Abstract
Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) depicts contemporary American realities
across a span from the 1950s to 1990s. The novel’s narrative, however
expansive and digressive, consistently develops around waste and trauma.
This paper, in the light of Lacanian/Žižekian psychoanalytic theory, looks at
waste/trauma not as a fully present object of the novel’s representation but as
an excess, a remainder of Cold-War politics and capitalist industrial-military
modes of production, and more significantly, the object a that arouses the
subject’s fascination and fear at the same time. Such an understanding
especially pertains to the novel’s protagonist, Nick Shay. Further, the novel
narrativizes the paranoid-conspiratorial belief that “everything is connected”
and that there are always larger forces beyond the subject. This paper will also
examine such an ideological contradiction and work out an ethics, both
psychoanalytic and ecological, that departs from political and moral
sentimentalism, from cynicism and apathy, and sees in waste something more
than danger, threat, or even doom. This paper, then, aims at the possibility of
working through ecological fantasy toward a psychoanalytic ethics of waste.