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Deleuze, Sartre — escape / confront absurdity?

Ventali Tan · November 2024, revised September 2026

In 1853 Herman Melville published, in Putnam's Monthly, a story about a copyist in a Wall Street law office who one day answers a routine request with the words "I would prefer not to," and then answers every subsequent request the same way, until he is carried off to prison and dies there facing a wall.¹ The story is forty pages and the sentence is five words, and between them they have carried a disproportionate share of political philosophy for a century and a half. Gilles Deleuze wrote an essay on the sentence in 1989 and called it a formula.

It matters which philosophy you bring to the sentence. Bring Sartre and it is a failure: a man who will not choose, and who is therefore choosing, in bad faith, not to. Bring Camus and it is a puzzle: a revolt with no defiance in it. Bring Deleuze and it is the point: a way of meeting an absurd order that neither confronts it nor accepts it but slips out from under it. This essay is about the third reading, what it offers, and what it costs.

The claim, in brief. Sartre and Camus answer the absurd by standing in front of it, one by choosing and one by revolting. Deleuze answers it by moving sideways, along what he calls a line of flight, into a space the order has no term for. The third answer is more interesting than the first two and more dangerous, because the space it opens does not stay open. Systems learn to anticipate their outsides, and an anticipated outside is a new kind of inside. The same problem returns at the scale of one person as the question of whose aspirations one is carrying.

1. Two ways to stand in front of the absurd

Sartre's answer comes from Being and Nothingness. Consciousness has no essence that precedes it; it is a nothingness that must make itself by choosing, and it cannot decline, because declining is a choice too. That is what it means to be condemned to be free. The characteristic failure is bad faith: the flight from freedom into a role, the waiter who plays at being a waiter so thoroughly that he need not decide anything. The characteristic virtue is authenticity, which is owning the project as one's own and taking responsibility for it, and in the 1945 lecture that made existentialism a household word, taking responsibility for everyone, since in choosing for oneself one proposes an image of what a person should be.² The universe is indifferent; the answer is to define oneself in front of it anyway.

Camus's answer comes from The Myth of Sisyphus, and it is not the same. The absurd, for Camus, is not in the world and not in us but in the confrontation between the two: the human demand for meaning and the unreasonable silence that meets it. There are three ways out. Physical suicide ends the confrontation by ending the one who demands. Philosophical suicide ends it by a leap, into faith or into a system, that pretends the silence has spoken. The third way is not a way out at all. It is revolt: keeping the confrontation alive, refusing both hope and resignation, living lucidly in a world one knows will not answer. Sisyphus, the rock, the descent, the rock again, and, in Camus's phrase, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy."³

The two are usually run together, and the difference between them is real. Sartre's confrontation produces projects; the free subject makes something in front of the wall. Camus's confrontation produces defiance without projects; the point is to keep facing the wall. But they share the geometry. In both, the absurd is a wall, dignity consists in facing it, and the unit that faces it is the individual consciousness. Refusal, in either, is a posture taken toward the wall: a bad one for Sartre, since it is a choice pretending not to be one, and a possible form of revolt for Camus, if it is lucid.

Deleuze changes the geometry. The absurd, for him, is not a silent universe but a loud one: a striated order that has a form ready for every life, a job, a role, a family position, a diagnosis, a market segment, and that asks only that you occupy yours. The response is not to face this order but to leave it, and not by exit, which the order also has a form for, but by a movement it cannot classify. Figure 1 draws the three postures.

2. The formula

What Deleuze sees in the five words is a piece of language that does something no ordinary sentence does. The sentence is grammatically impeccable and in its effect agrammatical.¹ "Prefer" is a verb that takes an object; here the object is elided and what remains is a bare "not to", pointing at nothing in particular. It is not a refusal, which would be "I will not." It is not an acceptance. It does not name an alternative, which would make it a preference like any other and give the attorney something to negotiate with. It has the form of an answer and none of the content of one.

The attorney cannot process it, and Melville makes the failure comic and then not. He asks Bartleby to be reasonable; Bartleby would prefer not to be. He offers him other work, other lodgings, money, a place in his own home. He tries every category he has, invalid, madman, charity case, and Bartleby fits none, because there is nothing behind the formula for a category to attach to. Deleuze's phrase for him is a man without references: no particularities, no interior, no past that explains him, no demand that would let him be placed on the map of the office as either its rebel or its conformist. What the formula abolishes is not this request or that one but the presupposed: the shared world in which requests are the kind of thing one accepts or declines.

