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

2 8 7
T h u r s c h w e l l
•
W r i t i n g a n d T e r r o r
surprise us, since death is the one traumatic event whose effects can 
only
be
experienced prior to its event. Or as Martin Heidegger would add, must 
in
fact
be experienced, whether authentically or inauthentically. Death, just
because we know that it will occur but do not know when, encroaches on
every present moment of our experience—again, if we follow Heidegger
this far, it structures the very nature of experience. 
And indeed, in his recent writing, both fiction and non-fiction, DeLillo
portrays the future as pressing in on the present to the point of explosion.
“The future becomes insistent,” he says in 
Cosmopolis
30
—“the white-hot
future,” as he also calls it in his post-

/

Harpers
essay, itself pointedly titled
“In the Ruins of the Future.” At a first level, DeLillo suggests that this insis-
tence of the future is a function of the voracious processes of “cyber-capital.”
“The present is harder to find,” a character in 
Cosmopolis
, Vija Kinski,
explains at one point, because “[i]t is being sucked out of the world to make
way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential.”
31
Relatedly, but touching a deeper level, DeLillo suggests that this insistence of
the future comes from the 
hubris
of calculative techno-scientific rationality,
whose overwhelmingly successful powers of prediction and control have
rendered the future, from the point of view of human knowledge and human
doubt, the equivalent of the past. Thus, in something of a postmodern twist
on Hume ’s argument against induction, Kinski also tells Packer (who,
again, is the very apotheosis of cyber-capital):
‘Doubt. What is doubt? You don’t believe in doubt. You’ve told me this. Com-
puter power eliminates doubt. All doubt arises from past experience. But the past
is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing.’
From this, she concludes, “We need a new theory of time.”
32
Lauren Hartke, the protagonist of 
The Body Artist
, seems to say some-
thing similar: “Maybe the idea is to think of time differently.”
33
But there is
a critical difference between Kinski’s “new theory” and Hartke ’s “different
thinking” of time—the same difference, I’m tempted to say, that divides
techno-scientific rationality from Heideggerian 
denken
. For Vija Kinski,
who is employed as Eric Packer’s “chief of theory,” the “new theory of
time” would be 
in the service
of this on-rush of the future, a way of under-
standing the new temporality of cyber-capital that would permit yet further
powers of prediction and control. Hartke, however is not a theorist but an
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