Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T11:29:28.366Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In the future, toward death: Finance capitalism and security in Don DeLillo's ‘Cosmopolis’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Johannes Voelz
Johannes Voelz*
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Johannes Voelz, Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Email: voelz@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo's novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.

Keywords

Don DeLilloCosmopolissecurityriskvirtualityauthenticity
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 4 , Issue 1: Financial times , 2018 , pp. 76 - 91
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2018 The Author(s)

References

Acker, K. (1988) Empire of the Senseless. New York, NY: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Altheide, D.L. (2002) Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Altheide, D.L. (2006) Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham MD: AltaMira.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, T. (2007) On Suicide Bombing. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Augustine (1884) The City of God. Volume 1. Dods, M. (ed.) Edinburgh: T&T Clark.Google Scholar
Boxall, P. (2006) Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLillo, D. (1989 [1971]) Americana. New York, NY: Penguin.Google Scholar
DeLillo, D. (1998) Underworld. New York, NY: Scribner.Google Scholar
DeLillo, D. (2001) In the ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September. Harper's (December): 33–40.Google Scholar
DeLillo, D. (2003) Cosmopolis. New York, NY: Scribner.Google Scholar
DeLillo, D. (2010) Point Omega. New York, NY: Scribner.Google Scholar
Esposito, E. (2011) The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Glassner, B. (1999) The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hägglund, M. (2012) Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, J.T. (2013) Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]) Being and Time, translated by Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E.. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Linke, U. and Smith, D.T. (eds.) (2009) Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Masco, J. (2014) The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Massumi, B. (2005) Fear (the spectrum said). positions, 13(1): 31–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robin, C. (2004) Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Svendsen, L. (2008) A Philosophy of Fear. London: Reaktion Books.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Updike, J. (2003) One-way street. The New Yorker [Online], 31 March. Available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/one-way-street>. Accessed 4 February 2018..+Accessed+4+February+2018.>Google Scholar
Valentino, R.S. (2007) From virtue to virtual: Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the corruption of the absent body. Modern Fiction Studies, 53(1): 140–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voelz, J. (2018) The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vogl, J. (2015) The Specter of Capital, translated b J. Redner and R. Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Whyte, W.H. (1956) The Organization Man. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Wood, J. (2003) Traffic. The New Republic [Online], 14 April. Available at: <https://newrepublic.com/article/66865/traffic>. Accessed 4 February 2018..+Accessed+4+February+2018.>Google Scholar