The History of Consciousness department is pleased to announce the first speaker in their Spring 2025 Speaker Series, Dmitri Nikulin, who will be joining them next Monday May 5th to give his talk “Bartleby, the Inscrutable Scrivener: On the Negative Constitution of Action”. The talk will be held in Hum 1 Rm 420 at 1pm with a virtual attendance option.

Please register here in advance for virtual access.

In Melville’s celebrated story Bartleby the Scrivener, everything is put in the negative. The inscrutability and seeming incomprehensibility of the main character’s actions and the challenge presented by his famous “speech-act” of “I prefer not to” makes it particularly challenging to narrate the story and make sense of it. Bartleby comes in negative relief, elusive in his seeming ordinariness. For this reason, one has to use uncommon philosophical and literary means, including apophatic accounts and alliteration, in order to describe the indescribable, pointing toward unutterable strangeness and barely explainable human goodness. Bartleby’s acting is inscribed into his mode of being. He writes but does not read and almost does not speak beyond “I would prefer not to.” Not exercising self-reflection, he does not display any interiority. His apparent non-thinking is translated into an action bound by negativity, which eventually halts and evaporates. In “preferring not to,” Bartleby wills nothing. Yet, since nothing is nothing, it cannot be willed. Such a will is not a rational will that claims itself for itself as moral and establishes itself in an act of autonomous volition. It is the will that does not will itself and thus wills to stop willing. It is the will that negates and suppresses but does not destroy itself. In this way, the act of willing nothing does not annihilate the will altogether but rather suspends itself. This establishes a logic of preference that does not prefer anything and hence prefers nothing. The action defined by Bartleby’s silent and motionless being is therefore the action of non-preference.

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient and early modern philosophy to philosophy of literature and of history. He is the author of a number of books including Matter, Imagination and Geometry (Ashgate, 2002), On Dialogue (Lexington, 2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2010), Comedy, Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), The Concept of History (Bloomsbury, 2017), Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2019), Critique of Bored Reason (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Non-Being in Ancient Thought (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).