“There’s Something Wrong with You in the Head”: A Lacanian Reading of Justin Torres’s We the Animals

This article argues that the current critical consensus concerning Justin Torres’s We the Animals is mistaken in its assessment that the novel forges a liberatory pathway for queer individuals through radical displays of sexuality. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it argues that the unnamed protagonist of the novel begins and ends his bildungsroman in a constant state of misrecognition and confusion as to what his social role might be in a phallocentric symbolic order. The overbearing presence of the phallus, his unsustainable fantasies of the imaginary and his mother, and his inability to forge an identity apart from the dictates of the phallic signifier, culminate in the re-emergence of infantile neurosis and his seclusion to a mental facility. This article also offers an alternative vision of queer liberation, drawn from Lee Edelman’s No Future, when the queer subject eventually learns to embody the death drive and to dismantle structures of heteronormativity.