Beyond Bartleby and Bad Faith: ThinkingCritically with Sartre and Deleuze

Dominic Smith University of Dundee

Abstract

This essay argues that important critical and political perspective canbe gained on Deleuzes famous essay, Bartleby; or, The Formula byviewing it as an attempt to move beyond the Sartrean frameworkof bad faith. The argument comprises four sections. In section one,I contextualise Deleuzes essay in terms of contrasting readings ofBartleby, from a prior account by Georges Perec, to contemporaryaccounts indebted to Deleuze, from Hardt and Negris Empire to GisleBerkmans recent LEffet Bartleby. The argument of this section is thata problematically reductive image of Bartleby has emerged in the wakeof Deleuzes essay, but that this can be challenged in favour of a morenuanced and politically significant reading by contextualising the essayas an attempt to overcome bad faith. In section two, I develop thisby drawing out the nature and relevance of the threat posed by badfaith through a focus on Sartrean, Deleuzian and Badioucan critiques ofBartleby, before arguing, in section three, that attention to the concept ofa logic of presuppositions developed in Deleuzes essay shows how badfaith can be overcome. These sections all build towards the fourth andlongest section, which draws out the wider political significance of whatit means to overcome bad faith. To do so, I pay attention to how logics ofpresupposition function in Bartlebys story, and consider Deleuzes essayin relation to his work on control societies and collective assemblagesof enunciation.

Keywords: Deleuze, Badiou, Hardt and Negri, Sartre, Agamben,Rancire, iek, Bartleby, Perec, Melville, Berkman, the formula, bad

Deleuze Studies 7.1 (2013): 83105DOI: 10.3366/dls.2013.0095 Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/dls

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faith, logic of presuppositions, image of thought, control societies,collective assemblages of enunciation

I. Contextualising Bartleby

In his 1967 novel, Un Homme qui dort, Georges Perec gives thefollowing summary of Herman Melvilles 1853 short story, Bartleby theScrivener:

Some time ago, in New York, several hundred metres from the barriers wherethe last waves of the Atlantic come to break, a man let himself die. He was ascribe in a law firm. Hidden behind a dividing screen, he remained seated athis desk and never moved from it. He fed on gingerbread biscuits. From thewindow, he looked upon a wall of blackened bricks that he could almost havetouched with his hand. It was useless to ask anything of him whatsoever tore-read a drafted document or to go for the mail. Neither threats nor pleashad a hold on him. In the end . . . [t]hey had to chase him from the office. Heinstalled himself in the stairway of the building. They locked him up, but hesat down in the prison yard and refused to eat. (Perec 2004: 132; translationmodified)

This description contrasts strikingly with Deleuzes essay on Bartleby,and with literature to have emerged in its wake.

Written in the third person, Perecs description outlines a story witha clear beginning, middle and end: a man (Bartleby) was employed asa scribe, he sat, he ate, he looked, he refused and, eventually, he lethimself die. There are forms of passivity and finality at work herethat contrast greatly with Deleuzes reading. For Deleuze, Bartleby isa violently comical text, marked by the disruptive activity of a centralstatement: I would prefer not to (Deleuze 1998: 68). This statement,repeated by Bartleby throughout the text, is what Deleuze famously callsthe formula, and it is the link bringing together the storys successiveevents: leading Bartleby from the position of worker, through repeatedpreferences not to, to vagrancy and death in prison.

In Deleuzes treatment, everything is geared toward allowing theformula to break out of Melvilles text and have effects beyondit. The formula, we are told, is devastating to any comfortablepresuppositions on what shapes identity, action and choice, because,neither an affirmation nor a negation, it eliminates the preferablejust as mercilessly as any nonpreferred (Deleuze 1998: 701). Thereby,Deleuze takes the formula to send presuppositions on how languagefunctions into flight and to make of Bartleby a man without references,

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without possessions, without properties, without qualities, withoutparticularities (74). Instead of narrowing Bartlebys significance,however, it is precisely these effects of the formula that Deleuze takes tocomprise it. If, through a speech act, Bartleby is progressively strippedof what particularises him (as, for example, worker or vagrant), then,Deleuze holds, his actions become the more universally significant forit. As Deleuze influentially puts it, Bartleby emerges with no otherdetermination than that of being man, Homo tantum (86), and it isprecisely this that he takes to comprise the wider significance of theformula: as a political act that frustrates and undoes the limits ofidentity.

In contrast, everything in Perecs summary seems designed to containBartleby. In Deleuzes essay, Bartleby is placed in an inter-textualnetwork including figures like Musil, Thoreau, Henry James and Kleist.In contrast, Perecs summary is intent on making virtues of its economyand banality of description. In Deleuzes essay, Bartleby, having emergedas a form of Homo tantum, is situated in terms of great cosmic themesof democracy, exodus, and the literary and political messianism of thenineteenth century (Deleuze 1998: 86). In contrast, Perec seems intenton distilling a storys essence by isolating it and reducing it to an object.To complete the contrast, what could be more striking than the fact thatPerec makes no reference to the formula? For Deleuze, the formulais something which every loving reader repeats in turn (68); Perec,however, has treated of his avowedly favourite short story by Melville(Perec 1965: 1415) while omitting reference to it entirely.

