This essay reconsiders the question of humanism in Herman Melville`s “Bartleby” in terms of a negative dialectic it thematizes by means of representing the titular character`s salient yet enigmatic nonhumanity. In the story, Melville depicts how the narrator faces but fails to comprehend Bartleby`s striking nonhumanity to critique and subvert the contemporary dominant ontological view of the substance of subject and the progress of the world: the Hegelian dialectical idealism predicated on the notion of self-restoring identity constructed by self-negating contradiction. Hence, what the character of Bartleby signifies is not simply a victimized or martyred individual in the inhumane system of modern law and capitalism, but a substantial ontic modality that cannot be categorized into neither humanity nor inhumanity. Such an incommensurable nonentity of the nonhuman being, this essay proposes, indicates an individual, particular, and existential mode of being that disproves the theory of conceptualized universal identity, foreshadowing Theodor Adorno`s notion of negative dialectics: an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic that denies the existence of a Bartleby-like nonconceptual and nonidentical historical entity.