Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

314Thus here. Man is an object to God” (29-30). This infinite projection of images is at the center ofMoby-Dick.54 What Žižek calls Bartleby’s politics is different from Hardt and Negri’s understanding ofBartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” While they see Bartleby as the figure of resistance and refusal asthe first step toward the construction of a new paradigm, Žižek considers Bartleby’s statement not asan abstract negation but as an integral element in the construction of a something new. He contendsthat Bartleby’s politicsmerely gives body to this negativity. The difficulty of imagining the New is the difficulty ofimagining Bartleby in power. Thus the logic of the move from the superego-parallax to theBartleby-parallax is very precise: it is the move from something to nothing, from the gapbetween two “somethings” to the gap that separates a something from nothing, from the voidof its own place. (The Parallax View 382)Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” Žižek argues, does not initiate an “abstract negation”; rather, it isan “arche” that cannot be filled with any content. Here, refusal is in reality a refusal of content asobjet a continues to be empty.55 Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida were interested in the inversion of signs in a practice of propriationoperated by debt. Debt is always signed by the other. My focus here is on the figure of the whale as asimulacrum, as a question of propriation.