And it spreads. This is in Melville, not only in Deleuze. Within a few pages the attorney notices that he and his clerks have begun, involuntarily, to use the word "prefer", and cannot stop. The formula hollows out a zone of indiscernibility between preferring and not preferring, and once the zone exists, other people fall into it. Nothing has been argued. No one has been persuaded of anything. A way of speaking that the office had no defense against has simply become available inside the office.

Sartre's refusal is a choice that defines a self. Bartleby's is the removal of the frame in which selves are defined by choices.

That is why the Sartrean reading misses. A Sartrean refusal takes a stance; it says no to this and so implies yes to something, and in saying it the subject makes itself. Bartleby takes no stance. He is not choosing not to copy; he is withdrawing from the frame in which copying is a thing one chooses or declines. Giorgio Agamben, reading the same story a few years after Deleuze, put the point in Aristotle's vocabulary: every potentiality is also a potentiality not to, and Bartleby is potentiality that keeps its "not", that refuses to exhaust itself in any act.⁴ Deleuze's stress is different, on becoming rather than on potential held in reserve, but the two readings agree on what the formula is not. It is not a decision.

It is also, at the scale of one man, a death. Bartleby stays in the office after he is dismissed, and stays after the attorney moves out, and is removed by the new tenants, and is taken to the Tombs, and prefers not to dine, and dies, curled toward the prison wall. The attorney's last words are "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!" Deleuze does not hide where the story goes, and neither should a reading of it. The formula, carried by one person to its end, ends the person. The question that the rest of this essay is about is what it becomes when carried by many.

3. Neither exit nor voice

Albert Hirschman's 1970 book gave the standard grammar for what people do when an organization they belong to declines. They can exit, taking their custom or membership elsewhere, or they can voice, staying and complaining, demanding, organizing. Loyalty is what holds a member to voice rather than exit.⁵ Firms, parties and states are built around these options; they have procedures for departures and procedures for complaints.

Bartleby does neither. He does not leave; he will not leave even when fired, even when the office itself has moved. He does not complain, demand, petition or organize; the formula contains no request. And he is not loyal in any sense Hirschman would recognize, since he does no work. He occupies the one position the grammar has no cell for: presence without participation. Figure 2 draws the grid with the missing cell filled in.

What the blank space does, politically, is expose the dependence of an order on participation. The observation is old. Étienne de La Boétie, in the 1570s, argued that a tyrant has only the power his subjects lend him and falls the moment they resolve to serve no more; Gene Sharp built the modern theory of nonviolent action on the same premise, that power rests on cooperation and the withdrawal of cooperation is the mechanism of resistance.⁶ But the strike and the boycott are voice. They carry a demand and an address; they are moves in a negotiation, and the order knows how to negotiate. Bartleby's withdrawal carries neither. It is not a tactic within the negotiation but a refusal of its terms, and the office has no procedure for that, which is exactly why it cannot be ignored and cannot be answered.

Scaled up, the formula does not look like a movement, because movements have voice. It looks like a pattern. The "lying flat" refusal that spread among young people in China from 2021, the "quiet quitting" that was named in the United States a year later, the slow withdrawal from elections, memberships and institutions across the rich world: what these have in common is the absence of a demand. Employers, platforms and states that depend on engagement register them as a problem and find no counterpart to negotiate with. Whether that is a beginning or an end is the disagreement between the two most-cited political readings of the story. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in Empire, saw in Bartleby the beginning of a liberatory politics and only the beginning: refusal alone, they argued, is a kind of social suicide, and it needs a new community constituted behind it. Slavoj Žižek, in The Parallax View, made the refusal the model itself: what should be declined is participation as such, including participation in the sanctioned forms of resistance that keep a system running.⁷ The difference between them is the difference between Bartleby as the first move and Bartleby as the last.

4. The capture of the outside

Deleuze knew what happens to lines of flight. A Thousand Plateaus, which he wrote with Félix Guattari, is in large part a book about it. Every deterritorialization is exposed to reterritorialization; every escape from a form is a candidate for a new form; the state has an apparatus of capture whose whole function is to appropriate what was invented outside it, and the paradigm case is the war machine, invented by nomads against the state and then made the state's army.⁸ The line of flight is not a way out of the cycle. It is one phase of it.

