Bartleby in power

At the end of The Parallax View, Zizek presents Bartleby's "I prefer not to" as the key figure of a new politics, a politics that moves past "the politics of 'resistance' or 'protestation,' which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation."

What is involved in this position?

First, Zizek differentiates his use of Bartleby from Hardt and Negri's. He points out that Hardt and Negri consider refusal as a first move toward building something new. Zizek understands "I prefer not" not as a starting point of abstract negation byt as an "underlying principle that sustains the entire movement; far from "overcoming" it, the subsequent work of construction, rather, gives body to it."
The work of constructing a new order is sustained by the "I prefer not." He writes:

The difficulty of imagining the New is the difficulty of imagining Bartleby in power. Thus the logic of the move from superego-parallax to the Bartleby parallax is very precise: it is the move from something to nothing, from the void to its own place. ... In other words, Bartleby's gesture is what remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego content.

Second, the withdrawal of Bartleby's "I prefer not" is primarily a withdrawal from resistance, from charity, and from the faux-Buddhist illusion of capital as a game. What this means for Zizek is that the refusal is a formal gesture; not one to be filled in with a specific content.

Zizek sums up the idea with Anthony Perkins (from Psycho) as the ultimate Bartleby who "couldn't even hurt a fly." He writes:

There is no violent quality in it; the violence pertains to its very immobile, inert, insistent, passive being.
    Bartleby couldn't even hurt a fly--that what makes his presence so unbearable.

How might we think about this Bartleby-parallax?

First, as another name for the discursive social link characterized by the discourse of the analyst. Here, objet petit a remains empty (unlike in the perverse discourse). So, the formal refusal is a refusal of contents.

Second, Bartleby-parallax involves violence. On the one hand, Zizek continues to emphasize that revolutionary violence is liberating in and of itself. In fact, he turns around the old adage but breaking a few eggs to say that "You can't break eggs ...without making omlets!" Nevertheless, he adds that revolutionary violence should not be confused with violent outbursts that bear witness to a more fundamental impotence. For violence to be more than a gesture to insure that nothing really changes,

"this very place should be opened up through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impassive refusal, through a gesture of pure withdrawal in which ... nothing will have taken place but the place itself.

Third, this impassive refusal is the other side (not the precondition of) building something new, the work of the negative.

What does this formulation offer?

One shouldn't expect a psychoanalytically informed theory to offer solace or answers; as Zizek repeats time and again, the point is not the imposition of a new Master signifier (or, contra Badiou, the introduction of new names). It's possible that this clarifies to an extent Zizek's thinking about violence--violent refusal over pointless outburst.  What is difficult, for me at least, is to think what a kind of work of building a new community rooted in "I prefer not" would look like. To this extent, the introduction of Bartleby (where Zizek before had been discussing the Pauline work of love) makes matter more opaque.