 78.
42. Ibid., 78–79.
43. Ibid., 75.
44. This national division should, however, not be taken as a particularly rigid
one, since many of the autonomist movements mentioned below were greatly in-
fluenced by the work of, among others, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari (and
vice versa).
45. For accounts of Autonomia, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class
Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press,
2002), and chap. 2 of George Katsiaficas’s The Subversion of Politics: Europe-
an Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), as well as the collection of primary and
secondary sources in Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds., Autonomia:
Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
46. Mario Tronti, Operai e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), 260; my translation.
47. Lotringer and Marazzi, Autonomia, 29.
48. Tronti, Operai e Capitale, 30; my translation
226 Kevin Attell

49. Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003),
111; emphasis in original.
50. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 204.
51. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 224.
52. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009), x.
53. With this last term, the titles of each of the books constituting Hardt and
Negri’s trilogy have been named. The middle volume is Multitude: War and De-
mocracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), in which this further
gloss on biopolitical-immaterial production is offered: “Material production—the
production, for example, of cars, televisions, clothing, and food—creates the means
of social life. . . . Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of
ideas, images, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations,
tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself. Immaterial produc-
tion is biopolitical” (146; emphases in original).
54. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 358; emphasis in original.
55. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State,
trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
326–327.
56. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 205; emphasis in original.
59. Ibid., 203.
60. Ibid., 204.
61. Ibid., 203.
62. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 228.
63. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204.
64. “[Heidegger] brings phenomenology back to classical ontology not in order
to develop a means to reconstruct being through human productive capacities but
rather as a meditation on our telluric condition, our powerlessness, and death. All
that can be constructed, all that resistances and struggles produce, is here instead
disempowered and found ‘thrown’ onto the surface of being.” Hardt and Negri,
Commonwealth, 29.
65. Max Henniger and Antonio Negri, “From Sociological to Ontological In-
quiry: An Interview with Antonio Negri,” Italian Culture 23 (2005): 162. For a
more detailed discussion of the division between Negri and Agamben, see my “Po-
tentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power,” diacritics 39, no. 3 (2009): 35–53.
66. Agamben’s essay first appeared alongside an Italian translation of Deleuze’s
Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis 227

Bartleby essay in a volume called Bartleby, la formula della creazione (Macerata:

Quodlibet, 1993). Agamben’s Bartleby essay, however, is an expansion of a brief
but important chapter (titled “Bartleby”) in Agamben, The Coming Community,
trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), which
was published in 1990—and there is an even earlier piece by Agamben called
“Bartleby Writes No More” published in the communist newspaper Il Manifesto
in 1988.
67. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 253–254.
68. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 45.
69. Giorgio Agamben, “The Work of Man,” trans. Kevin Attell, in Sovereignty
& Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007), 1.
70. Ibid., 2.
71. Ibid.
72. Agamben, Potentialities, 183.
73. Agamben, “Work of Man,” 10.
74. Among the arguments Agamben puts forth concerning the linguistic fea-
tures of the formula, perhaps the most crucial is his alignment of Bartleby’s “I
would prefer not to” with the Greek expression “ou mallon, ‘no more than,’ the
technical term with which the Skeptics denoted their most characteristic experi-
ence: epokhe, ¯ ‘suspension’” (Agamben, Potentialities, 256). Used, for example, in
an assertion such as “Scylla exists no more than a chimera,” ou mallon grammati-
cally makes neither positive nor negative claims concerning the truth or falsity,
being or nonbeing, of a given proposition. It suspends all propositions and “predi-
cates nothing of nothing” (ibid., 257).
75. Ibid., 268.
76. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 366.
77. Agamben, The Coming Community, 37.
78. Agamben, Potentialities, 269.
79. Ibid., 249.
80. Ibid., 260; translation modified.
81. Ibid., 271.
82. Ibid., 267.
83. A point noted by Jodi Dean in Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006),
197.
84. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 382.
85. Ibid., 11.
86. Ibid., 4.
228 Kevin Attell

87. Ibid., 382.

88. Dean, Žižek’s Politics, 120.
89. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 353.
90. Ibid., 352.
91. Ibid., 353.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 357.
94. Ibid., 356; emphasis in original.
95. Ibid., 338.
96. Ibid., 337–339.
97. Žižek, Parallax View, 281; emphases in original.
98. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of
Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 235.
99. Žižek, Parallax View, 381–382; emphasis in original.
100. Ibid., 382.
101. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
102. Ibid.
103. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 409; emphasis in original.
104. Ibid., 409–410; emphases in original.