Woosung Kang

In what has been called the "Bartleby Industry," Herman Melville's "A Story of Wall Street" has often been disproportionally evaluated by political theorists for its capacity to be read as a story of resistant subjectivity. Specifically singled out by such critics as an anti-systematic symbol, Bartleby is raised up to the condition of the revolutionary agent who prefigures the political subjectivity of post-industrial society. Taking issue with such premediated political readings, this paper attempts to deconstruct symbolic representations of Bartleby which separates Bartleby from Bartleby. Analyzing the textuality of Bartleby as the autobiography of the lawyer, I argue that critical theorists', especially Giorgio Agamben's, lack of attention to the issue of desire of the lawyer leads to the allegorical over-representation of Bartleby for the theoretical justification of political positions. Appropriating a literary figure for the means of political argumentation, these critical theorists disregard the way Bartleby's story is told by the neurotic lawyer. Agamben valorizes Bartleby as the tragic hero of impotentiality, not questioning the reliability of the lawyer-narrator. What lies beneath the lawyer's repeated emphasis on the insanity of Bartleby's "passive resistance" is defense mechanism to cover up his own madness and fear. Without considering how Bartleby's fabula is structured as a part of the lawyer's syuzhet, any configuration of Bartleby results in an allegory of reading. Focusing on the way the lawyer's autobiography pathologizes Bartleby's biography, I argue that Bartleby resists the discursive system of signification which sentimentalizes him and normalizes the lawyer's anxiety into conscientiousness.

Since the first outbreak at Wuhan, China in December last year, the world was literally shaken by the unexpected arrival of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic and is still being in the harsh grip of its pandemic panic. Virus did not care about how rich you are and where you live. Ironically, the so-called developed countries in the Western territories suffered as severely as China and Iran. It was the state of emergency and we had to fight with the invisible microbes awkwardly adjusting ourselves to the new rules of noli me tangere and social distancing. The extraordinariness of the whole panic came first with the news of the statewide lockdown of Hubei province in China which aggressively isolated more than 50 million people in one night. Then there was the general indignation over the stupid decision of the British government to adopt the policy of "herd immunity," which turns out to be the most controversial and utilitarian idea of quarantine. As an Americanist, I was specifically stunned by the outrageous responses of the Trump administration to the pandemic as well as the lib-ertarian individualism coupled with innate racism against the Asians and the African Americans. The US continuously attempt to size down the seriousness of the pandemic while taking even socialist policies to boost the economy demanding ongoing sacrifice to the poor and the unemployed. Meanwhile, the racist police brutality and the death of George Floyd in the middle of pandemic worsen the situation and put the whole American society in extremely vulnerable racial confrontation. The nationwide turmoil of fierce public protest against racism in the US clearly demonstrates that the health issues always have much to do with the political complaints: American people start to question the legitimacy of their racist state system as the defender of their individual safety. Racism turns out to be the deadlier ideological virus than the epidemic one. No wonder Slavoj Žižek foresaw the libertarian protest against the quarantine and the outbreak of racist and xenophobic virus of ideology in the English Language and Literature

Herman Melville's famous novella "Bartleby" has been circulated and consumed in the terrain of philosophical discourses aptly demonstrating the problematic status of a literary text within the realm of critical theory. Plenty of literary and critical theorists from Agamben to Deleuze like to take the figure of Bartleby as a political symbol supporting their arguments, but they often ignore the way he is represented as a part of a singular literary narrative. They tend to separate Bartleby from "Bartleby," capitalizing exclusively on his peculiar implication as a resistant political subjectivity which is supposed to signify something subversive in the systematic order of global capitalism. As a result, the figure of Bartleby, isolated from the literary context, has been easily reduced to a free signifier representing what the critical theorists desire to prove. But Bartleby in "Bartleby" is constitutively described by the unnamed lawyer to be a pathetic melancholic or a man of mental disorder whose inscrutable commanding presence with enigmatic formula, "I would prefer not to," is thought to configure a certain political potentiality. Reformulating the way Bartleby is co-opted and pathologized by the discourse of the lawyer, I would like to re-situate the figure of Bartleby within the contextual representation, taking the issue with theoretical and philosophical appropriation of a literary text. Taking example of recent critical analyses of Bartleby, I hope to demonstrate how theoretical analysis of a literary text often depends upon the cursory reading of the syuzhet of the text and how it drives the whole argument into its own ethical abyss.

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