It is not only Deleuzes reading that Perecs approach causes us torevisit. Going further, we should reconsider the influence of Deleuzesessay on subsequent readings of Bartleby. In Hardt and Negris Empire,for example, Bartleby again emerges as a form of Homo tantum, andhe is again situated in terms of grand political and historical themes.Working in a context opened up by Deleuze, Hardt and Negri readBartleby as a figure of absolute refusal, now construing the formulaas a negative moment in a movement with potentially more constructivesocio-political effects. As they put it:

[Bartlebys] refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it isonly a beginning . . . What we need is to create a new social body, which isa project that goes well beyond refusal . . . [W]e need . . . to construct a newmode of life and above all a new community. (Hardt and Negri 2001: 204)

Aiming at a community capable of resisting global capitalism in the formof Empire, this reading is more explicitly dialectical and programmatic

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than that of Deleuze. Emerging in explicit contrast to it, we have Slavojieks reading, which holds that:

Bartlebys attitude is not merely the first, preparatory, stage for the second,more constructive, work of forming a new alternative order; it is the verysource and background of this order, its permanent foundation . . . [T]hevery frantic and engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained byan underlying I would prefer not to which forever reverberates in it. (iek2006: 382)

For iek, Bartlebys formula is a permanent foundation which, contraHardt and Negri, is never properly overcome, but which haunts anyalternative political order whatsoever. What this reading importantlyshares with that of Hardt and Negri, however, is a background contextopened up by Deleuze that situates Bartleby as a form of Homo tantumof grand political and historical significance. In this respect, iek isin close proximity to another influential reading: Giorgio Agambensaccount of Bartleby as a figure of potentiality, the experience of which,Agamben holds, is possible only if [it] is always also potential not to (door think something) (Agamben 1999: 250). As with iek, Agambenreads Bartleby in a less straightforwardly dialectical sense than Hardtand Negri. As with iek and Hardt and Negri both, however, hisreading shares the context opened up Deleuze again situating Bartlebyas a form of Homo tantum of grand ontological, political and historicalsignificance.

And herein lies the problem that the very banality of Perecs summarydraws to attention. Has not this context become stifling, such thatBartleby now gets uncritically presupposed as a symbol for a kind ofgrand narrative refusal and resistance, causing other aspects of both hisstory and Deleuzes treatment of it to go unnoticed?1 What is perhaps atthe root of this problem is the eulogistic (if not downright eschatologicaland messianic) tone with which Deleuze concludes his essay: Bartleby isnot the patient, but the doctor . . . the new Christ or . . . brother to usall (Deleuze 1998: 90).2 This tone has a lineage in French treatments ofBartleby dating back to at least Blanchot.3 The danger, however, is that itstands, in spite of itself, to make Bartleby emerge reductively as a hero(whether tragic or comic), whose actions are to be straightforwardlypraised, mimicked or ignored, and whose formula reads like a soundbiteor slogan.

Significantly, even accounts that dispute Deleuzes reading tend tocompound this image. Jacques Rancire, for one, has claimed thatDeleuzes account of Bartleby is too aestheticised to point toward any

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meaningful form of political justice (Rancire 2004: 164). Strongerstill, and as we will shortly examine in depth, Alain Badiou hascharacterised Bartleby as a figure of betrayal, too intent on nihilisticrefusal to exhibit the commitment necessary for political change (Badiou2006: 422). Like the more sympathetic accounts identified above,however, these readings share in the tendency to make Bartleby emergereductively. This is because, while they contest Bartlebys heroism, theydo not dispute that this is the proper context in which to discuss hisstory.

To overcome this, this essay contextualises Deleuzes readingdifferently as an attempt to move beyond the Sartrean frameworkof bad faith. In her recent LEffet Bartleby, Berkman suggests thatBartlebys significance pertains to a moment of French philosophythat has passed.4 By contextualising Deleuzes essay as an attempt toovercome bad faith, this essay disputes this. It has several aims in doingso: to highlight the contemporary relevance of Deleuzes relation toSartre and the extent to which bad faith comprises a restrictive andmoralising threat; to highlight what conditions bad faith; and, above all,to argue that Bartlebys actions take on renewed political significancewhen viewed as a way of overcoming it. Respectively, these are the aimsof sections two, three and four to follow.

II. Bad Faith: Its Nature and Its Relevance

Sartres early period work sets up a famous dualism. Human beings, heholds, are composites of being and nothingness. On the one hand,one is a being insofar as one is an object, thing or in itself, situatedwithin the world. On the other, insofar as one is a human being, oneis also irreducible to this state: a nothingness, consciousness or foritself. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre construes human freedom inthese terms. One is free, he holds, only insofar as one becomes consciousof the simultaneous being and nothingness of the human reality. Thisis because, for Sartre, such consciousness of ones irreducibility rendersone capable of projects that change normative limits under which humanbeings are presupposed to be.

Conversely, Sartre takes human beings to act in bad faith whereverthis consciousness is denied. By this, he means that we are in bad faithwherever we view either ourselves or others as fully determined thingsor as fully transcendent non-things, not responsible for the worldlyconsequences of our actions. To be in bad faith, then, is to recogniseonly the being or the nothingness of oneself or another, thereby denying

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human freedom, and confirming existing normative limits on what it isto be (see Sartre 1943: 93109).

The question is, what happens to Bartlebys formula when setagainst this framework? For Deleuze, I would prefer not to is astatement that hollows out an ever expanding zone of indiscernibilityor indetermination between some nonpreferred activities and a preferredactivity (Deleuze 1998: 71). This, for Deleuze, is the violently comicalpower of the formula to disrupt language, beguiling those who expectBartleby to have explicit preferences. Read in Sartrean terms, however,what else can Bartlebys statement be, except an expression of thepsychic paralysis facing a character who denies human freedom, andwho chooses not to choose? What, then, can the formula be on aSartrean reading, if not an expression of bad faiths attempt to separatebeing and nothingness, and to flee the responsibilities of beingentirely? And what, then, can Bartleby be, if not a figure of bad faithpar excellence?

In his later Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre shifts away fromthe phenomenological ontology of Being and Nothingness towarda form of materialism. One might therefore be tempted to view thequestions just posed as pertaining to an out-of-date philosophy. That,however, would underestimate the extent to which dualistic thinkingis fundamental for Sartres philosophy more generally.5 Furthermore,it would underestimate the nature of Sartres influence on Deleuze, aswell as the sense in which a return to Sartrean themes is observable incontemporary Continental philosophy.

