Rebecca Wey

About Rebecca Wey

I am currently studying a literary initiative launched in response to narco-violence in Mexico, Nuestra Aparente Rendición, or “Our Apparent Surrender.”  Drawing from Richard Rorty’s concept of the contingency of language and articulating this to a critical project with Lacanian psychoanalysis, I consider fiction’s potential to elaborate what I call a non-conceptual critique, i.e., the potential to make political interventions via the effects of a narrative form more than constructive or de-constructive arguments.  I argue that narrative forms can impose what is merely contingent with the force of something necessary.  I am also thinking about the epistemological implications of the contingency of language; for example, to the claim that language requires external moorings to halt endless deferral of meaning, I propose a theory of fiction that shows that what anchors and ‘fixes’ meaning is internal to discourse itself. 

Research Interests

epistemology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, the intersection of politics and aesthetics