THE CONTEMPORARY AND THE STRANGE FAMILIAR: APPROACHES BASED ON THE UTTERANCE “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO”, BY BARTLEBYAbstract
This article relates the utterance “I would prefer not to” by Herman Melville’s character Bartleby with Sigmund Freud’s concept of the familiar stranger. The work begins with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the contemporary and then develops Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby, for whom literature points to a writing that incessantly tries to escape from forms of representation. Thus, Bartleby functions for the narrator as a familiar stranger who disturbs him so much that it is necessary to write about him. In other words, this unrepresentable and disturbing element makes us contemporary by producing something new that leads the present beyond itself.
Keywords:
Psychoanalysis; Familiar stranger; Contemporary; Bartleby; “I would prefer not to”