{"id":10396,"date":"2013-02-16T17:07:48","date_gmt":"2013-02-16T22:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10396"},"modified":"2013-02-18T16:15:23","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T21:15:23","slug":"riha-sumic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/02\/16\/riha-sumic\/","title":{"rendered":"riha sumic Bartleby"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jelica \u0161umi\u010d (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints<\/a>.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.<\/em> 16:3 (2011). 137-147.<\/p>\n

Institute of Philosophy
\nNovi trg 2
\n1000 Ljubljana
\nSlovenia
\nE-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si<\/p>\n

It is the simple fact of one\u2019s own existence as possibility or potentiality.\u00a0 Agamben The Coming Community<\/em> 40<\/p>\n

Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some definite task or goal, the subject must be nullified<\/span>. Indeed, it is only through the destitution of the subject<\/span> that man\u2019s capacity to be pure potentiality can be restored.<\/p>\n

Attributing all transformative force to sovereign power alone, Agamben\u2019s solution, whose ultimate aim is to restore contingency at the heart of necessity, consists in directly valorising the \u2018\u2018not happening\u2019\u2019 or rather the “nothing of happening” in order to consign change to a radical transformation in the subjective status, achieved by means of an operation of disidentification that aims, to use Agamben\u2019s vocabulary, at revoking all vocations.<\/p>\n

Agamben can recognise resistance only in terms of potentiality, which is to say, as passivity or inoperativeness, since, for him, \u2018\u2018the potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, the fundamental passivity\u2019\u2019 (P 182). To the extent that the potentiality that characterises human beings is primarily the potentiality of not doing something, the subject, here, is conceived as a place where the ceaseless operation of declassification, disidentification, is effected \u2013 Bartleby<\/span> being the model or paradigm of such a subjective stance in so far as the latter allows the subject to become nothing other than the pure potentiality to be or not to be.<\/p>\n

The characterisations of the subjective stance in terms of inoperativeness can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the deadlocks of the end of time in so far as such a stance involves \u2018\u2018a suspension of time\u2019\u2019 achieved through the only possible action at the disposal of contemporary subjectivity, an action \u00e0 la Bartleby<\/span>, an anticipatory figure: to opt for non-being, or more exactly, for the potentiality not to be.<\/p>\n

His act (“I would prefer not to”<\/span>…), in effect, consists in a mere taking place of the place. He turns himself into a place, an empty place, this being the only place which sovereign power cannot recapture.<\/p>\n

However, for this place to be preserved, maintained as a place, nothing should take place therein. His act, instead of constituting an event, in its subversive force, prevents all events from happening. Indeed, Agamben\u2019s Bartleby<\/span> can be seen as a guardian of the non-event. Ultimately, rather than risking the danger of falling prey to a bad infinity, Agamben seeks to think a final event.<\/p>\n

Thus, in contrast to Badiou, who thinks events as time-breaking and\/or inaugurating ruptures, Agamben\u2019s main preoccupation is with the event of the end. In light of this, one can also understand why the politico-ethical solution advocated by Agamben essentially consists in saving the past: not something particularly worthy of being remembered, but the past in its whatever character, as it were.<\/p>\n

The world can only be saved if its being-thus in the smallest details is preserved. What is saved, then, is not some break-inaugurating moment, a moment of “eternity,” as Badiou would have it, but the banality of the being-thus.<\/p>\n

It is precisely for this reason that the world can only be “saved” as irreparable, which is to say, ultimately, as absolutely unsaveable. The salvation and therefore the change of the world consist, in the final analysis, only in assuming its radical contingency.<\/p>\n

A true change consists simply in a parallax view, a shift of perception: to see the world as including its potentiality not to be. Yet this change, Agamben insists, minimal as it may appear, is nevertheless extremely difficult to accomplish. In some radical sense, humankind is incapable of achieving it; hence, in order to attain this perspective, the Messiah must come or, at least, Bartleby<\/span>.<\/p>\n

If Deleuze, as Agamben observes, is right in calling Bartleby<\/span> “a new Christ,” this is not because his aim is to \u2018\u2018abolish the old Law and to inaugurate a new mandate.\u2019\u2019 Rather, “if Bartleby<\/span> is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not” (P 270). If there is something Christ-like in Bartleby<\/span>, if he can, despite everything, be compared to a saviour, this is because he descends to the deepest level of Leibniz\u2019s \u2018\u2018Palace of Destinies,\u2019\u2019 in order to reveal “the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where \u2018nothing exists rather than something'” (P 270).<\/p>\n

In Badiou\u2019s vocabulary, we could say that Bartleby<\/span> reveals the inconsistency of being-multiple, an impossible point of the real before Being is localised in any being-there whatsoever, before any world whatsoever can take shape.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas this impossible-real, according to Badiou, can only irrupt to the surface of a world through a rare, unpredictable event, Agamben, on his part, presents it as a result of the subjective destitution.<\/span> 144<\/p>\n

It is precisely because it cannot be situated within a linear temporality of past, present, and future that this time of the now is, as such, the location in which action, the hollowing out of the assigned identities, functions, or symbolic mandates take place. This also explains why the messianic subject, Bartleby<\/span>, is arrested, blocked, as it were, in the “time of the now,” i.e., at the point of the suspension of time, in order to be able to effect his act, that of the de-activation of identifications assigned to him by the socio-symbolic Other.<\/p>\n

The result of the messianic act is not a new creation \u2013 it is rather a decreation<\/span>.<\/p>\n

From such a perspective, Bartleby<\/span> can be seen as someone who turns himself into an utterly irreducible remnant, the sole guardian and guarantor of the empty place destined for \u2018\u2018the experience of taking place in whatever singularity\u2019\u2019 (CC 24). But the price to be paid for this operation of exposure of every singularity to its being-thus, its being whatever, is that the subject himself remains blocked, suspended on the sole act he can effect: I would prefer not to<\/span>, an act which, in so far as it must be repeated again and again, imprisons the subject in a kind of tense-less space created by this very act.<\/p>\n

Hence, it could be said that it is only through a true act of decreation<\/span>, a subtractive act, to be sure, that the mark of contingency in every creature is revealed. If decreation<\/span>, as Agamben tells us, “takes place where Bartleby<\/span> stands” (P 271), we must ask: what exactly is this place where “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; [where] all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence”?<\/p>\n

Here, Lacan\u2019s famous formula, “The word is the murder of the Thing,”<\/strong> can help us to illuminate this singular position of the subject: if the signifier “creates” by breaking the biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing, if the word does not represent the thing but can only attain a meaning by being articulated to another word, this means that the signifier already de-realises or un-realises the world.<\/p>\n

The act of the signifier is precisely an act of decreation<\/span>, rendering indistinguishable that which exists from that which does not exist. If the signifier itself empties all reference, what could then be Bartleby’s<\/span> decreation<\/span>?<\/p>\n

Consider Bartleby’s<\/span> formula: “I would prefer not to.”<\/span> As Deleuze correctly observed in his reading of “Bartleby,”<\/span> Bartleby<\/span> may well use signifiers, yet he does it in a very peculiar way since his formula is destined primarily to cut the link between words and things, between S1 and S2, leaving S1 all alone<\/strong>, in sufferance, in eternal anticipation of the other signifier that would give it a meaning.<\/p>\n

But this formula is itself possible because Bartleby<\/span> occupies the place of an internal exclusion in relation to language. Put otherwise, only for a subject that is outside discourse, discourse, which for Lacan is precisely the social bond, is nothing but a fraud, a make-believe.<\/p>\n

Bartleby’s<\/span> decreation<\/span>, in short, can only be effected from the autistic<\/span> position of the subject who refuses to be caught in any social bond whatsoever, who wants nothing, yet<\/span> prefers not to,<\/span> who treats signifiers as fragmented bodies, without any reference whatsoever to a symbolic order.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is here that we can see what is subversive, really revolutionary, in the act of decreation<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Accomplished by the subject for whom there is no distinction between the real and the symbolic, indeed, by a subject for whom the symbolic is, as such, the real, the act of decreation<\/span> brings into question the Other, the guarantor of the link between words and their references.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Deleuze is right in claiming that Bartleby<\/span>, “even in his catatonic or anorexic state” is not the “sick man” but rather the “Medicine-Man, the new Christ or the brother to us all,” this is because only from the position of the inexistence of the Other \u2013 this being, according to Deleuze, the position of the schizophrenic<\/span> \u2013 the symbolic can appear, for other speaking beings, those who believe in the Other and live by its laws, and who use the symbolic as a defence against the real, as mere semblance.<\/p>\n

From such a perspective, Bartleby’s<\/span> act can be viewed less as an act that decreates<\/span> the created (i.e., the symbolised universe) than as one that decreates<\/span> the decreation<\/span>, a decreation<\/span> to the second power, as it were, because such an act of decreation<\/span> aims at revealing the generalised semblantification at work in the symbolic order itself.<\/p>\n

If the schizophrenic position<\/span>, a position outside discourse, suits well the revolutionary who strives to unbind the existing social bond in order to postulate a different basis for a community,<\/strong> beyond identifications, beyond functions and places,<\/span> this is because it embodies the liberating potential, as well as its risks.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For Lacan, as is well known, “not only can man\u2019s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man\u2019s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is only from such a position of extimacy<\/span> in relation to the social link that “the law of our becoming” can be formulated: “The unsoundable decision of being in which human beings understand or fail to recognize their liberation, in the snare of fate that deceives them about a freedom they have not in the least conquered.”<\/p>\n

Lacan. “Presentation on Psychical Causality” \u00c9crits<\/em>, trans. Bruce Fink 145<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jelica \u0161umi\u010d (2011): “Giorgio Agamben’s Godless Saints.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 16:3 (2011). 137-147. Institute of Philosophy Novi trg 2 1000 Ljubljana Slovenia E-mail: jsumr AT zrc-sazu.si It is the simple fact of one\u2019s own existence as possibility or potentiality.\u00a0 Agamben The Coming Community 40 Put otherwise, instead of seeking to accomplish some … Continue reading “riha sumic Bartleby”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,72,76,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-objet-a","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10396"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10398,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10396\/revisions\/10398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}