Sartre is one of the great suppressed references of Deleuzesphilosophy. By this, I mean a figure that features in his work, but whoseinfluence he often underplays.6 Deleuzes philosophy contains other suchfigures (Hegel and Lacan, for example), but Sartres status is attested inan especially contentious way: by the fact that Deleuze wrote extensivelyon Sartrean themes in his youth, only to later repudiate that work.7 Inhis later philosophy, Deleuzes explicit references to Sartre are short, andtend to follow a pattern: having praised Sartres acuity and influence, hegives reasons why Sartrean analyses fail to go far enough. This patternis particularly evident in works from the mid to late 1960s, in the periodwhere what is most distinctive in Deleuzes philosophy is beginning toemerge. It recurs in Logic of Sense, in Difference and Repetition and inDeleuzes 1967 essay on Michel Tournier, Theory of the Other.8 It isnot, moreover, contradicted by the more effusive tone of Deleuzes shortarticle on Sartre from 1964: He was My Teacher. Unlike the otherworks just cited, that piece is not concerned with developing Deleuzes

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own philosophical position. Instead, it seeks to praise Sartres stance asan inspiration and teacher. We might therefore say that it enacts half ofDeleuzes usual strategy: praising Sartres influence, but stopping shortof highlighting perceived shortcomings in his philosophy.9

Significantly, Deleuzes 1964 article does highlight bad faith as atheme he found striking in Sartre.10 After that, explicit references toSartrean bad faith in Deleuzes work are more limited.11 It wouldbe a mistake, however, to discount it as something irrelevant to thedevelopment of Deleuzes thought. On the contrary, bad faith names thenexus for all that Deleuze is opposed to in Sartre and in the history ofphilosophy more generally: against Deleuzes philosophy of immanence,it affirms the transcendence of consciousness; against his affirmation ofdifference, it affirms the brute objective identity of the in itself; againsthis affirmation of desire as positive excess in Anti-Oedipus, it affirmsthe negativity of the for itself as the only means to bring about worldlychange; and, against his attempt to have done with judgement, it isa viciously circular form of infinite judgement, since all attempts toovercome the dualism between being and nothingness will be susceptibleto its accusation.

What gives these oppositions added pertinence today is that areturn to Sartrean themes and tones can be detected in Continentalphilosophy.12 To bring this squarely into focus in relation to Bartleby,consider the following from Badiou:

There are no more than two possibilities regarding the becoming of a subjectwithin a world . . . It is necessary to act, in one manner or the other. Certainly,one can refrain from acting. One could, like Bartleby, the employee in theeponymous story byMelville, prefer not to. But then a truth will be sacrificedby its subject. Betrayal. (Badiou 2006: 422)

Witness just how Sartrean this is. Anecdotally, its themes of betrayal,choice and action figure heavily in Sartres late period literary andphilosophical output.13 More significantly, however, the entire critiquerests on the thought that Bartleby commits to nothing, not in the weaksense of being indecisive, but rather in the strongly Sartrean sense ofcommitment to nothingness.

In Badious philosophy, a subject is the bearer of a truth that goesunrecognised by the implicit normativity of its situation (or world in theabove terminology), until it changes this normativity through a sustainedprocess of activity (a truth procedure) (Badiou 2005: 199261). OnBadious reading, Bartleby exemplifies a subject that sacrifices its truththrough an act of betrayal. This is because Badiou reads Bartlebys

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preference not to as a decision to reject normative demands placedupon him by the situations of his story (those of the workplace or prison,for example), without declaring fidelity to a truth that would be capableof changing them.

Recall that, on a Sartrean reading, Bartleby is in bad faith because heprefers nothingness at the expense of being. This critique is replicatedexactly by Badiou. For Badiou, to be is to be recognised or countedas a being by the implicit normativity of a situation (to be included as aworker within the situation of the workplace, for example). This meansthat, for Badiou, not to be is, to put it very schematically, not to berecognised within a situation. For Sartre, whatever is not recognised asa being is nothingness. We can therefore readily observe the sense inwhich Badious ontology is one of being and nothingness. Granted, hisform of nothingness is not the Sartrean nothingness of consciousness,but rather a nothingness which, he holds, only mathematics can indicate,and which he calls the void.14 Irrespective of this technical injunction,however, the point is simply that whatever is not recognised by thenormativity of a situation is, on Badious reading, void for it. Badiousontology is therefore assuredly underpinned by its own forms of beingand nothingness, irrespective of how much of an update these compriseon Sartre.

Whether in the language of Sartres Being and Nothingness or that ofBadious Being and Event, then, the critique of Bartleby is the same. Ona Sartrean reading, Bartleby prefers nothingness at the expense of being,to which extent he is in bad faith. On Badious reading, Bartleby prefersdisillusion in the nothingness of the void, over a commitment to changesituations in which he is already counted (as a being). What Badiousreading of Bartleby offers, then, is confirmation of, and an update upon,the Sartrean critique. In the context of this essay, this does two importantthings. First, it prompts us to consider Bartlebys relation to bad faith ingreater detail. Second, it shows that bad faith continues to operate as abackground context for neo-Sartrean accounts of political action. In thefollowing section, the first task will be pursued. After that, section fourwill build on this to consider the political significance of what it wouldmean to overcome bad faith.

