Heroic passivity in “Bartleby, the scrivener”

Herman Melville’s Bartleby is a fundamentally passive character who has nonetheless been regularly presented as carrying out a heroic resistance. This paradoxical conjunction of passivity and heroic action is particularly acute in philosophical readings of Melville’s novella. Philosophers have identified Bartleby as a “New Messiah,” or new “New Christ” whose passive resistance offers a form of revolutionary emancipation from existing political structures, thereby affirming the paradox that Bartleby is a hero who does not act.By examining the paradox of Bartleby’s heroic passivity through the structuralist theories of Vladimir Propp and Louis Althusser, this thesis contends that Bartleby is not an enigmatic, heroic or political subject. Instead, these structuralist approaches to Bartleby’s heroic passivity elucidate a particular, exceptional and aleatory passage through which Bartleby’s passivity becomes resistance. By tracing Giorgio Agamben’s and Gilles Deleuze’s political valorisation of Bartleby’s paradoxical heroism due to his passive resistance, and by examining the criticisms of their work by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, this thesis contends that, although Bartleby’s passive resistance cannot be constitutive towards any corporeal collectivisation of politics, the singularity of its expression necessarily implicates a thought of the political at the junction of literature and philosophy