earticle

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This essay mainly examines the meanings of ethics and law as well as possibility of happiness and redemption in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” This paper, to begin with, explores various venues of previous studies on “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to critically review debates on Bartleby’s quizzical rhetoric and legal, political, philosophical, and ethical potentiality. These debates, reverberating with its contemporaneity mediated by the current global politics and ethico-ontological inquiries, includes Gilles Deleuze’s ground-breaking thoughts on Bartleby’s formula—I would prefer not to—and its political implication, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical illumination of the ethics and ontology Bartleby incarnates, Jacques Ranciere’s political critique on Deleuze’s interpretation, etc. After taking on exploration of these debates, the paper in turn moves to interpretations of the meaning of law and the lawyer’s ethical dilemma, paralleled with a country man’s dilemma before the door to the law in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” This paralleled reading purports to delineate a possible zone of ethics and zone of inoperativity where dialectics of law and state of exception and actualization of inhumanity halts. In this potentiality of impotentiality, this paper argues, Bartleby’s and readers’ happiness and redemption might potentially occur.