III. Deleuzes Post-Phenomenological Approach: How BartlebyOvercomes Bad Faith

For a phenomenologist like the early Sartre, it is things themselves(that is, phenomena) that prescribe the conditions for language,

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and, provided it is employed methodically enough, language will becapable of neutrally redescribing these conditions. What the method ofphenomenological ontology seeks to show in Being and Nothingness,then, is that bad faith is a phenomenon pertaining to the nature of whatit is to be. As post-phenomenological thinkers like Deleuze, Derridaand Foucault undertook to show, however, the inconsistency here isto presuppose that such structures of being, acting prior to language,can be neutrally redescribed through the structures of language. Whatmarks post-phenomenological thought in the French tradition, then,is the claim that phenomenology is insufficiently critical, and that itunderestimates the extent to which descriptions of reality are prescribed,not so much by things themselves, but by rules and norms inherent tolanguage.15

In Deleuzes essay on Bartleby, this focus on language is reflected inwhat he calls a logic of presuppositions. Here is how he outlines theconcept:

This is what [the attorney narrating Bartlebys story] glimpses with dread: allhis hopes of bringing Bartleby back to reason are dashed because they reston a logic of presuppositions according to which an employer expects tobe obeyed, or a kind friend listened to, whereas Bartleby has invented a newlogic, a logic of preference, which is enough to undermine the presuppositionsof language as a whole. (Deleuze 1998: 73; original emphasis)

By a logic of presuppositions, then, Deleuze means something closelyakin to the dogmatic image of thought analysed in Chapter 3 ofDifference and Repetition: an implicit set of norms or postulatesconditioning given forms of expression and behaviour. InDifference andRepetition, he views the dogmatic image of thought as a set of normsthat has had damaging consequences for the history of philosophy.16 Inhis Bartleby essay, he is aiming at something more situated with theconcept of a logic of presuppositions: an account of how everydaysituations like those of the workplace and of friendship are governedby their own limiting norms or postulates.

What happens if we take this concept up and use it to re-examineSartres notion of bad faith? Well, a curious dialectic is observed: at first,bad faith appears to offer a way of resisting the logic of presuppositionsunderpinning any situation whatsoever, before then revealing itself to bea product of this logic.

Bad faith seems to offer a mode of resistance because it namesthe possibility of actors within a situation who mean other than theyexpress. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops this in relation to

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three famous situations: a woman who sees no future with her date, awaiter who acts too sincerely, and a subject evading questions on hissexuality. In each situation, Sartre holds, bad faith is exhibited becausethe subjects communicate other than they mean: the woman acts as ifshe sees a future with her date, the waiter knows all too well he isacting, and the evasive subject refuses to commit himself (Sartre 1943:93109).

The trap of bad faith, however, is to view such acts of withholding asforms of resistance. On the contrary, we can observe that they conformto the logics of presupposition involved in each case. This is becausewhoever is in bad faith seeks to communicate other than they mean,and because, in doing so, it is in accordance with what is presupposed ofthem that they act: of a date, it is presupposed it will be an enjoyable andreciprocal experience; of a waiter, it is presupposed he will be a genialhost; of an interrogation, it is presupposed it will produce answers.Viewed from the standpoint of such norms, whatever actors involved ina situation might really mean, but withhold, is strictly irrelevant. Rather,what matters is whether or not they perform as they are presupposed to,and in each of the cases described by Sartre, this is what happens: thewomans date is led to see a future with her, the waiters customers aresatisfied, and the interrogator in the last case gets to interpret signs ofevasion as signs of admission.

The paradox of bad faith, then, is that it always conforms to whateverlogic of presuppositions it seeks to resist. This impotence does not,however, render bad faith irrelevant to how logics of presuppositionfunction. On the contrary, it reveals it to be an integral product of thislogic. This is because it is in the interests of a logic of presuppositionsto eliminate the possibility of meaning other than it prescribes withina situation, and bad faith satisfies this condition twice: first, becauseit comprises no real alternative; second, because it indicates the failedsearch for an alternative, offered to actors who thought they could resistnormalisation, but who must henceforth resign themselves to forms ofexpression and behaviour that are presupposed of them.

Turning back to the passage where Deleuze outlines the conceptof a logic of presuppositions, we now face a further question:what distinguishes Bartlebys logic of preference (as expressed by theformula) from the impotence of bad faith? Deleuze helps us to answerthis through the following passage:

Figures of life and knowledge, [Originals] know something inexpressible,live something unfathomable. They have nothing general about them, andare not particular they escape knowledge, defy psychology. Even the words

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they utter surpass the general laws of language (presuppositions) . . . Thereis nothing particular or general about Bartleby: he is an Original. (Deleuze1998: 83)

To overcome bad faith, one must show that it does not pertain tothe nature of what it is to be, but is rather a product of how logicsof presupposition presuppose beings to be. To do this, it is enoughto show that the being of a being (its singularity or differencein itself, in Deleuzes terms) is something irreducible to any logicof presuppositions whatsoever, and this is precisely what Deleuze isseeking to do in the above extract when describing Bartleby as anOriginal: to affirm Bartlebys singularity to be something in excess ofthe presupposed general and particular types to which recognised formsof epistemology, psychology and logic (to cite only the above examples)might seek to reduce it.

This affirmation of singularity is what distinguishes Deleuzesphilosophy from phenomenology. Under the terms of a methodlike Sartres phenomenological ontology, bad faith must emerge assomething pertaining to the nature of what it is to be (that is, tothings themselves). Against this, Deleuze recognises the inconsistencyat work here (that phenomenologys search for a presuppositionlessaccount of things themselves presupposes the descriptive neutrality oflanguage), and affirms the gap opened up between being and languageas the site for what he variously calls pure difference, singularity orOriginality; that is, forms of being that remain irreducible to the logicsof presupposition at work within language.

