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Chapter 4. Insistence
- State University of New York Press
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88 Chapter 4 Insistence Bartleby, the scrivener, and sweet little Käthchen are the flip side of the affective figures Billy Budd and Michael Kohlhaas, who overshoot their mark by hitting it too well, who respond to the resistances, obstacles, and challenges to understanding by malleably adapting and affectively assessing what is at hand. Bartleby and Käthchen pose the same problem, but upside down, or better, with Kleist, we could say: they present us with the same strange disposition as Kohlhaas and Budd, but under the opposite algebraic sign, or the opposite electric charge. While Kohlhaas and Budd are being overly rash and in their semiconscious ways incessantly busy assessing their opponents, as we saw in the last chapter, Bartleby and Käthchen hardly move at all, yet radiate a strange lucidity that seems to see right through their interlocutors and opponents. And while they stay put, their almost unbearable passivity puts everyone else around them in a flurry. Their comportment is as bewildering as Kohlhaas’s and Billy Budd’s, but with them the difficulty to read them resides in their stubborn immobility and the strange formulas they speak in. Their predominant trait is not so much an affectivity, which Kohlhaas and Billy Budd turn into affective thinking, but an obstinate insistence that they cannot and must not speak their reasons, preferences, motivations. And in order not to, they resort to the repetition of little formulas. The fact that they merely repeat these little formulas makes them appear straightforwardly simple, almost plainly a little dumb. But the stubbornness with which they insist on their formulas—and their strange quality of speaking broken-off utterances that insist on their absence of knowledge (Käthchen) or preferences (Bartleby)—unsettles everyone confronted with them. Among the figures of simplicity discussed in this book, these two are the most challenging, and at the same time most obvious, types proposed by Kleist and Melville: unlike Kohlhaas and Billy Budd, whom we saw affectively assess the situations they encountered and whose semiconscious refraining from explication enabled them to stick to these assessments, and unlike Gustav von Insistence der Ried and Captain Delano who incessantly gathered sense-impressions and indulged in explication and rationalization, while failing to recognize those as sentimental projections, Käthchen and Bartleby operate by insisting upon the inexplicit. This arrests these two figures in a disarming, radical passivity, a passivity that in turn permits both to remain silent—apart from their formulas, which, as I will argue, can be read as a way of remaining silent while speaking —and to refuse to explicate. Much has been made of this passivity, most prominently in regard to Bartleby. It has been argued that his passivity cannot be accounted for as mere receptivity or inactivity, as the absence or opposite of activity, but that it is a radical passivity undercutting those very opposites. All of this is highly relevant, and will come to bear here. But what the following reading would mainly like to point to is that, beyond the ontological implications of the discussions of passivity, Käthchen and Bartleby most intriguingly delineate Kleist’s “condition that knows”—perhaps most intriguingly of any of the three couples pursued in this book. Gustav and Delano were pathetically lost in the mazes of small perceptions and foreclosed any “condition that knows” because they tried to escape from these mazes by “ineffectual speculations ,” which we heard Billy Budd struggle to avoid. Kohlhaas and Billy Budd, in turn, pursued and achieved a sensate thinking by abiding by small perceptions , but their semiconscious modi operandi had to be fabricated.We saw them continuously labor to ward off the mode of speculation and to prevent being drawn out of their semiconscious states of mind. Käthchen and Bartleby seem unable to inhabit any psychic space other than this formulaic zone, which lies somewhat before consciousness. No one seems able to catapult or talk them out of it, and they just stay put. After an initial consideration of the peculiar passivity they expose, this reading will closely consider both figures with an eye on their lingering in a disposition “before-consciousness”. Such a disposition does not make them harbingers of a new and better type of thinking that would be more successful in articulating knowledge. The point is that they never formulate any such knowledge—their formulaic way of speaking does not amount to what we would usually call a formulation of knowledge. In a way they are the...