A placid, reasonless refusal defeats attempts to do battle on shared ground

Evidence

Indeed, this explains why the lawyer wishes that Bartleby would just outright refuse so that they could at least do battle on the same plane: “I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposite, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap.” Bartleby, who remains maddeningly placid throughout the story, exposes and inhabits a space around the original question, undermining its authority. For Deleuze, by its very linguistic structure, Bartleby’s response “carve[s] out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 264

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap’ image is shareable on its own.