‘되기’의 실패와 잠재성의 정치학: 멜빌의 『필경사 바틀비』

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between Bartleby and the lawyer in terms of Deleuze’s ‘becoming minoritarian’ and the concept of the new community based on Agamben’s concept of potentiality. Bartleby’s language functions as if it was a foreign language within language and becomes a minority standard. Though the lawyer’s disorienting experience reveals him a “zone of indiscernibility,” he remains rigidly within the major standard of the society, adult- white- heterosexual-European-male.” He fails in ‘becoming minoritarian.’ He seeks to pin down Bartleby’s preference either as will or as necessity without success. As Agamben points out, Bartleby is conceived as “pure, absolute potentiality” distinguished from both will and necessity. Bartleby has come to recover what could have been, that is, to reaffirm potentiality. His potentiality involves a withdrawal from actual world, which is a political gesture to refer to the new community outside the hegemonic position.