The Community with Nothing in Common: On the Power of Privation in Meister Eckhart and Herman Melville's "Bartleby".

In his treatise "On Detachment," Meister Eckhart underscores that the detached soul has the power to compel God. This article draws on Eckhart's concept of detachment to explore the gravitational pull that Melville's Bartleby exerts on both the narrator and the other characters in his law practice. In abstaining from the "common usage" of the practice and in abandoning "common sense," Bartleby brings to the fore another ground for communal living, although this ground can never be claimed as an individual or collective possession. It is the ground of being, or, in the vocabulary of the tale, the premise that everyone shares provided that it never becomes a property or a predicate. Eckhart's detached soul and Melville's Bartleby are companion figures to the extent that in doing—or preferring to do—nothing they expose the nothingness of all individual inclinations and preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]