ABSTRACT
Daniel Adleman argues that the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest was a remarkable watershed for radical subjectivity and political theorisation. His chapter examines Lee Edelman’s application of Lacanian theory to this momentous event. Bringing Lacan’s formulation of the death drive into conversation with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Edelman alleges that the antisocial Real dimension of OWS was, in fact, the mainspring of its political efficacy. Against the grain of popular wisdom, Edelman argues that if OWS were to be absorbed into the dominant order of things and translated into a campaign to improve humanity’s lot, the movement would lose its thanatotic potency in the process of assimilating into the homogenising capitalist network it was meant to short circuit. According to Edelman, the “queer” drive function of the event must be understood as a “negativity that prefers not to pledge itself to the goal of a new community and declines its positivization in a recognizably political agenda”. Adleman argues that while Edelman’s breathtaking psychoanalytic critique of shallow neoliberal discourse cuts deep, his prescriptions neglect the manifold ways that the Occupy movement has already metamorphosed into a project oriented towards a better future for the 99%. Adleman’s chapter makes the case that, in mapping his model of antisocial queerness onto social movements, Edelman perhaps overhastily dichotomises OWS’s itinerary as either potently disruptive (yet without an agenda) or counterproductively oriented towards a future that reproduces the neoliberal conditions its progenitors revile. Looking to the psychoanalytically-informed political theories of Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Glen Coulthard and others, Adleman presents an alternate array of Lacanian perspectives on the significance of OWS and subsequent waves of twenty-first century political activism.
