근대체제와 애매성 -「필경사 바틀비」재론 = The Modern System and the Ambiguity: Rethinking “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper proposes to examine what the inscrutable and ambiguous elements in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” might convey us in relation with the modern world s a ``system``, by taking issues with the recent arguments presented by several prominent political and philosophical thinkers. Their fervent responses have been triggered off from Bartleby``s unforgettable ``formula``, “I would prefer not to”, which respectively indicates “the beginning of liberatory politics” to Hardt and Negri, an arche enabling the departure from the anti-systemic power(politics of ``protest``)as well as from the main stream to Zizek, the embodiment of the pure, absolute potentiality to Agamben, and “the brother-community” freed from the paternal function to Deleuze. Among others, Agamben casts Bartleby as a white sheet at the abyss of potentiality, and puts him on the pedestal of the Messiah. One the other hand, for Deleuze Bartleby``s singular response, which is neither refusal nor acceptance, is nothing more than the resistance to the pervasive paternalism. In this sense, the attempt of the lawyer-narrator to make a true relationship with Bartleby beyond the contract of employment can be viewed as an exploration of “the possibility of a becoming, of a new man.” Admitting those approaches on Bartleby have shed intriguing lights on Melville``s story itself, this paper argues that they can be refracted by rather reductive ways of reading the literary work. The ambiguous elements surrounding Bartleby, for one thing, help to question the validity of the symptomatic interpretations, thereby having us focused on the meaning of his inscrutability per se. He is inscrutable like Moby-Dick, the eternal Other, but the scrivener lost lots of vitality of the creature; he can also be called the exhausted Ahab when his willful, though mild, repetitive refusal to conform comes to such an extent of dying an inscrutable death on the Tomb. More importantly, grappling with the ambiguities deriving from uncanny actions of Bartleby, we unwittingly get to sense that the modern world, though it looks completely rational, might be mad as a system.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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