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
the Western capitalist techno-scientific rationality that is a prime focus of
the Islamic fundamentalists’ rage. Packer lives in a triplex in “the tallest res-
idential tower in the world,” a “commonplace oblong whose only statement
was its size,” and that “reveals itself over time as being truly brutal.” Packer
“liked it for that reason”—“[t]he tower gave him strength and depth.”
9
Despite, or rather because of, that “brutality,” “strength,” and “depth,”
Packer is eventually murdered by a crazed and pathetic former employee,
whose real name is Richard Sheetz but who affects the 
 
nom de terreur
“Benno
Levin”—a name that one would certainly read as alluding to the terrorist
murderer “Bin Laden” were it not for DeLillo’s insistence that the novel
pre-dated the event. There is more—the funeral of the rapper “Brutha
Fez,” for example, whose music seems to represent the possibility of the rec-
onciliation of Western culture and Islam through art, and whose death
seems to signal the end of that possibility—but you get the idea. Whether
conceived with 

/

in mind or not, 
 
Cosmopolis 
reads like an allegory of self-
destructive overreaching by the Western global-capitalist machine and its
subsequent comeuppance in the violence it engenders in those whom it
pushes aside, an allegory whose symbolism is disturbingly close to the sym-
bolic charge that the terrorists of 

/

also sought to deploy. DeLillo’s nov-
els thus share with the clairvoyant characters who populate them a kind of
prophetic foreknowledge, if not of the absolute specificity of the events
of 

/

, then of their roots in the deep structures of Western culture—
economic, technological, and symbolic.
10
Beyond these diagnoses and anticipations, however, my goal in this essay
is to solicit from DeLillo’s novels the role that they assign to literature in our
contemporary political configuration of capitalism and violence. Law as a
social force is essentially defined by the way in which it reflects and responds
to these realities. Don DeLillo’s contribution has been to interpolate the art-
ist and writer at the deepest levels of these fields of traditionally legal con-
cern (which is why his work seems to me to be an exemplary topic for any
inquiry into “Law and Literature” and terrorism). Indeed, it had been clear
long before 

/

that DeLillo viewed the artists, writers and photographers
that populate his novels as players (of however ambiguous a type) in the
political fields in which they find themselves. It is therefore not surprising
that the horrors of 

/

would spur him to reflect more directly on the role
of literature, and he in fact did so in an essay written in its immediate after-
math, “In the Ruins of the Future,” in which he argues that, in the face of the
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