What distinguishes Bartlebys logic of preference from bad faith,then, as Deleuze notes, is that Bartleby affirms his creative singularityby inventing it. This inventiveness is sufficient to overcome bad faithbecause it runs counter to the impotence the latter prescribes. ForDeleuze, the effects of this inventiveness are observable at every levelof Bartlebys story: in, for example, the way I would prefer not tochallenges presuppositions on how grammar should function; in theway Bartleby challenges presuppositions on how employees and friendsshould act; and in the way Melvilles text challenges presuppositions onhow plot, character and metaphor should function in a story (Deleuze1998: 6870). In each case, Deleuze holds, a form of inventive andcreative singularity operates that shows there to be more to being thanlogics of presupposition can capture. This is what Deleuze means whenhe says that Bartlebys logic of preference is enough to underminethe presuppositions of language as a whole, and it is how Bartlebyovercomes bad faith.

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IV. Beyond Bad Faith and Bartleby: The Political Significanceof Bartlebys Actions

Consider how the shift in perspective just argued for alters thepredicament of bad faith. If, as in Sartres account, bad faith pertainsto the nature of what it is to be, then it is possible to suspect all beings ofit, and impossible to overcome it. This is because all behaviours, gesturesand actions will, simply by virtue of their being, forever be open tosuspicion of it, including all acts intended to overcome it.17 If, however,bad faith is a product of logics of presupposition, then, at worst, specificforms of bad faith are limited to specific situations of language, and, aswe will argue, the potential to overcome it entirely is inaugurated.

There are therefore two steps toward overcoming bad faith, the firstacting as a strategy of containment against it, the second as total liber-ation from it. In this section, we will work through these steps in order.

If bad faith is produced by a languages logic of presuppositions, thenit becomes possible to read it into any form of behaviour describablewithin the language. At first, this seems to mean that the threat ofbad faith remains as prevalent as ever. This is because it still seemsapplicable to all that is, irrespective of whether this is meant in theontological sense of all that has being, or in the logical sense ofall that is describable within the limits of a particular language. Thekey point, however, is that, as is implied by the very notion of alanguages particularity, there are a plurality of languages, each withtheir own limits (whether, for example, languages that are extinct,extant, possible, formal or natural), from which it follows that noone language in particular can definitively be said to account for all thatis, or that is capable of being.

The first step toward overcoming bad faith, then, is to realise thatparticular languages produce forms of bad faith specific to them, andthat the scope of these forms cannot be universal, because the languagesfrom which they issue are themselves incapable of accounting for all thatis. From here, the effects of bad faith can be contained by enquiring intojust how particular languages are. To develop this, consider remarksthat Deleuze makes immediately prior to outlining the concept of a logicof presuppositions:

A word always presupposes other words that can replace it, complete it, orform alternatives with it: it is on this condition that language is distributed insuch a way as to designate things, states of things and actions, according to aset of objective, explicit conventions. But perhaps there are also other implicitand subjective conventions, other types of reference or presupposition. In

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speaking, I do not simply indicate things and actions; I also commit actsthat assure a relation with the interlocutor, in keeping with our respectivesituations: I command, I interrogate, I promise, I ask, I emit speech acts. . . .It is this double system of reference that Bartleby ravages. (Deleuze 1998: 73)

This analysis is highly revealing. First, it corroborates the connectionmade earlier between the concept of a logic of presuppositionsand the dogmatic image of thought. This is because, in bothcases, Deleuze makes a distinction between objective and subjectivepresuppositions, and, in both cases, it is the latter set in which he ismore interested the implicit presuppositions or postulates that actas conditions for communication within a situation. Wherever Deleuzediscusses a logic of presuppositions or dogmatic image, then, heis targeting this form of implicit presupposition (see Deleuze 2004a:1645; Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 8395). Second, this shows justhow particular languages are on Deleuzes analysis. For Deleuze, whatmarks the particularity of a language is less the set of objective, explicitconventions according to which words are taken to designate, andmore the implicit logic of presuppositions setting conditions for theirexchange. Deleuzes conception of a languages particularity thereforegoes much deeper than more common-sense notions of geographical orethnic particularity, idiom or dialect account for. On the contrary, hetakes it that there are as many languages as there are situations withlogics of presupposition specific to them.18

To develop this, let us briefly turn to the story of Bartleby. Aspresented by Melville, Bartleby is a story related retrospectively bya single narrator, an attorney looking back on Bartlebys employmentin his New York law firm. The story begins by describing the periodimmediately prior to the advent of Bartleby (Melville 1990: 4).Thereafter, it documents Bartlebys good beginnings as a copyist, beforedetailing the effects of his subsequent refusals to perform in terms ofwhat is presupposed of him. There are four key situations involved inthe story: the workplace, the prison, and the situations of charity andmorality into which Bartlebys actions place him. It may seem strangeto class these four situations together, given that the first two are moreconcrete or physical, and the latter two more abstract or metaphysical.The reason for doing so, however, is that they each involve distinct logicsof presupposition, to which the attorney ascribes, and to which Bartlebydoes not.

Faced with Bartlebys actions, the distinct logics of presupposition atwork in the story are forced to emerge through the attorneys discourse.

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In the workplace, we therefore find that it is presupposed that therewill be periods of drudgery and stress, and that, while labour willbe alienated, employees are expected to be cheerful about this.19 Inprison, while liberties will be restricted, it is presupposed that privilegescan be bought.20 In receipt of charity, it is presupposed that therecipient (Bartleby) will be grateful and beholding to others, and that theconscience of the benefactor (the attorney) will be gratified.21 Finally, asa subject of morality, it is presupposed that Bartlebys actions will beopen to the judgement of others.22

Now, Bartleby passes through each of these situations, and he prefersnot to have his labour alienated, not to receive privileges in prison,not to be in receipt of charity and not to have his actions judgedby others. According to the Sartreo-Badiouian critique, this means thatBartleby is in bad faith. If that is the case, then Bartlebys actions have nosignificance beyond condemning him to a miserable demise. Accordingto our reading, however, Bartleby reveals bad faith to be a productof logics of presupposition. If that is the case, then Bartlebys actionshave a double political significance: first, they force the implicit logicsof presupposition at work within the story to make themselves explicit;second, by doing so, they show just how limited in scope these logicsare.

