David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011) employs the trope of acedia as the mode of its literary subjectivity. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Wallace’s detailed study of psychosomatic and bodily disorders by means of which his characters (IRS officers) manifest their resistance to their Bartlebesque lives. Given the consistency with which the bodies of the novel’s characters are exposed to hypertension, both from without and from within, it is clear that the object of The Pale King’s ideological critique is not capitalism in general, but its intervention into our biological life. In this way, the haptic serves as a poetic means in Wallace’s critique of biopower, the extent of whose intrusion into the intimate sphere of his characters’ lives is laid bare in the disorderly ways their bodies’ muscular, digestive and neurological systems respond to external and internalized discipline. The result of this poetic strategy is that the novel creates a series of micro events of what Lauren Berlant calls “self-interruption” which guard the agency of the subject and the author against interpellative calls of the book industry for self-exploitation and productivity