Melville, Whitman, and metonymy: towards a new poetics of community

Melville’s enigmatic short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, has puzzled critics and readers alike ever since its publication in 1853. It has, however, recently received
an even more puzzling amount of critical attention by the likes of Gilles Deleuze,
Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Rancière. The essay argues that the
approaches of the latter have to be considered in the light of what can be
termed a ‘metonymic poetics of community’. Read in this way, the hermetic
figure of the copyist can be juxtaposed to Walt Whitman’s notorious lists, as
that which cannot be integrated into the omnivorous, imperial I/eye of the
poet laureate of American democracy; as that which defies being sublated
into a metaphoric conception of community.