Gilles Deleuze’s “Bartleby; or, The Formula” (originally published in French as “Bartleby, ou la formule”) is a philosophical essay that takes Herman Melville’s enigmatic short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as its point of departure for a profound meditation on language, potentiality, and the nature of literary creation. The essay, which appeared in the 1990s as part of Deleuze’s later critical writings on literature, represents one of his most concentrated engagements with a single literary text and demonstrates his method of extracting philosophical concepts from literary works.
The essay centers on Bartleby’s famous utterance—”I would prefer not to”—which Deleuze identifies as a formula that operates at the limits of language itself. This seemingly simple phrase becomes, in Deleuze’s reading, a kind of philosophical bomb that detonates within language, revealing something fundamental about negation, affirmation, and the space between action and inaction. Deleuze is not interested in providing a conventional literary interpretation of Melville’s story; rather, he uses Bartleby’s formula as a launching point for exploring questions about potentiality, the nature of preference, and what it means to refuse without simply negating.
The Formula and Its Operation
Deleuze begins by examining the peculiar grammatical and logical status of Bartleby’s phrase. “I would prefer not to” is neither a straightforward refusal (“I will not”) nor an affirmation of an alternative (“I would prefer to do something else”). The formula suspends itself in a conditional mode—”would prefer”—and then trails off into negativity without completing itself into a determinate negation. This incompleteness is crucial for Deleuze. The phrase does not say “I would prefer not to do X” (which would imply a specific refusal) but simply “I would prefer not to,” leaving the object of the preference radically indeterminate.
This grammatical peculiarity has profound philosophical implications. Deleuze argues that the formula operates as what he calls an “agrammatical” expression—one that, while grammatically correct on the surface, violates the deeper logic of language by refusing to complete its own movement. It is a formula that hollows out language from within, creating a zone of indeterminacy that spreads like a contagion through the story. Other characters begin to repeat the formula, finding themselves infected by its strange logic, unable to respond to it with conventional arguments or commands.
The formula represents what Deleuze calls a “zone of indiscernibility” or “indetermination.” It does not oppose one term to another (yes to no, action to inaction) but rather suspends the very opposition itself. Bartleby’s preference is not for something else; it is a preference that prefers nothing, that exhausts preference itself. This creates a kind of void or vacuum in the symbolic order, a point where language encounters its own limit.
Potentiality and Impotentiality
Central to Deleuze’s reading is the concept of potentiality, which he develops in dialogue with the philosophical tradition, particularly Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality. In classical metaphysics, potentiality is understood as oriented toward its actualization—the potential to do something is fulfilled when that thing is actually done. But Bartleby’s formula introduces a different kind of potentiality: the potentiality not to, or what might be called impotentiality.
Deleuze explores how Bartleby embodies a pure potentiality that refuses to pass into act. This is not simply the absence of action (which would be mere passivity) but an active maintenance of the potential state itself. Bartleby does not lack the ability to copy documents; he possesses that ability but prefers not to exercise it. This distinction is crucial. His refusal is not grounded in incapacity but in a kind of sovereign preference that maintains itself at the level of the possible without actualizing itself.
This concept of impotentiality—the potential not to—reveals something fundamental about the nature of freedom and agency. If freedom were simply the ability to choose between determinate options, then Bartleby’s position would be incomprehensible. But Deleuze suggests that there is a more radical freedom in the refusal to enter into the game of choices altogether, in maintaining oneself at the threshold of action without crossing it. Bartleby’s formula thus becomes a kind of absolute deterritorialization, a line of flight that does not flee toward something else but simply withdraws from the entire field of determinate possibilities.
Melville’s Literary Project
Deleuze situates his reading of “Bartleby” within a broader analysis of Melville’s literary project. He argues that Melville is engaged in a fundamental experimentation with the English language, pushing it toward its limits, making it stammer and hesitate. This is part of what Deleuze, in his other writings on literature, calls the task of the great writer: to be a foreigner in one’s own language, to make language itself stutter and reveal its outside.
Melville’s characters, Deleuze suggests, are often figures of this linguistic and existential limit. They are characters who push against the boundaries of the possible, who embody extreme states or positions that test the limits of what can be represented or said. Bartleby is perhaps the most radical of these figures because his limit-position is not one of excess or transgression but of withdrawal and subtraction. He does not do too much; he does too little, and in doing so, he reveals the void at the heart of the symbolic order.
Deleuze traces connections between Bartleby and other Melvillean characters—the confidence man, Ahab, Billy Budd—showing how each in their own way represents a kind of limit-figure. But Bartleby’s peculiarity lies in his absolute passivity, his refusal to participate in any economy of exchange, communication, or meaning. Where Ahab pursues his object to the point of destruction, Bartleby simply withdraws, becoming progressively more immobile, more silent, more absent even while physically present.
The Community of Celibates and Originals
One of Deleuze’s most striking claims is that Bartleby belongs to what he calls a “community of celibates” or “originals” in American literature. These are characters who refuse the bonds of family, reproduction, and social continuity. They are figures of radical solitude who nonetheless form a kind of community—not a community based on shared identity or common purpose, but a community of those who have nothing in common, a community of the singular.
This theme connects to Deleuze’s broader philosophical interest in forms of collectivity that are not based on identity or resemblance. The celibate or original is someone who breaks with the logic of filiation and reproduction, who does not transmit or continue anything. Bartleby has no past that we know of, no family, no connections; he appears as if from nowhere and disappears into the void of the prison where he finally dies. He is pure singularity, irreducible to any category or type.
Yet this very singularity, Deleuze suggests, has a kind of universal quality. Bartleby’s formula, in its radical indeterminacy, can apply to anything and everything. It is a formula of absolute subtraction that, paradoxically, touches on something universal precisely because it refuses all particular determinations. The community of originals is thus a community of the singular-universal, of those who embody the universal only by refusing every particular identity.
Language, Silence, and the Limits of Expression
Deleuze pays careful attention to the relationship between language and silence in Melville’s story. Bartleby’s formula is not silence—he does speak, and his speaking is crucial—but it is a kind of speech that tends toward silence, that empties language of its communicative function. The formula says something, but what it says is essentially nothing, or rather, it says the nothing, the void, the outside of language.
This creates a peculiar tension in the story. The narrator, the lawyer who employs Bartleby, is a man of language, of law, of social convention. He tries repeatedly to engage Bartleby in dialogue, to understand his reasons, to bring him back into the circuit of communication and exchange. But Bartleby’s formula resists all such attempts. It is not that he refuses to communicate; rather, his communication itself is a kind of refusal, a speech act that undoes the very possibility of dialogue.
Deleuze explores how this creates a kind of asymmetry or disjunction in the story. The narrator speaks more and more, trying to fill the void created by Bartleby’s withdrawal, while Bartleby speaks less and less, eventually falling almost entirely silent. Yet it is Bartleby’s minimal speech, his formula, that dominates the story, that sets its tone and determines its movement. The formula proves more powerful than all the narrator’s eloquence, more effective than all his arguments and appeals.
This points to something fundamental about language for Deleuze. Language is not simply a tool for communication or representation; it has its own materiality, its own force. Certain expressions—formulas, in Deleuze’s sense—can operate as operators or functions that transform the entire field in which they appear. Bartleby’s formula is such an operator. It does not describe a state of affairs; it creates one. It does not communicate a preference; it installs a zone of indeterminacy that spreads through the entire story.
The Question of Creation and Exhaustion
The subtitle of Deleuze’s essay—”the formula of creation” or “the formula”—points to a deeper concern with the nature of literary and philosophical creation. Deleuze is interested in how certain formulas or expressions can serve as generative principles, as points of departure for new modes of thought and writing. But Bartleby’s formula is peculiar in that it seems to be a formula of decreation rather than creation, of exhaustion rather than production.
Deleuze explores this paradox throughout the essay. How can a formula of refusal, of withdrawal, of negation be a formula of creation? The answer lies in understanding creation not as the production of positive content but as the opening of new possibilities, the creation of new spaces and new modes of existence. Bartleby’s formula creates by subtracting, by removing the ground of established meanings and values, by opening a void in which something genuinely new might appear.
This connects to Deleuze’s broader philosophical project, particularly his interest in what he calls “lines of flight” or “deterritorialization.” Creation, in this sense, is not about adding to what exists but about escaping from established territories, breaking with given forms and structures. Bartleby’s formula is a line of flight in its purest form—it does not flee toward a new territory but simply flees, maintaining itself in the movement of flight itself.
Yet there is also a sense in which Bartleby’s formula leads to exhaustion and death. Bartleby himself becomes progressively more immobile, more withdrawn, until he finally dies in prison, having refused even to eat. The formula that opens a space of radical freedom also leads to a kind of absolute passivity, a death-in-life. Deleuze does not shy away from this darker dimension of the formula. The line of flight can become a line of death; the refusal of all determinate possibilities can lead to the refusal of life itself.
The Narrator and the Question of Charity
Deleuze also attends to the figure of the narrator, the lawyer who tells Bartleby’s story. The narrator is a complex figure—neither simply sympathetic nor unsympathetic to Bartleby. He is troubled by Bartleby, fascinated by him, unable to simply dismiss him or forget him. He tries various strategies to deal with Bartleby: reasoning with him, offering him money, even moving his office to escape him. But nothing works. Bartleby’s formula resists all the narrator’s attempts at management or resolution.
