Citation:
Date Published:
9 June 2023Abstract:
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been increasingly recognized as a critique of American neoliberalism, but whether Wallace suggests any specific way to challenge the status quo is still an open question. Focusing on the character Leonard Stecyk and his relationship with Wallace’s metafictional stand-in in the novel, this essay demonstrates how Wallace expresses an oppositional politics that takes on the ontological premise of neoliberalism. I argue that, against neoliberalism as an ontological project of immanent totality that configures capitalism as the nature of reality and the competitive homo economicus as human subjectivity, Stecyk represents three ontologies of alterity — the radical alterity of free work, the internal alterity of social reproduction, and the pre-individual alterity of affective resonance — that resist the totalization of capitalism, opening up the possibility of sociopolitical change.
March 2023: Shuyu Lee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She has published works on late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century American authors, including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace, from the perspective of contemporary continental philosophy. Her research interests include political economy, new materialisms, and workplace fiction. shuyulee@mx.nthu.edu.tw.