The most literal illustration comes from Eyal Weizman, whom the original version of this essay mentioned and did not explain. In the 2002 assault on the casbah of Nablus, units of the Israel Defense Forces moved through the dense old city not along its streets and through its doors but by blasting holes through the walls of houses, one to the next, "walking through walls" as Weizman titled his account. The tactic had a theory behind it. The army's Operational Theory Research Institute, led by Shimon Naveh, had been reading A Thousand Plateaus, and its officers described the operation in the book's vocabulary: smoothing a striated space, swarming, refusing the city's given geometry.⁹ The philosophy of escape had been read as a manual by the apparatus, and the line of flight had become a tactic of the state against the people who lived in the walls.

Deleuze himself gave the general form of the capture, in a short text from 1990 that the original version of this essay reinvented without naming. Michel Foucault had described the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries as built from enclosures: the family, the school, the barracks, the factory, the hospital, the prison, each a mold with a beginning and an end, through which one passed in sequence.¹⁰ Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" argued that the enclosures were giving way to something continuous. Control does not confine; it modulates. The factory becomes the corporation, the school becomes lifelong training, nothing is ever finished, the individual becomes a "dividual", a profile in a database, and the mass becomes samples, markets and banks. Marketing, he wrote, is the new instrument of social control.¹¹ The essential difference for the blank space is this: a disciplinary order needs your participation, since the mold works only on what enters it, and a control order needs only your presence.

Under the first proportionality, withdrawal is fatal to authority, which is La Boétie's point and Bartleby's leverage. Under the second, withdrawal is an input. Shoshana Zuboff's account of surveillance capitalism turns on what she calls behavioral surplus: the data given off by what one does, including what one declines to do, harvested regardless of engagement, and most profitably from the passive, who do not know they are producing.¹² The investor who declines to pick stocks and buys an index instead has, in aggregate, concentrated the voting power of American corporations in three asset managers, a withdrawal from choice that became a new center of control.¹³ Byung-Chul Han's name for the resulting form of power is smart power: it does not forbid or oppose the will, it reads and anticipates it, and it steers by seduction rather than command.¹⁴ In such a regime the quiet quitter is a segment, the disengaged user is a cohort with its own retention model, and the blank space is a column in a table.

So the question the original essay asked, whether a blank space can exist at all if every non-compliance is anticipated, has an answer, and it is Deleuze's own. The Postscript ends by saying that there is no reason for fear and no reason for hope, only reason to look for new weapons. Lines of flight are always vulnerable to recapture; their value was never that they last but that they create, and what they create, before it is captured, is real. The political frame that follows is not a stable outside and not a stable inside. It is a rhythm: outsides opened, measured, absorbed, and opened again somewhere the measurement has not reached. The authority that results has no center and no clear boundary, and its entire activity is adjusting to what escapes it. That sentence describes its power and also its dependence.

An anticipated outside is a new kind of inside. The practice is not to keep one blank space open but to open the next one before the last is fully mapped.

5. Whose aspirations

The same problem returns at the scale of one person, and here I will write in the first person, because the original essay did and because the problem is not abstract. I often cannot tell whether my aspirations are mine or the shape the frameworks around me have pressed into me. Aspirations are social. They need somewhere to land, someone for whom they count. Who is the audience, and who would consume the dream?

The question is old and has three answers, one for each column of Table 1. Sartre's is the look: the other's gaze fixes me as an object with a nature, and authenticity is the work of reclaiming the project as mine against that fixing.² René Girard's is less comforting: desire is mimetic, we want what a model wants, and so the question "is this dream mine" is answered no before it is asked; the only drama is the choice of models.¹⁵ Deleuze's, with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, dissolves the question the way the formula dissolves the request. Desire is not a lack that a subject has; it is productive and social from the start, and there is no "mine" prior to the assemblage that could own or disown it.¹⁶ Asking whether an aspiration is one's own is asking whether a sentence belongs to the speaker or the language.

Dissolving the question does not remove the difficulty, which is the audience. The frameworks that alienate are the frameworks that orient. They supply not only the constraint but the direction and the address: the "who" and the "why" that give an ambition a place to be recognized. Withdraw from them and one loses both at once. This is the individual form of the blank space, and Melville showed where it goes. Bartleby, present and not participating, faces the wall and prefers not to dine. Deleuze's reading of the ending is that the story is about a failed fraternity: the attorney is offered the position of a brother to Bartleby and cannot take it, and can only be charitable, which is to place Bartleby back inside a category. The formula, to survive its speaker, needs company that does not try to classify it.

That is the answer to the question in the title, escape or confront. Confrontation, in Sartre's mode or in Camus's, leaves the order standing and gives it a face to answer to. Escape, in Deleuze's mode, opens a space the order cannot answer and cannot leave alone, and the space closes. What remains is a practice rather than a position: open the next space, and do not do it alone.

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