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

2 9 1
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
exploring some root identity.
51
To be schematic: Art and aesthetic repre-
sentation, DeLillo suggests, begins in mourning and identification with
the (absent or dead) other (much like the writer of 

/

, who, DeLillo
says, “begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desper-
ately”).
52
Such is the origin of the paradoxical “living still life” assigned
the task of slowing down the future in the name of the present of lived
experience.
We have already noted critics’ doubts about the efficacy of this strat-
egy in the face of capitalism’s voracious cooption of all forces of oppo-
sition. At the same time, the parallels between an aesthetic practice that
operates by mourning the death of its object (DeLillo) and a notion of
literary language that operates through the “terrorist” annihilation of
its object (Blanchot) should be apparent. Thus the fundamental ambigu-
ity of DeLillo’s politics of literature: To the extent that the literary acts
issue in concrete aesthetic representations (whether these are books,
performances, or images), they enter immediately into the universal
commodification imperative of capitalist exchange. To the extent that
the literary act constitutes an idealizing process of mourning that
requires the consignment of its actual, living object to the oblivion of
death in order to represent it, then that act indeed resembles the ulti-
mately self-defeating drive toward absolute renewal through absolute
annihilation characteristic of terrorism. 
One way of resolving this ambiguous status of literature is to make
ambiguity itself literature ’s chief virtue. That, in different ways, is the
solution suggested by both Paulhan and Blanchot. Blanchot in particular
identifies the operation of death in language with an “ultimate ambigu-
ity whose strange effect is to attract literature to an unstable point where
it can change both its meaning and its sign,” an ambiguity that is at the
same time “a power to work substantial metamorphoses, a power capa-
ble of changing everything about it without changing anything.” Liter-
ature for Blanchot thus names that power within language that contin-
ues “to assert itself as continually differing possibility.”
53
On the other hand, there may yet be space enough between the death
inflicted in Blanchot’s account of terror in literature and the death
mourned in DeLillo’s depiction of the artist-in-mourning to permit
DeLillo the possibility of a more affirmative account of the literary act
than Blanchot’s “ultimate ambiguity.” This space, it seems to me, lies in
LAL1902_07.fm Page 291 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

---