Event overview
Part of the InC (Continental Philosophy Research Group) autumn seminar series: Force and the Worst.
These seminars seek to present current research undertaken in the field of continental philosophy, by current research students, members of Goldsmiths academic staff and external visiting academics. All events are free and open to both members of Goldsmiths and the general public.
Abstract:
‘I would prefer not to’: such is the oft-cited ‘formula’ of Bartleby, the central figure in Herman Melville’s eponymous 1856 novella Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. Whilst responses dedicated to the figure of Bartleby, his response and its consequences abound (many of which focusing on Bartleby as an exemplary figure of ‘passive resistance,’ as is of interest here), this paper will approach Bartleby’s utterance through the writings of Jacques Derrida. Focusing on Bartleby’s words as an act of response, the few fleeting references to Bartleby to be found within Derrida’s published works are inscribed within a broader thinking of responsibility and a certain conception of ‘passion’ – what we might call a ‘passive resistance’ – that, it is argued, inform Derrida’s entire oeuvre.
For Derrida, Bartleby’s response is a ‘sacrificial passion that will lead him to his death, a death given by the law, by a society that doesn’t even know why it acts the way it does.’ Addressing Bartleby’s response as a question of passion, sacrifice, the secret, and responsibility, the paper looks firstly to Derrida’s The Gift of Death, where Bartleby’s response is read in light of Abraham’s ordeal on Mount Moriah, the terrifying ordeal that becomes exemplary of the aporia of responsibility that we are faced with in every decision, response and relation to the other. Arguing that this aporia is predicated upon an experience of language which must be suffered and endured, yet nonetheless responded to and grappled with, the paper subsequently looks to other texts, sketching out a thinking of différance as another name for ‘passion,’ albeit a paleonymic passion that is not bound up in, but rather comes before, the dichotomy active/passive. This passionate experience is in turn is addressed in terms of Bartleby’s response which, it is argued, following Derrida, ‘takes on the responsibility of a response without response’; a responsibility that consists of ‘actively’ or ‘affirmatively’ responding to the experience of language, as passion (as ‘acti/passivity’), and to the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of the other.
Thinking this ‘response without response’ in terms of a ‘relation without relation’ (the ‘x without x’ through which Derrida responds to Blanchot), it is argued that every responsible relation to the other, as other, must necessarily entail a certain secret; a secret which once again is addressed in terms of passion, différance and a certain necessary violence, and in terms of a certain literariness of writing. The paper then turns to a thinking of Bartleby’s response as what Derrida, in response to the writings of Hélène Cixous, names the ‘Omnipotence-otherness [Tout-puissance-autre]’ of literature, in so far as Bartleby’s ‘singularly insignificant statement,’ in the very ambiguity of its sense and modality and in its resemblance of a secret language, can be read as an exemplary act of resistance. Finally, this is addressed in terms of what Derrida, again responding to Cixous, names the ‘puisse’; yet another paleonymic reinvention in which ‘power [puissance]’ is reformulated as a certain non-power (what we might call the powerlessness of an arche-performative) that, as an ‘originary subjunctive,’ feeds back into a thinking of the messianic ‘perhaps’ of Bartleby’s response.
Shela Sheikh is a PhD student in the Department of History, Goldsmiths. Her research focuses on the relationship between testimony and martyrdom in the work of Jacques Derrida.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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2 Nov 2010 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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