Ontologies of Alterity: Free Gift, Social Reproduction, and Affect in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

Abstract

Abstract: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.