Baader-Meinhof

Med udgangspunkt i Gerhard Richters berømte billedserie om Baader-Meinhof-gruppen skildrer Don DeLillo i en kuldslået novelle, der oprindeligt blev publiceret godt et halvt år efter terrorangrebene den 11. september 2001, hvordan terrorens logik også kan gøre sit skræmmende indtog i privatsfæren

"Death Itself Shall Be Deathless”: Transrationalism and Eternal Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

The status of human mortality in the face of rapid and overwhelming scientific and technological change is by no means a new topic in DeLillo’s fiction. For many critics, death fulfills a crucial function in the author’s work, its very possibility operating to maintain the boundaries of time and space that are otherwise under threat of disappearance in post war culture. Don DeLillo’s eighteenth novel, Zero K (2016), offers an augmented examination of this conjunction between death and technology, depicting an industrial and scientific landscape where fantasies of eternal life can be legitimately realized via radical advances in cryonic technologies. Yet rather than circumventing death and prolonging life as intended, this article argues that DeLillo instead presents cryonic freezing as a form of eternal death. Subsumed within the technological matrix, death’s ineluctability is disturbed and remodulated, meaning that temporal and spatial boundaries become violently unhinged and entirely immeasurable. This boundlessness becomes vividly mirrored in the architectural and temporal logic of the “Convergence” facility itself, a “transrational” space that unravels concepts such as time, space, language, and subjectivity

The art of everyday haunting

peer-reviewedThe question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo s novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida s Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo s text, I want to say something but what , a quasi question directed to Lauren by her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of what , or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an infinite remove , even if it is one s self.  It is Rey s suicide, and Lauren s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo s phrase within the context of Derrida s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren s question, What am I supposed to say? Derrida replies, Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence . Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe