The Event and Truth of Bartleby: Badiou Puzzles Out Melville’s Enigma

Tohid Teymouri

doi:10.4025/actascilangcult.v48.i2.78705

Authors

Tohid Teymouri University of Zanjan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4025/actascilangcult.v48.i2.78705

Keywords:

void; situation; knowledge; hysteric; forcing; literary event.

Abstract

Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street presents one of literature’s most enigmatic characters—a figure whose systematic refusal to participate in the mechanisms of society resists all interpretative closure. This study applies Alain Badiou’s philosophy of event and truth to decode Bartleby’s radical singularity, arguing that Bartleby functions as a pure event that exposes the void inherent in any situation. Rather than representing a psychological or symbolic being, Bartleby embodies what Badiou terms the ‘void’—that which exceeds the knowledge systems and presentational structures of a situation. Through Bartleby’s famous formula ‘I would prefer not to’, the text articulates an a-structural resistance that prevents the situation from achieving totality and completeness. Drawing on Badiou’s triadic features of the void—indifference, infinity, and immeasurability—this paper demonstrates how Bartleby’s impotentiality (following Agamben’s reading of Aristotle) operates as a forcing that transforms situations by highlighting what they systematically conceal. By integrating Lacanian discourse theory, particularly the discourse of the hysteric, alongside Deleuzian linguistic analysis, the study reveals how Bartleby’s unnameable singularity disrupts hegemonic narratives and opens possibilities for thinking beyond established knowledge. Ultimately, this analysis positions Bartleby as an exemplary literary event whose inexhaustible enigma calls into question any interpretative system claiming finality, thereby establishing Bartleby as a singular site where truth emerges through its very resistance to representation.

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