Bartleby demonstrates that there are languages particular to thesituations of the workplace and the prison, just as there are languagesparticular to the more abstract situations of charity and morality. Thesesituations each involve logics of presupposition specific to them, andthat make different normative demands. To this extent, they produceforms of bad faith restricted to them. If Bartleby refuses to copy withinthe situation of the workplace, then, this means that he can be held tobe in bad faith in that situation at most, but not beyond it. Again, ifBartleby refuses charity, this means that he can be held to be in badfaith in that situation at most, but not beyond it. From here, the way toenact a strategy of containment against bad faith becomes clear: first, tomake explicit what particular situations presuppose (to understand, forexample, how an employer expects to be obeyed, or how libertieswill be removed in prison); second, to detect the limits of the situation towhich these presuppositions are applicable, since, if no one language inparticular is capable of accounting for all that is, such limits must exist.

From here, the way toward total liberation from bad faith emerges.This is because, if specific forms of bad faith are restricted to particularsituations, and one is outside of these limits, one cannot be accused ofbad faith for behaving other than they prescribe.

Beyond Bartleby and Bad Faith 97

What, however, does it mean to get outside the limits of a situation?Well, it seems achievable in a straightforward sense: if one is physicallyoutside a situation like the workplace or the prison, surely one cannotbe accused of bad faith for acting contrary to normative demandsholding sway there? Given the increasingly malleable situations of workand discipline within what Deleuze elsewhere calls our contemporarycontrol societies, however, this becomes more problematic.

Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze outlined three forms of society in his1990 essay, Postscript on Control Societies: early-modern sovereignsocieties; disciplinary societies, which, he holds, operated between theeighteenth and early twentieth centuries; and control societies, whichhe takes to be characteristic of the contemporary world (Deleuze 1995b:1778). Contrasting the latter two forms, Deleuze notes that whiledisciplinary societies worked by closing people off within major sites ofconfinement that each had their own laws (the family, the school, thebarracks, the factory or the prison, for example), control societies workthrough ultrarapid forms of apparently free floating control that makeuse of new forms of communication and technology (Deleuze 1995a:174).23 Going further, Deleuze argues that, while people in disciplinarysocieties were moulded into individuals and masses by laws specificto the sites of confinement through which they passed, status in controlsocieties is determined by passwords and codes, the terms of whichcan, in principle, be revised at any moment (Deleuze 1995b: 1812).

The difficulty here is that Bartlebys actions may seem to have only adated political significance at most, related to a form of disciplinarysociety. Granted, we might say, Bartleby does force the logics ofpresupposition operating in his story to become explicit and to announcetheir limits, but these are only laws specific to the sites of confinementof a vanished disciplinary society (the mid-nineteenth-century USA). Oncloser inspection, however, we find that this is not the case, and thatBartleby also has profound things to say about contemporary controlsocieties, and about how we might overcome the bad faith that theyproduce.

To clarify, consider the following key difference that Deleuze notesbetween disciplinary and control societies:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as youwent from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in controlsocieties you never finish anything business, training, and military servicebeing coexisting metastable states of a single modulation. (Deleuze 1995b:179)

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Deleuze characterises the first form of judgement described here as oneof apparent acquittal. This, he holds, is felt by subjects in disciplinarysocieties as they move from one site of confinement to the next (from theschool to the barracks, for example) in-between sites, relief from whata situation presupposes of one is felt, but new forms of presuppositionand judgement await in the next site. He describes the second form,characteristic of control societies, as one of endless postponement.According to this form, the boundaries between old sites of confinementdissolve, such that one no longer knows when one has begun or finishedanything (as, for example, the limits between the workplace and thehome blur, and as schools are replaced by forms of continuous training)(Deleuze 1995b: 179).

There are two passages in Deleuzes Bartleby essay that relateprofoundly to these forms of judgement. First, of the formula, Deleuzestates that each time Bartleby employs it in response to a demandfrom the attorney, the latter has the vertiginous impression . . . thateverything is starting over again from zero (Deleuze 1998: 71). Thesewords do not suggest that Bartlebys political significance is dated. Whatthey suggest is that Bartleby is intimately aware of how the logic ofapparent acquittal works in disciplinary societies, because, through theformula, he is inflicting it upon the attorney. If this is the case, thenwhat it suggests is that Bartleby has already superseded this logic in somesense, because, unlike the attorney, he knows how it works, and, unlikethe attorney, he has not implicitly decided to be subject to it.

If this reading is too suggestive, it should be supported with asecond passage from Deleuzes essay. Of Bartlebys refusal to leave theattorneys office, Deleuze states: Bartleby lives cloistered in the officeand never goes out, but when the attorney suggests new occupations tohim, he is not joking when he responds, There is too much confinement. . . (Deleuze 1998: 88). One way of reading these words, a directquotation from Melvilles story, is as a form of localised subjectiverejection: by pointing out that there is too much confinement, Bartlebyis saying that he would prefer not to be subject to occupations suggestedto him. Read like this, Bartlebys actions would, as per the Sartreo-Badiouian critique, seem to be a lonely exercise in bad faith, and thatwould seem to be the end of the matter. Another way of reading thestatement, however, is as a diagnosis on the limits of a disciplinarysociety. What would count in this case is not the localised subjectivestance of the character Bartleby (whatever that might be), but ratherthe broader level of awareness demonstrated by the statement; and, read

Beyond Bartleby and Bad Faith 99

like this, the statement appears aware indeed, implying what Deleuzewould call a collective assemblage of enunciation.

