Article in Law and Literature · July 2007 doi: 10. 1525/lal

---

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228165364
Writing and Terror: Don DeLillo on the Task of
Literature After 9/11
Article
in
Law and Literature · July 2007
DOI: 10.1525/lal.2007.19.2.277
CITATIONS
11
READS
494
1 author:
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
Agamben and Derrida
 
View project
Adam Thurschwell
Indendent
20
PUBLICATIONS
71
CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by 
Adam Thurschwell
on 13 June 2018.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

---

 
Law & Literature
, Vol. 

, Issue 

, pp. 

–

. 
issn
1535-685x
, electronic 
issn
1541-2601
. © 
2007
by
The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-
sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Per-
missions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 
.
/lal.
...
 
2 7 7
Writing and Terror
 
D O N D E L I L L O O N T H E T A S K O F L I T E R A T U R E
A F T E R 9 / 1 1
Adam Thurschwell
*
Abstract. 
 
Over the past thirty years, Don DeLillo has become the novelist-laureate for our age of ter-
ror, exploring the inner life, cultural causes and symbolic significance of terrorism and terrorists of all
stripes. He is therefore perhaps the ideal subject for a consideration of the status of literature after the
disaster of September 
 
, 
 
. Indeed, DeLillo himself published a moving essay shortly after 
 

 
/
 

 
in which he posits cyber-capital and terrorism as competing world narratives and argues that “it is left
to us”—writers, among others—to “create the counternarrative.” In this essay I examine DeLillo’s
proposal through a reading of some of his recent novels against the background of Maurice Blanchot’s
thesis that literary writing is itself, in its essence, already terrorist. In particular, I attempt to show how
DeLillo’s novels suggest the affirmative possibility of a meaningful counternarrative that, without
refuting Blanchot’s conception of literature, still offers an (ambiguously) hopeful alternative view.
Keywords: 
 
DeLillo, literature, terror, terrorism, 
 

 
/
 

 
, Blanchot, Paulhan, death, writing
 
Revolutionary action explodes with the same force and the
same facility as the writer who has only to set down a few
words side by side in order to change the world. . . .
Literature contemplates itself in revolution, it finds its
justification in revolution, and if it has been called the
Reign of Terror, this is because its ideal is indeed that
moment in history, that moment when ‘life endures
death and maintains itself in it’ in order to gain from
death the possibility of speaking and the truth of speech.
 
— 
Maurice Blanchot
1
LAL1902_07.fm Page 277 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

---