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The essay considers Hermann Melville’s character Bartleby as an example of irresponsible power, since, in the story, the scrivener changes deeply his lawyer employer’s way of thinking and living, without giving any single answer to the many questions which the narrator keeps asking him about his apparently absurd behavior. The article offers some reflections about the difficulties that legal rules, as well as other set of rules (moral, ethics) meet when they are called to face irresponsible powers, and about the need to keep asking questions, though knowing that they will meet no final answers (thus accepting the irrationality of life, and coping with it).

In his treatise \"On Detachment,\" Meister Eckhart underscores that the detached soul has the power to compel God. This article draws on Eckhart's concept of detachment to explore the gravitational pull that Melville's Bartleby exerts on both the narrator and the other characters in his law practice. In abstaining from the \"common usage\" of the practice and in abandoning \"common sense,\" Bartleby brings to the fore another ground for communal living, although this ground can never be claimed as an individual or collective possession. It is the ground of being, or, in the vocabulary of the tale, the premise that everyone shares provided that it never becomes a property or a predicate. Eckhart's detached soul and Melville's Bartleby are companion figures to the extent that in doing—or preferring to do—nothing they expose the nothingness of all individual inclinations and preferences.

This article explores Herman Melville’s “The Piazza” through the lens of what social psychologists term the Just-World Hypothesis. Written last and serving as the opening story of The Piazza Tales, “The Piazza” presents readers with an imaginative narrator whose actions toward a young woman he meets in a lonely mountain cabin often seem puzzling; the present essay analyzes his behavior by examining the psychology of Belief in a Just World, a phenomenon that potentially explains why people often reject and blame victims of tragedy and those who suffer. This analysis, in turn, illuminates aspects of similar psychological positions for characters in other stories in The Piazza Tales, most notably the lawyer in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” While Melville’s works are often explored through the lenses of philosophy and morality, his ability to capture complex psychology in a realistic manner is powerfully demonstrated in The Piazza Tales, especially in the opening story.

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

This paper brings together Žižek's Bartleby politics with the praxis of organic intellectuals emerging out of the “Bougainville crisis”, in order to generate a new vantage point for theorizing anti-colonial resistance to state violence. Bartleby politics, it is argued, conceptualizes how socio-symbolic orders naturalize their existence, and the strategies required to disrupt this completeness of power, so we can begin again. Applying this approach, it is argued during colonization metropolitan powers shatter the permanency of indigenous socio-symbolic orders, by situating them within a wider (contrived) teleological historical sequence. However, the metropolitan power's capacity to manage this risky enterprise—where the possibility of possibility emerges—is shaped by anti-colonial resistance. This resistance can shift a teleological moment to a contingent moment, where multiple vectors of history are opened up by the colonized “subjects,” that go beyond the set sequence offered by the colonial power. One of the most radical forms of violence colonized “subjects” can inflict on the colonial powers during this open historical moment, it is argued, is refusal. Refusal, that is to negotiate the terms and conditions of incorporation into Empire, and instead unilaterally setting a different historical course. The violence refusal inflicts on Empire, and the greater violence Empire inflicts back, will be examined through the case study of the Bougainville war.

This essay explores the problem of the “unaccountable” in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1856) in light of the Kantian idea of freedom. The lawyer-narrator declares his own inability to tell a story of Bartleby, but by doing so he also emphasizes the scrivener’s accountableness, by which Bartleby is presented as a character of exceptional originality. Bartleby might thus appear free in the Kantian sense, because his unaccountableness suggests that the determining ground of his will is not determined by inclinations in nature but is independent from it. But, pointing out that this construction of Bartleby is based on unaccountableness that ends up in nothing but the modern notion of individualism or subjectivity, which is not freedom as such but a fantasy of freedom, I argue that Bartleby destroys precisely such subjectivity by his thing-like immobility. The lawyer cannot decide at last whether Bartleby is a human subject or a piece of furniture fixed in his office.

This article appropriates the concept of energy in order to analyze the interaction between the Danish welfare state and the category of citizens referred to among social workers and health professionals as “passive citizens.” While passivity might commonly be seen as mere inactivity—a certain non-action beyond the unfolding of social life—this article argues that in the Danish welfare society, the opposite is the case. In fact, in this context various forms of passivity have become the object of concerted political and media attention and the general schism between energy and passivity has become part of a public discourse on elderly health care and aging. By examining the way health care professionals talk about passive senior citizens in terms of a lack of energy, this article shows how, in a wider sense, passivity is framed as a particular problem that can be overcome through the right health care intervention. I argue that energy and passivity have become of key interest to the Danish welfare state in managing its aging population and that the attempt to activate the passive citizen in fact energizes the welfare state.

In Homo Sacer , Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail.

Nancy D. Goldfarb, “Charity as Purchase: Buying Self-Approval in Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’” (pp. 233–261) This essay examines Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) in light of recent scholarship in philanthropic studies. Through the lawyer-narrator, Melville’s story discreetly challenges the representation of charity as a viable means of redistributing wealth and restoring balance to an unequal social structure. The narrator masterfully employs the rhetoric of charity to negotiate his role in Bartleby’s tragic outcome, generating a self-promoting narrative that deflects potential criticism. His charitable acts toward Bartleby do not fulfill Kenneth Boulding’s criterion for philanthropy as a “one-way transfer”; rather, they constitute an exchange. In return for his financial gifts, the lawyer assuages his guilt and cheaply purchases “a delicious self-approval.” The story demonstrates the extent to which the profit-oriented culture represented by Wall Street is antithetical to a sense of obligation for others. By neglecting his civic responsibility and excessively valuing money, the narrator finds himself incapable of a spiritual connection with Bartleby and, despairing of his ability to assist his employee, instead offers him charity. Once the lawyer begins to perceive Bartleby as useful, the potential of charity to express human fellowship transforms into a means to profit. “Bartleby” demonstrates how in late capitalism the needy cease to be seen as individual human beings and subjects of their own lives. Rather, they are seen as an occasion for a purchase, an opportunity to achieve one’s objectives by means of what are now tax-deductible donations.