As developed in Thousand Plateaus and Kafka, Deleuze andGuattaris concept of the collective assemblage overturns common-sense presuppositions on how language functions, and gives newpolitical significance to seemingly isolated voices like Bartleby.According to the concept, a statement like there is too muchconfinement is not the ex nihilo utterance of a lonely subject immured inbad faith. Rather, it is a diagnosis that enunciates an implicit collectiveawareness of the deeper logic at work within a society.24 Read like this,Bartlebys statement is aware in two highly significant ways. First,it comprehends the level of confinement that the logic of apparentacquittal engenders within disciplinary societies. Second, by enunciatingthis, it points beyond this form of society, toward the future.

When developing the concept of the collective assemblage in relationto Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari state of his work that it is capable ofrendering still unknown sounds that come from the near future . . .diabolical powers that are knocking at the door (Deleuze and Guattari2003: 41; original emphasis). Reading his essay on Bartleby in relationto his work on control societies, the extent to which Deleuze also takesthis to be the case with Bartleby is clear. To demonstrate, consider a finalpassage on the move from disciplinary societies to control societies:

Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, wemay come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past.The quest for universals of communication ought to make us shudder . . .Weve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something differentfrom communicating. The key thing may be to create . . . circuit breakers, sowe can elude control. (Deleuze 1995b: 175)

Unpacking these words, it is clear that, if there is a character whosesignificance is dated in the story of Bartleby, it is the attorney. Thisis because, faced with Bartlebys actions, he ultimately decides toremain subject to the logic of apparent acquittal that they expose andsupersede.25 In this sense, he is a reactive subject, tethered to a formof a disciplinary society. In contrast, Bartlebys actions comprehendand control the logic operative in disciplinary societies, to which extentthey move beyond it and contain premonitions of the future forms ofceaseless control operating in control societies.

Bartlebys actions have an enduring political significance because theydo not shirk this future. On the contrary, it is the attorney who retreats

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toward a form of nostalgia that might just see the harshest confinementas part of a wonderful happy past. In contrast, Bartlebys actions do notsimply face up to future forms of control; rather, through the formula,they demonstrate how they might be resisted.

To draw this out, note that Bartlebys formula is an incisive exampleof the forms of creativity referenced in the latter half of the aboveextract: first, it shows how speech can be hijacked (through inventionwithin language); second, it shows how creating has always beensomething different from communicating (by undoing communicationslogics of presupposition); third, it shows how creativity can resist thequest for universals of communication (by exposing just how limitedlogics of presupposition are in their scope). In each case, the formulademonstrates a profoundly contemporary sense of what it means toget outside the limits of a situation: if control societies are replacingthe logic of apparent acquittal with one of endless postponement,then it is not sufficient to be outside the limits of a situation in thenaive, physical sense referenced earlier; rather, what is required toelude control are more nuanced and creative ways of diagnosing andsubverting the limits of language.

According to the Sartreo-Badiouian critique, Bartleby is a lonelycharacter immured in his bad faith. This, it holds, is because Bartlebydoes not embark upon an authentic undertaking to change the norms ofsituations in which he is included. The problem is that this analysis is tiedto a narrow understanding of character, and it presupposes bad faithitself to be an unchangeable form of normativity. What recommendsDeleuzes essay, in contrast, is that it accesses the deeper politicalsignificance of Bartlebys actions by going beyond the limits of character,and by linking them to the collective assemblage that makes thempossible. Thereby, it exposes bad faith to be something contingent onhow logics of presupposition judge isolated characters and subjects.The profoundly liberating message of Deleuzes essay, then, is that, whileit is always possible to read a character like Bartleby in terms of badfaith (Sartre and Badiou, for example, must do it because of the logicsof presupposition underpinning their respective philosophies), it is nevernecessary.

By exposing bad faith as something profoundly unnecessary, Deleuzesessay shows how we might be liberated from it. This is not to say,however, that his reading is immune to critique. Problematically, itstendency towards eulogy has, as section one of this essay sought todemonstrate, led to a reductive image of Bartleby as a hero whose actionsare to be praised, mimicked or, indeed, accused of bad faith.

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To overcome this, we should be attentive to the fact that Bartlebysactions are functions of what a text does to language. From here, a pathbeyond bad faith emerges: it involves being prepared to diagnose andresist logics of presupposition; it involves invention within language; itinvolves the creation of new characters and formulas; it involves beingprepared to learn and vary the languages in which one communicates;it involves being prepared to move beyond the impotence of bad faith;and, importantly, it involves being prepared to move beyond Bartleby.Such a move should not, however, pain us. Bartleby is not a hero to beidolised or a traitor to be accused of bad faith, but rather a provocativediagnosis on societies past, present and future, one that challenges us tothink deeply about how we might expose and critique the limits of theircontrol.

Notes1. Witness ieks uncritical use of the term Bartleby politics. (iek 2008: 409).

For signs of contemporary weariness with this reductive image of Bartleby, seeJean-Luc Nancy: everyone clings onto this I would prefer not to, but it isprecisely this that doesnt agree with me . . . My interpretation, if I must haveone, would be that I would prefer not to signifies I would prefer not to writehis novel, signed H. Melville (Nancy 2011: 179).

2. Berkman, for example, has characterised these words as symbolic of amessianism of the critical gesture (Berkman 2011: 83).

3. See Blanchot 1986: 17; Blanchot 1995. Blanchots earliest piece on Bartleby isfrom 1945. Berkman argues that, in many respects, Blanchot is the great, secret,initiator [of French accounts of Bartleby]. It is with he that . . . Deleuze dialoguesin . . . Bartleby; or, the Formula (Berkman 2011: 256). On Blanchotsgeneral influence on the French reception of Bartleby, see Berkman 2011: 2952.

4. The Bartleby effect is, without doubt, behind us . . . [Today], we are facedwith . . . a new epoch of foundationalism that wants to have done with thetroubling and undecidable powers of which [the] formula is the emblem(Berkman 2011: 1747).

