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

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L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
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Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
artist, and her intention is quite the opposite of the cyber-capitalists and
their academic lackeys: “Maybe the idea is to think of time differently,” she
says after a while. “Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life
that’s living, not painted.”
34
No matter how “living” the still life, however, it cannot avoid the
shadow of death. Indeed, just as still-life genre painting—
nature morte
, in
French—so often depicted a skull alongside the bounties of bourgeois
existence as a reminder of the inevitability of death, so, DeLillo suggests,
Hartke ’s desire to “open up” or “stretch out” time is itself only opened up
in the space of her mourning. From the outset—even in the initial scene,
which precedes her husband’s suicide—the novel is pervaded by the
anticipation (later the reality) of death and loss. As Peter Boxall puts it,
“[t]his sense that death is already here, already with us at the breakfast
table, leads to an extraordinary slowing down of time.”
35
But if the space
required for this opening of time is the space of mourning, the novel fur-
ther suggests it is in art that this opening is in fact achieved. In 
The Body
Artist
, this occurs, on one hand, 
as
the novel itself—DeLillo’s short, sim-
ple sentences achieve an almost exquisitely tortured precision in their
depiction of Hartke ’s moment-to-moment consciousness of her existence.
The aesthetic “stretching” of time is also depicted 
within
the novel, how-
ever, in the discussion of Hartke ’s performance piece, 
Body Time
. Inter-
viewed about the piece, she explains, “I know there are people who think
the piece was too slow and repetitious, I guess, and uneventful. But it’s
probably too eventful. I put too much into it. It ought to be sparer, even
slower than it is. It ought to be three fucking hours.
”36
As the interviewer
says, she “clearly wanted to make her audience feel time go by, viscerally,
even painfully.”
37
And so in 
The Body Artist
and 
Cosmopolis
we have two competing ori-
entations toward the temporality of the present. One, associated with the
explosive growth of our techno-scientific powers of prediction and con-
trol in the age of cyber-capital, destroys the present in the name of the
future—it “summons us all to live permanently in the future, in the uto-
pian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is
where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit” as
DeLillo puts it in the 
Harpers
essay.
38
Its motto is “[d]estroy the past, make
the future.”
39
The other, which he associates with art, refuses this destruc-
tion of the present by attempting to slow it down, in the name of a living
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