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

2 9 0
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
This apparent paradox is explained when one realizes that, in
DeLillo’s work, what is fundamentally at stake for all three of these ideal
types of historical consciousness is not their relationships to chronolog-
ical time, but rather their relationships to death—to their own death and
that of others. What distinguishes the terrorist—whether a terrorist of
the past or of the future—from the other figures is an indifference to her
own death and to the death of those she kills. “We are rich, privileged
and strong, but they are willing to die,” writes DeLillo. “This is the
edge they have.” But their other, complementary “edge” is their equal
indifference to the deaths of their victims: “Does the sight of a woman
pushing a stroller soften the man to her humanity and vulnerability, and
her child's as well, and all the people he is here to kill?” DeLillo asks.
“This is his edge, that he does not see her.”
47
What distinguishes the cyber-capitalist, by contrast, is an over-
whelming anxiety in the face of her own death. Eric Packer receives a
full physical examination every day, regardless of circumstances (in
Cosmopolis
it occurs in his limousine while he ’s driving across town),
and he obsesses about his “asymmetrical prostate.”
48
He is permanently
surrounded by bodyguards and a chief of security who warn him of
“credible threats” to his safety. In the midst of these threats, Vija Kinski
taunts him about “men and immortality,” and his own fantasy of living
beyond death in some cybernetic form: “People will not die. Isn’t that
the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of
information. . . . There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why
die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb.”
49
As we have already seen, DeLillo depicts the artist’s orientation
toward death in quite other terms. Lauren Hartke ’s attitude is equally
distant from the terrorist’s indifference and the cyber-capitalist’s con-
cern for her own death. Her obsession is instead with the death of
another
—she is in mourning for her husband, Rey. Indeed, to the extent
that she thinks about her own death at all, it is out of a wish to join him
in his death—or, to be more accurate, to 
be
him, to substitute for him,
one might even say: “She wanted to disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead,
be him.”
50
Moreover, this kind of “substitution for the other” is at the
core of her art. Describing Hartke ’s performance, an interviewer writes
“Hartke is a body artist who tries to shake off the body—hers, any-
way. . . . She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or
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