The narrator speaks of charity, of Christian duty, of his obligation to help Bartleby. But Deleuze suggests that there is something more complex at work here. The narrator is not simply being charitable; he is also being affected by Bartleby, transformed by the encounter with him. Bartleby’s formula creates a kind of ethical crisis for the narrator, forcing him to confront the limits of his own worldview, his own assumptions about human nature and social relations.
This raises questions about the nature of the ethical relation. What kind of ethics is possible in the face of absolute withdrawal, of a refusal that will not negotiate or compromise? The narrator’s charity proves inadequate because it assumes a certain reciprocity, a certain participation in shared norms and values. But Bartleby refuses this reciprocity. He accepts the narrator’s charity (in the form of continued employment, money, concern) but gives nothing in return, not even gratitude or acknowledgment.
Deleuze suggests that Bartleby thus poses a challenge to conventional ethics, which is based on exchange, recognition, and mutual obligation. Bartleby’s ethics, if it can be called that, is an ethics of pure subtraction, of refusal without negotiation. It is an ethics that does not seek to establish new values or norms but simply withdraws from the entire field of value and normativity.
Philosophical Context and Significance
Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby represents a convergence of several strands of his philosophical thought. It connects to his long-standing interest in literature as a site of philosophical experimentation, his concept of the line of flight and deterritorialization, his thinking about potentiality and becoming, and his critique of representation and identity.
The essay can be read alongside Deleuze’s other writings on literature, particularly his books on Proust, Kafka, and Sacher-Masoch, as well as his essays on various writers collected in “Essays Critical and Clinical.” In all of these works, Deleuze approaches literature not as an object of interpretation but as a source of concepts, as a form of thought in its own right. Writers, for Deleuze, are not illustrating philosophical ideas; they are creating new concepts through their experimentation with language and form.
The concept of the formula that Deleuze develops in this essay has broader implications for his philosophy of language and expression. A formula, in Deleuze’s sense, is not simply a phrase or expression but a kind of operator or function that transforms the field in which it operates. It is language operating at its limit, pushing against the boundaries of sense and signification. This connects to Deleuze’s broader interest in what he calls the “logic of sense,” the way meaning is produced and transformed through linguistic and conceptual operations.
The essay also engages with questions of potentiality and actuality that have a long history in Western philosophy, from Aristotle through medieval scholasticism to contemporary debates. Deleuze’s concept of impotentiality—the potential not to—offers a distinctive contribution to these debates, suggesting a form of potentiality that is not simply oriented toward its actualization but maintains itself as pure potential.
Reception and Influence
Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby has become one of his most widely read and discussed literary essays. It has influenced subsequent readings of Melville’s story and has contributed to a broader philosophical interest in figures of refusal, withdrawal, and passivity. The essay has been particularly important for political theorists and philosophers interested in forms of resistance that do not take the form of active opposition or revolutionary action but rather of withdrawal, refusal, or what has been called “destituent” rather than “constituent” power.
The concept of the formula and the analysis of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” have entered into broader cultural and political discourse, often invoked in discussions of resistance, refusal, and the limits of political action. The phrase itself has become a kind of slogan or watchword for certain forms of contemporary critique and resistance.
The essay has also been important for literary scholars working on Melville and on American literature more broadly. Deleuze’s reading offers a distinctive approach to Melville’s work, one that emphasizes its philosophical dimensions and its experimentation with language and form. While some scholars have criticized Deleuze for reading Melville too much through his own philosophical concerns, others have found his approach illuminating and generative, opening new perspectives on familiar texts.
Within Deleuze studies, the Bartleby essay is often read alongside his other late writings, particularly his essay on “The Exhausted” (on Beckett) and his final essays collected in “Essays Critical and Clinical.” These late writings show Deleuze increasingly interested in figures of exhaustion, withdrawal, and the limits of expression, themes that contrast with the more affirmative and productive emphases of some of his earlier work.
The essay demonstrates Deleuze’s method of philosophical reading at its most concentrated and focused. Rather than surveying a writer’s entire oeuvre or tracing broad themes across multiple works, Deleuze here focuses intensively on a single story, even on a single phrase, extracting from it a rich set of philosophical concepts and problems. This method of intensive reading, of finding the infinite in the minimal, is characteristic of Deleuze’s approach to literature and has influenced subsequent philosophical engagements with literary texts.
“Bartleby; or, The Formula” thus stands as a significant contribution both to Deleuze’s philosophical project and to the ongoing interpretation of Melville’s enigmatic story. It demonstrates how a philosophical reading of literature can illuminate both the literary text and the philosophical concepts at stake, creating a productive dialogue between literature and philosophy that enriches both domains.
