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
•
Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
But what “the business of living” turns out to mean for Packer resembles nothing so much as the
terrorist’s indifference to death, his own and others. After murdering his own chief of security to ensure
that he wouldn’t interfere with his plan (and then signaling to some kids who witnessed the shooting to
go on with their basketball game, since “[n]othing so meaningful had happened that they were required
to stop playing,” 
id
. 

), Packer goes looking for his own murderous stalker in order to confront him
and, eventually, allow himself to be killed. 
From the other side, in 
Mao II
, the Maoist terrorist Abu Rashid is asked about a Swiss hostage he
had taken some time ago—a United Nations aid worker who had been kidnapped to gain attention for
Rashid’s cause. His response demonstrates how thin the line that can separate the most ideologically
committed Communist from the rawest capitalist instincts, once Communist and capitalist share an
indifference to human life and death: 
‘What happened to the hostage?’
. . .
He says, ‘We have no foreign sponsors. Sometimes we do business the old way. You sell this,
you trade that. Always there are deals in the works. So with hostages. Like drugs, like weapons,
like jewelry, like a Rolex or a BMW. We sold him to the fundamentalists.’ (DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

) 
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

, 

.
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

. 
.
Blanchot, 
supra
note 

at 

, 

. I have argued elsewhere that this notion provides a valuable resource
for scholars (including those in the “Law and Literature” movement) who believe that law and political
philosophy have something to learn from literature. See Thurschwell, 
supra
note 

. 
.
See, for example, Blanchot, 
supra
note 

at 

(“[I]f this woman were not really capable of dying, if she
were not threatened by death at every moment of her life, I would not be able to carry out that ideal
negation, that deferred assassination which is what my language is.”). 
.
Blanchot, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
Blanchot,
 supra
note 

at 

.
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
Jacques Derrida, 
Memoires: For Paul de Man
, Jonathan Culler, trans. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 

), 

(emphasis in original). 
.
For example, when he says, “The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and
weighs upon me like an obsession with death.” Maurice Blanchot, 
The Writing of the Disaster
, Ann
Smock, trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

), 

. Or even more clearly: “Love, stron-
ger than death. Love which does not suppress death but which oversteps the limit death represents and
thus renders it powerless in regard to helping someone else . . . . Therefore excess is its only measure
while violence and nocturnal death cannot be excluded from the exigency to love.” Maurice Blanchot,
The Unavowable Community
, Pierre Joris, trans. (New York: Station Hill Press, 

), 

. 
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

–

.
.
Id
. at 

.
.
Boxall, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
DeLillo, 
supra
note 

at 

. 
.
Id
. at 

. 
LAL1902_07.fm Page 300 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

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