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

 
2 8 2
L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
•
 
Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
forced into silence, novelists who realize they cannot offer any kind of
meaningful resistance and who seek alternate ways of taking action—ways
that either prove futile or that place them firmly in the service of the domi-
nant system of capitalism and consumption they initially seek to resist. The
characters in these books cannot find the alternative mode of counternarra-
tion, between the globalizing systems of terror and the state, that DeLillo
advocates in his essay.
13
In other words, DeLillo cannot make good on his suggestion that literature
represents a “third way” of engaging with the political, between the “world
narratives” of cyber-capital and terrorism, because art—and literature in par-
ticular—is always reabsorbed into the system of capitalist exchange that it
seeks to contest. 
There is, however, an equally devastating reason, little noticed by the
critics, for questioning DeLillo’s claim for an aesthetic “third way,” one that
makes a complementary argument—that if writing could be politically
effective, it is only because writing is indistinguishable not from a capitalist
commodity, but from terrorism. This at least is the argument of some of the
most profound literary criticism of the last century,
14
of which the first epi-
graph, from Maurice Blanchot’s essay “Literature and the Right to Death,”
provides a sample. Blanchot’s peculiar notion of literary terrorism seems to
me a key to understanding DeLillo’s work, but requires some explication
before returning to my primary focus on DeLillo’s novels. 
The notion of “literary terror” was not original with Blanchot; rather, it
was first proposed by his friend Jean Paulhan in 
 
The Flowers of Tarbes, or, Ter-
ror in Literature
.
15
The question that Paulhan posed was the following: Whose
is the more genuine act of literary creation, the writer who expresses herself by
employing to greatest effect the rhetorical conventions and methods most
appropriate to her genre or literary form, or the writer who expresses herself
by rejecting all such conventions and forms in favor of a purer, more immedi-
ate expression of self? Paulhan called partisans of the former style “Rhetori-
cians” and partisans of the latter, “Terrorists.” “Terror” thus served as a met-
aphor for the destructive impulse of the new and the absolute within literature
(his literary terrorists are for the most part Romantics and post-Romantic
moderns) towards the old and the conditioned—the classical genres, figures
and rhetorical devices of the literary tradition. “We call periods of 
 
Terror
those
moments in the history of nations . . . when it suddenly seems that the State
requires not ingeniousness and systematic methods—no one cares about any
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