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

2 8 9
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
present experience that has become harder and “harder to find,” as
DeLillo puts it in 
Cosmopolis
.
40
Even Eric Packer, the embodiment of
cyber-capitalism’s head-long rush into the future, finds exactly this solace
in art: “A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared
to notice.”
41
Moreover, for DeLillo, art’s temporal orientation toward the living
moment is politically charged in a manner that is directly oppositional to
the temporal orientation of cyber-capital. This becomes evident when one
compares the (ostensibly apolitical) aesthetic aims of Lauren Hartke ’s art
with the overtly political aims of the anti-globalism protestors who appear
in both 
Cosmopolis
and the non-fictional 
Harpers
essay. Hartke wants to
“stop time, or stretch it out.”
42
In similar manner, however, the protestors
who storm Packer’s limousine in 
Cosmopolis
also “want to hold off the
future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the
present.”
43
Moreover, DeLillo says in “In the Ruins of the Future” that
anti-globalism protestors are “trying to slow things down, even things
out, hold off the white-hot future.”
44
It would thus seem that art, for
DeLillo, is political just insofar as it contests late capitalism by attempting
to represent—perhaps we should say, memorialize—the continuing vital-
ity of present lived experience: the continuing chance for a “living still
life,” in Hartke and DeLillo’s words—a 
nature morte vivante
—with all of
the paradox that that expression suggests. 
Returning closer to the events of 

/

, DeLillo also identifies a third
political temporality or political attitude toward temporality, distinct from
that of both cyber-capital and art: terrorism. This temporality appears
divided against itself in a paradoxical way, however. On one hand, as
DeLillo says, “[t]he terrorists of September 

want to bring back the
past.”
45
Were this his sole account of the relationship between terror and
time, it would make for an elegant complementarity among the terrorist’s
temporality of the past, the artist’s temporality of the present, and the cyber-
capitalist’s temporality of the future. In DeLillo’s 
oeuvre
, however, as in real
life, terrorists come in two stripes—those who want to force the past onto
the present (like the Islamic fundamentalists behind 

/

) and those who
want to force 
the future
, like the Maoist terrorist leader Abu Rashid in 
Mao II
.
“Terror makes the new future possible,” Rashid says. “Men live in history as
never before. . . . History is not the book or human memory. We do history
in the morning and change it after lunch.”
46
LAL1902_07.fm Page 289 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

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