Sign from the Wall Street occupation.
Maurice Blanchot writes:
Refusal is said to be the first degree of passivity. But if refusal is deliberate and voluntary, if it expresses a decision – though this be a negative one – it does not yet allow separation from the power of consciousness, and comes no closer to passivity itself than this act, of refusal, on the part of the self. And yet refusal does tend toward the absolute, independent of any determination whatsoever. This is the core of the refusal which Bartleby the scrivener’s inexorable “I would prefer not to” expresses: an abstention which has never had to be decided upon, which precedes all decisions and which is not so much a denial as, more than that, an abdication. Bartleby gives up (not that he ever pronounces, or clarifies this renunciation) ever saying anything; he gives up the authority to speak. This is abnegation understood as the abandonment of the self, a relinquishment of identity, refusal which does not cleave to refusal but opens to failure, to the loss of being, to thought. “I will not do it” would still have signified an energetic determination, calling forth an equally energetic contradiction. “I would prefer not to…” belongs to the infiniteness of patience; no dialectical intervention can take hold of such passivity. We have fallen out of being, outside where, immobile, proceeding with a slow and even step, destroyed men come and go.
