INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF REFUSAL. TOWARDS A THEORY OF PRIMARY REJECTION¹

Abstract

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. 2 Michel FoucaultFrom Herman Melville's iconic Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and its protagonist's signature formula 'I would prefer not to' to the Disney box office hit Frozen (2013), in which princess Elsa's emphatic 'Let it go' rejects society's conventional demands to be a 'good girl', refusing personalities in literature, visual culture, and history bear an undeniable fascination. Whether they obstinately dig in their heels or practise a more lethargic withdrawal, whether they reject social norms of productivity and industriousness, or of identity and desire, tales about individuals who refuse to accept normative expectations and collective participation elicit a certain form of pleasure: a delightful victory of individual liberation over the constraints of social norms and conventions. This Special Number seeks to explore the critical potential of this pleasure as well as its limitations: with what we have called 'primary rejections', we hope to offer an approach that helps us to think in theoretical terms about those narratives of refusal that are not already embedded in articulated political protest but that nevertheless pose challenges to existing normative power structures. The articles in this volume and also the theoretical considerations in this introduction thus form a 'Suchbewegung' to conceptually grasp 1 The articles in this volume are the result of 'Primary Rejections: A Comparative Workshop on the Refusing Personality in German and International Literature, History and Culture', held on 28 September 2018 at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The event was generously funded by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies. A follow-up podcast discussion with the radio producer Trevor Dann and some of the participants can still be accessed on the DAAD website: http://www.daad.cam.ac.uk/workshops/primary-rejections-a-comparative-workshop-on-the-refusingpersonality-in-german-and-european-literature-history-and-culture#tabevent-output.