5. The Critique of Dialectical Reasons distinction between the practico-inert andthe individuals free praxis echoes the dualism between being and nothingness.This means that concerns expressed under the rubric of bad faith in Beingand Nothingness get reworked in Sartres later text through new concepts ofpledging and betrayal. On this, see Sartre 1976: 31820; Badiou 2008: 2341.Deleuze, for his part, construed The Critique of Dialectical Reason as thenecessary complement of Being and Nothingness (Deleuze 2002b: 112).

6. Take two important themes: Sartres concern in Transcendence of the Ego toseek a transcendental field without subject, and his concern in the Critiqueof Dialectical Reason for a Neo-Marxist theory of group formation. Khalfaidentifies the first as a problem in relation to which Deleuze defines his ownphilosophy from Logic of Sense to Immanence: A Life, and states of the secondthat the Marxism that [Anti-Oedipus] will claim to follow is Sartres. (Khalfa2003: 724).These claims are accurate, but seem incommensurate with the levelof explicit credit that Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus give Sartre he receives

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three short citations in the former (Deleuze 2004c: 112, 118, 120), two in thelatter (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 30n., 278).

7. See, for example, Deleuze 2002a; Deleuze 2003; Deleuze 2007.8. In Logic of Sense, Deleuze praises Sartres acuity in searching for an impersonal

transcendental field that constitutes the subject, before condemning him forretain[ing] consciousness as a milieu (Deleuze 2004c: 112, 118). In Differenceand Repetition and the Tournier essay, Deleuze notes Sartres richness onintersubjectivity before highlighting his failure to provide a proper account ofthe Other (see Deleuze 2004a: 77, 323; Deleuze 2004b: 346). For evidence ofthis pattern outwith the period identified here, see Deleuze 2005: 85; Deleuzeand Guattari 2004b: 190.

9. The article cites Sartre as the thinker who taught the identity of thoughtand liberty. The impulse for it was Sartres decision, in October 1964, torefuse the Nobel Prize for literature. Deleuze praises this action insofar as itcrystallises Sartres revulsion at the idea of being institutionalised. What isfurther noteworthy is that Deleuze is therefore praising Sartre for what othercommentators perceived as an act of bad faith (see Deleuze 2002b: 113).

10. It was the uniquely Sartrean that struck me . . . : his theory of bad faith (Deleuze2002b: 112).

11. Bad faith is, for example, cited in a course at the University of Paris VIII (seeDeleuze 1983). These references are, however, more exegetical than critical.

12. This is evident in an anglophone context in the work of thinkers like PeterHallward and Nina Power, and, in a different sense, in the debt owed to Sartreby thinkers like Arthur Danto and Charles Taylor. In a francophone context, itis evident, most obviously, in Badiou, as well as thinkers like Kacem, Tarby andMavrakis. In a more populist sense, the proximity of Hessels Idignez vous! toSartrean themes is also noteworthy (see Hessel 2010).

13. For Badious analysis of these themes, see Badiou 2008: 2341.14. The void also functions, like Sartrean nothingness, as a source of change and new

possibilities. In Being and Nothingness, change occurs through the capacity of aparticular being (the human reality) to become conscious of its nothingness. InBeing and Event, change occurs through the capacity of the void to be recognisedwithin a situation, as an event that exposes the contingency of previously heldnorms on what it means to be (see Badiou 2005: 18490).

15. Post-phenomenological is used throughout this section in preference to post-structuralist. I take the former term to be more instructive in determining thecore theories of figures like Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. For evidence of theshift from phenomenological description to the post-phenomenological critiqueof language, see, in particular, Foucault 1966; Derrida 1973; Descombes 1979;Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 83122.

16. The postulates need not be spoken: they function all the more effectively insilence . . . Together, they form the dogmatic image of thought. They crushthought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar (Deleuze2004a: 207). For Deleuzes most developed account of the postulates oflinguistics, see Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 83122.

17. Bad faith leads to viciously circular paradoxes. It cannot be overcome throughan opposed theory of authenticity (contra Sartres suggestion in Being andNothingness see Sartre 1943: 111), nor by simply replacing the ontology thatmakes it possible (as occurs in Sartres later move toward materialism, forexample), nor by simply forgetting bad faith as a metaphysical idol out ofcontrol, la Nietzsche. This is because all such moves can be viewed as actsof bad faith toward the concept of bad faith!

Beyond Bartleby and Bad Faith 103

18. I swear is not the same when said in the family, at school, in a love affair, ina secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and neither is it the samestatement (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 91).

19. At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishingfor something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. Therewas no pause for digestion . . . I should have been quite delighted with hisapplication, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely,mechanically (Melville 1990: 9).

20. This is something the character of the prisons grubman, emerging late in thestory, makes clear:Your sarvant sir, your sarvant, said the grubman, making a low salutationbehind his apron. Hope you find it pleasant here, sir; nice grounds coolapartments hope youll stay with us some time try to make it agreeable. Whatwill you have for dinner today?I prefer not to dine today, said Bartleby, turning away. (Melville 1990: 32).

21. To befriend Bartleby, to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me littleor nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morselfor my conscience (Melville 1990: 13).

22. Consider these remarks from the attorney to the character Nippers:What do you think of it, Nippers? Would I not be justified in immediatelydismissing Bartleby?Excuse me, that is for you to decide, sir. I think his conduct quite unusual, andindeed, unjust, as regards . . . myself (Melville 1990: 14).

23. See also Stiegler on technologies de contrle (Stiegler 2006: 28).24. There is no individual enunciation . . . [E]nunciation in itself implies collective

assemblages. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated, andenunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collectiveassemblage requires it and determines it to be so (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a:88).

25. Deleuze sums up this decision as follows: the final words of the attorneysnarrative will be, Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! which does not indicate aconnection, but rather an alternative in which he has had to choose the all-too-human law over Bartleby (Deleuze 1998: 81).

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