Bartleby's Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability

Discusses Herman Melville's silent figure of Bartleby the scrivener (in Melville's "Four Novels") in relation to Bartleby's autism and as a figure on which literature, science and philosophy intersect over the issue of human communication. Bartleby is a literary figure with a distinctive clinical history, with many diagnoses of schizophrenia, but autism is nowadays the favoured diagnosis. Relates the study of autism as a case of extreme communication breakdown which is distinctively masculine: there are no women in Melville's story. Also discusses the Bartleby case in relation to the work of Francois Deligny on autistic children, and to Giorgio Agamben's picture of the living dead "Muselmann" victims of the Nazi concentration camps, who share the racial passivity of Bartleby.