Murmurs, Stutters, Foreign Intonations: Melville's Unreadables

The ‘notorious unreadability’ of Bartleby can be summarised by Derrida's brief provocation: ‘Is it not as if Bartleby were also speaking “in tongues”?’ Here, the modality of Melville's unreadability is not only Bartleby's indeterminate sentence, but how Melville's characters more generally become processes of depersonalisation or deidentification, such that their ‘characteristics’ resonate in the circumambient air of Melville's writing. This process is thematised in Deleuze's writing on Melville in terms of a vibration or a murmur, a thematisation which Rancière has recently critiqued.