Trauma, Paranoia, and Ecological Fantasy in Don DeLillo’s Underworld: Toward a Psychoanalytic Ethics of Waste1

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.