Je Me Touche

This book is an attempt to read, to respond to, the Occupy Movement in four movements. Opening with a reading of Flann O’Brien’s evocative short story, ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, it opens the dossier of the generative powers of imagination: not just in opening possibilities in the world, but that what is brought forth is always already a world onto itself. This is followed by a reading of Hermann Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, with a particular focus on the utterance, « I would prefer not to » ; not just as a phrase of negative resistance, but as a potential challenge, as a seductive challenge. The third movement is an attempt to directly respond — if such a thing is even possible — to the Occupy Movement in all of its potentiality: in no way, shape, or form, does the text attempt to explain it; instead, it attends to it in all of its possibilities, unknowabilities, absurdities even — en bref, as an event. It ends with an attempt to reflect on what it means to speak of something, especially an event — through, and alongside, the slippery figure of the subject, the « I ».