“I prefer not to dine to-day”: Self-starvation under Biopolitical Regulation in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
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The essay argues that Bartleby’s refusal to eat is an inevitable response of a subject who refuses the biopolitical system ingrained in the capitalist society of America. Michel Foucault points out biopower’s indispensability to the development of capitalism (History of Sexuality 140). As a microcosm of the capitalist society, the lawyer’s office is managed in ways which it maximizes its profits. The lawyer, for this goal, attempts to regulate his employees through the biopolitical means of food and foodways. Believing that his employees’ productivity is highly dependent on what they eat, he monitors and controls their dietary lives without actual intervention. Even after sending Bartleby to the prison, the lawyer cannot forsake his desire to control and regulate the scrivener, as exemplified in his employment of the grub-man under the mask of charity. Bartleby’s food refusal, in this context, should be understood as his refusal to the capitalist system that threatens to deprive his subjectivity. Not only does he become a useless occupant in the Wall Street office when he stops working and eating, but he also causes malfunction to the prison after he is sent to it. Perhaps ironically, Maud Ellmann points out, prison becomes a birthplace for modern subjectivity (94). If Bartleby’s self-starvation, self-defeating as it might be, is an attempt to disrupt the system built upon the regulation of bodies, his refusal of life, demonstrates that the biopolitical system cannot succeed all the time.
Abstract
The essay argues that Bartleby’s refusal to eat is an inevitable response of a subject who refuses the biopolitical system ingrained in the capitalist society of America. Michel Foucault points out biopower’s indispensability to the development of capitalism (History of Sexuality 140). As a microcosm of the capitalist society, the lawyer’s office is managed in ways which it maximizes its profits. The lawyer, for this goal, attempts to regulate his employees through the biopolitical means of food and foodways. Believing that his employees’ productivity is highly dependent on what they eat, he monitors and controls their dietary lives without actual intervention. Even after sending Bartleby to the prison, the lawyer cannot forsake his desire to control and regulate the scrivener, as exemplified in his employment of the grub-man under the mask of charity. Bartleby’s food refusal, in this context, should be understood as his refusal to the capitalist system that threatens to deprive his subjectivity. Not only does he become a useless occupant in the Wall Street office when he stops working and eating, but he also causes malfunction to the prison after he is sent to it. Perhaps ironically, Maud Ellmann points out, prison becomes a birthplace for modern subjectivity (94). If Bartleby’s self-starvation, self-defeating as it might be, is an attempt to disrupt the system built upon the regulation of bodies, his refusal of life, demonstrates that the biopolitical system cannot succeed all the time.
참고문헌 (17)
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