Negative Interpellations: From Oklahoma City to the Trilling-Matthiessen Transmission

The body of literary knowledge that has taken as its object of investigation narratives of the previously unrepresentable realm between the death of the symbolic order (in which the narratives take place) and the social death of its representative agents -neoslavery narratives, holocaust testimony, witness literature-has isolated negative interpellation as one of the invariant features of this emergent literary practice. The "subject" in/of each of these narratives has been voided of any "imaginary" relation to the "real" state violence to which the "subject" has been interpellated. What is negative in the interpellation then refers at once to the status of the "subject" before she/he was taken up by the interpellative address ("Hey, you there!") as well as to the sociosymbolic order that had come disjoined from that addressee.